Story: Kojou ga Miseta Yume = “The Dream the Old Castle Showed Me.” This visual novel from Nippon Ichi Software tells the tale of a prince who dies right before his crowning ceremony and finds himself cursed (or blessed) to relive the next few days over and over again as a ghost. By silently haunting the remaining inhabitants of the castle, Will hopes to solve the mystery of his own death and prevent multiple tragedies from befalling his family, his friends and the rest of the country at large.

Gameplay: Prince Will can only haunt people, he can’t actually possess their bodies and force them to do anything. But by following them on their daily routines over the next 28 days, he can learn their plans and problems and gather certain “keywords” from their conversations that can be shown to them as dreams, influencing their actions. Will can also jump from body to body using the L/R buttons, thus moving around to various places in the castle. This is essential because some people almost never interact. Princess Vanessa (Veene for short) never talks to Chancellor Nells in the next 28 days, for example. So if you want to get from Veene to Nells, you might have to jump from Veene to Jimmy the palace guard and then to Nells. Or Veene -> Mary the Maid -> Nells. That sort of thing.

Since the game really does loop infinitely as per the title Infinite Loop, permanent failure is impossible. If you do something wrong and get someone killed or fail to stop the tragedies on Day 4/10/16/22, you just get sent back to day 1 to start afresh. That said, it is all too easy, especially for people like me who are terrible at this logic thing, to get stuck in a pattern where you know what is wrong, but you don’t know how to stop it. That’s where a FAQ comes in handy: http://gamepukka.com/guide/g165_infiniteloop/il02-chart.html If you can’t read enough Japanese to follow the FAQ, you can’t read enough Japanese to follow the game either, so nothing of any value will be lost.

If you’re adamant about not using a FAQ, following every single character in the game will eventually lead to someone dropping some pretty heavy-handed hints about what you’re supposed to do. It can still be tricky though, because not only do you have to show the right keywords to the right character, but you also have to do it on the right night. E.g. show the keyword 国葬 to a certain character on Day 7 to avert the tragedy on Day 10. If you view that character’s timeline too early, you might forget all about him and get caught up pursuing alternate means of solving the problem.

Speaking of which, my main issue with the game was that there was only one solution to every problem. In some cases it made sense, but in other cases, e.g. when someone’s been kidnapped, there should be many other characters who can come along and rescue them, not just one particular guy. But when I think of the complexity of the game, that would probably have created more alternate routes than the writers could deal with. Something to explore in spiritual sequels, I hope.

Once you been down a character’s timeline once, you can jump to any point in their timeline, saving you the trouble of watching all the days every time you loop back to the start. The timelines look like this, with a different color for each character:

Making changes in a character’s route might break their timeline, prompting you to skip to that event and see what has changed and what hasn’t. There’s a candle list that tracks events you have viewed and those you haven’t. For example if you prevent character X’s death, a candle will be lighted to that effect. If you decide to redo that event, or if you decide that you want character X to die after all, you can just snuff out that candle and start afresh. In fact the game promised it would be possible to solve the same mystery in different ways by lighting and extinguishing candles, but in practice only very minor events have such alternate routes.

Graphics: Bright happy colors! What, you’ve heard that one before? I also like the anime character designs, and I love how active and bouncy the character models are. They move even more than the Phoenix Wright models do. They’re not quite fully animated, but they’re far from static portraits either. Backgrounds are a bit bland and it sucks that we don’t get to explore more of the country, but those are minor nitpicks.

Apart from inducing story-related dreams, keywords can also be used to trigger CGs. They run the gamut from cute to hilarious to completely fanservicey “for perverts with bum-and-foot fetishes” material. At least two of them are just plain unsafe for work. I won’t post them here, if that’s what you’re hoping for. There are over 50 CGs to collect in addition to 72 dream events and 42 keywords. It’s a great game for 100% completionists, but anyone who claims they got everything without using a guide is either insane or lying or both.

Characters: An interesting bunch of  likeable and relatively normal people. Following them around 24/7 makes them even more interesting, because you get to see and hear some very unexpected… things. Some things I was definitely better off not knowing. Just imagine all the things someone would discover if they turned invisible and shadowed you for a couple of days. Creepy, right? By playing with dreams and keywords, I came across a lot of events that made me go “Huh” “Ewww” “Hahaha” “Oookaaaay…. *backs away slowly*” Prince Will does occasionally look away when he sees something he’s not supposed to see, but alas the player doesn’t have that option.

It’s just unfortunate that there weren’t any huge surprises to discover. For example, almost everyone loved and adored Prince Will while he was alive and nobody ever says anything bad about him. I thought half the fun of being invisible was hearing all the negative things people said about you when they thought you were gone. It’s unlikely that anyone can have such a universally high rating, but we’ll chalk it up to the nil nisi bonum effect since only Will just died a few days ago.

So sure, some people who seem wholesome turn out to be not so wholesome (and outright creepy in at least one case) and some who seem like tough nuts turn out to be fairly decent people.  But overall the good people stay good and the Big Bad is easy to identify very early on and stays bad throughout. And with the exception of the Big Bad, they’re a very funny and likeable bunch of characters. I thought Will’s goody-goody fiancee and pampered little sister would annoy me, but they turned out to be some of my favorites. I liked everyone, in fact.

Apart from everything I’ve mentioned so far, Infinite Loop also has: excellent voice acting by VAs I’d never heard of (not like I’m a seiyuu expert or anything), a great soundtrack and many anti-frustration features such as saving anywhere, very fast fast-forwarding and scene-skipping.

Problems: Kojou ga Miseta Yume has a charming cast and very interesting gameplay for a visual novel, but it needed a bit of work in a few areas:

1. Even with scene-skipping, jumping and fast forwarding, looping the same game 100+ times will take a toll on you if you want to see everything. That said, if you use a FAQ and go straight to the correct routes you could probably finish the game in 3 hours, so I guess it was my choice to drag the game out.

2. The story lacked surprises, big time. I want to spoil, but I won’t. The ending was also rather rushed and didn’t give as big a pay-off as I’d hoped for, plus some of the developments came completely out of left field, but I can’t really explain without spoiling so I won’t.

3. The cast was a little too small and a little too incestuous. A small group of people and they all know each other and they’re all nice, wonderful happy decent people except two… it gets a bit bland after a while.

4. The 200-word database was unnecessary. The database is basically a collection of words and concepts related to life in Western Europe c.1600-1800. It contains a lot of information about cultural life, politics and religion in those days and is probably of great interest to history buffs. Except they probably know all that stuff already. It’s boring for everyone else, and having “database entry unlocked!” kind of messages pop up when you’re having a conversation is distracting. Especially since the writers went out of their way to worm those words into conversations where they didn’t belong, so that a maid will randomly start talking about Die Nibelungen, for example.

5. It is outright stated that the country of Liseburg is very poor and the majority of people are just eking out a living. That being the case, it’s a little uncomfortable to play as the 1%, living in our beautiful castle, eating delicious food, drinking delicious liquor and only thinking about how best to maintain our wonderful lifestyles. This does bite the cast in the bottom on Day 10, but once that tragedy is resolved it never becomes a point of concern again. It would have been better to introduce at least one Average Joe character, just to see how the other half lives.

6. While it’s normal in visual novels for everyone but the main character to be voiced, Will really should have had a voice this time. If not a voice then he should have had written dialogue. It’s just weird the way characters interact with him (in flashbacks) by leaving blank spaces for you to fill in with your imagination. “You’re going where?” <pause> “That’s lovely, I wish I could go too.” <pause> “What? Me? Noo!” <pause> “Hahaha!” <pause>, etc. You can get a pretty good idea of what the conversation is about, but would it really have been so hard to give Will dialogue?

Overall: The slightly disappointing story aside, Infinite Loop is a great game and definitely worth a try for anyone who likes visual novels and can read a fair bit of Japanese. Fans of light-hearted murder mysteries like Ace Attorney, Ghost Trick and Time Hollow should take to this one like ducks to water. While Infinite Loop’s characters aren’t quite as wacky, they’re still very charming folks. Furthermore the dialogue isn’t quite as witty as in other games, but the right localization team could have done wonders with what they were given. I’m quite sad this game never came to the West. Maybe if it had been on the DS instead of the PSP something could have been worked out. Alas for what never was.