Thursday, April 30, 2020

Root Letter: Last Answer (Switch) Review


Root Letter: Last Answer takes a good idea for a story and, well, turns it into a visual novel.  While in high school 15 years ago, the main character had a pen pal named Aya.  After finding the last of her letters mysteriously delivered to his house, "Max" decides to take a shot at meeting her in person.  As his nickname implies, he doesn't do anything half way.

Max travels to Shimane and quickly hits a dead end looking for his old pen pal. Undeterred, he decides to re-read one of her letters, and track down her old friends as a path to finding her.  Trouble is, she never specifically named any of her friends, just their nicknames.  Armed with that, determination, and some help from a few well-meaning locals, Max does everything he can to find out who his pen pal was, and where she is now.

For better or worse, the crux of the story is whatever secret revolves around Aya and the bull-headed conviction of people to be useless towards that goal.  I'm not going to spoil things if I can help it, but it really doesn't end up being that big of a deal.  One or two of the secrets may make some sense to keep under wraps, but the rest are super benign.  Plus, those one or two aren't even related to Max's quest.  One other weird aspect are the character's nicknames.  Max learns the real names of Aya's friends, but staunchly refuses to use those, instead only referring to them by these sometimes offensive nicknames.  It's not that bad, but makes it a bit harder for me to cheer him on.

One unique thing the game does is how it handles the interrogation of Aya's friends.  After corning one (sometimes literally), Max refutes each of their lies by presenting evidence.  It's set up like Phoenix Wright, but still feels fresh here.  Sometimes you will even enter "Max Mode", where a meter fills, changing what response you will tell the person.  I say tell, but he's usually yelling it at them...or at least enthusiastically saying at their face with higher volume and exclamation points.  The meter doesn't fill at a consistent rate, and the right answer isn't always obvious.  It's even harder when you have only a second or two to read the responses in the funky fonts.  At least there's no penalty for getting it wrong.

Root Letter does offer different routes in the story, but not in the way you may think.  The first 8 chapters are pretty much the same, and it's only the last one or two that are different.  The only things that affect your route are your responses to the letters you received years ago.  Max "remembers" what he wrote in each letter near the start of the chapter.  For better or worse, none of the other choices matter.  In my opinion, it's not the most logical, or interesting, way to do it.

Given this, the game would be prime for a flow chart, so you could just jump around and change your choices to get the different routes.  Unfortunately, there is no such grace.  Instead, you have to go through the whole game again, each time, to make the choices and get a different route.  Fortunately, there is a chapter skip in the menu, which will automatically advance through the completed chapter.  It's not the best method, but it at least keeps the subsequent playthroughs to about 20 minutes for a new ending.

Now, about those endings.  I won't spoil them, but they run the gamut from normal to horror, and even comedy.  You can see a bit why the choices lead to those endings, but they just don't feel like logical conclusions to the story.  If the choices had more of an influence over the story instead of just the last chapter or two, they might not seem as out of place.  Still, one or two of them are interesting.

There are two main additions in the Last Answer release.  The first is a live action mode, where all of the people and placed are replaced with photos of actors and locations.  It's pretty neat, and they did a great job replicating everything, but I prefer the original drawn artwork.  Quickly switching between the two would have been great, but you can't do it.  It has to be done on the main menu.  It would be nice to see the two back to back as you go through the story.  Still, it's a nice idea.

The second addition are some extended endings to most of the originals. These are hit or miss, but sadly, mostly the latter.  Thankfully, they are just unlocked to watch from the menu once you have completed all the vanilla game routes.  The one I would consider the "true" ending, because you have to watch the other first, is pretty good, and gives some extra closure.  There was another I liked, because it gave an actual resolution to the route.  The other two...are there.  Sorry to spoil this, but one involves kaiju.  Yes, really.  It's...odd, to say the least.

Root Letter: Last Answer is a decent visual novel.  The concept is good, as is the evidence-based interrogation scenes.  Route choices aren't the most intuitive, and the secret(s) behind the mystery could have been much more interesting.  They even throw out a very plausible explanation in the middle as a joke.  It's not that long of a game, so it's not a big time investment if you are looking for a new and (hopefully) cheap visual novel.  Otherwise, I'd suggest skipping it for much better offerings.


The Good:
Interesting idea with Phoenix Wright-style interrogations.

The Bad:
No route differences until very late, and very random directions of those changes.

The SaHD:
Like 428: Shibuya Scramble, this makes me want to visit the area it's set in.

(Root Letter: Last Answer was purchased by the reviewer)