The plot itself is extremely clever and masterfully done. This game has some of the best twists I've ever seen, and after playing Zero Escape, that's saying something. The problem lies in its presentation and pacing. You have to play four routes to get a full understanding of this massive story, clocking in at 60 hours. The endless dialogue boxes and the many instances of Once More, with Clarity! make this experience a chore to go thorugh. I actually had to pull myself to keep playing this game despite the fact that I found its plot very intriguing, because of the player-unfriendly experience.
Root B in particular drags on massively, with virtually nothing interesting happening until the fourth day except a car accident at the end of the first day. In fairness, the game does develop and flesh out half of the cast in this route rather well, but the constant flashbacks makes going through it a pain. Luckily, the route improves tremendously on the sixth day, and only gets better.
Then there's the main gameplay mechanic, the Senses Sympathy System (SSS). Whenever there's a branch in the story, an enneagram will allow you to set a value on your "impressions" of some characters. I never really knew what this meant, but looks like it's something resembling trust. Very often Alice and Bob will be in argument and you'll have to pick a side — but it's not consistent how you do it. Sometimes you'll have to increase the "impressions" of the one you agree with, but other times the game has another internal logic and interprets your answer in the opposite way. Not to mention a good handful of times the SSS will appear seemingly for no apparent reason and you'll have no idea what the game expects you to do or how this will impact anything. It gets worse when you can change the values of three or more characters at a time, the protagonist included. This mechanic is infuriating to no end and is a thousand times worse than a simple prompt where you can pick "Do what Alice proposes" or "Sacrifice Bob to save the rest".
As for the characters... They're not bad. Kazami gets on my nerves through Root A because she doesn't want you to do your job, which kinda makes sense character-wise but you wouldn't know until 40 hours of gameplay later. Ena's an asshole in Root A, but improves tremendously outside of it, especially in Root D. Yuuri at first seemed to me like this secretive suspicious cute character the devs had to paste onto the poster of the game just for marketing, and didn't win my affection in Root A, but Root B made me love her a lot. Speaking in general, these characters have more to them than meets the eye and you'll see it for yourself in root D... whether you want to or not. Because in order to get through the plot you'll first need to see every character's entire backstory. I understand this is a very important part of the plot, and it ends up making sense why it's so heavily hammered in, but it doesn't do the experience any favors.
A player-unfriendly great story
The plot itself is extremely clever and masterfully done. This game has some of the best twists I've ever seen, and after playing Zero Escape, that's saying something. The problem lies in its presentation and pacing. You have to play four routes to get a full understanding of this massive story, clocking in at 60 hours. The endless dialogue boxes and the many instances of Once More, with Clarity! make this experience a chore to go thorugh. I actually had to pull myself to keep playing this game despite the fact that I found its plot very intriguing, because of the player-unfriendly experience.
Root B in particular drags on massively, with virtually nothing interesting happening until the fourth day except a car accident at the end of the first day. In fairness, the game does develop and flesh out half of the cast in this route rather well, but the constant flashbacks makes going through it a pain. Luckily, the route improves tremendously on the sixth day, and only gets better.
Then there's the main gameplay mechanic, the Senses Sympathy System (SSS). Whenever there's a branch in the story, an enneagram will allow you to set a value on your "impressions" of some characters. I never really knew what this meant, but looks like it's something resembling trust. Very often Alice and Bob will be in argument and you'll have to pick a side — but it's not consistent how you do it. Sometimes you'll have to increase the "impressions" of the one you agree with, but other times the game has another internal logic and interprets your answer in the opposite way. Not to mention a good handful of times the SSS will appear seemingly for no apparent reason and you'll have no idea what the game expects you to do or how this will impact anything. It gets worse when you can change the values of three or more characters at a time, the protagonist included. This mechanic is infuriating to no end and is a thousand times worse than a simple prompt where you can pick "Do what Alice proposes" or "Sacrifice Bob to save the rest".
As for the characters... They're not bad. Kazami gets on my nerves through Root A because she doesn't want you to do your job, which kinda makes sense character-wise but you wouldn't know until 40 hours of gameplay later. Ena's an asshole in Root A, but improves tremendously outside of it, especially in Root D. Yuuri at first seemed to me like this secretive suspicious cute character the devs had to paste onto the poster of the game just for marketing, and didn't win my affection in Root A, but Root B made me love her a lot. Speaking in general, these characters have more to them than meets the eye and you'll see it for yourself in root D... whether you want to or not. Because in order to get through the plot you'll first need to see every character's entire backstory. I understand this is a very important part of the plot, and it ends up making sense why it's so heavily hammered in, but it doesn't do the experience any favors.