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anon--h · 2 years

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AI: Nirvana Initiative. Closing Thoughts

That was a lot of fun. I beat the game in 72 hours because it kept demanding my brainspace. Spoilers underneath the cut. Let’s dig in the good, the bad and the strange.

The Good

Strong, strong setup. Finding two halves of a corpse appearing seemingly out of nowhere would make any murder mystery enthousiast salivate..... In the game I mean, not in real life.

Ryuki is incredibly likeable as a protagonist. At first he appears to be the straight man to the wackier characters, but he might just be the most feral one there. He has horrible taste in men though.

One of the themes, Unreality / Simulation Theory gets explored through Ryuki and his Breakdown moments are fittingly unnerving. Making him go through the Nihil Number ending seems to ensure he will never psychologically recover.

I liked Tama way more than I expected to like her. She’s less dommy mommy and more emotional support.... Who just happens to enjoy tying Ryuki up..... So no, I guess she actually is dommy mommy.

There’s a lot of discourse to be had about Kizuna and Lien, but I thought they were pretty sweet together. I guess I am a sucker for this kinda thing. Lien was pushy, but not forceful and never quite reached the creepiness of Ota.

Speaking of Ota; returning main characters (sans Mizuki) were used sparringly. We got an update on their lives, but they were barely involved in the plot. Which is good. It allowed the new characters their chance to shine.

The AI-balls and their partners are still hilarious and the game delivered multiple laugh-out-loud moments. Maybe my sense of humor is just that bad.

Date and Tama would be a pair made in hell and I kinda wanna see it.

I enjoy that this serie keeps flirting with high concept Zero Escape things like alternate timelines and space/time displacement without confirming their existence in this world. In AI1 it was Date remembering things from 8 years ago; in NI it is the player’s misunderstanding of the timeline.

For the longest time, I was convinced the masked woman was the Boss, based on her color scheme, mannerisms and way of speaking. Having it turn out that she was adopted by the boss made complete sense to me. Also, don’t think I didn’t notice the boss’s profile say that she’s an adoptive mother to Mizuki. That was incredibly cheeky. I appreciate it.

I really liked thinking along with the mystery this time. I managed to figure out that the killer used Carbon Nano Tubes by paying close attention to the AI-ball trivia and deduced the existence of a second killer pretty early on. It was a lot easier to pick up on than the hints towards bodyswitching in the first game and made me feel very clever.

The Somniums feel so much more varied than before. We have escape rooms, 999 references, quiz shows, pokemon go and cooking contests. I really enjoyed going through them this time.

The twist of the killer being dead in present day was interesting, and made the reveal of their killer very tense and emotional. Mainly because I hoped it wasn’t so. It felt sad and a little anticlimactic to have someone that feels like a bystander be the final culprit. An unfortunate fate indeed.

Mizuki and Date still have amazing dysfunctional father / grump daughter chemistry.

The Bad

Mizuki and Date don’t share nearly enough scenes together.

The timeline *not* being symmetrical seemed like a missed oppertunity that annoyed me way more than it should have.

The lack of an ‘annihilation’ timeline, wherein the bad guy wins (or at least does as much damage as humanly possible) also feels like a missed oppertunity.

Bibi’s existence does make me question a few things about the timeline of the first game. She must have been out sick that week. It also puts a very new, horrible perspective on Shoko’s abuse of Mizuki. “Our child is abnormal”- yeah, she sure is.

Controls for the Switch version get screwy during Tokiko’s Somnium. Especially during the hand puzzle. I just kept getting pushed away from the desk for some reason. It left me too little time to complete the Somnium and turned a haunting dream into a frustrating one.

One of the most memorable moments of the first game was the confrontation with Saito. He got to gloat and explained his motives while filling in some of the gaps. Tearer never got to do that. In fact, the player gets barely any interactions with Tearer at all. As a result, he never feels like much of a character. Tokiko feels like more of a character; even Chikara feels more three dimensional.

Tearer being another illegitimate son of So is hilarious to me, but I am not sure that it was the game’s intention to be funny.

Fuck the Red Room puzzle.

Mama is a delightful character, but I felt they really cheapend them in NI. Having them tell the future was a little weird already, but having them talk directly to the player felt especially janky.

The finale felt like a lengthy power rangers fight. It had a few fun moments, but it felt really out of place for a murder mystery game.

The Strange

I am not sure how to feel about the reveal of Mizuki. I feel like her superpower needed sóme explanation, but her being a result of genetic experimentation was probably the least interesting way to take it.

For a game with a very obvious arc-number (that being 6), it feels very incomplete that there are only 5 victims. I kept anticipating a final victim that never appeared. Not bad, just weird.

I am grateful that minecraftheads are genetically recessive.

Ending on a bombastic song and dance number seems to be a tradition now, which is fun. Unfortunately only the choreography improved. The song itself had some bizarre turns and twists.

The twist of the timeline being different than initially presented isn’t bad, but it feels clunky. Because of course we misinterpreted the timeline, Nirvana Initiative. You misrepresented it.

#nirvanai #aitsf #ai: the somnium files

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