Why I really loved Death End re; Quest

So, I’m back on Tumblr. Neat! Either way, I played this game and a bunch of other ones earlier this year and it was quite the experience. I won’t hide that I fell in love with it, but it has its share of problems. Either way, let’s get on with the review!





The story is about Arata, a young programmer who has been recieving an email containing a file leading to an older game he worked on: World’s Odyssey. There, he discovers Shina, the CEO of the company who went missing a year ago. So, it’s his job to help her clear the game and get her back to reality. However, some hints left in-game lead to some real-world clues, which makes him discover that the situation might be even worse than what he expected. There are then lots of twists and turns that completely caught me offguard in this great psychological thriller. I loved most things about it, though. Especially coming from the guy who wrote the story for the Corpse Party games: Makoto Kedouin. There are rarely any real fanservice moments, which is a great idea for an Idea Factory/Compile Heart game. However, there were a few other moments that were extremely uninteresting during the later chapters to the point where I skipped a bit of dialog because I already knew what would happen next. Kedouin is not that good at writing torture scenes. Also, since the game is for a more “mature” audience, there is a lot of blood. Not necessarily on-screen, but in some descriptions here and there. While some descriptions can take quite some time to read, they are often condensed into a paragraph or two. Despite these flaws, I got fully invested in the plot enough to clear the game’s true ending. I would recommend all players to reach the normal ending and then replay the game in order to truly enjoy the true ending. Once I finished the game, I ended up wanting more. I wanted more of this universe, more of this lore, and more of these characters. What about these characters? Most of these characters start out as ordinary stereotypes yet end up becoming surprisingly memorable…most of the time. Some interesting side characters end up not being developed enough to my tastes or flat out disappear during the final act. I desperately wanted to spend more time with them, but that’s not what the game wanted, so…too bad! As for the villains, they are extremely boring and one-dimensional. Every single time they appeared, they ruined the mysterious atmosphere established by the game. In other words, I loved Death End re; Quest’s story, despite its issues.

As for the gameplay, it’s split into two segments: a visual novel-style segment in the real world with multiple choices and an RPG-style segment in the virtual world. The visual novel segment is very standard, with multiple saves (except for a few segments during bosses) and multiple choices leading to different endings. It works for what it is. The game even encourages you to view every singular outcome. As for the RPG segments, I think they’re really great. The mechanics introduced are interesting enough to make this game stand out from other RPGs: glitch mode, cheat codes, and knockback mechanics all work really well. The player can also change gameplay styles and, while I wish the developers would have done much more with that idea, it was still very nicely executed. The controls for aiming can be very sensitive, so I would recommend players to move the camera right at the specific angle instead of moving the character itself. As for the dungeons /locations, their design is a massive step up from a few other Idea Factory/Compile Heart games with lots of puzzles and labyrinth-like structures. I loved the dungeon designs of this game. One of the very few problems I had with it is that the central location (the wilderness), is a bit confusing to navigate in. Another issue I had is with the difficulty. Players would usually think that the harder the difficulty would be, the more rewards they would get, but it’s quite the opposite. Cranking down the difficulty gives the player MORE rewards, inciting players to always lower it. This difficulty setting doesn’t encourage the “more risks, more rewards” philosophy of ordinary RPGs. Another thing to note is that you can switch from the real world to World’s Odyssey by pressing R2. You’ll have to switch from World’s Oddyssey to the real world quite a few times in order to progress, so watch out for that exclamation mark. So, despite that as well as a few other problems, I loved the gameplay.

As for the presentation, I liked it. However, the visual novel segments are as ordinary as they can be, the characters barely have any facial expressions (which is probably to keep the game’s universe somewhat “realistic”, but I still would have liked more expressive characters) and the game runs at around 30 frames per second on PS4. Despite that, the voice acting (even in English) is great, the graphical style works very well, the enemy and character designs are neat, and the music is a love letter to the late 1990’s/2000’s era of gaming, which is a very good thing to my ears. Overall, I liked it.

In conclusion, I loved Death End re;Quest despite its flaws and had a lot of fun overall. I would even recommend the story to any psychological thriller fan (although I would also recommend them to be very patient during chapter 9). So yeah, see you next review!