音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

Trusty Bell

>> No, for his sake, please not ask me to bring up its subtitle, nor its English equivalent.. orz

1. The graphic is extremely beautiful (the character design is cute too). Every single scene. For a lot of times, I stopped and just stared at the screen, doing nothing else but enjoying the beautifulness.
   1. Polka's "black-and-white" costume is my favourite.
2. The music is good enough to be played individually -- Of course I'm not saying the "Chopin Selection".
   1. Need not to mention the "Chopin Selection" can be used as an introduction to people who're not familiar to him. I like the background narration inserted in each chapter.
3. Battle system is fun and exciting (at some point). It's basically a turn-based-action hybrid, and it has a guard feature, which is crucial to whether you can survive even when your HP is fully tanked.
   1. Due to this, the battle is also evil enough. Time allowing you to respond the guard button is way too short (less than 1 second?), and once you fail, your HP goes down like mad. I assure this is the top 1 game that I die for the most of times (including normal battles!). Many boss fights I spent in this game were much longer than fighting Nosferatu (BIOHAZARD CODE VERONICA; 2 hours) and Salazar (BIOHAZARD 4; 2 hours).
   2. I like the setting about skill change under light or shadow.
   3. Other party members are actually blocking your way while moving, which is tricky to bring close-ranged characters to desired location in time.
   4. The camera angle is fixed, so it's (very) hard to know whether the character is at the right place in order to punch (endless complaints about chapter 3's boss).
   5. I never figured out how to let the long-ranged skill hitting onto the exact enemy I want to target.
   6. The "photograph" feature seems useless. I'm not doing Fatal Frame!
   7. Harmonic chain sounds delicious but is hard to activate.
4. Most importantly, the story. I'd say this will be a good plot if removing the identity of the main character -- you know whom I mean, don't you...
   1. While ignoring this, it's a great fantasy a brighter version of "Higurashi no Naku Koro ni" (which I figured out at the end of chapter 6), even including the sort-of-hard-to-understand final chapter.
   2. I don't really see a point of how each chapter fits the concept of Chopin's works. To me, it's more like dragging the two together with a little force. As "side contents", they're not bad though.
5. A few poke-in's:
   1. As a person who checks the cast voice before actually playing a game, when I was watching the "prelude" cutscene, I laughed out that "Hirano Aya voices quite a lot who jump off" (while that part is so much like Fatal Frame 5).
   2. Also because of the cast voice, from the beginning to the end, I only referred Allegretto as "Satoshi (Corpse Party)".
   3. Again, during the "prelude" cutscene, I was disappointed by what Polka's mother said, and kept complaining "don't teach your child weird things, waves form because of wind, NOT moonshine".

"NosferatuShadow" by F.W. Murnau - screen capture around the 1hr 19min mark. Licensed under PD-US via Wikipedia.
↑ I do love this scene!

Now I'm a zombie!

Here's the certificate!

But why an operator? Ain't I supposed to be a researcher zombie (for example, the doctor zombie from Code Veronica)?
And Raccoon Park! I know it well. I died miserably due to the jumping out frog-hunter! xDD;;

Only looking at the track list, I didn't have any desire to buy, but...

The CD jacket is too moe to not buy!
The most possible scenario is I'll get it together with Biohazard 0 in the end of next January.
("tSoLE" is beautiful! ><)