Alexx Aplin
Alexx AplinI’m no stranger to Idea Factory and their RPG’s. In fact, I’m very familiar with the Neptunia franchise, as I am quite fond of its brand of humor and gameplay. However, Idea Factory has come up with a new RPG that has really surprised me, which is rare for an RPG veteran. Death End Re;Quest is a breath of fresh air in the Idea Factory brand.
Before I dig too deep into the game itself, I should mention that this game is NOT for children. While there may be cute characters and quirky anime designs, there are a LOT of dark subjects that are included in the game. Things like death, suicide, murder, gore, violence, and sexual themes are present, to a degree that I was not expecting from the developers.
Now that we have the content warning out of the way, here is the general premise of Death End Re;Quest. The game takes place in two settings. The real world and a virtual world created by Shina Ninomiya and Arata Mizunashi called World’s Odyssey. World’s Odyssey was meant to be a Virtual Reality MMO that would allow people to embody their character and progress through its story in an immersive experience.
Almost a year prior to the start of the game, Shina disappeared, and the World’s Odyssey project was shut down by the development company, Enigma Games. Many assume the pressures of developing such an ambitious game caused Shina to flee out of anxiety and cowardice. Arata is unconvinced of this and begins to try and investigate. At the start of the game, he receives an email from Shina’s account tied to World’s Odyssey and discovers that she is trapped inside the game.
Shina has no memory of the past year, and at first, believes that World’s Odyssey is the real world. After the two reunite (with Arata guiding her from the Real World,) they discover that the only way for Shina to survive and return to the real world is to complete the game’s true ending. The problem with that is that the True Ending has a projected success rate of less than 1%, but Arata is determined to help Shina. This goal is complicated further as they discover that items from the real world are appearing in World’s Odyssey, and the NPC’s in the game have begun to act strangely.
Additionally, World’s Odyssey is slowly being overrun by bugs, with areas and characters becoming corrupted. This corruption manifests as a curse that turns characters into monsters, and through bug-like creatures called Entoma. Around this same time, weird phenomena begin to appear in the real world as well, and Enigma Games winds up being investigated after they are implicated in cyber attacks that they did not commit.
Arata and his allies must seek to clear their name, while also trying to help Shina cleanse World’s Odyssey, free her from the game, and get to the bottom of everything that has been happening. The plot is complex, and there are a lot of weird moments in Death End Re;Quest, but I haven’t seen such an ambitious RPG in a very long time.
Gameplay in Death End Re;Quest plays out in two phases. The main aspect of the game involves standard RPG mechanics, where you take Shina and her party through various environments, exploring, solving puzzles, and fighting enemies. Sometimes, you may find that an area is blocked off, preventing your progression. This is where Arata comes in, and this leads to a separate section of gameplay.
In the real world, Arata must follow leads, investigate occult phenomena, and work with his friends in the real world to solve various mysteries. Often these mysteries lead to discovering bits of code that are missing from World’s Odyssey, which allows you to open previously inaccessible areas. Essentially, the general flow of the game involves playing as Shina until you have difficulty progressing, and then switching to Arata to see if he can figure out something that will help.
Arata may seem like a passive protagonist since he cannot ACTIVELY fight alongside Shina in combat. Despite this, he is a vital part of the team for a few reasons, including his ability to hack into World’s Odyssey to change the stats of Shina and her team, as well as assisting her in a few other ways. Before I fully explain that though, let’s take a slight step backward and talk about the flow of combat itself.
Like most Idea Factory RPG’s, combat takes place in a circular arena, in which each character can move and issue their attacks, spells, items, etc. However, Death End Re;Quest has a fundamentally different approach to combat. For starters, the battlefield is usually covered in things called “field bugs.” Different field bugs do different things, whether they heal your HP or SP, raise or lower stats, etc. However, all of the field bugs will increase your characters’ corruption if they walk over the bugs. How do you deal with this? The solution is rather simple.
Instead of each character getting a single attack, you can slot up to 3 actions in a single turn. If you attack 3 times, you can get a 4th “knockback attack” which allows you to knock enemies into each other, clear field bugs, and also lets you knock enemies into your allies. By knocking an enemy into an ally, it allows them to attack and knock the enemy back as well. The cool thing about this is that you can chain multiple knockbacks between characters for extra damage.
The concept of knockbacks and field bugs changes how you approach combat. It isn’t just a simple turn-based RPG anymore, now you have to keep track of where your characters are placed, what their range is, and the most effective way to clear field bugs. Additionally, once you clear a certain number of field bugs, you can utilize Arata’s special “Battle Jack” effects.
Battle Jack is essentially a mechanic that allows Arata to hack into the game of World’s Odyssey to assist Shina and her allies in combat. There are multiple ways of using Battle Jack effectively. Arata can install a Genre (changing combat from turn-based to other genres like shooters or 2D fighters,) alter enemy stats, raise Shina and her allies’ stats, or Summon an Entoma creature.
Summoning Entoma Queen creatures allows you to essentially let them fight for you for a short period of time. You can only summon the Entoma Queens you have defeated in battle, and you can only fight with them for a short time. The reason is that every time the Entoma Queen attacks, more field bugs are generated. This can be a risky move, especially if you are dealing with your party members being corrupted.
By walking over field bugs, or being knocked into them, your characters accrue a percentage of corruption. If they reach 100 percent corruption they are unable to fight, however, at 80 percent it unlocks Glitch Mode. Glitch mode is a powerful form for each character that gives them a super ability and increases their stats. Glitch mode only lasts a short time, but it can quickly turn the tide of a rough battle in your favor.
Combat becomes a strategic, complex, and refreshing endeavor. In most RPG’s, even the most devoted fans tend to get to a point where they say “Ugh, another battle?,” but in Death End Re;Quest I never felt that. The combat was always engaging, exciting, and the different genre options add a lot of variety.
In a lot of ways, Death End Re;Quest defies normal convention, while also playing into several common tropes. There is fanservice, typical of anime-styled games. However, there is a lot of content in the game that defies typical ideas and taps into new ones. For example, Arata’s gameplay largely involves story elements that pertain to the occult and cryptids.
The game blends the mundane, with existential horror elements that are creepy, and convey a fear of the unknown befitting of the natural world the characters live in. Questions are presented that echo real-world curiosities, and eventually, you begin to wonder, “How can Arata and his allies ever go back to normal after this?”
Shina’s journey, on the other hand, (while interwoven with Arata’s) echoes common video game storylines, since she is literally trying to complete a game she and Arata created. As you play though, you begin to realize that her tale and Arata’s are intrinsically linked, and all the NPC’s created for World’s Odyssey begin to exhibit human qualities.
This is where Death End Re;Quest sets itself apart from the other Idea Factory RPGs and other anime-styled RPG’s. The darker subject matter, and the existential horror elements throughout, make it interesting and unique. As I mentioned earlier, there is fan-service, but it never gets to the point where you feel like it is particularly out of place.
The problems I ran into with Death End Re;Quest were fairly minor, but they are still worth mentioning. For starters, sometimes the depth perception in-game is a little off. For example, when using a symbol attack (an attack on the field that determines whether you get first turn or not) sometimes you think you are in range when you actually aren’t.
On the flipside, sometimes you think you are far enough away that enemies can’t hit you, only to wind up in a bad encounter because they hit you first. Other than that, the only other issue I found was that in some areas, there is a lot of backtracking, which can get annoying.
For the most part, I would say that Death End Re;Quest is the game to bridge the gap between RPG veterans and newbies. If you aren’t a fan of fanservice-y anime titles, you MIGHT get turned off by it at first glance, but I would encourage taking a second look at this one. I am not exaggerating when I say that, as an RPG veteran, this is the most unique example of an RPG (in the best way possible) I’ve played in a long time.
A PlayStation 4 Review Copy of Death End Re;Quest was provided by Idea Factory for this Review
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Death End Re;Quest
$56.97 USD
Pros
- Engaging, Strategic Combat System
- Fantastic Story and Premise
- Unique twists on common Tropes
- Accessible for New RPG Players
- Deep Progression Systems
Cons
- Depth Perception is Sometimes Off
- A Fair bit of Backtracking
