Set in Kyoto, Japan in December 1999 at the end of the 20th century, Angel Halo is loosely inspired on the prophecies of Nostradamus in the year 1999.

The protagonist, Kusakabe Makoto, lives an ordinary high school life. One day, an angel named Sophia and a demon named Lilith appear before him. They are the messengers of Heaven and Hell, informing him of the approaching end of the world.

The day of Lucifer’s judgement is approaching.

In 2020 I believe that it’s impossible to play Angel Halo without inherently trying to find contrasts to Sei Shoujo’s seminal work – Bible Black. The comparison might be a bit unjustified, as according to staff list, Sei only worked as an artist on this game and the scenario planning and writing was done by someone else who seemed to have a rather short stint in the industry.

But it’s hard not to see this game as a sort of germinating seed for the game that would do much better for establishing Sei’s reputation in the future – the moody atmosphere, focus on occultism, attractive school uniforms with a heavy Gothic bent and path branching along the lines of Law and Chaos as opposed to the heroine-based branching that would become the norm for the medium. These are all elements that can be found in both games, so perhaps he was looking over the shoulders of his colleague while working on this game.

That’s not to say it’s a 1-1 copy with name swaps. You likely won’t get far predicting the plot simply trying to match the archetypes in both games – for example, the childhood friend character, quite possibly the most important character in BB, ends up being really minor in the grand scheme of things in Angel Halo.

To be real honest, the short description blurb really makes the story sound better than it actually is. While reading it, I could sense the writer really wanted to explore themes such as the inability to escape one’s fate and mankind’s helplessness against the Divine powers.

What he actually wrote though is a story where the main character bumbles around the region stumbling into incidents until the game finally ends rather than attempt anything on his own initiative for the most part.

The game is mercifully short, in fact strangely so. There are five routes in the game, broadly categorized into belonging to either the “Angel” or “Devil” route, each of which can be completed in a couple of hours. To make matters worse, the routes for each category tend to share 99% of the same content with the differences usually only coming into play near the very end, leading to a lot of text skipping trying to get to the new content. It’s a bit unfortunate because old VN engines like this one, having a whooping 4 save slots total and no ability to automatically skip previously read text (thus having to manually keep track of when the new text appears), makes things harder than it should be to fully complete the game. Thankfully the brevity of the game means it’s more of a minor annoyance rather than a complete deal breaker.

I have strong suspicions that the scenario might have been pared down from its original length. The setup and reveals feel like they’re paced for a game longer than it actually is. The reader is told the hard deadline before the end of the world occurs which you think would lay down the foundations of story pacing going forwards, but every path in the game has an event which just knocks off a bunch of days swiftly making the end always feel so abrupt. While I certainly prefer a short piece over something that pads out its run time with 20 hours of cooking scenes, it’s hard to feel like you aren’t getting shortchanged somewhere.

As stated, Angel Halo’s 5 routes are divided into either the “Angel” or “Devil” route depending on who the main character aligns with. The Devil routes involve the devil Lilith (meaningful name) encouraging Makoto to give into his base instincts and go wild since morality and long term prospects aren’t a thing when the world is ending anyway, while the Angel route involves Sophia (meaningful name) needing him to “awaken” the angel candidates to prevent the resurrection of Lucifer. The latter’s excuse for erotic eroge game scenes is about as flimsy as Fate’s mana transfer scenes, but I do wonder if it wasn’t intended to be somewhat foreshadowing the fact that the Devil faction’s representative ends up being more honest than the Angelic ones.

Now the main plot progression of Angel Halo may be sloppy, but there’s one notable exception – the endings. There’s at least one stinker of a bad ending and some endings may feel somewhat redundant depending on which ones you have seen already (it feels to me like there’s an optimal way to experience them but that’s completely arbitrary on my part), but for the most part it certainly feels like an unforgettable experience. I highly suspect that the endings must be written very early in the process and the meh middle parts filled in later to bring it to the end.

I think they’re further enhanced when you finish all of them and realize just what the game is going for (SPOILERS – highlight to read) – in all but one ending, Lucifer is revived, humanity is wiped out (or close to it) and the Earth is left a living hell – all set to a lovely rendition of Joy To The World. It’s kind of an interesting take on using the medium’s usual feature of having multiple endings, because it takes advantage of the player’s desire to “make things right” as soon as he reaches what appears to be a negative outcome.

But once you realize that there’s nothing you can do to change humanity’s fate, watching the world burn becomes a beautiful, haunting moment.

The other positive aspect of the writing are the minor snippets of the world building you learn through dialogue about the current state of the world. For historical context, Angel Halo is based off the “End of the Millennial Apocalypse” fears of its time where people believed that the world would end based off (pseudo-)religious beliefs and prophecies floating around in that era, giving rise to cults and organizations who all probably looked rather silly when the year 2000 came and passed without Lavos turning Earth into Bad Future (TM), but nevertheless it had quite the impact on many in the artistic field with games such as Subahibi / Wonderful Everyday and Shin Megami Tensei. The game oozes with the occultic influence of the times and while the religious references used is probably inaccurate (and probably slightly sacrilegious), it’s kinda a interesting take on the themes anyway.

Moving on, when it comes to talking about the graphics in a Visual Novel, there’s two general points of interest – the CGs… and everything else.

The PC-98 era happens to be one of the few times “everything else” is of interest – think about the last time anyone talked about the backgrounds in a modern Moege! In Angel Halo’s case, I really doubt anyone is going to use screenshots of it to showcase the technical excellence of the artists of that era regarding masterful use of techniques like dithering and shading like Yu-NO did. Angel Halo’s backgrounds are actually fairly simplistic, but I thought it was an interesting decision to only use monochrome colours for the backgrounds. It conveys the sense of malaise and bleakness that would be characteristic of the era and the brightly coloured characters stand out in contrast to the world around them.

And now, we’ve come to the part that would likely the major factor in choosing to pick up this game – Sei Shoujo’s CG and the erotic content.

For better or for worse, artists change over time. From a cursory glance of his portfolio, Angel Halo is the first game where Sei Shoujo started to really develop his characteristic style – previous works starring his art (mostly formulaic Mahjong games) were almost indistinguishable from others on the market.

I consider Angel Halo to be one of his “golden eras” when it comes to his artistic style as it straddles a fine line between the “traditional” designs of the time with a tinge of his personal touch – the end results of Angel Halo’s character designs ends up reminding me of Satoshi Urushihara works (of Langrisser / Growlanser fame), so I may be a bit biased in that regard.

I’ve never been a particular fan of his modern artstyle where due to being a famous household name he now has total control over his productions and no oversight George Lucas style results in his modern work tailored too much towards his own fetishes – he’s almost as bad as Masamune Shirow (Ghost in the Shell) drawing nothing but oily horsemen nowadays. Angel Halo hits the sweet spot for me and I wish he would return to those days.

As a final note, for those traumatized by the extreme content that Sei has come to be known for, Angel Halo is very tame even on the Devil route, with the most non-Vanilla content being some of the ladies packing eggplants… if you know what I mean, but I suppose that’s not a very surprising development where he’s concerned. And here it’s mythologically accurate to boot!

As far as the music goes, Angel Halo’s pieces are fine on paper, especially if you listen to them outside of the game – nowadays there are many people uploading the soundtrack of PC-98 games onto Youtube, which is how most people will likely have their only experiences with them.

In practice, I find them to be a bit overpowering at times and it actually takes me out of reading. There’s not a lot of variety there either so the music gets old even for the short game length.

I never get tired of listening to the end sequence music though. Then again, it is a public domain piece so I think the only credit the music guy should receive is that he recreated it with the rocking PC-98 soundfont.

The PC-98 and its Visual Novel scene has a curious reception in modern day. You see people admiring random screenshots posted over social media but not many attempts to actually play the games. Granted, this is likely due to the language barrier but even the language fluent populace seems pretty content to dismiss all but the small handful of “widely accepted classics” as tripe.

It’s true that most of the era’s games would accurately be defined as amateur works, but I can’t say I agree with the mentality that anything that doesn’t reach the level of Russian literature is not worth reading. Personally, I kind of find a lot of modern storytelling a little sterile in the age of widely available focus testing, whereas the rough “imperfections” of hobbyists can sometimes create interesting results. Angel Halo, I feel, is one of those games that represent more accurately the nature of the PC-98 as a system as a whole – a mess, but it’s the nature of being a beautiful mess that gives it a particular appeal that’s hard to replicate.