TOKYO CHRONOS

A lovely little visual novel, although obviously limited in scope. Follows the story of a group of eight childhood friends. Despite looking tropey at first it's surprisingly heartfelt, really rich with sentiment and emotions, and its characters feel realistic and lifelike. In particular it's nice that each character feels well-considered, and that it feels very believable that these characters were friends as kids. It's executed well enough that you can basically forget that it's paced on the slow side... If not for the weight of having to wear a headset the whole time. Its use of VR is not particularly novel outside of a few scenes where characters are super close to you (you could tell me that the environments were mostly out-of-the-box assets and I'd have believed it), but it is nice to be able to see where each character is looking and how others react while they talk. Plot-wise, the game goes back to the start one time, which is admittedly a little annoying considering a lot of scenes are identical, or nearly identical to the point I frankly couldn't tell that something was changed but evidently invalidated the "Skip" button. That said the framing method is interesting, so I can forgive it - Though others might not. I'm also iffy on specifically Lowe as a whole. There are parts of his writing I like, but on the whole I have mixed feelings on him. I like the overall plot progression and general warm theme.

I can't comment on the story because I couldn't get over the scaling, which is a shame. I was excited for a VR visual novel. Not only is the world huge, but I'm huge compared to the world. The player is like 1.5 times the height of the other characters, even at the lowest height setting. Because you can only perceive yourself as "you," not as a giant, it feels like you're hovering up in the air on a drone or sitting on a lifeguard chair or something. Having to constantly look down to see what's happening is a prime recipe for vertigo. I thought something was broken when it first loaded. There should be no reason to have to look at your feet to interact with the button interface in a VR game.

This is the first time I spent 14 hours in a VR reading, reading, reeAAA (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ At some point I was begging for this story to just end, it was like a torture. But on a serious note, there are quite many flashbacks where you simply read text and look at still human silhouettes. Not all of them are boring, but yeah, this is my biggest complaint. Other than that, the story was actually quite unique and the characters were interesting as well. Overall, a good VR VN, 7.5/10. Also, the first game I finished 100%.