I'm actually pretty late to the party on this one as this is a "directors cut type budget re-release of Hayarigami" (translation would be something like Popular God or God in Fashion/Vogue). Basically this is Nippon-Ichi's only non-colorful SD rpg/s-rpg this generation that isn't some PC port. It's a serious dark and violent horror text adventure game. Since I'm a pretty big Nippon Ichi fan I wanted to see how they'd fare with a serious game. Also Famitsu had scored it pretty high (around 32-34 I think) and considering that Famitsu are graphic whores and tend to rate text adventures around 20-25, it perked my interest that they were so impressed by it. But still I didn't really want to blow $60+ for a text adventure. So now that it was re-released for <$30 I gave it a chance.
True to the Nippon-Ichi tradtion the game is on a cd rather than dvd, but then again besides the FMV intro, I'd bet the game is under 100megs total. No voice-acting at all (kinda strange since voice actors are cheap and all the other N1 games have acting), just still pics and text with a few short pieces of music and sound effects. I'd be really curious how much the budget is for projects like these.
Anyhow the game opens with this live-action fmv that plays out like a trailer for a set of generic Japanese horror films:
http://www.hayarigami.com/window/movie2.html
Once you start the game it's broken up into a bunch of files/chapters. Each one is an independant short horror story (first one was about 1:20 long) though I think there are re-occuring characters and the plots will connect in the end. The theme of the game is "friend of a friend" as in it's a game about ghost story rumors. When you play a chapter it basically plays out like reading a book (you have very few dialogue choices) and important words with go into your FOAF (friend of a friend) database.
Each chapter your character starts with a set number of "courage points". When you are talking to people and dialogue choices pop up sometimes a risky question will cost a courage point. But if it's a success it might provide a useful hint or take you down a different branch. So deciding whether it's worth blowing a courage point on a question is one of the choices you need to make.
The next gameplay section comes through self-reflection. Every so often when you need to make an important choice the game goes into self-reflection mode. Here you choose from multiple path branches, for example "A. Is he lying? B. He seems to be telling the truth" if you pick A it will branch to "C. Would he be lying because he's the culprit? D. Is he lying because he's scared of ratting out the killer?" etc.. and eventually depending on your choices you will come up with an idea/decision. I'm pretty sure this branches the current story into multiple paths.
Finally the last gameplay part and the most important one is the "logic path" screen. During the chapters you'll get various key words that will go into your logic screen. Then at the end of a chapter when you are forced to give your theory on who the killer is and what their motive is you fill out the logic screen. The logic screen is the classic character connection screen (you know, with all the face portraits and arrows connecting everyone and showing their relationship). It will show a card for every character in the chapter and in the lines between the cards there will be a an empty slot. Here you choose how the two characters are connected by choosing from your list of picked up words (Ie. friend, enemy, fan, posessed demon). If you get it right you solve the guess. Not sure what happens when you get it wrong since I got it right when I played ^^;
That's how the gameplay works out. But for 96% of the time you'll just be reading straight text like reading a book. Personally I prefer text adventure games with more interaction because if it's going to be very linear and mainly just reading why not simply make it a book?
The story at least from the first tale was ok. It's a pretty generic short Japanese horror tale. I dunno, Japanese horror is fun but for the most part it all the ideas feel old and been done before. The writing is fine and the tale was maybe ok for a 30 min ep of some horror show, but Tales from the Crypt it was not. The art on the otherhand (the main thing that drew me to the title) is very very good. You can get a glimpse of the character art here:
http://www.hayarigami.com/window/chara.html
Music is pretty non-existant so it can't really be compared to other N1 scores.
Overall the game seems ok. It's a solid ADV game but nothing really sticks out (heck most other ADV games at least have voices!). At this point I don't understand what made Famitsu give it such high scores compared to most ADV games. Maybe not being centered around loli-con girls gets plus points from Famitsu. Or maybe the story will really pick up and become great. It's always interesting to play a Japanese adventure game since there really is no western equivalent to the genre. It'd be kinda neat if just one of these games came out in the west one day just to see what gamers think of it, but even though I bet it'd be incredibly cheap to license it probably wouldn't be able to recoup sales if released in the west.
Just my $.02
Will have even more time to play games then since I'm gonna use the money saved here in Japan and take a nice 2-3 month unemployment vacation before I look for a new job 