World End Syndrome is a visual novel with a nice and unique aesthetic. What makes it so is the animated backgrounds. So not only does the aesthetic makes it look like a piece of art, but each background scene has something that is constantly moving, whether it is the pinwheels, or the fan spinning, or the waves breaking. It gives the visual novel a dynamic feel, even if the character designs are using more traditional aesthetics.
The story follows a male protagonist that you can name yourself. He moves to a small seaside beach town. There, he attends school and joins the mystery club, which is predominantly comprised of female members, and each of them is a romance candidate. The town has a legend where every 100 years, yomibito (the rising dead) reappears to kill and coincidentally this is the 100th year. When playing through the story the first time around, you will hit a compulsory bad ending that feels like it comes out of the blue. It truncates the whole story as it comes straight after introducing the characters. However, this sets up the mystery element and as you go through each of the various characters’ routes, you will learn about each girl as well as revealing a little bit more of the mystery.
The gameplay and story progression largely revolve around the player progressing day by day in the month of August. Each day is usually split into three segments: morning, day, and night. During each segment, you can decide where to go within the town and this will determine which character he will meet. Meet enough of a specific character to trigger their route and ending. It’s nothing revolutionary and can be quite boring as you go through similar motions each day. It doesn’t help that each day can feel short and has a lot of fluff until the bigger story moments. There is also a lot of trial and error as you do not get any hints at all on where the characters you want to meet are… which can lead to a lot of wasted time.
Naturally with these types of games, there is a romance element between the protagonist and the different girls. Unfortunately, the story takes place over a few months, and it only takes two hours or so for each route. There isn’t that much time to build these relationships. It does a commendable job, but it is very hard to shorten character development. As a result, most of the time, the characters just suddenly confess to each other, and it lacks that spark and chemistry.
In terms of gameplay, the game makes a very weird choice. It constantly breaks up the sections with a message asking if you wanted to save. At a minimum, after each in-game day (which may only take a few minutes), it will ask if you want to save. An autosave, or even just omitting these points (as you can save quite frequently anyway at points in the story), would have been an easy quality of life improvement. The other thing is that while you can open the backlog to reread text that you may have missed, you cannot jump back to scenes. There is also no way to jump to specific points in the story. You have to replay a huge chunk of the game, which is a pain if you made mistakes but didn’t want to waste that much time.
With the various routes focusing on each heroine, the game is repetitive in its story structure. This becomes predictable as each route has the same key scenes such as the moments where the significant backstory of the chosen heroine is revealed. Thus, the game becomes a bit of a chore by the time you’re on the third route. Each route will end with something weird but also reveals just a little bit more of the mystery surrounding the town. You will have the typical harem romance story that tonally clashes with the darker mystery which usually only shows up from time to time. With the way the story teases the mystery, including a cutscene at the beginning of each route that reveals a little bit more each time, it has a lot to prove that all this fluffing around is worth it.
The concept of the story is sound, but the mystery was thematically so different it doesn’t quite gel with the slice of life romance elements. The true route in which it reveals everything had a lot of predictable elements to it which most players would have probably already guessed. It saved a bigger reveal for later, but it wasn’t that amazing to the point of justifying the repetitive loops. The other thing was that even after playing the true route, it still doesn’t justify the journey of playing 70% of the story five times, for a payoff that is disjointed from them. It would have been better if the diverging routes were instead merged into one longer story that had better character development and build up.
Despite the various routes, the game is still short. You can replay sections of the story to see if you can pick up on the foreshadowing now that you know the big reveal, but the game makes it painful to skip. You can only fast forward events rather than skipping them entirely or jumping to a specific section. There are some collectibles scattered throughout but they are hard to find without a guide and ultimately do not unlock much. All in all, it takes around 15 to 25 hours to complete depending on your reading speed and whether you follow a guide to know exactly where everyone is each day. The music of the game has a creepy tone to it, which is further enhanced with the voice acting. The way that they whisper their dialogue at specific moments would lead you to think that there is a horror tinge to it, but it doesn’t.
Overall, World End Syndrome has a good concept for a story, but it doesn’t quite pan out. The aesthetics are unique and the moving elements in each of the backgrounds are a nice touch that sets it apart from other visual novels. Unfortunately, the story arcs are somewhat shallow, even the big emotional payoff at the end of the game doesn’t quite justify it. Having to repeat most of the same story elements multiple times is tiring and repetitive. This leads to a visual novel that’s slightly above average, but not much so.
-----------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------
The physical copy of the game comes with an artbook, here are some samples below.
