If you remember our 24 hour run for Extra Life 2017, you know I finished Corpse Party over that amazing night. But even then, I understood it was only the first of several titles, if titles that were only available in Japan. But that changed last year when this direct port from the PSP release dropped on PC. I knew I was going to get my hands on this as I really enjoyed the original. But this time would be a quite different experience.
I knew it would be, though. The trailer made it obvious that I was about to walk into a game less like the original which felt like it was made with RPG Maker, and more of a point-and-click/object hunting affair. To be honest, that sounded interesting, for while things like chase scenes may have to be removed, the potential to show off the world of Heavenly Hosts would go absolutely off the charts. So it would soon enter my library. What did I think? Well, let's just say the original was a much better game.
When you first start this game, you are not greeted with a title, but with a small animated opening about one our survivors from the first game, Naomi, and her mother. You see, her mother is terrified her daughter is going insane. She keeps going on about having a best friend named Seiko, but the young woman she talks about never existed, no matter how many times Naomi insists otherwise (sometimes violently).
However, you can put this introduction to the back of your head as soon as the beautiful anime-style opening credits begin to play. The game will not allude to it again either, at least until the very end. In the meantime, you will go back to before Seiko vanished and in fact is staying with Naomi for a sleep over. This is before the fated day when the class would unwittingly take on Sachiko's curse from the original title... but something is different, and very wrong. Naomi keeps getting deja-vu as the day plays on, like she had been through all this before, but could not be sure... and why does Seiko have a weird bruise around her neck? And even when the fated moment arrives, something is strange as Satoshi desperately tries to convince his classmates not to do it. What is it about a schoolkid's charm/game to ensure they remain best friends that terrifies him so?
It doesn't take long for the game to reveal the events happening now happened before and our class is stuck in a time loop around the curse this ritual would unleash. But why? And how? And can they break this curse Sachiko has on them all? Sadly the game will do little if anything to explain these over-arching plot-points, instead choosing to plug holes not explained in the previous title. This will occur over 7 chapters and there is no sequence to these chapters plot-wise. Rather they seem to enhance or cover parts of the story the original could not get to at random. The only sequence to them is that you can only unlock one when you finish the one before it. This would leave any new player to the franchise confused and with little to connect back to as most of the important details encapsulating this game happened in the previous title only. In essence, this makes understanding this game basically require you to have played the first one, even as it goes nowhere on it's own.
But to try to help with this, there is a hidden 8th chapter that only becomes available if you either complete the game and and find all the bad endings or happen to have the first game in it's PSP form and copy the completed save file to this PC version. I am warning you about this now, because if you do not realize this requirement or (like in my case) that there even was an extra chapter until you finished the game and looked at a guide due to the complete lack of any sort of ending as the credits role, you are likely going to have to replay most of the game a second time to access this.
This extra chapter takes place outside the loop with Naomi and another survivor Ayumi (who is the class president and the one who brought the ritual to the classroom thinking it was just a cool charm instead of a gateway to basically a Hell) travel to Sachiko's family home to try to bring their "erased" friends back. But even this promise is short-lived as where it could possibly help explain why a time loop is happening in the first place, it turns out to be nothing more then a "to be continued" you have to earn for a game not yet released on these shores (Corpse Party: Blood Drive). And while a bad ending is better then no effective ending, it is still a terrible way to do it, especially if most of your players won't even know it exists, much less see and play it.
But that is not to say those stories they choose to tell are not good. In fact some of them are really well done, which is a good thing, as this game is perhaps more visual novel than it is a point-and-click adventure. And I mean that literally. Most of the chapters making up this game will have you reading/watching over an hour of plot setup before you are let loose to begin wandering around the school, looking for whatever your goal is at that point. And you will do so moving a cursor around full colored manga quality drawings of the rooms corridors looking for where your cursor changes from red to blue as this signifies there is something you can interact with. And these things will range from corpses you can identify to object you can pick up to just plot progression points (like looking through a shelf of books to find out something about the ghosts holding you in this place). But at the same time, that is the limit of your interaction as anything you can do when you make such a click, will automatically occur. It's more of a way to progress the story then any challenge of any kind.
When you are done looking around a location, you will move between rooms by a map of the floor you are on. Clicking a spot will make your current character go there if possible and towards it till they have to stop if not. In either case, you will wind up in a new location and rinse and repeat. There are puzzles to complete, but they tend to be simple and occur within more conversation/story-telling moments that happen along the way. They are also usually pretty direct as making a wrong choice can often lead directly do a detailed text of death (or wrong end as the game likes to cal it). You would think this annoying with all the text you might have to wade through before you get back and make the right choice, but the developers thought of that, and the "quick save" function automatically creates a save whenever you answer such a choice, letting return directly to it if things don't work out right. It's very convenient to keep the game moving, but it is not perfect, as there are far less save slots available then the game will use, meaning you are likely only going to have the past few chapters backed up. This is fine for a casual play, but if you find yourself having missed an ending in an early chapter and locked out of chapter 8, this means you are now stuck with whatever saves you thought you needed manually or restarting that chapter to unlock it. And with no "skip" option for the lengthy cut-scenes, you can imagine how rough that is going to be.
Bugs: Honestly, I couldn't find a bug when playing this game. It ran perfectly.
Overall: A relatively simple point-and-click adventure wrapped in several hours of visual novel, this game is one definitely designed for a niche audience. That niche gets even smaller when you take into account that you really need to play the game this sequels first before you go near it. And to narrow it down even more, this game isn't going to answer any big questions it itself proposes about the over-arching story of the series. It's only going to answer details that might have some fans of the original game curious. I would say pick this one up on sale if you played and loved the original Corpse Party and maybe only once the game that sequels it comes out so you can actually get the full picture. But most people should probably consider avoiding this title, at the very least for now.
Score:
5/10
System Requirements:
- 1.5 Ghz Processor
- 512 MB RAM
- Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 64 MB VRAM
- Windows 7/8/10
- 6 GB hard drive space
- Ryzen 3 2200G running at 3.5 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 10
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