/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Finished Innocent Eye's in one sitting, without a walkthrough.

A point'n'click eroge about a scientist protagonist, a clumsy spoonbender, and the daughter of the facility's head of research getting locked inside an underground psionics research facility, trying to save the little girl main heroine locked at the bottom of it, and hopefully find out what the hell is going on. Or at least I finished the main heroine's both endings; as far as I'm aware there's no other unlockable true ending for completing everything else. Apparently the game automatically railroads you to her "route" unless you specifically only pick flags favoring one of the two side heroines that you spend the majority of the game with, but I can't be arsed to do the gameplay again, because the proper branch for each heroine is only at the very, very end of the game and everything else stays the same. The H-scenes are all stacked there as well. Not that either of the side heroines were even remotely interesting characters, so my educated guess is that I'm not missing out on much. The main heroine's endings properly wrapped up the main plot anyways, so I'm satisfied it accidentally turned out this way.

If you view the game as a short but sweet gameplay title akin to numerous free RPG Maker games, it's an alright point'n'click timewaster. Puzzles are serviceable enough and don't work on retarded moon logic, so the game is perfectly finishable even for people who aren’t great at these type of things. However I’d recommend taking notes while playing as there’s a large number of rooms and it’s easy to forget what's where. The game also handily highlights interactable environmental objects, so you don’t need to pixel hunt like YU-NO or Caucasus. Map movement is also both fast and simple, so backtracking doesn’t become an issue. In this sense, I actually want more eroge like this. What I was not fine with were the handful of instant game overs: there's like three in the entire game, unless I missed some. First time it comes as a total surprise just by clicking a thing, second and third instances thankfully let you back out and save beforehand. So if you forgot to save you'll get fucked. They don’t even add any plot, they’re just “oh shit nigga you ded” non-endings without CGs, and they’re in rooms you don’t need to completely explore anyways so it’s not like they’re punishments for fumbling a puzzle either. The game would’ve been better off by removing them altogether. They and the random crashes to desktop are a good excuse to save every time you make progress. Skipping with CTRL always crashes the game without fail as well, but thankfully the in-game skip button doesn't.

As a full price eroge however, it's pretty abysmal. Heroines aren’t very likable or fleshed out apart from the bare minimum that’s required for the plot to work, everyone’s VAs are pretty terrible, writing in general feels very janky and flashbacks about characters are dropped on you at the beginning with no rhyme or reason to give an excuse why they're there. Handful of starting scenes after the characters get trapped are also way too lighthearted for the overall tone of the game. So lighthearted in fact that even the CGs have entirely different lightning from the rest of the facility in gameplay. BGM doesn’t loop, though I’m not sure if it’s just on my end. Main plot is also very flimsy and there’s not much world building, infodumps or anything like that to get you invested in the scifi setting, while major twists aren’t really twists because the game often spoils them by showing scenes from other characters’ perspectives beforehand, or they're just something you've seen before in other titles. It’s all very basic, essentially everything non-gameplay is on par with something you'd download on a whim from ふりーむ as well, and even saying that is insulting the better games available there. And as I mentioned, the game is also fairly short. In short, everything that doesn't directly serve the simple gameplay and exploration is complete trash.

Overall I got my share of enjoyment out of Innocent Eye's, but if I were to recommend the game to someone I’d warn them to keep their expectations about the plot and characters very, very low. If nothing else, it's a weird curiosity considering it's made by early Unison Shift. If I was one of the people who paid 8800 yen for this I’d be pretty fucking livid though. Root Double 0.9 this game is not.