Visual novels are a hard sell in the west, the largely Japanese genre being barely a step above choose-your-own-adventure books. The minimal interactivity and reams of text often prove an instant turn-off for many players, so this effort to enliven them seems worthy of attention.
Admirably, Tokyo Twilight tries to inject a little life into its tale of high-school ghost-busting with regular exorcisms in the form of strategic battles. But sadly, it also utterly fails to explain anything to the player. Out of battle, conversations involve picking an emotion icon, then an action icon. To what effect? Who knows? The characters you talk to don’t seem to react whatever your choice. In combat, enjoy a confusing mini-tutorial, then laughably basic top-down encounters where ghosts and allies are represented as minuscule arrows.
Great character design and pleasant animation are the only saving graces in what can only be described as a gaming experiment gone horribly wrong.
