Our World Is Ended

While the novel isn’t animated in the true sense, the developers worked hard to show changes through the different images used. There is some movement in terms of blinking and mouths moving, which helps add a little motion to the story. These work together to make the art itself a very enjoyable part of the game. Visual novels are a great way to combine a passion for reading and games. “Our World is Ended” is an intriguing sci-fi mystery, with stunning graphics and a plotline reminiscent of another popular visual novel, Steins;Gate.

Inappropriate shift in tones

Visual novels often play with tension to help heighten the experience, but in Our World is Ended, the tension is thrown off in an unpleasant way. The novel is overall a serious story about what happens when an AR headset starts leaking the experience into reality, but every time something serious happens, someone always cracks a sex joke.

Fan service is an important element in visual novels, but the timing and tone of these jokes were very off in the novel. As an example of how poor the timing is in this novel, there’s a scene where the protagonist is racing to stop the city from disappearing in a blink. He is terrified due to this very real threat, as he should be. During this tense, dangerous moment, they have to search for a “banana, cream, and a thick, dark long pole” to craft the “Climaxblade” to defeat the tentacle monster causing the problem. Also, they must get it from an elf woman designed to be as sexy as possible.

This can lead to conflicts in the reader in how they are supposed to feel. Aroused? Terrified? Concerned? Is this even a big deal? It both plays down the dangerousness of the situation, robbing you of tension, but also of the potential for arousal. It’s hard to enjoy fan service with tension clouding it, just as it’s hard to feel tense with sex jokes thrown in.

Offensive content

The sex jokes go well beyond trying to lighten up grim situations, and can turn the stomach of even the raunchiest reader. Pedophilia, slander against LGBT people, and other downright gross jokes can make all but the most diehard readers uncomfortable.

This tone deaf approach to sex is usually coming from one dimensional characters, whose only purpose is to enjoy preying on young kids or hating gays. This is very disappointing, since the story itself has a lot of promise. It’s easy to imagine how frightening a world would be where games can burst out into the real world, and there’s plenty of opportunities to build sexual tension as well as the more serious kind without these oddly placed, poor jokes.

Reasonable amount of gameplay

If you can get past the changes of tone and offensive content, there’s about 30 hours of game play in this novel to play all the endings. This is a reasonable amount of game play for a visual novel. On top of the usual endings, you can even unlock a secret ending.

Pros:

• 30+ hours of gameplay
• Amazing graphics

Cons:

• Tone is off
• Lots of typos
• Pedophilia and LGBT hate