Magical Eyes – Red is for Anguish – review

Title Screen

Magical Eyes – Red is for Anguish is a game by Pomera Studios and licensed in English by Fruitbat Factory. It’s a mystery/supernatural VN with a dash of action, so if you’re looking for boobs or romance this is not the game for you. As far as a mystery VN went I liked this, and am looking forward to the next game in the series (which apparently is still in development). It’s available via Steam, although I bought mine off Humble Bundle (because I have a thing for supporting DRM-free).

The start of the story from the official description:

In the middle of the night on a certain day of April 201X, the left arm of the owner of a general store is chopped off in the backyard of his own store.

Even though he claims that the perpetrator is a ‘doll’ that was kept in the store, his words carry little weight due to the lack of other witnesses.

The doll and the detached arm are gone from the scene of crime.

That’s not all the story, of course… this world has something called ‘Variants’, the manifestation of overly strong emotion that could even possess objects or living beings, moving those possessed towards the fulfilment of a single goal. A group called Disobeyers handles incidents involving Variants, of which the protagonist Amakawa Yuu is a member.

I finished the game in roughly 1 day – Steam tells me I have ~5hr spent on the game, so yeah it’s a pretty short game. It’s linear too, so no reason to go back and replay the game.

Map

The game has shifting PoV (+map system) – most of the time you play the game from the eyes of Yuu, other times you play it as Chiharu or other characters involved in the mystery. On the map the game will show points/locations you can select to advance the storyline. A ‘!’ indicator means it’s the main storyline and any other optional storyline (if available) will disappear if you select the main storyline. This part disappointed me a little – there weren’t many of those optional storyline available. Whenever they ask you to select the next point on the map to go to, ~85% of the time there’s no optional scenario available. And most of the time, when there’s an optional scenario available… it’s for something that’s not related to the main plot. …I guess that’s why they’re optional.

Flow

But it’s also a nice system since it makes transitioning between PoVs easier – you know that when you select a point on the map there’s a good chance it will be the PoV of a character different from the one you were just reading. It also gave a sense of movement – when Yuu said that he’s going to meet up with another character, the point on the map shows where he’s meeting up with the other character. In a way, it eliminated the need to write things like “I made my way to XYZ Station to meet with ABC.” And I’m guessing to make it easier to keep track of what’s happening where, the game has a Flow system you can access via right-click. You can hover your cursor on any of the bubble to get a brief summary as to what happened at that point in time.

Reasoning Mode

The story in the game ran over roughly a week, and each night Yuu would organise facts he’s found out about the case – basically, a quiz mini-game for you consisting of 3-4 questions each time. It’s pretty easy if you’ve been paying attention to the story, although there was a few question which seemed to have more than 1 correct answer to me. For full completion you need to get all the answer correctly. You can always load your save file and try again to get S ranking… which will unlock extra scenarios and extra stuff in the Special menu off the Title screen.

Index

The game also has an index where you can look up explanation on different phrases that came up in the game, starting from a short description on characters or organisations mentioned in the game to… food. Which I found pretty amusing.

The background looked like 3D models. It looked weird at first against the style of the character models, but I found it easy to adapt to. Visual effects was also well done, most notably when there’s a fight scene on.

But characters are I think the best part of this game. Odd to say this, but there wasn’t a single character I disliked. Including the main antagonist (excluding Nikawa but he’s a side character who didn’t even have a portrait so…). I enjoyed their interactions, and I wish there’d be more of it in the next game. Also, if you’re squeamish some of the things that happened in this game might make you uncomfortable, but at least they only described it and not have any CG for it…

Be warned though… when I completed the game it felt like it was simply a set up, an introduction for more. I knew it’s the first part of a series, and I’m guessing the sequel will delve further… because this particular game… whilst the main plot was resolved there were other unresolved/unanswered questions/plotlines. That irked me a little, but it also demonstrated that they did well in its writing because I actually want to read more instead of going “meh, too much effort”.

The only things I found rather odd after finishing the game (don’t read if you don’t want spoilers – but then again these will only make sense to people who’ve played the game):

• The shadow puppet show at the start is meant to ‘explain’ the motive in the game… but I’m rather lost here. Is the ‘little girl’ from the shadow puppet show meant to be the villain? And the knight meant to be Soejima? If yes that implied that he saved her once before, but from what?
• Throughout the game there were snippets of 2 kids in hospital, with the game opening about how they’re meeting outside of the hospital for the first time. Who are they? I had thought (at the very start) that they were Jun and Shizuku, but that didn’t make sense. No explanation on it either in the game.
• The extra scenario #5 – made me wonder if Chiharu was perhaps not quite what she seemed…
• They never really explained Yuu’s skill. One character mentioned that he was ‘toxin’ …more explanation would be lovely.
• This might be too nitpicky, but the title has no significance. The only characters with magical eyes were the children, and they didn’t really help with the mystery. As for the ‘red’ bit… I guess… because the kimono was red…? Not sure…
• They never explained the rising crime rate, but I’m guessing that’s to be explored in the future games…

The above are good reasons why I’ll get the next game in the series when it’s released. When will that happen I wonder…