Word. I mean, I came into this knowing exactly what it was. Essentially an interactive novel, with puzzles and choose-your-own-adventure choices and whatever.
The dialogue and over-written narration is just disastrous so far. These characters are uninteresting, they over-explain everything, belaboring even the simplest mechanics like digital roots with repetitive explanations, and it takes a good five or six sentences to explain something simple like "Junpei is trapped in the room and water is rushing in!". It's unnecessary and just artificially inflates a chapter of the story where practically nothing is happening.
There are far more graceful ways to explain RED, DEAD and all of that than a half-hour parade of crap dialogue and instruction (this lobby scene where all the characters are introduced).
Honestly, even for the genre its placing itself in, it's not a good thing for any video game if a player is only making about 2 or 3 choices in the first hour. I think I can count on one hand how many choices I've had so far. It's too much, especially for a portable game I want to play in half-hour bursts.
On a personal note, I'm noticing I'm having this problem with a lot of games lately, handheld and console. I'm of the conviction that a game (or almost any story really) has to frontload a lot of its 'awesome' to grab someone. So I was excited at first to see that the game basically opens with a panic situation, but all of that excitement is catastrophically deflated by an endless parade of text explaining everything ad infinitum in that first room. Nevermind that every time I jumped into the screen to enter a suitcase code, I got another text window explaining everything again. Man. I get it! Let me play the game!
So yeah, maybe its my own problem. I'm well-trained in the notion of investment into a longer story, and trudging through slow portions to arrive at the awesomeness beyond, but bit by bit my patience in that department is waning.
edit-
I've just been made aware that someone from the development team on this posts on GAF. I want to apologize for sounding like a critical dick, but I mean....I'm not of the belief that I should change my opinion because of that, lol. I'm all for championing unique games, especially when there's so much shovelware out there, particularly on the DS. So yeah, I'm grateful this game exists, and that its premise is exciting (the premise alone made me hunt this down and pay $45 for it after all) -- I just hope I really get grabbed by it soon!
