Games

So Square Enix did it again... they sprang one of the best games of the last few years without any noise and made Paranormasight 2 (The Mermaid's Curse). Amid 7 years of nonstop RPG releases and remakes, these two titles stand out as something you'd never guess they'd do, especially since it's a limited budget game (there's only about 20 names in the credits, compare to the AAA size that usually involves hundreds of people).

What can I say? They nailed it again. If you remember I talked about paranormasight 1 a few months ago here, contrasting Famicom Detective Club to it.

Paranormasight 2 hits just as right - and it's no surprise, considering how closely it follows the formula. Yet even as I thought I knew how to watch out for the tricks the game would pull, I still found myself taken by surprise most of the time.

It's a game that engages you, the player, to participate in its story and not just consume it. It rewards your deductions even if they're wrong or incomplete yet, and then likes to recontextualize them - what you thought you knew for sure turns out to be something else, things like that. This hasn't changed from the first game, and the enigmatic Storyteller even makes a return to carry you through this story. Although I will say I did make some correct deductions far before the game needed me to, but it really didn't spoil or ruin anything.

And like I said in my review of the first game, this isn't a game about the supernatural. At its core, this is a story of human drama and correcting the errors of the past. It starts with a young man wanting to find a mermaid because he believes his mother, who has disappeared five years ago during a storm at sea, might have been one. But then it turns out there's also in folklore "fish-mermaids" and "human-mermaids" - and yes, the difference is important. It is said that eating a mermaid's flesh can grant anyone immortality (apparently this is true in Japanese folk stories), but actually it might only be 800 years and actually there might be other conditions as well, possibly. Maybe. Also there's dead bodies washing up on shore after an underwater pit opened up, and an unknown girl mysteriously arrived on the island where most of the game takes place just two months ago... also you should probably learn the Heike clan's lineage and some centuries later an island in the bay of Ise disappeared under the waves never to be seen again. I'm sure that's nothing though right?

And this is just the prologue, I'm not even spoiling anything. This is how the game starts you, and it's up to you to figure everything out piece by piece. It starts with a very strong supernatural/horror vibe (don't worry there are no jumpscares), but that's really not where the meat of the game is. I like this approach; the supernatural serves to sublimate and elevate the underlying story, not to pull a red herring like many other games do. In the first game, you the player learned that curses that could kill people were real because the prologue had you use them liberally. It left no doubt in your mind that you had to suspend disbelief and whatever the game was throwing at you was going to be the truth. In the second game, they expedited this a little and there is some dissonance in the beginning, where people who would have no reason to believe in the supernatural instantly believe you.

Still, the dialogue hits all the right notes. It will make you laugh, it will make you cry, it will make your heart palpitate. You can be having a completely normal conversation in one moment when it suddenly turns into a tense standoff.

The story chart has come back, this time with 4 pairs of protagonists instead of just 3. It was a bit harder to follow in the beginning especially with all the history you're suddenly fed with, but it mellows out as the game goes. This is a series that plays with what a game means, and although there is less of that in this sequel (the first game had you actually use video game mechanics to progress), the story chart remains relevant. But it did get confusing a little in the beginning trying to put events in their linear order, when you're jumping all around both in time and protagonists.

The game definitely strings you along exactly as it wants to, and you're just here for the ride. But you gotta trust that it will bring you where you need to be in due time. It's a beautiful story, much like the first game, and very bittersweet. I remember reading a while back we don't like finishing things because it means it has ended and we have to move on. We'd like things to remain in a metaphysical state, never budging, so that we don't have to say our goodbyes.

Mind you, I haven't actually finished the game yet - I decided to pace myself for this one, and play a couple hours a day. Judging from the steam reviews it seems to be around 12 hours long like the first one, and I'll reiterate what I said about the first one too: I am ready to play 12 hours more lol. But I guess this is what the game teaches you in a way, things can't last forever. Even immortals die eventually.

Well, a big theme of the games like I said is correcting the errors of the past, i.e. having agency to change things. Which I think is a powerful message to convey; too often protagonists are passive in the face of what happens around them, being carried by the waves without even attempting to swim against the current. So it's refreshing to have a story that says, it's never too late to make things right. This is why Paranormasight is about deeply human stories at the end of the day even if they rely heavily on the paranormal.

And that's where I am too. I'm in what I believe to be the final stretch of the game, and half of me wants to finish it as soon as possible and the other half wants to take my time so I don't have to move on too quickly. Mind you as a mostly visual novel-type game, you won't have a lot of gameplay either and it's a lot of reading, so it's perfectly fine to take breaks and chip slowly at it. Otherwise it is a lot of sitting there and pressing A to continue.

Oh one last thing. I don't think it has much bearing really but, the island they say is fictional is actually real and the pictures are clearly taken from there lol. Here's a reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/ParanormasightHonjo/comments/1rg2wkz/the_completely_fictional_kameshima_island/. I think it was more of a liability thing to rename it and treat it as fictional but I think it's also a caution against not treating all the historical elements the game tells you as true lol.