EDIT: Sorry for the wall of text, tl;dr at the bottom.
I bought it a while ago while it was still on its way down, and so far I like it. The gameplay is... kinda bad. It's a very simplistic grid-based strategy RPG—nearly the entire battle takes place in a diagram that's barely better than grid paper, with only attacks animated—, with a few complications. You have limited turns to win, all actions—even turning in place—cost AP, and like very old JRPGs, all actions for all characters are decided at the beginning of the turn, meaning you have to predict where the enemy units are going to be when planning your attack, instead of simply aiming for wherever they were at the end of the previous turn.
Enemies also have some decided advantages. They can attack in response to being attacked, while your characters can't, and can use certain points on the field to teleport to other points.
Your advantage is that you can set up the field with traps and other tools before battle begins. Setting barriers in the way of those warp points, or items to attract the enemies' attention, is key to pinning them down.
It sounds pretty bad, and to be honest it's really simplistic and I can understand how it might seem tedious, but it's not as difficult as it might sound. For one thing, there's very little penalty for defeat or running out of turns. In either case, you can simply start the fight over with no penalties, and you only lose the money you spent on traps if you decide to abandon the fight—otherwise you can just restart with the same trap layout you had initially set. The enemy AI is also extremely simple, and once you figure out its priorities, its pretty easy to predict how it'll act.
The atmosphere, for me, is where it really shines. Despite the fact that the game clearly spent its entire budget on character/enemy portraits (even the backgrounds are just photos run through a filter), they did a pretty decent job establishing immersion—from the company website to the way profits are tallied at the end of a battle, there's a very authentic feeling to it all. Even the menu sound effects are satisfying. While some of the equipment you can use doesn't make a lot of sense—an electric guitar as a weapon to fight ghosts, for instance—there's also some stuff that almost makes too much sense, in the context of a smalltime modern operation—thick manga stuffed in your shirt as body armor, for instance. There was also a lot of thought put into making even little things like item descriptions more engaging: one possible head armor is a white sheet to confuse ghosts (because you "blend in").
Did I mention the art? It's pretty gorgeous. It has a sort of dark, painted look, instead of opting for the ultra clean look that most art with a modern anime aesthetic goes for. The animation is just the photoshopped image manipulation you see in a lot of Japanese games these days, ranging from Vanillaware's entries to Conception II. Like any of that sort of animation, it's not that great, but it's far from the worst example I've seen.
The other side of gameplay is the visual novel aspect, which is where the majority of the story is told. I haven't gotten very far in the story, since I've been spending a lot of time getting a feel for battle, but I've liked what I've seen so far. Like the atmosphere, the writing comes off as pretty authentic, and the characters are generally likeable, all with plenty of personality. There are multiple endings, though as early in the game as I am, I couldn't tell you how repetitive trying to get them all might feel.
Like many visual novels, you're given semi-frequent decisions that affect your relationships with other characters (as well as, presumably, which ending you get), but these come in two varieties. There are the standard list of two or three options that most VNs offer, but the majority of these decisions are presented as a more complex interaction—you're presented with a diagram with five "emotion"-based options, followed by a diagram with five-"sense" based options, and depending on the combination of options you pick, your character will thereafter interact with whatever prompted the decision in a certain fashion—for instance, when meeting someone for the first time, picking the "friendly" emotion followed by the "touch" sense will typically lead to an attempted handshake. As you can probably imagine, this system, while intriguing, is so vague that attempting to predict what the game will actually do based on a given combination of options can be frustrating, though the appropriate responses tend to follow a pattern. The worst part of this system is that no explanation is given (I believe in the Japanese version the diagrams used kanji to represent the emotions and senses, which would have been easier to interpret compared to the simplistic pictures offered in the English versions), so you should definitely look up what each emotion and sense picture is supposed to represent before starting the game.
In short, it's a VN that tries to stand out from other VNs by various means—a greater focus on atmosphere and details, the inclusion of a poorly implemented battle system, and that weird interaction system. I feel like what's good about it outweighs the oddities and irritations, but I can be pretty patient with these things and I can definitely understand how others might get frustrated or bored with them. At its current price I think it's definitely worth a shot, but keep in mind that it's definitely... quirky, and not necessarily in a good way.
up in each possible situation. Why even release this damn thing for such a poor overall showing?
