/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Finished Kara no Shoujo 3.

Have I grown exceedingly jaded over the years, or was the game kind of shit? Production values were pretty good but that’s really only good I can say about it. First thing I can say without spoiling anything is that the game is an overall letdown as a mystery. I'd want to say it's more drama-focused this time around but the new characters are weak and the old guard doesn't get developed in an interesting way either. And the iffy plot developments.

Structure wise it’s mostly the same as previous games but less obtuse, slightly for the better: NG+ has very little new content aside from few scenes and the two actual plot differences hardly change anything before an arbitrary cut-off point. The first proper non-game over ending you get is callously called “Unsolved case”, but it’s only “unsolved” in the sense that the plot decides to cut off there before protag and co. even question the arrested suspect. I’m not expecting a grand finale out of a non-true ending, but at least in previous games the other endings actually attempted to be fucking endings in some manner even if they left mysteries open. Here it just arbitrarily cuts off literally mid-case, fuck you, start from the very beginning for the usual Innocent Grey rigamaroo: replay through the entire thing with a handful of new scenes sprinkled in between, almost none of which add anything meaningful enough to warrant a full replay. The new scenes do have a lot of new CGs so you can’t fault the devs for lack of effort, but they’re all stuff that was already revealed or alluded to on first playthrough. While technically new, it’s still just padding in terms of plot. Nothing really new here if you've played the previous ones.

As one saving grace there’s a lot less map movement and other choices than previous games, so less having to restart the game several times over because you missed an optional encounter or didn’t get enough hidden points or something, though I followed a walkthrough on second playthrough just in case because IG has made me paranoid. You’d guess catching certain character on second playthrough would change stuff, but no. Yaginuma doesn’t as much as get redeemed or proven valuable either, the plot just decides not to kill him this time around and one completely unrelated clue just doesn't exist for no reason on first playthrough. At first I thought the skip only seen text function was also broken for second playthrough and was ready to drop the game then and there because I’ve just had it with IG’s bullshit a long time ago, but then I realized they just put the trial content at the beginning of second playthrough as well. For some reason.

But yeah, the mysteries and overall story weren’t that interesting. The two previous games at least had stuff that directly had to do with the main characters themselves, but in this case all of importance gets put on hold for what is essentially ends up being a side story for characters that don't matter in the long rung. And then the plot takes a massive nosedive: Rokushiki is just a boring villain since he just returns to doing what he's been doing, mostly for cheap drama, while directly showing his manipulation also makes him a worse character since we never saw it in the first game and it was implied fucking up his patients took years. In this sort of case tell don't show can be more effective, but in this Ks3 we see it first hand: Rokushiki isn’t a smart villain – he’s a wizard who turns everyone else into a drooling ingrate the moment he enters the scene. It just relies on characters acting retarded rather than him being clever. Yaginuma’s decision could perhaps be excused if he didn’t literally know what type of women Rokushiki kills, and Fumiya's blackmail seemed pretty far-fetched as well: "Oh no, someone found me masturbating to a painting I stole, let's help an escaped serial killer (who’s very likely to kill my sister as well – which literally happens in one bad end) kidnap another victim so he won't tattle about my fantasies!"

Everything after time skip was weak as well. Tangentially related stuff that just so happens to be related to main plot by sheer coincidence, with a slew of new, even weaker characters that the game has no time to develop. It doesn’t feel like Reiji and co. are advancing the plot, more like the plot itself just decides to give them bread crumbs. Naori’s motive for everything was retarded as well, when it's something you'd expect the game to heavily focus on considering it's supposed to be a direct follow-up to KnS2. Even the artsy fartsy novel parts were paced better in previous titles and made you guess how they’re connected to the actual case, whereas here it’s all given in one fucking go with a plain “oh right, here’s the last part, lol”.