Spielzeit:
1107 Minuten
How To Date A Magical Girl (or) Doki Doki Disappointment Club
I bought that game because it was often linked to Doki Doki and I thought that game was amazing. I had played "You and me and her" and this "meta-horror-game" was also amazing, so I expected similiar things from this game.
I have never really played a Dating Sim, so this kind of grinding for affection was new for me. We attend a school for Magical Girl as the only boy who was ever admitted there. In this school, we soon meet our 5 dateable friends, each one with different personality and likes/dislikes. We cannot really controll what is happening at school, but at an ordinary day, we can decide to go to different locations and do two activities per day, that can be earning money, training one of five magical attributes (stats) or spending time with one or two girls.
After gaining a certain amount of affection, we can go on dates and learn new things about our love interest. This cutesy dating sim is then interrupted by mysterious attacks by monsters. And that made the story actually interesting. The monster attacs were shrouded by mystery, some of the monsters were really frightening, the art was cool. I really loved that and I was curious to get a resolve to all these sinister things.
Shortly before the ending, one was able to get together with his chosen one (no regrets here) and then...yeah...then I had the feeling the writers just did not know how to end the story. Tying all the hints together, making sense of all the attacking monsters, would have been an amazing feat (not sure if I could pull that off) and all the build- up would have lead to a wonderful payoff. But...
[spoiler]It was an A.I. all along. We are in a coma and the whole magical world was set up by an A.I. to help our recovery process. Because we do not want to wake up (there were no clues to that) the A.I. decided to kill everybody off in a gory fashion. And seriously, the last 10 minutes or so are just a gore fest with disturbing images of our friends getting found dead, disfigured, decaptivated etc. It is not about "Who has done it?" or "Can we do anything about it?", it was just pure shock value that wore off after the second girl was found dead.
It was hinted in the beginning that our character has a magical power related to time, THAT would have been a great idea. Avoiding the deaths in the end and saving our friends.
But the ending felt just like a big big betrayal. "Wush, it was all just a dream, that's why it does not make sense." So many good ideas...just wasted.
Doki Doki was quite similiar, but the whole "literature club" part where we try romancing the girls was written intentionally bad AND it did not take up of nearly 10 hours to play through it. If the whole "romancing the girls" part would have gone for 2-3 hours, the ending would not be such a disappointment.[/spoilers]
The characters are also very similiar to Doki Doki. Especially Yui seems to be a Yuri clone. Not on the outside, although both have a quite large chest. Yui likes dark things, is shy and can be very passionate. That is just Yuri from DDLC.
Miyu is just Monika 2.0, with a slight air of arrogance added. But also the typical over-achiever.
Then we have Kaori, the typical Tsundere who is also cute.
Hikari, our childhood friend, who is basically Sayori without depression. She is clumsy, she likes food and always relies on us to feed her.
Rei is tomboyish (not a Doki clone) and she is actually quite likeable.
In the end, all the main characters are pretty cool and I liked that. The game had funny scenes but the ending does not fit the build-up and that is a shame. With that kind of game, one will be always on-guard when enjoying it as there is no guarantee that the ending will fit the story or just spoil it.
So the quality of the story- in my mind- is what killed the game for me. The in-game story was just TOO good to let it allow to end like this.
👍 : 0 |
😃 : 0