A Trip In Death And The Afterlife: A ghostpia Season One Review

By Teepu

Players: 1
Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch

In a world flooded with kinetic visual novels to choose from, it’s always challenging to decide which ones are worth your time. A tale of a town of ghosts trying to find their place and reason for still existing, ghostpia Season One explores a very interesting story that takes you down some interesting twists.

The story follows three (eventually four) main characters as they get into all sorts of shenanigans in this odd town that is inhabited only by ghosts who are eternally stuck as such. There are two interesting catches to their existence that lead to a bit of a mystery to be solved. The first is that while these ghosts can feel pain and "die" from mortal wounds, they just end up coming back to life (un-life?) and can’t move on. The second is that any possessions they keep that they aren’t constantly keeping in their mind and thinking about will eventually get sent back to a junkyard where they’ll have to find them again.

The characters themselves are clearly meant to be manifestations of extreme parts of their personalities from before they died, and this works quite effectively. That being said, the main character, Sayoko, often acts in very abrasive and mean ways that can be a bit challenging to stomach. There will be situations where she will purposely put a perfectly innocent person in harm’s way and call them extremely hurtful things for seemingly no reason at all except unfounded prejudice, among many other scenarios. Perhaps that’s the entire point, to highlight her shortcomings, but it makes it extremely hard to ever feel for Sayoko when she’s constantly being so problematic. That was the biggest issue with the main cast, as the other three are also a bit exaggerated in their personalities, they're not quite as dislikable. On the flip side it helps that the other characters are less frustrating, it helps balance Sayoko out.

As for the narrative itself, it’s a mixed bag at first. The character interactions and shenanigans the main cast get into are quite amusing, but the first three episodes feel like they have a major lack of direction. It feels like them just going about their day-to-day lives, fleshing out the mystery of the town they live in, and their limitations as ghosts just doing a whole lot of nothing in the end. There isn’t really much character development either, as through most of those first three episodes they are just acting the same, simply in different situations. It’s not until episode 4 that the true plot starts to unfold and culminates in episode 5. I feel like they could have either removed one of the episodes entirely or started the trek towards the plot development in episode 3. Despite quite enjoying the dialogue throughout, by the time I started episode 3 I was starting to ask myself what the point of reading the visual novel was. Thankfully I stuck it through, and it did end up being worth it in the end.

Without going too deep into spoilers, the plot mostly revolves around the mystery of a missile in the middle of this dead town that has the names of all the town members written on it as some sort of memorial. The deeper meaning and quite impactful themes expressed in the story become exceedingly clear as you get further into the story. As every little clue trickled in the narrative leads to the ultimate revelations by the end, I’ll refrain from giving any more details.

On another note, I totally dig the presentation of this visual novel, all facets of it. The music is amazing, varied, and appropriate. The sounds effects are great as well, including the silly Banjo-Kazooie style of gibberish sounds when characters are talking. Of special note are the gorgeous visuals. The art style and presentation are phenomenal, unique for the genre and far more varied than I’m used to for visual novels. The cast is also a bit larger than I’m used to for visual novels. Most of them are temporary but it’s nice to see more than just three or four faces the entire time. To top it off, there are some pretty fun animations throughout the story to keep things engaging. I noticed the later you get in the story the more they pop up, so I imagine they decided to improve the experience with each episode. It's important to point out that the visual novel is a bit violent at times and can be a little offensive, but there isn’t anything crazy bad in it, as far as more mature content goes. It borderlines its T-rating, but I feel like the rating is still appropriate.

Despite a relatively slow start to the story and an exceedingly frustrating main character, the tale presented in ghostpia Season One is fun, engaging and fairly unique. It took me about 10 hours to get through it, and I’m a slow reader. It helps that the visuals and audio are very high quality as well. I hope this team keeps making visual novels, as they made something quite special here. My entire run through ghostpia Season One was with the Nintendo Switch release, but it is also available on the Steam. It is $19.99 in both locations, which is a solid price considering the shorter length compared to other visual novels. As a reminder, this is a kinetic visual novel, which means it doesn’t have any formal gameplay or choices to be made throughout the story. Keep in mind this is a season one, and as such ends in a cliffhanger with the main story still needing to be resolved. There is enough resolution to not feel like a cop-out for story threads presented, but it's clearly meant to be a series. That said, I still highly recommend you check it out if you can.

Check Out ghostpia Season One on Nintendo Switch:
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/ghostpia-season-one-switch/

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Story: B+
Gameplay: N/A
Graphics: A+ 
Music/Sound: A
Value: A+

OVERALL: A

Pros:
+ Motley cast of characters.
+ An absolute aesthetic treat of a visual novel.
+ Surprisingly hard-hitting narrative that seems mostly silly at first.

Cons:
- A bit of a slow start to get the story and character development moving.
- A bit on the short side. The price reflects this though.
- Main character is unlikable for most of the story.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

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#ghostpia