Game EXP: DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia (VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia

Systems: Windows, Linux, PlayStation 4

Release Date: September 5, 2024

Publisher: Idea Factory International

Developer: Idea Factory, Compile Heart, Sting

Time Spent: 10 Hours 6 Minutes

Before we get into the game, I'm going to need to preface this entire article with some context.  

I don't usually play visual novels, although I have played a couple visual novels over the years, so I am somewhat familiar with the genre, just not intimately so.  I have also not played anything developed by Idea Factory, which includes the DATE A LIVE series, the Neptunia series, and the Death end series to name a few.  I also haven't watched any anime related to any of these aforementioned series, so I didn't know any of the characters or know if there was any kind of crossover before going into DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia, which is the sequel to DATE A LIVE: Rio-Reincarnation.  The game does include a library of sorts that gives a short description of each of the principal characters in the game which gives a little backstory, but not really enough to feel like I played through DAL:RR or read a Cliff Notes copy.  I could have also watched a walkthrough or a highlights video on YouTube beforehand, so that's on me going into DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia with as little knowledge as I did.

From what I have been able to tell from playing through six different scenarios in DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia, your playable character is a guy named Shido who is able to interact with potentially destructive angelic spirits who after dating and making them "fall for him," he is then able to "seal their spirits" in the form of high-school aged girls who all live in a collective house in a small town.  The girls don't lose their angelic abilities, they're just not in the forefront.  Or something.  There's also something about spacequakes, some backstory with Shido and Kurumi who traveled back in time 30 years to prevent the Spirit of Origin, and something to do with the spacequakes.  Oh, and there's something about Shido being able to change from a biological male to a biological female named Shiori; how this happens isn't exactly as clear as it is in Ranma 1/2.  There's also an organization that oversees the girls/spirits and spirit-related occurrences in the town/region, but they're mostly in the background.  I think.

So!  Now that that's out of the way, let's get down to this dating-sim visual novel!  Below I've included the first half-hour of the game if you decide to sit through and listen to all of the voice acting, which occurs significantly slower than I am able to read it, so it will likely take you fewer than 30 minutes.

A couple of things to note about this video.  First, I recorded this to be as complete as possible leading up until Shido's first decision, which lunch he will take that's offered to him.  I'm not sure how this specific decision affects all of the other potential choices you make in the game apart from those directly dealing with either Kaygua or Yuzuru, but since this is a decision-based visual novel with nine possible storylines and up to 15 different endings, it didn't make sense for me to even attempt to record all of the possibilities.  So from here on out we'll be going into generalities with some specifics here and there.

After you make your choice of lunch options, there's a few more minutes of dialogue, before you're taken to a map of the school and the city and you get to decide where you want to go and who you want to interact with.  This is probably the earliest that having knowledge from Rio-Reincarnation would be beneficial since at this point in the game, you decide who you want to focus your story on.  You can choose side characters to interact with, and while that's entertaining to help build up the world, I don't actually know if that has any effect on any choices later in the game.  For me, it was mainly deciding based on who I had talked to yet in my previous playthroughs.  Through all of my playthroughs, I was pretty disappointed that this option never came back, to decide where you wanted to go, unless it's unlocked after picking a specific character an making specific choices.

The basic version of the story is that a malevolent entity named Ren presents herself to whomever you've decided to have Shido interact with during the after-school phase.  Ren will appear in the dream of whomever you decide on and offer them a wish each night for three straight nights.  On the third day, Ren "collects her fee" and will kill the woman you chose.  During your dates/outings with the character you chose, you have to make choices that will affect whether you get the bad ending (character dies) or the good ending (character lives and banishes Ren).  

After playing five separate times and never having reached a good ending (every girl I picked was killed), I was starting to feel weary about the whole game.  I felt that my choices were having some kind of effect on the outcome of the game, but it really came down to nuance and likely how well I knew all of the characters and how my choice in whatever decision that presented itself would be interpreted by that character through past interactions that did not exist in this game.  That put a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, coupled with feeling exhausted about having to go through the entire beginning of the game each time and seeing every character fall for the same tricks and traps laid out by Ren, did not feel good as a player.

Something else that I wasn't thrilled about, and this is likely from having played Doki Doki Literature Club, is that while this game encourages replaying multiple times to either find your way to a good ending, finding the good ending for one particular character, or finding all of the good endings for everyone, there is a lot of trudging through the same repeated dialogue.  Yes, there is a fast-forward button (that I only discovered on my fourth playthrough) and you might be able to start a new story from a previous save file before you make any kind of choices, but there doesn't seem to be any kind of recognition from any of the characters that you might be going through this for the 12th time.  And while I do appreciate that a non-speedrun playthrough will only take about two hours, it does become mentally taxing not fully knowing if the choices you made will lead to a good ending.  If you make the wrong choice just one time, that will immediately lead to a bad ending, so unless you happen across a walkthrough, you are going to have to decide how much trial and error you want to sift through.

The story though, I liked well enough, and even the first two playthroughs I was becoming invested in the mystery surrounding Ren, her motivations and how everything was supposed to intertwine.  I was beginning to get a sense of who the characters were in Shido's life and more of the backstory that built upon what I'd already read in the Library.  But feeling utter helpless in my decisions having any kind of an effect on the outcome of the game, led me to look up a walkthrough for some kind of hint within the answer as to what I had been doing wrong.  As it turned out, I had made one bad choice (because of a character trait that I don't feel was adequately explained in this game) away from getting one character's good ending.  So I followed a walkthrough, got a good ending, and while the story didn't reach a satisfying conclusion, it felt like it could very well be the end for me.

I honestly don't know if I'll return to DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia either in the near or distant future, if only because I feel like I've not gone through various parts of the story six times, five of which choosing different characters to have the story focus on, and I'm kind of over the character of Ren at this point.  Maybe if I ever go back and play through any of the other DATE A LIVE games it might incentivize completing this portion of the story.  And maybe that's just my own fault for starting a series with the fourth game.  Ah well.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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Just for shits'n'giggles, here's an in-game fast-forwarded version of the game leading up to the first decision: