World End Syndrome
Jan. 10th, 2022 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingWorld End Syndrome is a visual novel about a small seaside town with dark secrets. It’s structured like a dating sim, and you have to romance the five datable characters in a specific order if you want to unlock the “true ending” that answers all the questions about the overarching mystery. That being said, the dating sim elements are relatively undemanding. There aren’t a lot of dialog choices, and the gameplay mainly involves choosing which location to visit on each day during the month of August.
Because I know this will be a deal-breaker for some people, I should say at the beginning that there’s some mandatory incest in this game. But it’s sort of okay because of plot reasons? As far as dating sim incest goes, the relationships in World End Syndrome didn’t particularly creep me out. It’s honestly not that big of a deal, especially not in a game that would be PG-rated were it not for the occasional murder.
As the nameless protagonist, you move to the small seaside town of Mihate to live with your cousin following the death of your sister in a car accident. You and your cousin are in the same class in high school, and your homeroom teacher is a folklore scholar who has just published a bestselling YA romance novel. The novel is called World End Syndrome, and it’s based on the Mihate legend of the Yomibito, a dead person who returns to life for a year but doesn’t know they’re dead.
There are strong “Bruce Willis at the end of Sixth Sense” vibes surrounding the protagonist at the beginning, but he turns out to be very much alive – at least until he gets murdered at the end of the prologue. This is the game’s official “worst ending,” and you have to start over from the beginning and make a different choice at a crucial point to progress. This gives you the opportunity to romance one of the girls in your class. Successfully doing so gives you an ending that, while satisfying in and of itself, does nothing to explain what the deal is with Mihate and its spooky legends.
It’s tedious to explain the details, but the game has an interesting system of unlocking various interactions and dialog choices. Thankfully, your cumulative progress carries over between saves, even when you’re hopping from one save file to another. What this means is that each playthrough is going to be slightly different. You begin with a fairly straightforward high school romance story that’s very sweet despite having hints of darkness, but on subsequent routes you realize that there’s something very weird going on in this town. World End Syndrome isn’t really a horror game, as it’s not gruesome and doesn’t go out of its way to be upsetting, but it turns out to be an intriguing supernatural mystery.
The character art of the girls is very cute, the character art of the boys is very over-the-top silly, and the environmental art is absolutely gorgeous. Although there’s nothing special about the writing on a line-by-line basis, the translation is solid and pleasant to read.
What really helps this game stand out is the voice acting and sound design. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what makes it so appealing, save to say that the quality of the recording is excellent. There’s a lovely in-game radio broadcast that allowed me to finally understand the appeal of ASMR, and I think the sound quality is something you can appreciate even without knowledge of Japanese. The game gives you a lot of control over the sound channels, so you can turn down or mute the voice acting if you prefer.
I was on the fence about World End Syndrome, as I was dubious about a game that wants you to play the same story six or seven times, but I’m glad I gave it a chance. If you’re only interested in one playthrough, that’s perfectly fine. It takes about ten hours to get from the beginning to the first character-specific “good ending,” and it’s a lot of fun to walk around town, go to club activities, and fall in love while there are dead people and possibly a cult wandering around and killing people in the background.
Because I know this will be a deal-breaker for some people, I should say at the beginning that there’s some mandatory incest in this game. But it’s sort of okay because of plot reasons? As far as dating sim incest goes, the relationships in World End Syndrome didn’t particularly creep me out. It’s honestly not that big of a deal, especially not in a game that would be PG-rated were it not for the occasional murder.
As the nameless protagonist, you move to the small seaside town of Mihate to live with your cousin following the death of your sister in a car accident. You and your cousin are in the same class in high school, and your homeroom teacher is a folklore scholar who has just published a bestselling YA romance novel. The novel is called World End Syndrome, and it’s based on the Mihate legend of the Yomibito, a dead person who returns to life for a year but doesn’t know they’re dead.
There are strong “Bruce Willis at the end of Sixth Sense” vibes surrounding the protagonist at the beginning, but he turns out to be very much alive – at least until he gets murdered at the end of the prologue. This is the game’s official “worst ending,” and you have to start over from the beginning and make a different choice at a crucial point to progress. This gives you the opportunity to romance one of the girls in your class. Successfully doing so gives you an ending that, while satisfying in and of itself, does nothing to explain what the deal is with Mihate and its spooky legends.
It’s tedious to explain the details, but the game has an interesting system of unlocking various interactions and dialog choices. Thankfully, your cumulative progress carries over between saves, even when you’re hopping from one save file to another. What this means is that each playthrough is going to be slightly different. You begin with a fairly straightforward high school romance story that’s very sweet despite having hints of darkness, but on subsequent routes you realize that there’s something very weird going on in this town. World End Syndrome isn’t really a horror game, as it’s not gruesome and doesn’t go out of its way to be upsetting, but it turns out to be an intriguing supernatural mystery.
The character art of the girls is very cute, the character art of the boys is very over-the-top silly, and the environmental art is absolutely gorgeous. Although there’s nothing special about the writing on a line-by-line basis, the translation is solid and pleasant to read.
What really helps this game stand out is the voice acting and sound design. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what makes it so appealing, save to say that the quality of the recording is excellent. There’s a lovely in-game radio broadcast that allowed me to finally understand the appeal of ASMR, and I think the sound quality is something you can appreciate even without knowledge of Japanese. The game gives you a lot of control over the sound channels, so you can turn down or mute the voice acting if you prefer.
I was on the fence about World End Syndrome, as I was dubious about a game that wants you to play the same story six or seven times, but I’m glad I gave it a chance. If you’re only interested in one playthrough, that’s perfectly fine. It takes about ten hours to get from the beginning to the first character-specific “good ending,” and it’s a lot of fun to walk around town, go to club activities, and fall in love while there are dead people and possibly a cult wandering around and killing people in the background.
