Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters (PS Vita) Second Opinion Review

The game begins with a familiar old anime trope; the protagonist is a transfer student at a school in Tokyo. On his very first day, he's being shown around by the standoffish Class President, Sayuri Mifune. The pair heads to the closed-off fourth floor and see a girl in a sundress haunting the hall, begging them to defeat the man in the red coat. The man in the red coat turns out to be a ghost, something that looks like a cross between Carman Sandiego and Jack the Ripper, with a huge smile on his face and a wicked blade in his hand. Luckily, the "Gate Keepers" appear to fight the ghost and pull the protagonist into assisting. These "Gate Keepers" are something like a cross between the teams of Scooby Doo and Supernatural, a team of occult researchers who have a front of producing an occult magazine that deals with ghosts, cryptozoology and UFOs, but also take on requests from across Japan to exorcise fiendish phantoms.

Right from the beginning of the game, the controls and mechanics are a complete confusing mess. First off, there is the method of choosing dialogue to respond to characters. A wheel appears on screen showing five options: a heart, a handshake, a closed eye with a tear, a fist, and a puzzled head surrounded with question marks. This would seem a simple method of choosing dialogue, to reply with either a loving, friendly, upset, angry or questioning response. However, upon selecting which type of reply on this wheel, a second wheel appears… again with five options, but this time apparently representing senses, with an eye, a nose, a mouth with a protruding tongue, an ear and a hand. There is no tutorial or explanation for these at all, so it's trial and error to try and establish what each actually does. Take, for example, one of the first interactions in the game. After bumping into a cute girl and being told off by her friend, it would seem appropriate you would want to respond politely. Perhaps the handshake icon means friendly and the mouth means speak? Speak friendly to them, then? Nope. That meant lick them. It's just terrible design.

The combat is even more confusing, and is such a prevalent part of the game that it feels more of a strategy game than a visual novel. As the crew heads out on ghost hunts, they use blueprints of the haunted locations to plan their attack, and these blueprints transform into grids for the combat to play out on. Each turn consists of moving the team members and performing actions based on the amount of energy that characters has, while at the same time the ghost or ghosts move around. The aim is to attack where the ghost will be at the end of the turn. There are hints to try and establish where the ghost is and a forecast grid of where the ghost can move to, along with a collection of items to try and corral the ghost to a specific area. While the design of the combat sounds like it would make for an interesting and challenging puzzle, it ends up being as terrible as the dialogue. Instead of being able to make logical moves and box ghosts in, it is reduced to random chance and frustrating moments. This is improved somewhat by the use of items and tools - spreading salt the ghost cannot cross, for example - but still isn't enough to make the gameplay enjoyable.

Being a visual novel, the story could somewhat redeem the problems with combat and the dialogue system, but sadly, this is not the case. Firstly, though there are walls and walls of text here, novel length dialogue does not a visual novel make. The aforementioned stupid system of icons ruins the, it's hard to make decisions to guide the story when it's impossible to know what the results of the choices will be. Even the story itself a fairly humdrum. Split into "episodes" as the Gate Keepers help different clients, the majority of the game is spent jumping from one ghost hunt to the next, with lots of grinding between to improve the characters in the team and their relationships.

While the gameplay elements are riddled with flaws, the presentation is absolutely superb. Tokyo Twilight includes music from the legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu, and they sound fantastic. Then there are the visuals; both backgrounds and sprites look ridiculously good. Character sprites are crisp, with fantastic designs and are actually animated! The backgrounds blend perfectly with the style of characters. This really is top tier presentation. There is a flaw, however: the text. Perhaps it looks better in the PlayStation 3 release, but on the PS Vita screen, some of the text, especially the tooltips, look far too small to be easily readable.