Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa is many things. It’s a puzzle game. It’s a visual novel. It’s a moe game. Or so you’d think. The latest offering from PQube and Art Co. Ltd. starts out as a mixed bag of tricks and manages to keep you guessing. But it’s not everything you’d think it is. In Kotodama, you play a student at Fujisawa Academy, where you’re a new transfer. Oh, and you happen to have a cute demonic cat companion named Mon-Chan for no apparent reason. Eventually, you end up connecting with fellow students Nanami and Wakaba, both of whom are in the Occult Club. You end up investigating the seven mysteries of Fujisawa Academy. That’s where things get oddly tedious.
As you play through Kotodama, you’ll realize that there’s a spectacular amount of exposition that doesn’t really go anywhere. This is one big visual novel, but it doesn’t grab you, at least not often. Most of the seven mysteries are anti-climactic at best. You’ll interrogate people and use your ‘Kotodama’ power (the power of Words….seriously) to convince them to spill the beans so to speak. When using Kotodama, you inexplicably imagine each character as losing a piece of clothing every time you manage to make them happier in the puzzle sections of the game. Yes, imagine. This is all going on in your head and not actually happening. Once successfully interrogated, the students will open up about the ‘mysterious’ happenings around campus. You’ll then move on to the next chapter, rinse, and repeat. It’s tedious, the stories mostly aren’t all that compelling, and it got old fast.
However, for a falling gem game, the puzzle section of the game is actually quite good. Instead of matching gems in a normal fashion, you select a gem which shoots to the top of the screen, effectively dropping the gems above it to make matches. It’s a simple mechanic, but surprisingly tough to master and quite entertaining. In addition, combos can unlock a variety of special abilities, including dynamite, move clock stops, and more. The game only gives you a limited number of moves to succeed within, but disrobing your opponent will net you some extra moves. As the game progresses, the challenge of the puzzles slightly increases, but never makes it to outright challenging. You can also use earned points to fondle your opponents a la Moero Chronicles, but with a much stricter limit on perversity. You touch them, they react either positively with a heart, neutrally, or negatively, in which case your game suffers a variety of consequences. It’s a well-designed mechanic (except for the obviously tacked on fondling), and would be an excellent game in its own right with a little tweaking. If you manage to beat an opponent, they strip…sort of. You’ll see a closeup with them teasing their lack of clothing but never showing anything. This goes for the guys as well as the girls. Yup, you mentally strip both guys and girls naked in your interrogations.
Aside from puzzling and visual novel selections with minimal choices and a barely coherent story, there isn’t much to Kotodama, at least on the first playthrough. Just because you’ve reached the credits doesn’t mean you’re done though. As the credits roll, time gets reversed and you end up back at day one, albeit with a few more options to choose from. Eventually you’ll play through a few more times and find the true ending of the game, but it’s a ways off and the first playthrough ends abruptly at Chapter 5. It’s a lot of work for a minimal payoff, but the game slowly gets better as you inch tediously towards the true ending.
In addition to Story mode, there’s also a Fantasize mode where you can practice your puzzling skills in a couple of different difficulties with every character you’ve managed to unlock. Beating them in the puzzles unlocks alternate lingerie sets but doesn’t serve much other purpose as far as I can tell. Well, except for that it’s fun. Don’t forget that part.
It feels like the developers of Kotodama wanted to do everything but honestly just didn’t know how to go about it. They designed a great puzzle game, but it only unlocks at scripted events and it can get tedious. They wrote a decent story, but got the pacing terribly wrong and managed to botch the whole thing up so that you don’t really have the patience to get to the end. They tried to add some moe elements in with the touching during puzzles, but it really isn’t sexy in any way and pretty much falls flat.
When things finally get moving around Chapter 5, you’re going to get blasted right back to the beginning, frustrating you all over again. It’s kind of ridiculous, as the amount of text you’ll have to wade through is silly, but PQube conveniently added some buttons to speed things up. The downside is that you can’t tap the letters and numbers of ethereal bonuses that don’t really matter.
In docked mode, Kotodama is playable. However, it’s definitely not the greatest, so don’t go buying a system for this one. In fact, while docked, the game plays all right, but it really shines portably with excellent touch screen controls. Undocked, the game is largely quite intuitive and is noticeably intended for a smaller screen. Everything is touch-ready, right down to all the menu options and the puzzle game. It’s a welcome change from games that are designed for docked mode first and foremost, especially in a visual novel which many people are likely to play in bed.
It’s hard to quantify Kotodama. It’s not really successful at anything, and it tries hard to be, but it’s also not a bad game, just not a particularly good one. Everything about the game feels like a swing and a miss. Sure if you have the patience, you can unlock the true ending, and there are some slightly creepy plot points along the way, but there are no compelling characters, no notable tension, and the game simply doesn’t engage particularly well as visual novels go. There are definitely better visual novels out there for the Switch (Steins;Gate Elite comes to mind immediately) but Kotodama is still kind of fun. At a $30 price point, it might be a good idea to wait for a sale though.
This review was based on a digital copy of Kotodama: The7 Mysteries of Fujisawa provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes. No questionably aged schoolgirls were technically stripped nearly naked for this review…because it was all in my character’s head.
Official homepage: http://pqube.co.uk/kotodama/
Twitter: @PQubeGames