Review SuperEffective 3/5 · Mar 5, 2022
Good, but Weird Things Here
I wasn't sure what to expect from this game, and after completing it totally, I'm not sure if I got what I was expecting out of it.
Story
After finding a random postcard in your room for whatever reason, you decide to go find out what happened to your old penpal, Fumino Aya, some girl you never got over despite …
I wasn't sure what to expect from this game, and after completing it totally, I'm not sure if I got what I was expecting out of it.
Story
After finding a random postcard in your room for whatever reason, you decide to go find out what happened to your old penpal, Fumino Aya, some girl you never got over despite never actually meeting her. Presumably with no real job or expectation in your life, you head out to basically harrass Aya's old classmates and be a nuisance to everyone in the town.
Okay okay, real plot: You discover a postcard that was never sent while cleaning out your childhood room at your parent's house from a penpal you exchanged letters with during your later years of high school. Despite the positive exchanges, your penpal mysteriously stopped responding and disappeared altogether. Unable to find any information, you decide to head to Matsue to see if you can find out what happened.
Upon arrival in the town, you start with what you know - starting with finding where the house that the letters came from and slowly meeting her classmates one by one. Through your... aggressive interrogations, you come to discover that Aya is not who she portrayed herself as in the letters, and you have to further explore to find out who she really is and why she lied.
There are five endings you can achieve, all of them extremely different from one another, which kind of makes it worth trying to view them all. Two of them are so weird that they ended up being my favorite ones.
Gameplay
The game is a combined visual novel and investigative game, where you follow a path that takes you through the town to talk with characters, investigate areas and clues, and interrogate former classmates to find the truth. It is text-heavy, as expected of a visual novel, and if you're interested in exploring all the choices and endings, you can enable a skip feature once you completed scenes once. At the start of each chapter, you will reread a past letter from Aya and choose how you want to respond - this will affect which endings you will get. You can also choose to depict the characters in their anime style or j-drama style, which is kind of interesting.
Overall
My main issue with the game is the protagonist himself. He comes off as someone who would post on r/aita and everyone would respond, yes, you are. His reason to find Aya are sketchy and his reasoning to essentially harass everyone are selfish. Despite some of the bad things that certain characters may have done, the protagonist proceeds to do some seriously shady stuff while reprimanding others.
Ignoring him/you, the other characters you meet are interesting with their own unique stories. It was interesting to see who they were in high school compared to where they are now. Exploring the endings was pretty fun with some of them being very unusual. If you like visual novels, this could be worth trying it out. I'm not sure what additional content this version has in comparison to the original version outside of the live-action sequences, but it's probably worth getting this version instead.