MiSide - In essence, DDLC 2

Secret Boots

Secret Boots

It is an honor to serve.
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Feb 24, 2024
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Another Animu 'Looks wholesome, actually horror' game that suprised me by being actually good.

Edit: So I caved in and bought the game on Steam. Simply put, you don't play it as a horror game; you play it because you like anime girls. It is remarkably good for being made by two Russians with 10 rubles and a dream.

The good:
  1. Anime girls.
  2. Atmosphere.
  3. Music.
  4. There are a lot of mini-games.
  5. Since it was made in Based Trad Russia™ there is no wokeness.
The bad:
  1. Game has liminal space / backrooms shit.
  2. Whether or not the story is good is very subjective, it's one of those stories that a loretuber would spend 30 minutes elaborating about.
  3. Horror aspect is very ehhh. There are jumpscares and blood (and rarely gore), but it is overall not impressive.
 
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XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG said:
Elaborate a bit. What part(s) are good, or what made it good?
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I highly enjoyed the atmosphere and story, the horror aspects were decent, and most of the character writing was good. For the fact it was made by two Russians on a small budget, It impressed me.

However, the English localization has many errors and there are only two endings as of now.

Edit: stance has changed, see OP.
 
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I thought it was a pretty good little horror game, probably only a 7/10 but still pretty good. I am somewhat sad it's got caught up in a autism vortex of people wanting it to just be a endless dating sim, it deserves more than that in my opinion.
Secret Boots said:
However, the English localization has many errors and there are only two endings as of now.
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There are actually 3, but one is clearly just a tease for the peaceful mode, and the other seems like a after though with no real purpose.
 
A friend gifted this to me. Where it’s definitely not my kind of game, I gave it an honest try. I think its opening act is pretty good, but I feel like the overall story is far too contrived for me. Played through the entire thing in about 4 hours, and then watched the alternative ending.

5 out of 10 from me. If I were into anime stuff, this probably would boost to a 7. The game is very enjoyable, but the story it tried to tell kind of got lost on me. It wasn’t terrible, I just didn’t care.
 
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I found it to be pretty shit. If you go horror then go full horror, don't pad shit out with slow dialogue, shitty minigames and slow walking. The scares themselves are basic (really? The 10 billionth iteration of the weeping angel enemies?) The tone is all over the place and even the message seems to not know what it wants to be, Crazy Mita spergs about how the player is a bastard that doesn't care about the NPCs but it falls flat considering she's the abusive baddie and you can't fault someone for what amounts to how you treat inanimate objects. Wonder if there will datamined/patched endings or the three we have are what the devs intended because they all suck.
 
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wtfNeedSignUp said:
I found it to be pretty shit. If you go horror then go full horror, don't pad shit out with slow dialogue, shitty minigames and slow walking.
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I honestly liked how the horror stuff was paced. Having things go back to being light-hearted and calm for a while in-between the horror parts at least gives it a snowball's chance in hell to catch the player off-guard again. Not likely for horror game lovers, but at least for people who haven't seen much of the genre.
wtfNeedSignUp said:
The tone is all over the place and even the message seems to not know what it wants to be, Crazy Mita spergs about how the player is a bastard that doesn't care about the NPCs but it falls flat considering she's the abusive baddie and you can't fault someone for what amounts to how you treat inanimate objects.
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It was just salty that it didn't have its own version to exist in and envious of everyone else. The only real 'message' that game really seemed to be trying to portray from what I saw was to go outside.
wtfNeedSignUp said:
Wonder if there will datamined/patched endings or the three we have are what the devs intended because they all suck.
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I doubt it. Now that they've had it go viral and had their 15 mins of fame, they have maybe another month or two tops to release any meaningful update before they lose everyone's attention. Seems like their priorities are stuck in making a dating sim mode instead of fleshing out the game with any sort of interesting "true ending" over that timeframe, so I bet they won't have the motivation to do it.
 
Just finished watching a friend go through over Discord. The game has a good aesthetic, and I like the cutesy hangout portions you get with each of the different character variations. That being said, between this and DDLC, I'm quite annoyed by how eager they are to pull the rug underneath you and get straight to the spoopy parts. Not to mention that both of them rely a lot on the cheap creepypasta vibe that wasn't even scary back when creepypastas were a thing. DDLC couldn't go 20 minutes before showing you a hanging bitch, and this game starts off with a fucking trigger warning regarding its jump scares and gore. Way to kill the surprise before we even started.

It's a shame, too, because there's another "Subverted Anime Love Story" game out there that's older than both DDLC and MiSide, and it managed to get it right the first time. You spend hours getting to know the characters, so you actually get invested in the characters and plot, and the twist is actually foreshadowed pretty well and actually ties into the fucking plot. Instead this game amounted to being cheap jump scares so that Vtuber #950684 can scream into her microphone because she's being stalked by a Crash Test Dummy.
 
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Book Thief said:
It's a shame, too, because there's another "Subverted Anime Love Story" game out there that's older than both DDLC and MiSide, and it managed to get it right the first time. You spend hours getting to know the characters, so you actually get invested in the characters and plot, and the twist is actually foreshadowed pretty well and actually ties into the fucking plot.
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I assume you're referring to You and Me and Her?
 
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