ARETHA（アレサ）

ARETHA is a GAME BOY RPG that came out in late 1990, and the English spelling of the title can't help but make me think of Urethra. And if a tube full of piss isn't the best way to describe this game, I don't know what is.

Yes, that's the official title

Putting aside the questionable decision to romanize "Aresa" as ARETHA, one might certainly be tempted to buy this game based on the cover. I suppose it did well enough to spawn a whole series?

This game did come out only one year after the GAME BOY's launch but I've played enough RPGs on the GAME BOY to make a fair comparison. Heck, the first SaGa game came out almost a year before and was WAY better than this headache. It had amazing innovative features like being able to talk to NPCs in the same screen! 

If only I could see the dialogue IN THE GAME...MIND BLOW

I vaguely remember finishing this game on an Anbernic GAME BOY shaped device in a stupor while shoved in what seems like ever shrinking economy seats on a plane. This year, I went a little crazy with Chinese Android handhelds because I freaked out about tariffs. BTW, speaking of tariffs, every time I post about how shit the world has become, it seems like we figure out a way to make things even worse.

GOOD JOB MERICA! WE DID IT!!!

Anyway, the only thing that motivated me to finish this game was being stuck in a metal box thousands of feet above the ground. The mechanics are so broken, I couldn't even enjoy old school grinding.

If you fight too many enemies, they disappear until you enter a new area. Then it changes to new enemies that more often than not will totally destroy you. And since the previous guys disappeared, there's no way to grind on weaker enemies.

Thank god for save states because there were times I had to keep retrying to get less enemies that I could handle because multiple enemies were a death sentence. They can pound on you for multiple consecutive turns without giving you a chance to do jack.

I can never decide which color scheme to use with GB games...

The game was filled with the usual fetch quests but often with weird and very expensive random items you had to buy in towns.

The main character pops in at random times and reminds you what to do but at some point, I missed giving something to someone and I was almost ready to give up even following a guide.

Jema is not actually the main character but I can't tell the difference 

The story could have been kind of interesting but there were so many fetch quests, I literally had no clue what was happening. Not to mention weird and baffling game design decisions for instance, the inn keeper would often be out so you just have to go back in and out a few times. What's the fucking point?!

Where's the fucking manager?? I'm going to change my character's name to Karen

Your grandpa heals you for free at the start but of course that doesn't last long. You can withdraw some money from an ATM (huh?) like 30000 pera to start. But the money scale was so wack, I didn't even feel like counting all the zeros for stuff that costs 26500000 pera or whatever. Huh, where's the commas, you ask? Lol, what you think this is PS5?

Grandpa looks younger than me, fuck I'm old 

The menus and UI are just shit as well. I guess I can't be too harsh. I can only hope that one day, somebody can figure out how to show you which weapon is for who and whether it's better than what you have equipped or what each items do. I can dream, can't I?

No idea how much Healing B is better than A and no I don't give a fuck

At least according to the guide, DEF actually has no effect on your damage. It said don't waste money on armor so I guess that's one less thing to worry about. Innovation!!

The music is pretty mediocre, like I've heard worse but the GAME BOY already demonstrated how good music can be on the device with games from 1989 and it's not up to par. Yeah, I've heard worse when it comes to game music so it's ok, I suppose? You spend most of the time hearing only a few of these tracks though so it gets old pretty fast.

It has music, so yeah... it's there.

I followed the guide and fast forwarded through until I got to the climax final end, which consisted of fighting like ~15 (or so I lost count) regular enemies you encountered already and was blissly freed from ever having to play this game again. Yes, you read that right, you don't even fight the final boss.

Yeah, I finished this game... Sigh I dunno man, I'm dumb

Score: 1 "I'd rather pay tariffs than play this shit (JK, China's supposed to pay right? Still waiting for the check)" out of 5

I can only hope playing this game was worth it as maybe the rest of the series is amazing (doubt). Not that I remember the story anyway.

I love quirky mechanics as much as the next person when it works but there's a fine line between quirky and broken. Actually no, this game just sucks, slightly better than Avalon Code, but that's not saying much.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Dai Obake Yashiki（大幽霊屋敷 〜浜村淳の実話怪談〜）

Funny Jhipster story, I was searching for info on this game based on the cover art of the copy that yes I physically own and Google had to autocorrect because I thought 幽 was actually 山. The cover designer thought it would be clever to make little blue ghost lights instead of properly writing out the little 幺 parts. To add insult to injury, that's not even the regular Kanji for a haunted house, it's like geesh, stop trying to be "artistic".

Oh thanks (read as: fuck you) for the furigana

Ok yeah, talking about Kanji isn't exactly like super fun blog post but really that's the most interesting thing I could come up with when talking about this borefest. Maybe I played too many horror games and am jaded. Other Jhipsters might find it scary but personally, this game was perfect for turning off the lights, laying in bed, and just fucking falling dead asleep like a log bored to tree sap tears. The spine card says, "Please don't play by yourself" and they're right. You can seriously injure yourself if you suddenly fall asleep in random places. In fact, they should have added an extra warning to never play when operating heavy machinery. Lawsuit waiting to happen right there, IMO.

It's unfortunately not half as scary as it looks

To sum up the "game", you go through a series of PS1 era CG tour of the haunted house while you hear or read scary stories from the staff. The scary stories are very typical ghost stories like, "I was walking home at night and I saw a ghost! Scary!" For some reason, there were a lot of stories about obasans. Total speculation here but I'm guessing it's because they could reuse various pictures of the same old lady with the scary make-up.

Geesh mom! How many times have I told you to knock first?!

There's was a minor meta story about the owner of the haunted house and I liked the credits as they show where ghosts are hiding in the real life pictures that were used throughout the game. I liked the 90s Japan aesthetics as well.

Hey, that's my apartment working as a coporate salaryman slave back in the day!

Score: 1.5 scariest part is when the obasan opens the door while you're masturbating out of 5

If the idea of an audio book of "scary" campfire stories on the PS1 appeals to you, go right ahead and give this a whirl. (Needless to say, you also need to be fluent in Japanese.) It was a good one for me to go through in a couple of nights because I've been having trouble going to sleep due to stress. Additional bonus, it's a time respecter so it was nice to be able to purge this one and make room for another game in my hoarder closet.

You'll need to play through it twice to read and hear all the stories but you can skip through the repeats pretty quickly which is I why I gave it an extra .5 score for being technically easy to blast through.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Chrono Cross（クロノ・クロス）

Full disclosure, I'm pretty much a Chrono Trigger fanboy. I still remember watching the trailer over and over at Toys R Us with my jaws on the floor. Holy shit, the Toriyama Akira art, the amazing graphics, the music, it was a trifecta of perfection. I saved up my arubaito money and bought a shady CIB copy at the flea market for the cheap, cheap price of $70, probably like $100 in today's money adjusted for inflation.

As a stupid kid, I lost this poster along with the game.

Several years later, as an older and wiser gamer, I bought a used copy of Chrono Cross on eBay probably for like $15 or something. Despite not splurging on it on release like a craven Youtuber, I was still super hyped, that is until I started the game. The music was pretty good. It's not as good as Trigger's kami OST but not bad and that's about the only good thing I can say about the game. I eventually stopped playing around the part where you rescue Rideru not because the game was terrible but for a reason that's almost worse, it was just boring. This time, as a fully evolved Jhipster, I decided to finish at least the true ending hoping that the original Japanese script will make things better. It didn't really.

At least the OST is good...

Here's the deal, Chrono Cross is the kind of title hipster game journalists will hail as "underrated" as they masturbate to their droll, creative lit 101 inspired review. I'm just a dumb gamer so I'm gonna call this spade a duck (or whatever, I'm not a "pro" writer). This game fucking sucks ass.

You would imagine a team would have to mentally prepare themselves with balls of steel to create a follow-up to one of the greatest games of all time by the "Dream Team" of RPGs. For you kids, that term is no joke referring to a team with Jordan, Magic, Bird, Pippen, Barkley, and Ewing. It was like watching somebody play 2K with cheat codes in real life, to give you an idea of how ridiculously OP that was. So when the sequel doesn't even recognize the save files and makes me move the cursor to "Continue" every time and doesn't even remember the last save slot, I could already tell these fuckers did not take the task at hand seriously. How the fuck do you have the balls to make a sequel to Chrono Trigger with a sloppy and shitty UI? I know it sounds like nitpicking but it just shows a lack of polish that also speaks to the rest of the game.

Chrono Trigger team but more Japanese and slam dunking brilliant game design. 

As soon as you start the game, it's apparent that it looks nothing like the original and not in a good way. I'm not super picky about graphics but man, they couldn't cut Toriyama a check? The character design is so fucking generic. It's especially jarring for some characters that are supposed to look a certain way based on the first game and they totally don't.

I'm sorry but this looks like something a bunch of Korean contracters would knock out on the cheap

In addition, while the battle system is balanced, it's slow and boring as fuck. What makes an RPG fun like Dragon Quest and of course Chrono Trigger, is watching your characters get stronger as they progress. Apparently they forgot that, as well as, obviously missing Horii himself. In this game, you get a star and level up when you beat a boss but only very, very minor stat increases for regular battles so there is literally zero incentive to the whole thing. The economy is broken so there is no monetary incentive either. I spent the entire game trying to avoid the enemies as much as possible and still had little trouble beating the game. As a game, Chrono Cross isn't any fun, which is primarily why I stopped playing back in the day. But another reason I stopped was because the story just didn't go anywhere.

People don't understand the story because it's never shown, not because we're not "pro" enough to understand it. In the original game, we traveled around the world across many ages and experienced an amazing adventure first-hand whether it was dragging Robo's broken body to a dome or bumping into a cute girl at the festival by chance. In this game, some shitty ghost characters tell you some mumbo jumbo about multiverse and some Captain Planet shit about the planet moving cities to try to protect itself from humans or whatever. But really, what you're actually doing is going back and forth to the same but slightly different set of islands, collecting shit and fighting boring enemies with no backstory. The switching was especially annoying too. What, they couldn't make it a menu option? You constantly have to go back to the beach, skip the cutscene, go talk to this character, collect an item, etc., and switch again for the next thing. I don't remember what happened in which world and honestly it doesn't even matter.

At least Jhipsters don't have to read Kid's stupid Australian accent, eh mate?

You never get to leave the islands, you don't get to see the main continent they keep talking about, you're just going to the same tiny islands at least twice cause you know, alternate reality! Wow, what a clever way to recycle the same shit... Urr I mean set up an "equally valid, separate, and well-developed world" that's not a "rehash" to quote a "pro" journalist. It really reeks of a low budget game maybe because they were so busy writing tiny variations of dialogue for all the random characters that join you for no reason.

I don't know what the fuck they were thinking with all the random characters. Most don't add jack to the game and you're not going to convince me that their little side stories are equivalent to the deep character development from the original. They also tried to do a half-hearted token shoehorn of Maou but instead fucked up one of baddest, coolest villians in game history.

Fuck you Arufu, you ain't shit

And that's my major beef with this game. It's not a horrible game, it functions and would normally be around a 2.5 score but I cannot forgive it for fucking with the story of Chrono Trigger. They added this ending in the later DS version as a tie-in to Chrono Cross, kind of like how that stupid Anakin kid shows up at the end of the "enhanced" version of Return of the Jedi instead of Darth Vader.

Meesa thinks this game sucksa.

It's the most pathetic ending I've ever seen that just left a bad taste in my mouth. Basically, there's a boss you're not strong enough to beat because you have to wait for Serge or some shit. Yes, the original cast with better design, infinitely better character development, been through way more shit than just floating around some islands somehow couldn't deal with it. Instead, Serge has to... you know what? I don't even know what the fuck he did. The story is so abstract and lectured to you, what did Serge actually do besides being born? The true ending with the Chrono Cross melody that I had to google ends the whole thing with a final boring lecture. I had more fun watching a documentary about quantum physics. (To be fair, quantum physics is cool... and WEIRD.)

Score: 1.5 Jar Jar Binks out of 5 imagine if Solo doesn't even shoot in the cantina but instead lectures about protecting the environment. (40 hours to beat)

Apparently, Chrono was too busy drinking green milk to deal with things this time. Actually, the game never explains that part. It leaves a lot of things unexplained, which hipsters love. But Katou, I just wanted a fun game. If I wanted to play some artsy, hipster shit, I would rather play Moonlight Syndrome and that pretty much sums up how much I hated this sacrilegious "Indiana Jones Crystal Skull" level of butt fuckery.

To explain why I can't help, first, are you familiar with string theory?

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Majin Tensei（魔神転生）

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!!! I finally, finally finished Majin Tensei after 59 scenarios of tedious fucking hell/makai. I really need to question my own sanity. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment? Unfortunately, I didn't realize the snapshot feature on my emulator overwrites the previous snapshot so I pulled most of these images from other JP bloggers that are almost as crazy as me. I say almost because they stopped updating before finishing the game, which in retrospect was probably the right thing to do.

Ugh, seriously, fuck this game

I'm going to go on a little rant here because this game has a LOT of problems. The biggest problem is all the goddamn waiting for enemies to move and sometimes those fucking yellow neutral demons that take their own turn. It's so bad that the game was pretty much unbearable without a fast-forward emu button. I really, really should have started using the turbo button from the start. Even with that, it was a bear, especially Scenario 56 near the end with the fucking sprawling desert that you can only travel at 2 squares a turn.

Fuck this desert. I'm too fed up to even come up with a funny caption.

Now, I'm not too big into SRPGs so it's not like I have a ton of experience to compare to other games in the genre but I can tell a shitty game when I see one. Not only is the waiting just unbearable but the whole demon fusion part is completely useless. You generally only want to play with just the two main characters because the demons only get a few levels in the form of stars and experience is pretty much wasted on them. On most maps, it's the same spiel, rush to the nearest blue healing pool thingy, kill all the nearby enemies, rinse and repeat.

The other issue is your tiny inventory space which makes items and most of the treasure chests an absolute waste of time. Basically, you just hoard the jewels until you can trade them in for some aura gear or Excalibur.

Thanks for making items essentially useless

If for some crazy reason that I can't fathom, you are interested in playing this game, you might want to look up the conditions to unlock the "best" ending cause why the fuck would you want to play this any longer than necessary? One of the annoying requirements of this ending is to visit Atlas 3 times with 3 floors, essentially extra repeat playthroughs of 9 maps (almost as fun as stabbing yourself with a fork!).

I unfroze you so can you please get out of the fucking cave?

The other tip I would offer before you go down to hell/makai is to recruit both the army guy and the blonde dude by finding Izanami on a random square in a cave. At the very least, I recommend the angels because they can fly around fast to plug up those pesky spawn circles.

She's in a cave somewhere, just google jp it. 

Score: 1.5 "so good I cried in joy when it was finally over" out of 5 (too many hours of my life wasted to beat)

Honestly, besides the boring waiting game Atlus thinks somehow qualifies as "gameplay" and the fact that none of the mechanics are fun or serve any practical purpose, I thought it was a pretty good Megami Tensei game. I can't comment on the music because it was playing at 2x speed pretty much the entire time but the story however minimal it was, has the standard Megaten shenanigans.

If you don't mind fast forwarding after every turn and really, really must play ALL the Megami Tensei spin-off series, I would say give it a go. However, to play the game as it was originally intended without emulation is just a pure exercise in self-flagellation. (I mean if you're into that kind of stuff, I won't judge.)

Thankfully, I'm here to warn the 2 people that read this blog to avoid a game they were never going to play anyway so I'll conclude my contribution to the greater good of society here. Don't say I didn't warn you...
..
.
Hello? Is anybody reading this? Bueller? Aww. （◞‸◟）

C'mon, we have boobies on Nintendo here! (Yet another AdSense violation)

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible II（女神転生外伝 ラストバイブルII）

It's fitting that I finished Last Bible II just before Labor day because slogging through this boring RPG was quite laborious or as our most eminent and erudite statesman today would say, "much bigly labor (at the golf course)".

I just like to snatch me some Gorgon pus- uh... where is it?!

Now, the first Last Bible game was localized as Revelations Slayer Demon Gods Ultra Cross-fire Deathrays on Sharks... or something, whatever the 'merican marketing folks thought would sell. Yet surprisingly, NOA decided to ditch the series starting from this one. I dunno, maybe because the game starts with mass infanticide? I don't know what the problem is, Reggie? Do you hate the bible? Don't tell me you're one of those atheist anarchist Antifa violence, yes there will be actual violence people??

Hey mom, what does "dispose of all babies" mean?

As we all know, there was no ratings board back in the good ol' days so really how were the parents to know not to buy this for kids? After all, it has cute anime kids on the cover and you can barely make out the crowd of demons in the backgrounds. Oh yeah, sorry not demons, these are magical beasts（まじゅう）cause you know, think of the children!

Oh I'm sure she'll be crossing her arms in the game as well. It's for kids after all!

However, thanks to the magic of Nintendo's "emuparadise killer" eshop, we now know that the series went from Cero A from the first game to Cero B. Oh thank goodness parents know not to expose their kids to infant genocide until 12 years old... um what? Cero B for "Sexual Content"? Spoiler alert but um... there's no sexual content unless they're referring to the monster designs in which case what's different from the first game? Oh right, ratings are totally subjective and arbitrarily.

I heard a rumor there's a patch that unlocks some hot green tea!

Anyways, I guess I should get on to talking about the game but I honestly don't have much to say about it. It's just a boring RPG all round and yes, even though it's a Game Boy game, it just doesn't have much going for it even ignoring the primitive graphics.

Is this 60FPS? Cause 30 gives me migraine headaches...

While in the first game, you kind of knew there were going to be 3 Gaia Masters for your party, this game is similar to FFIV in that people come and go throughout the story. I might be exaggerating by even calling it a "story" cause yeah, events occur but they're just kind of random as you go from one generic town to the next. There's so many towns I don't even remember their names or care. I do have to say the highlight of the game is Safia cause she's a girl that was so naughty, they had to lock her up. I don't mean naughty in any sexual way though despite her attire (and the Cero rating).

Waaait! My pants!

They added a token demon magic beast fusion system and some other ways to grow demons such as carrying an egg and defending it from attacks. Honestly, I really can't think of a reason why you would want to play this game. I only made it through thanks to fast forward on my PSP err... I mean... they have fast forward on 3DS virtual console right? But yeah, seriously, save your 617 yen unless you have an unhealthy obsession with playing things in order.

Score: 1.5 let's see if this qualifies as an Adsense violation out of 5

Wide open arms, damn false advertising!

The game got particularly annoying near the end when it started getting coy about where you were supposed to go such as buying a certain type of claw to open a floating rock to get the Lapis. Thakfully, there was a playthrough on YouTube but then I had to wonder why I didn't just watch the rest like the kids these days.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

NIGHTRUTH -Explanation of the paranormal- 闇の扉

It's never good to go into a game over hyped. When I bought NIGHTRUTH, it was after a quick Google search revealing it as a shit game of legendary proportions (aka 伝説のクソゲー, JP search of course). I thought it was worth checking out for a few bucks with my expectations set way, way low. I mean look at the title. Is it NIGHT RUTH or NIGH TRUTH? The latter barely might make a tiny bit of sense as in it's "nigh (almost) true". But based on the way the words come together in the OP, I'm guessing it's the former. (WTF is a ruth?) Either way, unfortunately, perhaps my expectations for this game were not set low enough.

PS opening is almost identical to Saturn sans the naughty frames
As soon as the crazy ass intro video ends, I was assaulted by the shitty audio and shitty graphics. But then, I noticed the weird green line at the top of the screen.

Before I get into the shitty graphics, WTF is up with dat green line???

Was it some kind of bug? Would it go away if I restarted? Nope, it's just a fucking green bar that stays there the entire game. What the fuck is it for? Is it some weird aesthetic decoration? Otherwise, how could the devs not see nor care to fix it?

That was just the tip of the iceberg as the Titanic lunged forward at full speed. Not surprisingly, this game is a bit lacking in the features department. BGM and dialogue audio balance options? Dialogue backlog? Option to skip read lines? AHAHAHAHA. No, pansy, you don't even get a freaking option to SAVE! It auto-saves at certain points with absolutely no indication so if you want to stop playing, just hope you're near an auto-save point and prepare to replay from there. Fuck that, time to burn this disc and load it in an emulator.

No save feature? Man, so spoiled. GIT GUD.

Speaking of (the lack of) options. The BGM is terrible and the dialogue is barely audible through the poorly balanced BGM. What is audible sounds like it was recorded on a cheapo mic, then streamed via RealAudio (yeah, I'm old), and then rerecorded 10 feet away. From the packaging and the second CD of voice actor interviews, it's obvious that the VA was a major selling point of this game. If you're paying top dollar to hire the likes of Ogata Megumi (Shinji from Evangelion, etc.), why would you throw all that in the toilet with god awful audio recording quality?

Not the best screenshot of Ogata. Sorry, Megumi-chan!

I know it was before the days of cheap, high quality audio equipment so maybe they ran out of money to use a real, professional recording studio? Right away, you can tell when a line of dialogue was recorded at a different time when the same person sounds totally different from one line to the next. If you ever tried to create a single video with audio of your voice recorded on different days, you know what I'm talking about. At the very least, it made me appreciate just how difficult voice recording and editing must be in a good game. So... good job NIGHTRUTH??

Well, maybe, just MAYBE the story is good? It starts with you waking up to an all too realistically annoying alarm clock. As you get ready for school, you talk to your ring and out of the blue, it starts talking back. WTF?!

Man, this game would be so cool if the main character was clinically insane

The story is full of these WTF moments and to be perfectly honest, I laughed more than a few times because it was just sooooo STUPID. It really does read like something a middle school kid would write up during his recess complete with numerous spelling errors and terrible grammatical phrasing.

Little known fact: he wrote the plot for this game right after the Liger
To give you some more hints of the wonderful plot, I was able to get 4 different endings. The first route I ended up was the one where you find the dog when you arrive at school. The remaining routes depends on whether your ogle your English teacher's legs/butt or her hair. This is truly Shakespearean stuff at work here...

Your fate hangs in the balance, fool!!!

For some reason, on the dog scenario, the voiced dialogue switched off at a random spot in the game. Perhaps this is the additional scenario added to the PS version which would explain the lack of voice recording. If it is, well, it's not fucking worth it as the dog story was pointless and anti-climatic, much like the rest of the endings. I don't want to give away any of the wonderfully stupid story but honestly, it was so bad, I almost want to recommend everybody (Jhipsters only ofc) to play this game. It even has some great art even though the main visuals look like they were drawn in MS Paint.

Um... wha? WTF? Did they hire a real artist late in the game???

Score: 1.5 Graphics, story, music, features, and audio were absolute shit but you should totally play it! out of 5.

Overall, yes, I agree that this game does deserve the title of legendary shit game. It was so bad that it was almost... well it's still pretty goddamn bad. But hey, I got a few good laughs and I did make it through 4 endings (albeit with save states). I don't know if there are any more routes because nobody cared enough to write up a full guide online, which is surprising because even Prismaticallization has a full website dedicated to it. Frankly, I have to wonder if I'm not just wasting away my precious limited time on this mortal coil by playing this shit but if I don't do it, what Jhipster will?

To give the game credit, it does have some good art and even some rare snippets of good music phrases hidden in all the diarrhea. They did manage to poop out 3 more games of the planned 5-part NIGHTRUTH series (oh god) but who knows if I'll ever decide to buy a copy of the sequels. Honestly, the first one was more than enough for a looooooong time and I've already purged it from my shrinking closet of shame™.

Come to think of it, I almost want to get the next entry Maria, just for the making of disc to see what shitty tools they used.

Additional screenshots for the legendary shit archives.

In 96', you could play Biohazard but fuck that shit. NIGHTRUTH!

My favorite character. She looks cute. Good enough for me!

LOL Sonnet, way to go with product placement

If only I could tell you how Shiori shows up. It's hilarious! (Sorry non-Jhipsters)

Another WTF moment, busts out shades to cry (ie glasses are hard to draw)

One of the infamous(?) lines from this Shakespearean masterpiece

I'm not a Japanese expert but even I could spot this obvious typo.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Prismaticallization

Sometimes, a little perspective goes a long way. While I didn't think too much of Never 7 (called infinity at the time), it's WAY better than Prismaticallization, even though it only came out a few months later. I can't help but compare the two games because Prismaticallization is like an earlier and crappier version of Never 7. It has the exact same basic concept except without any voice acting and crappier BGM. I bought this game purely on the cover art, so fool on me I guess.

Yesh, it doesn't take much to convince me to buy (if under $10)

It first starts out by warning you that there's nothing to do put read for the first 30 minutes. Pfft, 30 minutes?! Yeah, no worries there, I'm not an ADV newb. At the end of your first playthrough, you pick up an odd green prism crystal thing (hence the title). This prism crystal can be used to remember up to 5 things.

Be prepared to loop through this damn game at least 100 times

It's a very annoying user interface as you constantly have to loop and often run out of space on your crystal. I went to about 100 playthroughs and 7 hours before I cleared the first ending (the game helpfully keeps count in the upper-right corner). Yeah, if you follow a guide, you can clear an ending in under 20 but I was playing blind. Most of the time was spent holding the △ fast forward button so this game is totally a multitask affair. It really was an awkward way to play an ADV game and kinda unnecessary in my opinion. I mean, it was kinda fun at first, but it got old pretty fast. At the very least, maybe if the prism could hold 10 things or there was a skip to next choice feature (not fast-forward but instant), it would've made things quicker.

Unlocking the swimsuit scenarios were especially annoying as you have to first play a tarot game (1 loop). This set you on a path to one girl (chosen randomly). Then you have to remember the correct cards to win a card game (2 loops). Finally, you can unlock the swimsuit at the beach (1 loop). You then have to win the card game AGAIN (1-2? loops) and trigger the swimsuit memory at the beach a second time (1 loop). This takes about 5 loops for each girl (you may have to reload if you get duplicate random girl).

Well, I guess the effort was worth it for Miyu sukumizu

As I said, the BGM is not so great either though it sounds much better on the Dreamcast version. It feels like they spent all their budget on the pretty good opening animation and the ending song. Otherwise, this game is pretty darn low on both the polish and quality front.

The OP and ED were good but that's about it

Still, despite the overall cheapness of the game, the illustrations were not bad and it could have redeemed itself with a great story but unfortunately, it falls flat in that department as well. None of the characters were well developed and pretty much almost nothing is explained even after watching all the endings. The only good thing about the story was that it wasn't too long-winded and I was able to beat the game in about 12 hours. I did not unlock all the swimsuits however cause it's a pain in the arse and Miyu is really the only girl for me anyways.

Fake imouto was almost enough to make this game a 2. Almost.

Score: 1.5 sometimes even an imouto is not enough to make a decent game out of 5. (12 hours to beat)

I didn't think this game was terrible. It has some funny moments and some decent art, I just don't know if it was worth it. I certainly won't be keeping it in my ever shrinking closet of shame. If for some crazy reason I wanted to play it again, it's also available on PSN, though I would probably recommend the DC version for the better music and some extra scenes.

Oddly, this illustration was in a different style from the rest of the game

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely