When I finished the previous Corpse Party title, I have to admit, I felt like things were unfinished. To recall, the game did absolutely NOTHING to progress the story unless you got every ending and unlocked the secret last chapter, but even that was nothing more then a stinger leading up to this game. If I had not made a point to see that ending though, I would not have needed to finish things with this one. I should have just let it be.
Story: While Blood Drive takes place several months after the hidden ending to Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, it chooses to start the narrative in those last few moments. To explain, Naomi and Ayumi (students of Kisaragi Academy and survivors of the the original delve into Heavenly Host Elementary during the events of Corpse Party) believe they found a way to undo the damage that haunted school has done to their lives and to their friends. You see, that first adventure had some casualties, and while it's always sad to lose a friend, it's infinitely worse when you return to find yourself in a world where no one else remembers them and where the universe itself has erased all evidence of their existence, leaving even their faces in any picture you have of them from your past blacked out.
Desperate to bring them back, Ayumi had found out about the Book of Shadows, a powerful artifact full of black magic which she believes will let her bring back the dead, but suffice it to say, it failed and failed hard. In fact the failure was so bad she would have been killed had her sister not shown up to sacrifice herself to save her. Even so, she was still gravely wounded and spent the next several months in the hospital.
Upon return to class, Ayumi is greeted by her friends as they struggle to put that inter-dimentional school of Hell behind them, even if they have to carry the burden alone since no one remembers their lost friends. The removal is so complete that even the teacher they lost has been replaced. It's hard and they all have to be strong for each other and their own sanity. But that state was not meant to remain, for on her way home one night, Ayumi ran into a mysterious stranger who told her she had been on the right track. The Book of Shadows can revive her dead friends if she can reclaim it, she would just have to use it while inside that cursed school again. Since it was no longer at the estate where her previous ill-fated attempt had occurred, she made her way to the apartment of one Makina Shinozaki, an old woman now dead who had tried to warn her friends about going to the cursed school before. Being of the same bloodline of those who owned the estate (as well as her own), she had hoped to find clues to where she might find the book again.
From this basic start, you will find yourself following an entirely new adventure for the students to survive as each in turn is pulled back to Heavenly Hosts Elementary. For some like Ayumi, it is in a desperate attempt to undo the past. For others, it's to protect those who are going. And they are not going alone. This mysterious man has his own reasons to want to see Ayumi succeed, and he's not the only one taking interest.
And if this sounds like a good setup for an awesome story, you would be right. What is here is vast, deep, and with absolutely profound possibilities and ramifications for our students involved. If this were a stand-alone game without any previous lore to fall back on, I would have been thrilled with the results for the most part. True, there are some details that would standout as unexplained (and even a few that really seem dumb), but not enough to really take too much away from what is otherwise an awesome story here. Sadly, I can not say this is the case. The one really big crime this game makes with it's story is one we are sadly getting more familiar with by the day in the entertainment industry it seems: ret-conning. In order to explain, however I need to give some general spoilers, both for this and the first game in the series, Corpse Party.
In the original title, we find out that the central power holding the Heavenly Hosts Elementary school together is a malevolent ghost of a little girl named Sachiko. She is part of a family line known for their spiritual power (and in fact Ayumi is also of this same bloodline), which would in this case cause what would normally be a terrible and traumatic crime into a personal Hell for her, the principal of this school, and anyone who gets stuck there.
In essence, Sachiko was a fairly shy girl who was deeply attached to her mother Yoshie. The principal of the school had taken an unhealthy shine to the lady and ultimately tried to rape her, killing her by accident involving a staircase. When Sachiko came to terms with this, she lost it and became the vengeful spite filled little horror we knew in the game. When she died, her hate and rage did not let the school fall when it was demolished in the real world as a result of this and other horrifying events, but created a hellish version of the place where the souls of the unfortunate can be trapped and where she rules supreme.
While a complete story to explain the origins of the place, Blood Drive chose to completely ignore it so they could expand the world of Corpse Party well beyond this vision. Rather in this game, the origin of this school goes on before Sachiko or her mother, but was created and stored in the Book of Shadows by it's original creator... a witch community of medieval nature who were found and exterminated by the local villagers (they do not say where this happened). The book then found it's way into the hands of Sachiko's mother who attempted to use it to save her father, but instead unleashed this Hell. In order to stop it from taking over our world, she threw it into her daughter who was able to absorb it and prevent absolute tragedy for a time. However this time would come closer to ending when Sachiko was made a victim of the murders that finally got Heavenly Host shut down. When she died, it took it's form based on her memories to become a world between words modeled after the school with Sachiko controlling it. Quite the difference huh?
In essence, I wish I could give more credit to the story here, but it just overwrote so much of the key details revealed about this in-between space of hell revealed the first time, that it leaves a sour taste in my mouth, despite being overall very well written in it's own. (Although I do have to say overall due to a very "Deus Ex Machina" style detail that progresses the game towards the very end. This I wont spoil since it's key to main story of the game and not background you pick up along the way.)
7/10
Graphics: The look of this game is a lot more di-polar then the story is. When the game is using a cut-scene (which can be a while when it happens) expect to see scenes drawn in anime-form. Still drawn pictures that are clearly professional and frankly look great will fill in your screen while the same style characters will stand on either side of the text box explaining any actions or showing anything being said in the scene (which is a good thing as this game has no English audio). Simply put these parts of the game look fantastic.
But then we have to talk about the actual game part of the game... and this did not fair so well as it's still and drawn counterpart. Like the original title, the game will be played from a birds-eye view of the students as they wander around the school and locations of their hometown, but this time it is rendered in full 3D. This abandons the charm the pixelated work that first game and does so without giving much back. The characters you control are heavily chibi-fied in this area, removing a lot of detail that would help them stand out. And that fact will be proven stronger as there are several characters who, until they talk, can easily be mistaken for each other due to simply having the same school uniform and hair color.
Nor does the world benefit from this. True the details in the ground or walls can be fairly high, but the environment tends to repeat them, often blending in with itself and leaving the titles of the locations to be the best way to tell where you are. This also does not help that the game is very dark, hiding obstacles you are supposed to avoid walking into exceptionally well if you don't happen to see them in your flashlight. In fact trip-wires in particular tend to come out of nowhere, not because they are well placed, but they just blend in with the world, really only showing up when you see the shadow from that flashlight.
But that is not to say it's all bad. Mechanically it's not great (and we will get into that more in the gameplay section of this review), the overall vibe is very effective showing off a very creepy decaying building with mutant flesh splattered about to make things uneasy, so while the game has it's drawbacks in the looks, it also has some real strengths as well.
6/10
Sound: This is as strong as any fan of the game series would expect... almost. Taking a lot of queues from the previous games, the soundtrack is damn near perfect, setting in with the creepier tones of the game brilliantly. But there is one song which stops this from being across the board and you will listen to it a LOT during the later game. At this point, you will be forced to listen to a looping circus tune which is intentionally being played as if the speakers they come from can't handle the volume, distorting it. It's supposed to sound creepy, and the first time, it does. But it also is only for one scene. Later it gets used for an entire map, staying WELL past it's welcome going from creepy to obnoxious very quickly.
But this is not the only place the sound excels. True there are not a lot of sound effects to worry about, the voice acting is absolutely top notch. You will not find a word spoken in English in this game, but the tones and feeling coming off of the lines you hear are just soaked in the horror of the story, sometimes even reaching levels of being uncomfortable to hear. You will actually cringe from some of these cries of pain and fear when shit really hits the fan, proving these actors know exactly what they are doing and have it down to a science.
9/10
Gameplay: I wish I could be so kind with the gameplay as I am with the atmosphere of this game... but sadly this is where the game really falls apart. This being a Corpse Party game, you can expect to spend a lot of time in cut-scenes as the story plays out for you, but you should be able to expect some interesting stuff for you to do as well. After all, this game is taking directly after the first Corpse Party which had several environmental puzzles to keep you thinking. But not this time. There are really only 2 actual puzzles in this entire game. Rather you will spend most the time wandering around the school avoiding obstacles while you look to trigger the next cut-scene to progress the story, and that is not an exaggeration.
True, there are a few moments here and there that change it up, usually in the form of a chase, running from a boss encounter before it can kill you, and these work for the most part, but there are two maze parts underwater which fail completely. These sections just make it exceptionally hard to see what is going on or where you have to go, so expect even though the path is simple, to fail either a time or two.
But that lack of vision is not just in those pools. The developer wanted to recreate a lot of the set pieces from the original game in this new 3D version, but they let it also get in the way. This is one of those games where walls can block your view on top of everything else, requiring you to literally squeak around sections the first couple times you see them just to make sure you don't hit an obstacle like a part of the floor ready to give way or shards of debris hidden by that wall now obscuring your view. And you can't even move the camera to alleviate it. Now to be fair, the game actually seems to play fair with this, not actually hiding anything with these spots, but they can be close and running past them is never a good idea... even if you need to run to avoid a phantom running around trying to kill you (and they will follow you forever as long as you are close enough to track. They do not stay in the room or hallway you found them in.
And yet even that really doesn't matter either because of your choices to deal with them. You are supposed to get ahead of them far enough to hide in a locker and wait for them to pass by. If you succeed, they will go wander somewhere else, but if you are too close when you get in, they will just pull you out and beat the shit out of you. Still, they have one weakness and that's talismans you can find throughout the game rendering this idea of hiding worthless. If you have one, the phantom dies when they touch you, but you lose it in the process. This should be incentive to avoid them in case you run out, but I found myself very rarely without one through the entire game, rendering these main enemies of the entire game little more then an annoyance that disappear after yelling at you on contact.
But all of this would really just boil down to a very boring set of levels encasing a story that could carry the entire experience and be at least worth it. Unfortunately, however, two issues combine at the very end to just shit on everything as they make the last boss borderline unplayable. The first of these issues would not be more then an annoyance on it's own, but if you plan to play this game with a controller, you are going to have to spend some extra time setting up: while the game "supports" controllers, it has absolutely NO control mapping done when you start. No menus, no gameplay, not even a "press this to continue the fucking text" button is setup for you.
FURTHER unfortunately, there are three buttons included in this called QTE Options A B and C which you will need to map. For most of the game, you will use these to choose actions to do during cut-scenes from a menu that will list your choices top to bottom. Since they are in order, you can inference which is A, which is B, and which (if it's there) is C, even though there is nothing identifying them. Should there be? Probably, but it still works... until the last boss, which again, I will have to spoil to explain,
"When you reach the last boss, you will control Ayumi as she floats over an abyss with four blue fires floating around her. Across the abyss is another girl floating in a blue fire of her own, and it's time to duel. The girl will show a set of runes and you will be given three sets of runes you will have to choose between to respond. Choose right and you will throw a green fiewball at her. Choose wrong (or not in time) and she will return in kind, but one of your fires will take the shot, extinguishing it. Hit her 5 times before you lose your last one and you win the duel. The problem is that the choices are NOT in the order your A, B, and C buttons would suggest based on how the rest of the game has gone and there is nothing identifying which is which on screen to let you know. Not only is this a puzzle you need to learn the right response to, but it is one you have to guess which button will actually use that response! Add to this no significant way on the screen to show which one you DID hit to learn this and you have a guessing game at best."
Now I am not going to say this is a flaw in the original game. It actually isn't. This game was originally made for the PS Vita and ported to PC and the Vita version actually does things right, telling you which button is which option in those choices during the game as well as in this final boss. This is a port issue where the developer just failed utterly on the player and ruined the game at it's very end. Even if since they let you choose the buttons they had just used their internal labels (A B and C), it would have been annoying, but at least you could go to the controls and see which button you chose to do what, but it doesn't even give you that. And that would have only been a half-assed solution. They SHOULD have done like every other indie developer does these days (I mean the game came out in 2017 and the port in 2019) and had a standard layout for the most popular controllers (like the Xbox/Xbox One or even the Playstation system controllers), but the absolute lack of care destroys this game at the very end.
3/10
Bugs: Overall this game ran very well, but not perfectly. In fact I had to force the game to close once because somehow I managed to cause the title screen not to appear when leaving a "Wrong End." The game still ran and I could hear the menu and music, but the screen was just black. I'm fairly certain in my push to get back in and finish this game as fast as possible, I actually went faster then the game could to cause this, but it only happened once, so I am not sure.
Overall: This is a sad end to what could have been an amazing chapter of horror games. The original title, while sometimes simple, was also simply a classic and something anyone into horror games should play. The first continuation was something interesting, but really unable to stand on it's own two feet so it really should only be played by those who finished the first and want more. But this? This stumbled along telling a descent (and would be great if not for the crime of ret-conning the original) story until it tripped at the end falling to it's doom in the abyss of it's own creation. Don't bother playing this one. Just watch it on youtube.
Wrong End
Score:
3/10
System Requirements:
- Intel i3 Dual Core CPU @2.5 ghz
- 2 GB RAM
- Intel UHD Graphics 620 (1 GB VRAM)
- Windows 7 or better
- 3 GB hard drive space
- Ryzen 3 2200G running at 3.5 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 10
- PDP DX Wired Controller (Crimson)
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