Root Letter: Last Answer is a live-action remake of the original game. It has the exact same story with some additional content and you can play it with the original’s anime styled graphics if you wish. There is always something odd with live action stills instead of anime inspired aesthetics in a visual novel. This is the biggest change to this game and it’s not exactly a good selling point. It’s made worse because the actors and actresses dress up similarly to the original designs, right down to the distinctive and quirky features. This can lead to some exaggerated features that no one in real life would have. They also tend to exaggerate their expressions which feel completely off. On the other hand, the live action scenery is pretty good and mimics the original very close. Some of the live action shots have noticeable photoshopping done so it can look weird.
The story has the main character, Max, going through his things before finding a bunch of old letters. They were from back when he was in high school fifteen years ago and had a pen pal. The pen pal was a girl named Aya Fumino but after a period of time where they had exchanged letters, she had suddenly stopped replying. Max, captured by nostalgia, goes to the town of Matsue in order to try and find out what happened to her. Naturally, this is not an easy task and there are a lot of coincidences in his search that gives him hints on what had happened. Ignoring the fact that he manages to find the vaguely referenced friends of Aya, they are hesitant to talk about her and refuse to acknowledge her existence at all.
Each of Aya’s classmates has issues. As the protagonist, by showing them the letters that Aya had written, Max helps resolves those issues and lets them get over it. As the game contains the same story as the original, the live action doesn’t change any of that. If you can forgive the filler, then the story has a fairly strong beginning. The endings are another story as a few of them are disappointing and lazy. There are multiple endings and they all share the same first eight chapters. A few of the endings are pretty crazy and out there as well. The neat thing is that you are able to completely skip the chapters in your subsequent playthroughs to go straight to the different endings with minimal fuss.
This is a visual novel so most of the gameplay is reading text. Using a menu based system, you move from area to area and despite its efforts, the game is linear. There are heaps of occasions where you cannot do anything else until you have done the one thing the game wanted you to do. There are also investigation sections where you end up interrogating another character. If you fail these, you’ll automatically get another chance. Thus, there is no way to fail the game and get a bad ending. There is even a hint option that literally tells you what to do in order to proceed.
The chapters are short. If you read fast then it’ll take twenty to thirty minutes a chapter. Each chapter is predictable as it’ll deal with a particular classmate of Aya’s. Furthermore, the game likes to send you repeatedly all over the class for no good reason. This can get annoying as it feels like a massive fetch quest at times. When you go to a location only to get a few lines of text before moving on, it’s a waste of time. However, with each chapter, a bit more of the mystery is solved and you can feel yourself getting closer to the answer.
At a brisk reading pace, it will take around four to five hours to complete your first playthrough. Then another half hour or so for each of the alternate endings. Each of the endings are completely unrelated and different from each other. They each take a different direction. Some of them don’t justify the huge amount of secrecy that the characters employ. It is impressive how the writers managed to give different reasons and perspectives around the same type of events for each of the endings.
The other noticeable plus of the game is the background music. The normal theme is catchy while the fast paced one that plays during investigation sections makes the scene more exciting than it actually is. Although as typical of PQube published games, there are some typos here and there.
The Last Answer subtitle refers to the additional content, which takes on the form of short epilogues that expands on four of the endings. Some of them provide further clarification of what happened in that ending, while others retcon ridiculous things. A particular one feels like fan fiction in which the writers completely gave up. These Answer Arcs can actually ruin the endings since it either goes for something completely left field and terrible, or removes a lot of the suspense and mystery of the ending. The additional content only takes around half an hour to get through them all.
Overall, Root Letter: Last Answer is the definitive version of the game. Whether you like the live-action stills or not depends on your preference. Since you can select either the live-action or the original artstyle, it’s not a huge problem and both tells the same story. The game has a solid start but the endings let down a lot of the suspense and tension that it builds up. Some of the endings also clash with the theme but all in all, this is a worthwhile visual novel.
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