Rei-Jin-G-Lu-P / Raging Loop / レイジングループ

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In Raging Loop, graduate student Fusaishi Haruaki is on a motorcycle journey through the countryside, when he gets lost in the middle of nowhere, and finds himself in an isolated mountain village with odd customs and little hospitality for strangers. The village is suddenly enveloped in a mysterious mist, trapping him there, when a series of brutal murders strikes. The villagers believe that the murders are the work of Wolves risen from the underworld that have taken human form and hidden among them, and their ritual tradition is to lynch suspected Wolves by majority vote, leaving Haruaki caught between being murdered or framed for the murders and hanged to death. Yet when Haruaki is killed, time magically rewinds for him, allowing him to uncover more of the mystery with each loop.

At the heart of Raging Loop is the daily trial, which puts a Danganronpa-like spin on the Werewolf party game also known as Mafia. Each day, the villagers discuss the murders and vote to put a suspect to death, then at night, the Wolves murder another villager, while certain villagers blessed by various guardian spirits use their powers to investigate suspects or protect other villagers from harm. Each trial is a battle of wits as the villagers struggle to coordinate their actions without revealing too much information about themselves and potentially attracting unwanted attention or appearing suspicious. Just like in the party game, except with much higher stakes, and individuals that put their own survival and that of their loved ones ahead of the team’s interests. The result is a rollercoaster of constant intrigue and betrayal, and the novel is at its best here.

The other half of Raging Loop is the mystery of the village and why all these things are happening. Haruaki is an intelligent albeit insufferable protagonist, and hence a rather convenient audience surrogate, acting as a dabbling detective investigating the murder scenes, and as an amateur anthropologist studying the legend of the Wolves and the culture of the village’s traditions. The setting is infused with Shinto and Zen Buddhism, and spends a great deal of effort on worldbuilding to a degree considered, if not authentic, at least comprehensive. The sense of neverending inescapable despair certainly makes the setting feel like a kind of naraka hell.

But this isn’t just any old murder mystery. Raging Loop is a visual novel, with the video game convention of saving and reloading manifesting in-narrative as a time travel twist, much like in the Zero Escape series. Mechanically, this operates through its tree-like forking structure, with many dead ends, and choices unlocked by information obtained from other branches. But Raging Loop‘s supernatural setting and the time travel mechanics it establishes within handles this structure with considerably more finesse than other, more conventionally SF stories. Like the protagonist of Sumaga, Haruaki’s memory of previous loops is imperfect, and only triggers at certain (arbitrary) points, which lets early story branches coherently ignore later information. That is, it allows head-scratching statements like ‘he hadn’t remembered the future yet’ to make sense within the narrative. It might not be the most sophisticated approach, but it doesn’t feel inelegant the way Zero Escape does.

Yet despite the branching structure, Raging Loop is surprisingly linear. Many of its choices lead down short branches to dead ends, and the corresponding correct branches are often unlocked closely and quickly. It is only in the final chapter of the game that the player is required to connect the dots from distant timelines, and only then that the player is offered more freedom to choose the order in which to connect those dots. This linearity has the benefit of keeping the pace of the story fairly constant and making it easier to keep a complicated story straight in one’s head, but at the cost of making it much more of a passive experience than I had expected from how it appeared. A simple way of making it more active would have been to require the player to identify which piece of information is relevant at critical points and think carefully about what has been learned, like in the Kara no Shoujo series.

In some aspects, Raging Loop is a mess of contradictions. It’s a CERO-D horror story full of brutal, bloody scenes that never actually shows any gore and shies away from situations that are too squeamish. Dead ends are all punctuated by a cartoon mascot character explaining what you did wrong, even though it’s always obvious anyway due to the structure of branches. It’s is full of eroge tropes, but never gets too explicit. Its protagonist is a smooth ladies man, and each ending is associated with him getting close with a particular heroine, but the game keeps it all family-friendly. It’s a whodunnit mystery game where the player isn’t required to do any detective work. The script is much too long for a mobile game, and the interface is a bit too simple for meaningful adventure gameplay.

I suspect much of the discussion of Raging Loop will center on its ending. The rollercoaster of twists and turns ends with a resolution that I am still undecided on evaluating as epic and brilliant or an absurd ass-pull. It is the sort of ending that makes sense upon reflection and feels thematically consistent, but in the moment, seems rather anticlimactic and unsatisfying, compared to the highlights of the novel. The third chapter in particular is outstanding, and apart from the first section of the final chapter, the last act tends to drag on with lengthy exposition and ends up comparatively bland up until the end. It certainly didn’t inspire me to stick around and read the bonus content to tie up the remaining loose ends. If I had to point to where the problem was, I’d say the novel tried to do too many things at once, eventually straying too far from the heart of the story.