Tag: death mark

#oneaday Day 142: More sound novels, please

Playing through Death Mark and now its sequel NG, I’m once again struck by how much I like the “sound novel” approach to Japanese-style adventure games. I last encountered this style of presentation back when I looked at 428: Shibuya Scramble, and I liked it a lot there, too. And I’d like to see more of it.

For the unfamiliar, a “sound novel” is usually a form of visual novel in which audible character speech (as in, voice acting) is eschewed in favour of presenting narration and dialogue exclusively (or almost exclusively in the case of Death Mark and NG) through text. To counterbalance the “loss” of this aspect that is normally found in most visual novels these days, sound novels place a much stronger emphasis on ambient audio.

That means unlike many other visual novels, which tend to have continuous background music as their main accompaniment to the action, sound novels attempt to create a sense of “immersion” in the game environment via a slightly different means. It’s a uniquely “video game” way of doing things, and the more I experience it, the more I really like it.

Part of the reason I appreciate it is because I’m a fast reader, and when I’m playing a visual novel with full voice acting, I find it very difficult to make myself advance the text before the speech has finished playing — even if the speech is not in a language I understand. This is because I know that there is often some very good voice acting in visual novels — it tends to be where a lot of the budget goes — and I worry that I might miss out on some particularly dramatic or emotional moments if I skip the sound.

The game that got me into this habit was Corpse Party on PSP, which is kind of sort of a visual novel, only with RPG-style exploration. The voice acting in that game was so good that I not only listened to every line in its entirety, even though I don’t speak Japanese, I also made listening to the Japanese voice track my norm in most games (well, those that originated in Japan, anyway) I played from thereon.

But I’m always just a bit conscious of the fact that all that lovely voice acting is slowing me down, and since I inevitably read a line faster than it’s spoken — particularly if we’re dealing with one of those characters that speaks incredibly slowly — I can occasionally feel my attention wandering. Now, I could just skip the dialogue and move on to the next line, but like I say, there’s a little switch in my brain that’s flipped, and I can’t flip it back; it just doesn’t feel right to do that.

Sound novels, though, present no such difficulty. I can romp through Death Mark and NG (and indeed 428: Shibuya Scramble before them) at completely my own pace. I don’t need to wait for a voice actor, I don’t need to wait for a dramatic moment, I just read and advance. And I really like it.

This got me thinking more broadly about how I’m settling into a place where I feel like I actually prefer the games that deliberately hold themselves back from trying to be “realistic” in various ways. I played Death Mark immediately after the Silent Hill 2 remake, and while the Silent Hill 2 remake was indisputably excellent, I think I’m actually drifting into a place where I enjoyed Death Mark more in terms of the way it was presented to me. And I’m enjoying NG even more than Death Mark, because it’s doing a lot of the same things, only it feels a bit more polished and refined.

So I think I’m in a place where the “sound novel” approach is fast becoming one of my favourite ways to present an interactive narrative. It’s got the descriptive text and well-crafted dialogue I enjoy, it’s got incredibly atmospheric ambient sound to feel “immersive”, and I can play through it at completely my own pace, rather than being arbitrarily limited by my inability to skip through voice-acted lines.

Of course, in the other games I suppose I could just turn the voice acting off. But then I feel like I’m deliberately depriving myself of an important part of that game’s presentation.

Oh, woe is me. I realise, of course, that this is a completely pointless problem to be worrying about, and, to be honest, I’m not actually worrying about it at all. It just struck me as something interesting while I was playing NG this evening, and I hope I can find some more sound novels to enjoy once I’m done with the Spirit Hunter series.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 138: Marked

I’m currently playing Death Mark, a game I’ve had on my shelf (along with its two sequels) for quite a while now, but have never gotten around to. I’ve been meaning to play it for “spooky season” for a few years now, but for one reason or another the timings have never quite lined up. This year, I made it happen!

As with most things, I’ll do a full writeup on MoeGamer once I’ve finished it, but four chapters in now I can offer some reasonably well-informed thoughts on what I think so far.

For the unfamiliar, Death Mark is a horror adventure game by Experience Inc. Experience Inc. is a developer primarily known for making dungeon crawlers with beautiful artwork such as the excellent Demon Gaze series. Death Mark eschews most of the role-playing game trappings in favour of adventure game mechanics — though Experience haven’t completely left behind what they’re known for.

The premise of the game revolves around individuals suddenly finding they are “Marked” with a strange scar that looks like a bite mark. This indicates that very soon, they are going to lose their memories and then die horribly. The game consists of a series of discrete cases, during which you, as the Marked amnesiac protagonist, are tasked with helping out one or more companion characters and hopefully giving a restless spirit — the source of the Mark — some peace.

This involves exploring an area from a first-person perspective, discovering clues, solving puzzles and, when the time comes, confronting the spirit directly.

The first-person exploration is where Death Mark is closest to Experience’s dungeon crawlers, though the locations you move between are static images rather than polygonal environments. If you know a pathway exists, you can simply hit a direction on the D-pad to go that way, but in some cases you’ll need to investigate the environment in a point-and-click style with your torch to find hidden routes.

As you explore, you’ll start to learn more about the Ghost of the Week. In the tradition of Japanese ghost stories, all the restless spirits have been wronged in some way, and they are designed to have rather sympathetic stories — even if their ordeals turned them into vicious, violent monsters. And this is relevant when it comes to confronting the spirit at the end of each chapter.

A “battle” with a spirit unfolds in a turn-based fashion. Each turn, you and your companion can use one of the items you’ve found during the chapter. Some items can be used repeatedly, others have a limited number of uses. And some items can be used in combination, allowing you and your partner to cooperate and achieve something.

The process of the battle generally consists of a couple of rounds of you finding ways to counter the spirit’s attacks, and then, when they get close enough, you have the option of either killing them violently, or doing something that will pacify them and lay the troubled soul to rest once and for all. Taking the former option is usually a more obvious, easier choice, but will usually result in the death of your companion. Taking the latter option requires that you really have searched the environment thoroughly and acquired all the necessary clues to resolve the situation.

It works really well. The game is good about not allowing you to get into “unwinnable” situations, as if you mess up you can simply restart from a previous decision point or, in the case of the spirit battle, from the start of the confrontation. This means that even if you’ve reached the “finale” of a case, you can still wander off and make sure you haven’t missed any important clues before taking on the spirit.

It’s a game that is, for the most part, creepy rather than “scary” — there aren’t many in the way of “jump scares”, and the horror mostly comes from the gradual realisation of what has happened to the poor souls you’re laying to rest. There are some gory, violent scenes, though, and many of these have a somewhat fetishistic angle, which, as you might expect, caused more than a few people to sniff and tut when it was originally released.

As anyone with basic media literacy knows, though, sex and horror are inextricably linked, and have been for the longest time in both the eastern and western traditions of the genre. So Death Mark is just doing what comes naturally for the genre; while this leads to some genuinely uncomfortable scenes, it’s also good to see a game that doesn’t feel like it has to hold back from showing you these things.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I’ll have much more to say when I’ve beaten the whole thing. I believe I have two more cases to go, so I reckon I’ll probably have it done by the end of the week. We shall see, though; in the meantime, it’s been a great pick for Spooky Season so far, and I’m looking forward to exploring the follow-ups!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.