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.
I ended up finishing it lol. Spoiler thoughts below I guess! (And yes, no holds barred these are full game spoilers)
getting the ending
The last puzzle was almost frustrating, but just short of thankfully. I kinda knew what to do from having read a few clues online lol, and just following the story actively. However when it came time to 'call me four times' I was on the right track but it seems clicks with the controller didn't work, so I had to open a walkthrough. Bruh.Oh yeah and it turns out the deaths in the coastal ditch being in the Gameplay Guide parts of the file was just a mistake, no bearing on the reveal whatsoever. I didn't mention it above but yeah additional background and primary info gets put in the 'encyclopedia' for later reference, and gameplay guide portion is more about how to play the diving minigame and move around the map, so I was wondering what that file was doing there.
Prior to speaking to the mermaid there was a lot of other steps involved and yeah it's all just sprung on you at the end as the last puzzle to solve. I don't remember the first game having this, the meta puzzles were spread out through the story.
As for finding the mermaid it makes a lot of sense and they knew you'd never think about it lol. You go back to the title screen and literally click 4 times on the mermaid standing there (after finding the hint for it). Also when you start or load your game, you go through a portal, so yeah turns out the title screen is not just a title screen but literally where you the player start the story.
the mermaid's curse
The title is right, this is the mermaid's curse. One of the plot points is that living for 800 years is miserable, and this is nothing new in fiction. Everyone you know and love dies while you endure in a body that will never age. Eventually, people get suspicious and start shunning you - that's literally how Highlander starts lol. Then, you start to forget your earlier memories. Even if you want to undo your immortality and finally be laid to rest, you can't. There is no way to. You can still die, get sick, and feel pain - but you come back to life endlessly.Once you meet the mermaid on the title screen, she comes across as selfish. It's not hidden that she resents you, Yuza, for making Mare love you more than her. So when she made you immortal it was also kind of her cursing you - saving you as per Mare's last wish, but also fulfilling her own twisted relationship to you, her son. She also refuses to tell you about your mother saying that even if you're her son, their relationship was private and only for them to know. One can speculate lol, but it shows she still bears resentment towards Yuza. It's only been five years since he became an immortal after all.
But it also doesn't really have a resolution. You speak to the mermaid for all of 5 lines and then go back to the game. She's still as vindicative as ever, and for all mermaids have been hyped up during the game you start to think damn, never meet your heroes. I guess this is part of why I would have been ready to play 12 more hours of this game. Making a self-contained, 'short' story is impressive in itself, but there could definitely have been more to this game without turning into fillers.
Maybe I would have also liked it more if Mare had more of a presence in the game, seeing that she's Yuza's mother, and for a long time I thought 'you', the player, were playing as Mare in fact. Sort of a last act from her, coming back from purgatory to save her son.
the surprise plot
The relationship between Yuza and Sato, the two immortals, sprung out of nowhere and at the very end of the game. I choose to take the story as it is, so I don't have any criticism about it. It's just that on the one hand, there was never any foreshadowing about it during the game. They apparently agreed to keep up appearances as if they didn't even really like each other, so for the whole game they don't really talk much.But then it turns out they love each other deeply, and I'm like how? why? We don't particularly see any chemistry between them, even in the few chapters you get after you learn they have been dating. They've also only known each other for all of 2 months at most.
The final plot of the game is that Yuza, who has 795 years left to live, helps Sato become an immortal all over again, when she had only 48 hours left to her life. By ingesting mermaid flesh again (hence why you speak to sobae), she gained another 800 years of life so they can be together. This was more of a crapshoot than an established mechanic of how immortality works.
But yeah, it's still kinda just two high school kids having a summer fling out of nowhere, I don't know, they didn't really give us a whole lot to get invested in. Happy for them though lol.
Is it truly over?
I would have liked a better resolution to Kikuko's story, and was expecting one to happen under the theme of fixing the errors of the past. For most of the game Kikuko was set up to become an interesting part of the plot, as she was the only character to bring the dimension of feeling stuck on a dead-end island with people set in their old ways in a changing world to the story. Like, you can relate to the feeling that your life is stuck going nowhere and maybe you just need to try something radically new.But then she turns out to be working for the villain and ready to kill everyone on the island for her own vanity, talking about her 'noble' blood and her 'rightful heritage'. Completely destroyed the character for me. I wish she could have gotten her redemption arc, since in the final timeline she never ended up helping to kill anyone as the plans were stopped in time.
Although, now that I've finished the game, I still have two chapters that the game says I haven't fully finished yet. They're also two chapters that seem to influence later events, with a little banner at the bottom that says "Kikuko was subdued" or "Kikuko was killed by the curse". So I don't know if it just means I haven't looked at every option there or can still do one last thing.
I'll be honest I'll probably look for a walkthrough of what else there is to do in these two chapters because I think it's really just about trying out every single dialogue option for it, I don't think there's any secret epilogue or anything like that.
Are we going to get paranormasight 3?
I think it's in the works already, barring some unforeseen events like Square Enix suddenly changing their mind about it. There's still a lot of mystery surrounding the game, like the identity of the famous psychic that appears in both games, the paranormal affairs bureau, and of course the storyteller. The storyteller is a being that transcends any boundary - they can show up at any time, any place, even in Ryugyu (the domain of the mermaids/purgatory).I think really the reason we weren't expecting a second game is because SE is not known to be making VNs or new IPs - they usually just make Dragon Quest and Tales Of spinoffs and remakes. So while Paranormasight 2 was a surprise, I don't doubt they have more in the works now.
But I'm also wondering what they can come up with for a third game, and I imagine they'd have to switch up the formula a little bit. I just hope they manage to keep the quality they've cultivated.