/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Finished Fatal Twelve. Production values were decent, but that’s about as much good as I can say about this battle royale game. No tension, no real battles of wits, lack of good twists, not even the character drama that’s the main focus really manages to deliver anything new either. Wouldn’t call it outright bad, just horribly bland.

My biggest beef was the protagonist Rinka being the biggest お人好し of all time and I think much of the game’s blandness stems from that: in concrete terms most often she just ends up spending time with her supposed enemies of the chapter and getting to know them for the eventual drama where they’re conveniently eliminated by someone more ruthless, except in cases where the opponents specifically ask Rinka to put them out of their misery. Characters just giving up happens all the time in this game. Even when the protagonist's indecisiveness ends up backfiring hard and you’d normally expect it to be a good turning point for some major character development especially because we’re talking about a high stakes genre like battle royale, it’s just conveniently fixed in the same fucking chapter. Lesson of the day learned without any price, and not even the lesson itself makes her behave noticeably any different.

Because the protagonist spends most of her time doing fuck all it means the game uses a lot of scenes from other characters’ perspectives, but even their ordeals don’t really manage to get very hectic and the elimination phases of each week never really surprise because who's going to die is clearly told beforehand or some character previously mentioned something like "I know that one is going to betray me so I made preparations". Not to mention the big fishes who are supposed to be the actual main threats that so far have made other players drop like flies also decide to team up in times of need to eliminate a common threat, and later even fucking decide to up and die just because they ended up liking the main characters and want them to get their happy ending. It feels like everyone revolves around the protagonist and her friends, in a really bad way.

The last chapter was also pretty weak. It didn't feel like the characters were approaching the goal on their own merits, because pretty much every single relevant plot stuff is conveniently dropped on them at the end without any connection to their own or the other characters' ordeals. Like literally a character just happened to know something all along and additionally never previously mentioned background explaining item just ends up in the protagonist’s possession by accident. If that was not enough, the last piece of the puzzle, even when the protagonist is *specifically* told she has to figure out the rest herself, is delivered by more magic and quite literally just hanging out with a person who knows the answer and appeared for the sole purpose of giving the answer.

Aside from those complaints, I think there was also a huge missed opportunity in the basic set-up because the game didn’t really use the early established gimmick of world returning closer to original timeline every time someone is eliminated as much as I had hoped, especially considering there’s some really colorful people of various nationalities, some of who are also big power players as well so you’d reckon the world reversing closer to “original” timeline after each elimination could’ve been used for some really major stuff. Only notable use of it is erasing the protagonist's mistake earlier on. The game could’ve also somehow utilized that, the characters and their stories to gradually deliver the last chapter’s revelations rather than as one convenient chunk the protagonist is just given at the end simply because she’s she.