Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Eric Vs. 365 - Day 248 - Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa

Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa is a visual novel that features a decent story and nice artwork and is generally pretty good. It also takes a Doki Doki Literature Club crazy turn and goes wonderfully off the rails surprisingly early and only gets more nuts from there. Oh, and it's also a pretty fun puzzle game, too. This game has it all and more people should play it. Read more and watch gameplay here.

Kotodama starts out like a fairly normal visual novel. You're a new kid in school and are quickly caught in the wake of another student who is part of the Occult Research Club and get dragged along to discover the seven mysteries of the high school. At first, the explanations for a secret library, or white wolf roaming the nearby woods, or a mysterious gentleman who wanders the campus are pretty simple and rooted firmly in reality. There is a darkness lurking just below the surface here, however, and things go absolutely freaking nuts. 

When I recorded the video I was only on my first playthrough and speculated that you probably had to re-play it a few times for the good stuff to happen, and I was right. Your first playthrough doesn't really give you any choices and there isn't much going on, but then something crazy happens and it unexpectedly ends. You then start over from the start, but remember what happened before, and this time you have a lot more options on how to dig deeper into what is really going on at the school. 

In addition to the visual novel aspect, Kotodama is also a puzzle game where your character uses special powers to force people into telling the truth by somehow rooting around in their brains via a gem matching puzzle game. Don't think about it too much. There's also tons of fanservice because the characters you're interviewing get stripped naked (no nudity, though) during the process. If you like seeing panties and hearing cute little squeals from embarrassed girls, Kotodama's puzzle mode is for you. There's also dudes you use this power on, too, but who gives a crap about dudes, right?


All in all, Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa is quite good. I'm happy I took a chance and bought it. I'm not super big into visual novels so it was actually the puzzle game aspect that convinced me to try it. It turned out that the visual novel was pretty good, too.