it took me...i think 7 months, but i've finally finished Code Z...! well, i'm missing 3 death ends, but i got the true ending, so i'm basically done.
i've been wanting to talk about it!
i don't really know where to begin, though.
i want to say i liked it overall, and i think i did, genuinely, but i think the biggest sticking point with me is the rougelike gameplay, i think i realized while playing through this that i'm just inherently not fond of this genre. i'm less excited for eventually getting around to omega labyrinth and sorcery saga now...
not helping is, in typical compa-chan fashion, there are kind of dumb design decisions and oversights. i mentioned this in a previous post, but getting all the death ends in this game is such a tedious process, since you get sent out of the dungeon, meaning you have to completely start over. already annoying on its own, but it gets even worse as you get later and later into the game, since the dungeons start getting stupidly long at 40 floors, and that's not even getting into spawn rates for some enemies, sanity death ends adding another layer of stupidity, having to get the death ends for the bosses, which basically requires doing the entire dungeon twice...
chapter 9 was a total slog, because you essentially have to go through that whole dungeon 4 times at the minimum. once to get glitch celica's death end, once to get the boss's death end, again to get the game's bad ending, and then again to get the good ending and unlock the final chapter, and that's me ignoring all the deaths i got in the lower floors, which sent me out of the dungeon. that reminds me, the way the glitch girls work is so dumb; it's possible to defeat them in the dungeon, but defeating them doesn't really amount to much, since it's possible for them to just spawn again on the next floor. i had several instances where the glitch girl would reappear on the floor several floors in a row, killing the glitch girl should've just made it to where they stop spawning for as long as you're in the dungeon.
i was thinking while playing, the issue i have with the death ends could've been mitigated if there was an easy mode, or maybe an alteration to the normal mode, where dying just sent you to the beginning of the floor you were on. this made me realize that this game and a some eroge have a similar kind of issue where it feels like the scenes that're the main draw of the game are meant to punish you for doing something wrong a lot of the time, that's kind of odd
a lot of issues i had with the game just kind of rectified themselves once they started overstaying their welcome. like, the amount of items sayaka can hold at once feels really limiting at first, but then you start getting more item slots, or certain enemy types get annoying to fight, but then you unlock different weapons. you unlock midpoints at some point for the dungeons, which give you the option to continue from a certain point in the dungeon, but for some stupid reason, they never actually unlock at the halfway point of the dungeon, it's always after you beat the boss, which almost ruins the point completely. the return points you run into periodically in the dungeons should've acted like checkpoints.
it's also possible to softlock yourself out of certain death ends if you invest in the skill tree the wrong way, or if you beat a boss without getting its death end first. it struck me as odd that it's not possible to turn off the perks you get from the skill tree. the double death ends are the most odd thing in the world, you need to trigger one specific trap in order to get them (which is why you have to avoid the "trap destruction" skill in the skill tree). it's so odd, you'd think there'd be more than one way to attain them, like enemies having attacks that cover multiple tiles or something.
i'm being incredibly critical of the gameplay, but i really can't bring myself to say that i think it's bad, it's just kind of a roughly made mystery dungeon game. i'd like to think i wouldn't finish a game that i think is so bad, but i found myself getting frustrated at it really often...
i think the story and writing in code z makes up for it, though, i really liked this game's story! the game almost feels like an anniversary title, with it bringing back pretty much every (important) character, and how it references events from past games and the like.
i saw someone on one of these boards post some screenshot or other of someone saying that they found sayaka unlikeable, and i really don't see how...? uninteresting, i think i could understand, but she doesn't really do anything that'd make her unlikeable i don't think... (then again, i've seen people say they find lydia and hinata/al unlikeable, so). her character arc actually made me feel bad for her. seeing her sanity erode and her losing her sense of self and questioning if anything she does even matters hit a bit close to home for me.
given that the marketing on this game emphasized that the higher age rating let them get away with more, this game is shockingly not very gory (not that i'm complaining, some of the death ends here already made me wince a little, i couldn't imagine it being worse. that, and i'm getting progressively less and less tolerant of people who're fine with gore, or other awful things happening to characters in fiction, but then get upset at just vanilla sex or romance, but that's neither here nor there). some of the text descriptions were pretty graphic, and a lot of the earlier scenes in the game, like the game opening up on mai's arm being chewed off, and the heroine death ends up to lily's all look kind of bad, but then the game just kind of looses that momentum. or maybe i just got desensitized, i don't know, every death end past a certain point is just a close up of the character's body lying down. doesn't help that the normal heroine death ends don't even have dedicated CGs, and every enemy death end for sayaka reuses the same set of CGs. though, this game is thankfully more evidence that if compa can't get away with visual fanservice, they'll gladly ramp up what they can do with the text. a personal highlight of the game for me was glitch lucil masturbating to sayaka and rottie getting electrocuted to death.
some miscellaneous thoughts:
-i can't help but feel like a hack-and-slash kind of game would've been more fun. they could've even kept the randomized dungeons, since i think my biggest problem with the rougelike structure is that the combat is really not very fun. i got so tilted when sayaka missed her attacks, because unlike in literally any other genre of game, there's nothing i can do to prevent that!
-i kind of wish the game awards were less racist towards japanese games, i think shadow arata's voice actor deserves an award or something; he was another personal highlight of the game for me. he gets so loud and emotive.
-i thought i'd like naraku more, but i think kiki's one of my new favorite characters in the whole series. she's just so comically evil and insane, and i found it really entertaining （￣︶￣）↗
-on the glitch girls, i'm a little surprised and sad that they took them in a different direction than what i was expecting... i was thinking that they'd call back to derq 1, where they all represent the characters' surpressed emotions, and the game does...symbolically do that, i guess, but they're more literally doppelgangers (huuki is a clone of kaede's mom, naraku is a reincarnated komai, i think lillith is mentioned to be the physical embodiment of all the people that died in the hospital or something, and kiki's just some girl svletana knew), i found it kind of confusing, especially since some of them get way more elaboration than others (naraku and falena get way more elaboration than kiki or lillith). also some of them just have two names, and i thought that was really confusing. how they're presented in chapter 10 was closer to what i was expecting from the whole game.
-chapter 10 reminded me so much of the kind of thing you'd see in an updated rerelease, like what a lot of PS2 rpgs or visual novels got.
-i'm happy this game references and elaborates upon some loose plot threads from the other two games, and even the 1.5 book, but i found the way it tries to connect 1, this game, and 2 together to be kind of confusing. DE-2 having its own name implies that 2 is its own world, and at first i was kind of disappointed since i just assumed these games all took place on a linear timeline (and also i dislike multiverse shenanigans), but it made sense. but then chapter 10 comes along and it's revealed that 1.5 isn't actually its own world, it still takes place in the DE-1 world, and then it also mentions that julietta did kill arata, which means all three games would have to take place in the same "world", so now it's just kind of confusing.
-i think it was always apparent that this game was a spinoff, so i was expecting asset reuse (though some of the dungeons are totally unique, which was actually pretty cool), but they reuse character portraits for all of the agents from the world on high, which didn't confuse me on its own, but nobody ever seems to bring it up in-universe outside of a couple of instances, and that bothered me. it's like derq 1's natsuo munakata and rin asukaze never existed. i also thought all of the no-name world on high members all using adventurer shina's portrait was incredibly dumb. they gave shadow arata a unique portrait, i don't see why they couldn't've done the same with everyone else...
er...sorry if this post was really long.
tl;dr - play this game on normal if you like derq's story and characters, you might get more mileage out of this game if you already like pokémon mystery dungeon, don't be an autist like me, don't attempt to get every death end immediately on your first run, just try and accumulate them over the course of the game...