Our World Is Ended is a visual novel that is set in Asakusa, Japan. It has a unique art style for the character designs that looks great. That art style never gets old. The game-play is typical of visual novels in that the only form of interactivity is decision making. At certain points of the story, you must select an option from a few available choices in order to progress. It tries something different with something called Soul of Selection events where various choices will fly past and you have a limited amount of time to pick the one you want. It’s more exciting than it sounds and is more of a chore than anything novel.
The protagonist is Reiji, who is introduced as the most normal, plainest, person that ever lived. He is friends with Yuno, and together, they work part time as Judgement 7. Judgement 7 is an indie game developer with their office in Asakusa, and they have one hit game under their arsenal, and a lot of dud ones. The other employees of Judgement 7 are colorful characters, each with a unique, extreme, personality. From Asano the hotheaded yet naïve girl to Iruka No. 2 who is a stereotypical gamer spouting nonsense and striking poses. Despite their seemingly clichéd personalities, they end up being quite likable over the course of the game and very unique in their own ways.
The story starts off innocently enough, with Reiji testing out the new augmented reality software that the team has developed. However, glitches happen and the software crashes. Despite it crashing, there are augmented objects being rendered that appears way too realistically. Reiji finds himself momentarily in another dimension, while later on he finds that he is stuck in Asakusa, and that’s when the strange things truly start to happen.
The story has a fairly strong beginning, as it is shrouded in mystery and interesting events happening early on. Sadly, it doesn’t keep up the pacing and it drops back to a very normal slice-of-life section for a while, and then the intrigue of the scenario kind of fades away. Nevertheless, the weird “new world” as the characters name is, somehow wraps the developer’s previous games into it, and each game has its own twist and objectives.
The various chapters where it deals with the characters experiencing the phenomenon are definitely the better and more interesting ones. It provides a surprisingly in-depth development to the characters, and by the time the third chapter finishes, you’ve endeared to them. While they still act like the stereotypes that they are, the game has gone a little way into building upon their experiences. Once the mystery of the phenomenon comes to light, the weird happenings and integration of the developer’s games doesn’t have the same kind of intrigue attached to them. The story themes changes somewhat, and the later parts of the story can feel very different to the beginning.
As soon as the mystery of the alternate world phenomenon is explained when you’re one third of the way into the game, it loses a lot of its appeal. It reverts to a generic visual novel where the characters are doing very normal things, having fun, exploring with no stakes. It tries to inject some character development into the story but Reiji very obviously ends up as a typical protagonist with a route dedicated to each character.
The game has a fixation on breasts, purely for fan service but it is too frequent and detracts from the storytelling. It is consistently brought up in almost every scene and it soon gets tiring when some of the same jokes starts being reused. It loves to play on the extreme stereotyping, Owari is the worst with his constant unabashed lust; and Asano with everyone just thinking her as “saddening” (although this is actually pretty funny). Since the game focuses so much on each characters’ personalities, a lot of the humor works because it is just so in-character of them to do it. Oftentimes, one character would nonchalantly insult another character and their reactions works well.
While accepting that the game probably did not have a large budget, it is still disappointing to see the occasional spelling mistakes. These are a lot more frequent in the earlier chapters. It is not enough to ruin the meaning of the sentence, but is enough to take you away from the moment. What takes you back into the moment though is the surprisingly good background music. There are some catchy tracks that will capture your notice.
While it depends on your reading speed, it takes around 15-20 hours to complete the normal ending. The normal ending is the only ending you can get on your first playthrough, and it is pretty much the neutral ending where Reiji doesn’t have any romantic outcomes. It’s still a solid ending, and while the game never quite recaptures the same mystique as its beginnings, the characters helped make up for it. It was fun watching them argue, make up and eventually triumph over their obstacles. There is a great sense of camaraderie within the group. By the end of the game, you can’t help but miss them, even just a little.
The true ending can be achieved from the second playthrough onward, and it has touches of amateur plot twists and a never ending story. There were bouts of ridiculousness like it was written for young children, including scenes where characters power up and it did felt that either the writers were enjoying this cheesiness a lot or they just outright gave up. Nevertheless, it had an acceptable ending that was better than the normal ending. Furthermore, after the true ending, there are epilogues starring each character, based on the choices you made in the game. Each epilogue is fairly decent in length and does a good of closing out the character arcs. It’s just a shame that you end up having to replay the game multiple times in order to unlock them.
Overall, Our World Is Ended is inconsistent in its quality. On the one hand, the initial parts of the game were great in its handling of the mysterious phenomenon. Then it squanders that early goodwill with amateur plot developments, and an oversaturation of breast jokes. Truth be told though, at least it is consistent in those types of jokes made by the same character. In the end, it depends on your tolerance but there is still an inkling of a good story here that makes the game worth experiencing.
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