Finished! Yay! That only took me about 6 hours or so. Short game is short! It’s another one of those games I’d been meaning to play but just never got round to. What gave me the impetus to go ahead was getting bored with Tactics Layer towards the end. Then I got really caught up in Time Hollow
Time Hollow follows the story of Ethan Kairos, whose parents, Timothy and Pamela Kairos, mysteriously disappear on his 17th birthday. Ethan realizes that the entire world has changed as if his parents had disappeared 12 years ago. Ethan then finds a note tied to his cat’s collar telling him to look in a dumpster behind his school, where he finds a Hollow Pen, an uncanny object with the unique power to open portals to the past, as well as a note from his parents. Ethan uses the pen to solve problems that suddenly and mysteriously occur, thus changing the present, though he himself is able to remember these past parallel universes. He also meets a girl, Kori Twelves, who seems to share Ethan’s displacement from time. Eventually, Ethan comes to realize that the past is being manipulated by another Hollow Pen wielder, Irving Onegin, as revenge for the fact that Ethan supposedly killed his mother.
That’s pretty much how it goes. The gameplay feels a bit like the Ace Attorney games. You know, you walk around looking for clues, questioning people, putting facts together, that sort of thing. It also reminded me quite a bit of Radiant Historia, which I finished not too long ago. You know, the way the bad guy and the good guy have the same ability, and you have to jump back into the past to fix what went wrong in the present. Irving messes something up, Ethan fixes it, Irving messes something else up, Ethan fixes it, all the way till the end.
When the game came out there were a lot of complaints that the gameplay was too easy and too repetitive. I can see where those people are coming from. It was really, really obvious at every stage of the game exactly what you had to do to get the game to progress. There are only about 15 cast members and about 10 locations to visit (several of which you almost never go to). That means that whenever you get a flashback showing something has changed, it’s pretty easy to figure out what, where, who and what to do. Then it’s just a matter of getting more information, visiting the location and changing things with your pen. Simple!
For my part, I liked the gameplay just fine. I wasn’t looking for much difficulty, I just wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to my parents. I appreciated the fact that the system stayed out of my way and let me get on with it. A liiitttle more challenge would have been great though. Instead of the Hollow Pen glowing whenever it was ready to be used, the game should have left it up to you to judge the best time and place to use it. Lots of opportunity for frustration, but lots of opportunity for strategic thinking as well. And there really should have been more to playing the game than just See Flashback, Change Flashback, See Flashback, Change Flashback x100. Thank goodness it was short, is all I have to say about that.
When it was all over, I was pretty satisfied with the ending (though I was hoping for more than one possible end). Ethan got his parents back, his friends were all safe and sound, Uncle Derek and Kori got together, and since cousin romance is legal in Japan, Ethan might even get him some with Kori Junior. There were just a few sticking points I would have liked the game to address:
1. The game says the Hollow Pen has been handed down through the Kairos family for generations. Okay. A little more detail, please? Where did it come from? Why was it invented? What was it supposed to be used for? And why does the Onegin family have one too? Maybe Konami is saving that info in case they ever make a sequel (highly unlikely).
2. Was it really a good idea to let Irving Onegin go off like that? Sure, his mother never dies so he never decides to pick on the Kairos family. But he’s been shown to be highly unstable and even downright murderous. And he’s probably going to inherit his mother’s Hollow Pen sooner or later. Who knows what kind of havoc he could be wreaking out there with that thing? We can only hope his mother got him some much-needed psychiatric care.
3. Why was Ethan so cavalier about letting Uncle Derek sacrifice himself? The whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth. He only hesitated for a frame or two then he was like “…All right.” None of them there even tried to talk Derek out of it or to try an alternate way of saving Kori. Drop a trampoline or a mattress below her or something, I dunno. I can see Ethan’s thought process now:
Derek: Let me go save her, please!
Ethan (thinking): Damn right I’ll let you go! Go get killed, Uncle Derek, you <beep>! Living in my father’s house, using my father’s study…you’ve talked down to me one too many times. I hope you suffer, Uncle Derek. I hope it hurts real bad. Maybe the next uncle will know better than to mess with the Time Master.
Ethan (aloud): …All right.
4. Nobody thinks anything about Derek going back in time to save Kori? I mean he even addresses himself in the past as “Future Me”. He hasn’t changed much either, I mean Kori recognizes him on sight. Even if she didn’t, after 10-12 years, wouldn’t she notice her husband looks exactly the same as the guy who saved her? Wouldn’t police DNA tests and fingerprinting on the corpse turn up something? Of course even if they did there’s nothing they can do about it, so I guess that’s why the game didn’t bother to go into it. Hey wait, or maybe Derek didn’t die? He did send Ethan a letter at the end, after all. So he’s somewhere in the current world? Stuck in time forever like Sox is? Still doesn’t solve the problem of current Derek looking like Derek-who-saved-Kori. Hmm.
5. Japanese police must be the most incompetent cops in the world. If past-Kori scratched her killer hard enough to leave lifelong scars then she must have had blood and tissue under her fingernails. It wouldn’t have been that hard to check every student, teacher and worker… Oh wait, never mind. Past-Kori never died, right? Because Ethan’s dad went back and changed that, making her merely disappear. Okay, scratch that one.
6. I don’t get how the Kori timeline thing worked. She was about to die, so Ethan’s father pulled her into a parallel world where she didn’t die. Which stopped her time, making her stay 16 for 12 years. But what about the Kori in the present world? Wouldn’t she have graduated and gotten married, etc? So there are two Koris in the present world? Or if the worlds somehow merged so that Kori disappeared in *this* world as well, then how can she boldly go to school and walk around town like that? It’s a small town, someone’s bound to recognize her. The police, her parents, Mr. Twombly, Derek… Weird.
7. Who were those people who said “We shouldn’t have given him the pen. If he gets in the way we can just erase him”? I thought it would end up to be your parents and that they were evil all along, but the incident is never referred to again. Who’s the “we”? Mr. Twombly and Irving? But they didn’t give Ethan the pen, did they? And they never tried to erase him when he started getting in their way. I don’t get it.
8. What was in that “Mystery of Parallel Worlds” book? It was referred to twice, but Ethan never followed up.
9. How did Irving/Jack survive falling off a sheer cliff into the sea?!
10. What’s it like inside Vin and Ashley’s house?!?!
That’s about it, then. I had fun. It was an interesting short story. There wasn’t too much reading, the characters were decent, the music was nice and unobtrusive, I liked the bright graphics. There was definitely room for improvement in terms of challenge, length and depth of story and character development but overall yeah, it was fun.
Haha short game is short. A sequel to that would be pretty cool, really it felt like a first chapter before they introduce you to more and more options and ways to play. The concept i really liked, the lil movies, very well done. I’d have loved to hear the japanese voice though lol
I liked that they didn’t try to drag the story out forcefully just to make the game longer. Another game featuring the Hollow Pen and hopefully with more content would be great. Maybe one will come out for the 3DS.