2. √ Letter (PS4)
√ Letter (or Root Letter) is a visual novel, and one of the handful of games I got for Christmas. I played enough to get all of the endings, though there are still 3 of 4 gallery items locked - the conditions to unlock them are stated, but not obvious in-game. Technically there are a couple trophies left as well. I might wind up firing it back up for those reasons, but otherwise I pretty much did what there is to do in it.
The game is predominately set in the town of Matsue, in the Shimane Prefecture. The developers seem to have pretty much gone out and taken pictures of locations to use in their game. If the message before the game is accurate, they may have based some of the NPCs on actual people as well, albeit fictionalized. While I think a lot of the background art is filtered/edited photography, it's not as blatant as in some games, so it mostly tends to look like detailed illustration.
Given the degree that the game seems to focus on hitting potential tourist spots, I suspect that's how they got the cooperation of the town and businesses featured.
Yay tourism.
Your reason for going there is to track down an old pen pal, after discovering a final, unread letter from them. Instead of, say, exhausting internet or phone options, you hop a plane out to her home town, as one does. When you can't find her, you start tracking down her old classmates, referenced only by their nicknames in her letters.
More or less, things play out entirely linearly. You get a variety of menu options, but they can mostly only be used when appropriate, and there's no way to progress without finding the thing you need to find. The "Think" option serves as a hint, though it's also the only way to proceed at times.
Checking your phone is probably what you should have done before dropping money on airfare.
Pretty much, the game progresses through ten chapters, named after some stationary pattern from a letter. The first eight are the exact same every time, following a general pattern of first showing you a letter that talks about a specific classmate, and include question and a response to a previous question. You then spend that chapter...pretty much getting directed to the classmate in question after picking up a few pieces of evidence. Then you confront them in Ace Attorney-ish sequences, get them to admit being that person, and then try to pry information.
While you can "fail" those sequences, they just restart if you do, until you succeed. The way you steer the course of the game is via the answer/question part of the letters.
She did not tell me her measurements.
There are five different pairs of chapters 9 and 10, leading to the five different endings. I'm not sure if every single choice actually matters for the letter portions - the first I got with mixed answers, the other four by literally just choosing the same (first, second, etc) option from each list. The fifth option only appeared after clearing the game once, and led to the "real" ending.
Three out of the five endings are...less than grounded, and really have nothing to do with the real one. More like "wouldn't it be crazy if..." scenarios. The other is kind of a near-miss, which is the first one I got.
Which, to be fair, weren't entirely out of the blue.
So, it was a mite disappointing to not so much be unraveling much of a mystery via the repeated playthroughs. The convenience of getting all of the endings is a mixed bag. Nearly all of chapters 1-7 can be outright skipped. You can pick your letter responses, pop open the Smartphone, and skip to the next chapter (delayed, slightly, by the fact that you don't have immediate access to the Smartphone when starting the game). There is a fast-forward though, and the Think option will pretty much tell you what to do if you forget where you are.
Then, for some reason, chapter 8 can't be skipped. There's the remote possibility that the gallery challenges are available then, and it becomes skippable if/when you complete them, but I couldn't say. It's still not -that- big a deal with fast-forward, but doesn't seem like it should be necessary.
Other little complaints are that the game did have a handful of spelling errors (though mostly missing letters), and I'm guessing the translation might be spotty. Every so often there'd be conversation options that didn't describe the resulting dialogue very well, that sort of thing. Not that it gets in the way of anything, of course.
Overall though, it's a decent enough VN, and one that is largely inoffensive as well. Almost none of what the ESRB slapped an M rating on it for is pervasive, or even really that extreme in the first place. I enjoyed it well enough, but I wouldn't call it must-play.
