World's End Club

(I tried too hard to make a clubbing-jumpstyle-platformer joke in the title for too long.)

There are some light/early game spoilers in this review.

I am a fan of Kodaka's Danganronpa series, and a bigger fan of Uchikoshi's Zero Escape and AI: The Somnium Files, so when they made their own studio I was suitably excited. Death Come True, a short FMV game with a gameplay loop that you'd expect from these two was pretty good, but I was more interested in World's End Club (at the time called Death March Club). The character art popped, and while initially surprised they'd cast 12 year old characters in a death game, assumed there would be a twist or two that mitigated whatever was to come. Even at that time it was sold as part action adventure and part visual novel, so despite the name change and "the death game is cancelled" trailer I believe the game we got was what was intended all along.

And that game we got, in my opinion, is kind of... alright. It's split into story segments, VN-like presentations of information; camps, where you can talk to everyone in your party for additional dialogue and characterizations (essentially more VN); and adventure segments, which is the gameplay.

The character designs do indeed pop, as do the characters themselves. While some fall into treasured anime stereotypes (Kansai is the loud annoying baseball boy who's jealous of the main character, Mowchan is a little fat boy who loves to eat, Aniki is emo and wants to do things on his own because emotions hurt), I was pleasantly surprised by others (Jennu is a handsome girl who's obsessed with not-Takarazuka Revue, Vanilla is a ditzy genius programmer, Nyoro looks über fashionable but is a scientist at heart). The interplay between these characters is the high point, and to be expected they all have another side to their personalities. Their emotional journeys are not entirely even, but the good ones pulled at my heartstrings, especially because I am weak to any kind of sibling-related sadness. Overall, the theme of sticking together through thick and thin bears out in the end in a satisfactory, if typical way.

The overarching story would be hard to get into without spoilers. After the short false start death game it basically becomes a road trip through a people-free Japan. At certain junctions you (as the silent character Reycho) pick which group to go with after an inevitable splintering of friendships. There is fun worldbuilding, as this is definitely not set in our 1995, the post-apocalyptic setting isn't what you'd expect, and several characters are tied into the various plot elements. In some ways, I wish they had left out any of their... I'll say more typical twists you'd expect of this studio's helmsmen. This could have been portrayed as a completely straightforward story, and the lack of novelty of those particular elements almost makes them worse in my opinion. Again, the conclusion is mostly satisfying and I enjoyed that not every single thing was tied up with a perfect bow.

The worst problems lies almost entirely in the platforming. I think the gameplay was poorly conceived as a whole and should have been rethought. They could've gone 100% VN (as is it's maybe 80%), a puzzle/point and click adventure game, or swung hard into puzzle-platformer. The movement does not feel good. Jumping is somewhat floaty while platform grabbing and pulling up feels slow and sticky. The characters move slowly--it doesn't have the snappy feeling you expect from a modern platformer to enjoy it as a platformer alone. Thankfully checkpointing is frequent, which cuts down on frustrations. As for the puzzles... there really aren't many. There's a late level where you can't fully control a character (which gave me a bit of Warioland when-Wario-is-on-fire vibes) which is the most enjoyable puzzle area in the game. Everything else is simple: a couple platforms in a row, a pit or two, a couple enemies easily dispatched by your player character's power, and then it ends. Maybe a light puzzle where you have to push a box around. And yes, your characters have various powers, which are used poorly in the gameplay segments, and a bit better in boss fights.

For example: one character can blow fire. She gains this power in an ice level, and you can imagine all kinds of ways for puzzle platformers to use this. Instead, there's blocks of ice in the pathway. You melt them. You move on. A yeti walks up to you. You kill it with fire, you move on.

You have 12 characters, with 12 unique powers, and you don't get to use them interestingly or enough in general. A character with an upward piercing rock attack is mostly used the same as a character with an electric shock, as the one with the fire blowing: essentially just mid-range attacks with cooldowns. The platforming segments are mercifully short, with the caveat that it gives you less time to utilize these characteristics. It feels like the gameplay was made simple for kids, but the story line is certainly not. This is why I wish they'd gone a different direction entirely, to let the characters breathe and show off their traits in levels formulated for each of them alone. There are many great puzzle platformers nowadays, so the standard is high and it simply does not cross that bar.

This is not a terrible game, it's more a shame that one aspect drags it down so much for me. With the poor gameplay and sometimes sluggish paced dramatics of the VN scenes, I had trouble wanting to play it, and I think these two creators can do better. I appreciate them trying to move beyond their ADV game roots but this particular entry is underdone.