DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia Game Review – Game Review

DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia is one of the most difficult games I’ve had to review. Not in terms of actual difficulty but more in trying to sort out how best to quantify my experience playing it.

I was walking into this one about as uninformed as a person can be. I have never played a Date A Live game before (strike one), never played a visual novel at all in fact (strike two), and have not watched the Date A Live anime or any other supporting materials such as the light novels (strike three, hit the showers). I am an ignorant young fawn, fresh-eyed to this world and genre, and this is about as novel of a new player experience as one could concoct.

I hoped I was prepared at least partly for what was to come. Sure, I’ve not played any visual novels, but I love to read books and have no issue with large amounts of text. Similarly, I’ve played titles that have aspects of visual novel-style storytelling, such as the Disgaea and Blazblue series. I also read a fair few choose-your-own-adventure books as a kid and always enjoyed them. Surely, these would at least give me a frame of reference for DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia.

They, uh, didn’t.

The game is a visual novel where you are mostly looking at visuals and reading lots of prose. There is a common opening segment followed by a major choice of which girl’s path you want to follow and see how her relationship with Shido plays out. Within each path is a telling of the game’s potential events, though multiple playthroughs will yield various conflicting or potential endings. There is some light interactivity here with roughly two to four scenarios in most runs that serve as forks in the story. You choose from a menu of a couple of choices and then see how the next half an hour or so plays out. At the end of the run, you will have accumulated certain endings and added them to your completion percentage, as well as adding new images and videos to the game’s gallery to check out at any time.

The other two major features of note are saving and auto-play. You can save at any time, and the save files even display the exact frame you saved on, making it easy to dog-ear the page. You can also set the game to auto-play either at normal speed or at fast forward, the latter of which is very important after you’ve completed a run but want to try out various options at the narrative forks to see if they yield different outcomes.

I can say rather definitively that this is not a good entry point for a new player. I know other titles in the series that have been given official releases, and those are probably much better starting points because to say I was lost is putting it mildly. There is a rather expansive setting here, with secret organizations, spirit entities, timeline-rupturing battles, and so on. Little to none of it is explained clearly to the player, leaving me to wonder what exactly the organization Ratatoskr is, what these spirits are, etc.

My issue with DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia is that I don’t feel the characters and visuals are all that engaging. I was hoping that with a dozen or so paths we would take time to explore the unique relationships Shido has or could have with each of the women. I mostly found these paths dull and not informative, with flat characterization and obvious tropes that didn’t do much for me.

The various cast members’ interactions all boil down to roughly the same handful of situations. If a girl is on screen, she is letting Shido know overtly and covertly that she is madly in love with him. It doesn’t matter if there are three other people in the scene, they’re all doing the same thing (or bickering about who loves/can provide for Shido more). For myself, the lack of variety got old fast.

Ren is the newest character and the titular antagonist. I was not particularly enamored with her, but at least her appearance added new wrinkles to the game. The mystery of who she was, what she was after, and why she was intervening added much-needed conflict and tension to the various runs. I also feel that she made the visual half of the genre most appealing as her character design is a bit more involved and would change in subtle and not-so-subtle ways depending on the story’s events. Most of the other cast members felt and looked more static by comparison.

I also don’t think the game leveraged the visual aspect much either. Now and then a major story event would happen and there would be an exciting new piece of art that showed off a unique situation or an interesting new design/outfit, and those were fun moments. Most of the game though involves the same handful of backdrops with the same characters all talking to Shido in the same way.

DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia wasn’t a bad game per se. It’s unfair for me as a newcomer to outright blast a game in a genre I’m unfamiliar with based on a property I have no experience with. Perhaps there is a much deeper appeal that I missed. That said, I don’t feel DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia serves as a good entry point to see whatever positives the series has to offer, and this title is best reserved for more dedicated fans and true believers.