In my continued quest to get through all of Compile Hearts/Idea Factories fanservice games I finally went through their most serious title. If Fairy Fencer was an attempt at being serious Neptunia with a 50/50 split on silly and serious, Death end is Neptunia if you inverted the tone entirely. 90% serious, 10% silly.

The game is 60%~ VN and the rest is turn based RPG in a similar vein to Neptunia.

Story-7

Before I get into the details, I want to mention the biggest issue the game has is presentation. It simply relies to much on VN style scenes to tell a story that wants to be visual. This is likely budget related. The actual story is mostly interesting and honesty better then anything else Compile Heart has bothered with, and honestly better then plenty of other Vns and games I’ve played. It’s not a Demon Roots or Steins Gate, but still fairly strong. I just hope the sequels don’t hurt what is probably Compile Hearts best story.

You start with the main heroine, Shiina, crying about all her friends being dead. Arata, a body less voice and the male lead, tells her she is god powerful right now and to stand and fight. She stands, gets stabbed through the stomach and then the giant monster bites her head off. Guess we’re done here…

Shiina wakes up in a house in the middle of no where with pictures of a mother that looks like her and a young girl around it, but has no memories of herself. Leaving she recalls her name and that she’s an adventurer who promised her mother to go to Odyssia, the fabled sky island. But the land around looks a lot more torn up then Shiina remembers.

After fighting some monsters and saving a merchant, you get a lore dump. Heavenly monster came down, killed 90% of the world and then died a year ago. In the last few months the survivors have started dying from self deletion being caused by these weird bug things, one of which Shiina has attached to her. She decides to try to go to Odyssia before the bug makes her crazy.

Castle, meet king to get job for money, king sicks soldiers on Shiina saying Shiina killed the queen, she tries to escape and then hears a voice. The male lead is finally on stage.

We switch to a world like our own, where Arata is doing his job, programming. We get more info here, like that Shiina was a game director for a VR MMO their company was working on but vanished a year ago. Arata is broken up about this and still wants to see hear. He then gets an oppai mousepad shaped like Shiina’s boobs from a coworker. Like the game was doing really well setting a tone and boom, kind of ruined it with that.

He goes home and gets a few texts. He tries to connect to the VR MMO’s supposedly shut down servers and finds Shiina in game. After some more stuff and dealing with getting Shiina to realize she’s a real girl and not a video game hero, the actual plot kind of starts, get Shiina out of the game by beating it as she has no log out button. Now it’s Sword Art but good. Dying even might kill Shiina for good! Okay honestly the plot is closer to .hack’s first anime(especially if you ever watched the real world stuff that was happening as the game’s went on) then Sword Art but either works.

As Arata and Shiina make their way forward they gather a group of NPCs with body’s they shouldn’t have, items from the real world that lead Arata on goose chases, code in the real world that fixed bugs in the now bug filled VR game, and eventually a cult and real life magic stuff like a homunculus. It gets really interesting. Definitely the best thing Compile Heart/Idea Factory have written. I won’t deny it gets into some weird ideas and sometime the violence feels more for shock value then anything else, but it’s also really refreshing to read what is mostly an otaku product where blood and death happens. A lot of otaku projects play it way to safe with their characters.

There’s a few odd choices for the writing I want to mention. Like how Shiina is definitely the main heroine but the game has 7 “good” endings, 5 of which are bland and feel really pointless. Arata has screen time with like 3 girls in the real world and a bunch with Shiina, the game should have had 2 or 3 endings. The party members getting them is dumb as they barely have a relationship with Arata.

The game has 25~ bad ends, and like half of them are just silly. A decent number are really graphically violent or really go all in on terrible ends. Honestly it might be more spooky/unsettling then Spirit Hunter ever got. Bloodier to.

Then there’s the VR world’s backstory. While it does come into play late in the story, for a decent amount of the game you don’t really feel the oppressive hopelessness the random NPC’s should probably have. Like their world is screwed but it doesn’t read like they know that? The fanservice scenes, the scant few the game has, also feel oddly hopefully or silly, which is probably to lighten the mood? If anything the game probably could have used a few more scenes of levity with the party.

Overall it’s solid. There’s some weird stuff with the endings and direction of some of the plot but honestly you could recommend this game to basically anyone okay with the blood, the fanservice stuff is so scant and rare it really shouldn’t block someone from experiencing this.

Gameplay-4

It’s a modified Neptunia. With a lot of issues carried over from Neptunia, mainly balancing related. I switched to easy around the halfway point to get fights done and deal with incredibly frustrating boss fights. You don’t play this for gameplay anyway.

As for the specifics, each girl can move around the field as they please. No limit to movement other then field bugs which are basically mines though a few types have good effects(you can check with the cancel button, also can check enemy element type). You then get to select 3 actions and execute any that can do something based on range and effect(revive won’t do anything if someone isn’t dead, but you won’t use the MP for the attempt). Why would you use something that can’t do anything? The spark skill system. Combo’s of skills will show a lightbulb and a percent, after using combo of skills it rolls your chance of learning the new move and then uses it for free if you win.

That method of learning skills is interesting at the start of the game, but gets kind of annoying later on. I had to enter a lot of fights and spam healing skills to get new skills. Thankfully higher levels = higher chance so if you don’t want to grind skills you won’t use you can get guaranteed chance by the end of the game. Generally healing skills get you more healing, and physical skills more physical. Also most skills are learned by using 2 related skills or spamming the same skill. Only like 5 skills require 3 different skills in total in the game.

Moving on, after you attack, if your last attack can knock back and the enemy is in range you do that and they bump around the field taking field bugs and bouncing off the wall and other enemies. Then things die and the next turn occurs. Field Bugs are just mines, they do an effect you can check, some positive and mostly negative. Biggest use is to up corruption for glitch mode, the character’s super modes. Clearing half the field of bugs also lets the male protag do some stuff like summon bosses and mess with the combat system, i didn’t do much with this.

All enemies are weak to either physical or magical, then sun, moon, or star which are your elements. So basically 6 options, most character focus on one main type and have two or three other options to cover when their main is basically useless. Weaknesses are really important, beyond the weakest enemies you go from scratching enemies to one shotting them with their weaknesses. The main issue is some enemies counter any attempt to use specific elements, which gets super annoying. Also, sometimes even with their weakness you still don’t do much damage becasue the scaling is screwed. You miss all the time and some enemies are just way to tanky or dodgy. Bosses will oneshot someone, and fights can end up being having someone stand in front with a defense skill as you tap at them until you win. It wasn’t fun for me.

Dungeons are pretty short and mostly rely on finding keys and key items, which will then have you go to the “real world” for some Vn content and maybe a bad end choice. Then back to running the short dungeon. Fight boss, reach next dungeon in 5 minutes. The only variation is each characters field skills, which are handled weirdly. Shiina’s gets told to you right away yet it’s not till chapter 3 you can find a place to use it. Which is also the first time you can use one. They basically act as keys but other then Clea’s open white doors you always have who you need to open the path. Lecil’s make invisible paths visible is probably the only annoying one, as finding some of the paths can be a pain.

The standout idea of Death end re;Quest is the episode chart. You just get rewards for seeing story content that is global, so a brand new game can get a bunch of armor, money, and accessories from a completed game. This mostly means you want to see all the bad ends, as they give the best rewards. And some of the bad ends are weird. Most are just choose the stupid VN choice. Some are lose boss fights. A couple are run from boss fights and leave the room. One is trigger a story scene then turn around and walk back like five steps and then everyone burns to death. None of the bad ends are really required reading unless going for 100%. Which is good because some of them have the characters act like complete idiots. Honestly way to many bad ends are just silly because of what the characters did to achieve them. Like don’t trust the world famous adventurer. Or attack the obvious party member merchant.

Final note, I’ve never seen a game be so all over the place with weapons. Usually it’s main attack stat for character, with maybe a side stat like defense based on who the character plays. Here it’s all over the place and seems almost random. Shiina has 1 physical skill, a bunch of her weapons raise attack. She almost only uses magic attack. Caster elf gets that for two whole chapters where the game wants you to up her physical attack even though she basically never uses it, though some of those weapons can also give you agility or defense or HP. It’s weird going into the shop and the new chapter weapons only raise agility and lower attack.

Lewdness- 3

Other then jiggle on the models and their super cursed forms being in basically bikini’s, there isn’t much fanservice in this. Or more like the attempts are very tame.

Basically each girl gets a bloody death cg, and an attempt at a sexy cg. Celica and Lucil get what is supposed to be a maid outfit cg but only Celica is in a different outfit. Shiina and Clea fall together and you get probably the most sexual cg with Clea’s 1 ass cheek on screen. Al and Lily also fall together but other then some cleavage there’s nothing there. All the real world girls get 1 cg to themselves but it’s light cleavage for two of them and cosplaying a younger girl for the baby faced older women.

The ending cgs are just face images, just like Mary Skelter. There’s more cgs with blood then sexy stuff.

Final Thoughts

I question if calling this a fanservice game is accurate… It was an interesting read, but for anything other then story it’s lackluster. It’s one of those games I’d recommend using a NG+ save to just run through the game. Or play only on easy. Treat it like the VN it already 60% is.

I’ve planned to play the sequel just because the aesthetic was always interesting so I’m jumping right into that after this. I wish the Neptunia games were good enough to keep my attention and make me want to play them back to back like this. Honestly few games have gotten me to care enough to jump into a sequel. Skelter certainly didn’t.

For fanservice fans I can’t really recommend this, this is more for people who want a different flavor VN. It’s story is its only strong suit.

Save for Death end re;Quest

Filled episode rewards, all cgs and bonus content, and the top save has all weapons which all have their own models. Also included are saves to every 2nd chapter for easy access, on NG+ to make progress quick. No dlc’s were used.

Gameplay: 4/10 Eroticness: 3/10 Story: 7/10

Completion:

Get all bad ends using a guide, get the normal end and the true end on first run. Then get true end again on NG+ and select an ending. Do so another 5 times for a total of 7 true end clears. That’ll fill the episode reward screen. Then I just checked a guide for gear and skills so I had everything cosmetic and animation wise.