Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation is a visual novel compilation based off the light novel (and anime) series. The game actually contains three visual novels, Rinne-Utopia, Arusu-Install, and the titular Rio-Reincarnation. The first two were released only in Japan on the PS3, so this is the first time all three games are available in English. It’s recommended to have watched at least the first two seasons of the anime so that you know who the characters are and the concept of the story.
Rinne-Utopia
Rinne-Utopia was the first game in the collection to be released. The premise is simple, and it’s the same for all three games. There are spacequakes around the world, and what caused them were the appearances of spirits. These spirits take on the form of teenage girls. They do wield considerable power, although this visual novel never really shows that at all. The protagonist is Shido, who is the only one that has the power to calm these spirits down, via making them fall in love with him. Then he keeps their powers controlled via keeping it up, i.e. constantly go on dates. It’s a ridiculous premise, one that the visual novels don’t really improve upon.
In Rinne-Utopia, Rinne is a childhood friend of Shido’s that was apparently always present. Obviously, something is wrong, but for most of the story, Shido isn’t too aware of this and it’s only towards the end where he actively thinks about it. As a result, the game is mainly a slice-of-life harem story that’s full of cliches and wish-fulfillment scenes. It’s quite drab and predictable as a result.
As you’d expect of a visual novel, most of the content comes in the form of text, and the quality of the story strongly determines your enjoyment of the game. Rinne-Utopia has six routes, each associated with one of the heroines. The decisions are simple, they’ll lead you to the good or bad ending with that character. As each route only takes around two to three hours to finish, it never manages to develop enough to be more than a shallow story of all the heroines falling for Shido.
While it is supposed to be played off for laughs, a lot of the characters have worrying creepy traits. It seriously puts you off when they nonchalantly speak about sniffing other people’s clothes, or joke (not really) about forbidden relationships. This coupled with the aforementioned cliched and predictable events, makes for a niche audience that lacks wider appeal than the already niche audience for visual novels.
The visual novel is short. After the first route, each subsequent only takes less than an hour if your reading speed is somewhat fast. Hence, you’ll be able to finish everything in under ten hours. The good endings are easy to get as they don’t require many decisions at all. Even if you pick the wrong one, you’ll end up reaching the bad ending within a minute, so it just feels like the game lacks nuance and attention to detail. Each route is also structured the same, so it becomes too repetitive when it’s primarily the same events six times.
The final true ending route requires you to have played all the others and gotten their endings. However, this was probably the best route out of the lot in terms of being the least predictable. It takes advantage of the multiple endings you’ve already experienced to wrap it into its story, which was surprising. While the ending ultimately doesn’t do anything new, being way too familiar for this genre, it has the most effort put into it. It’s a short game though, taking less than ten hours with speedy reading and knowing which options to pick.
Apart from the multiple endings there’s nothing else to get you back. There’s the usual gallery mode, and the quality of the CGs are hit and miss. Some are great, while others feel like they’ve gone for the bare minimum or are fan service scenes for the cheap win. The same goes for the backgrounds as due to its nature, it is set in the same few places and thus able to reuse the same few backgrounds. The aesthetics will depend on your tastes but all the characters are carefully stylized to make them appear overly cute and childish.
Overall, Rinne-Utopia is a cheap cash grab of a popular series. Everything about the game screams bare minimum effort for a minimum viable product. The story is half-baked and it’s not canon (but even if it is, the ending made sure to invalidate all the events of the game anyway.). Not being canon is not a huge problem but it’s the predictable and repetitive story elements with an excuse plot that makes the game generic and low budget. The true ending is the best ending of the lot but isn’t an example of high quality writing, and you gotta go through every other ending first so you’ll be seeing the same events six times, where even text skipping will still make you think the game is taking too long and outstaying its welcome.
Arusu-Install
Arusu-Install is the second game in the collection. This story takes place after the second season, given the new characters introduced in that season that shows up here. There is a quick exposition dump in the beginning to introduce the setting and all the characters before it dives right down to it. You don’t really need to have watched the anime, nor even be that well versed in the setting given that the story boils down to a generic romantic harem.
If you’re playing this straight after Rinne-Utopia (which is likely given this collection), you can tell that this game has reused and recycled a lot of content. All of the returning characters’ models, as well as the backgrounds, are reused. It does add several new backgrounds and characters but the feel of the game is that it is an extension of the first game rather than a proper sequel.
The setting of the game is out of wack as Shido finds himself the target of yet another girl that wants him. More unusual this time is that it’s an AI and the cast ends up being transported into a virtual reality version of the town. They have to help the AI understand love through observation of their interactions. Virtual reality has not difference to reality except that it gives the story an excuse for some truly bizarre scenes.
As a result of the virtual reality setting, the story is less serious as it gives the characters a chance to roleplay. However, these scenes can either be creepy or downright doesn’t make sense. It tries to present this as the justification for the jarring scene transitions. It does end up crossing the line in several scenes where it ends up being quite uncomfortable to read.
There are eight routes, or nine endings, depending on how you count it, this time around. There’s one for each of the female protagonists and of course, all of them involve the character fawning over Shido and having a happy ending. Even the story structure is near identical with Rinne-Utopia with the story taking place at home, then moving onto school, then after school where there is a decision for the player to choose which female character to target, and then evening at home.
Just like the first game, when going through all the routes, you’ll have to skip a lot of the same events, which ends up being extremely repetitive. The skip function only speeds through the text, it doesn’t allow you to skip straight to the next decision. Each route’s ending is where the bulk of the unique content is and they are actually a step up compared to the rest of the game. They writing is not amazing, probably below to about average to other visual novels, but are good enough to at least make the time spent getting them somewhat worthwhile.
Surprisingly, there are a lot of unique CGs. It’s always fun to see what would turn up next although they’re definitely a lot more suggestive and daring this time around. Completing all the other routes will unlock the final one, which is also the true ending. It feels kind of weird as the journey up until this point had pretty much ignored a huge chunk of the setting of the game in favor of being a generic romance harem visual novel, although it tries to tie that in.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of filler in the final route, especially during the climax which drags on and on. Throughout the game, there were portions of text that you have to wait for the dialogue to be spoken in full before you can progress to the next one, which was weird by okay-ish. However, the climax is filled with scenes where there is a single static background image and then low budget animations / flashes representing attacks from the characters. You cannot skip these, they last for a while and they are frequent. It’s terrible since they waste way too much time with nothing meaningful happening during them.
The actual ending itself is okay but like the rest of the game, it follows a predictable structure so that it ends up being dragged out as well. Every single character had to have their scene and chime in so it can be tedious. You’re here waiting for the clincher or the resolution but no, here are the other eight characters speaking and showing off their attacks, and just for good measure, let’s cycle through everyone again. Anyway, once you’re done with all the routes, there’s nothing much to keep you back.
Overall, Arusu-Install, while still low budget, definitely had more effort put into the game. It still follows a too familiar and generic structure so it is average at best. The biggest thing against the game is how pointless it is. It deliberately uses virtual reality as a setting, and written the ending in such a way, that the whole thing is a write-off by the end. It leaves no impact to the characters, no development at all and everything ends up being how it was at the beginning of the game, so it can make the whole thing feel too much of a waste of time upon reflection.
Rio Reincarnation
The third and last game is Rio Reincarnation and this is the new content for this collection. As if it realizes how self-contained and lack of consequences the previous two games had, Rio Reincarnation changes that and acts as the epilogue to the previous two games. As a result, something weird happens again and Shido finds himself seeing Rinne, Mario and Marina once again.
Being forced to say his goodbyes before, and remembering the sadness during that time, Shido is of course happy to see the three again, particularly Rinne given she had completely disappeared after the events. However, this happy perfect world cannot last, and there is now the new appearance of a girl called Rio, who mysteriously calls Shido her "papa” and Rinne her “mama”, while looking for something important.
Unlike the previous two games, there’s really only one main route here, with a few decisions that’ll branch you off to a separate ending. However, these endings only involve Rinne, Maria and Marina. The other heroines, aka the spirits that weren’t introduced by the games, take a backseat with only some scenes here and there. The majority of the game focuses on the game exclusive heroines, which feels quite weird.
Due to the heavy focus on Rinne, Mario and Marina at the expense of everyone else, that’s why this game feels like an epilogue. This is further reinforced through the short length. The first two games weren’t long by any means, but they’ll still take around at least 10 hours each. Rio Reincarnation takes only around two hours to reach the true ending, and then another hour or so to get everything else. This means that there is even less story development than before, there’s only enough time to introduce the setting, have several interactions between the characters, and then a resolution.
Speaking of the resolution, despite it feeling like it was going to correct the way that the events of the previous games had no impact, the ending still effectively reverses everything to how things were at the beginning. Once again, there is not lasting consequences or effects from the events of this game. It also sucks somewhat that the game once again recycles all the content, the only new stuff here are some new outfits for the characters.
Due to its short length, there’s even less to do once you’re done with the main story. While there’s the usual gallery where you can see all the CGs at your leisure, there are some bonuses above and beyond what you’d expect. It includes all three limited edition artbooks of the games, and even fully translates the short story inside each artbook into English. It also includes several drama CDs but unfortunately, these were not translated so unless you understand Japanese, you’ll have no idea what’s happening.
Overall, Rio Reincarnation is okay. It serves as a final farewell to the characters introduced in the previous two games. It’s short and sharp, so it doesn’t fall into the trap of feeling repetitive like the other games did. At the same time, it barely had enough time to develop the situation before it finished and the writer took the lazy way out of just reusing a similar scenario anyway.
Overall
Overall, Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation presents decent value in terms of content as it bundles in three visual novels. While none of the visual novels are long on their own, when combined, it’ll take you twenty to thirty hours to see everything. The stories themselves are average, and the story progression can be too repetitive and tedious. This is definitely one for the fans of Date A Live, but even then, it doesn’t use its source material to its advantage anyway.
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