Impressions on, sort of a review of, Read Only Memories, an adventure and visual novel-ish game by Studio MidBoss.
You could say my infatuation with cyberpunk is pretty recent. I think it started with the paper I was writing for class, about science fiction. Since then I've pretty much been fascinated with this exaggerated, over-the-top, dark, dank, technocratic setting. I read the classic Neuromancer, I watched Blade Runners (less cyberpunk and more film noir, I know. The setting's solid, though), I went through Ghost in the Shell. And recently I've been digging myself deeper into the world of Shadowrun.
Read Only Memories boast itself with the tagline A New Cyberpunk Adventure. It's set in 2064, and features everyday-life robots, genetic modifications, corporate overlords, and, of course, unabashed corruptions. But for a while I find it hard to believe that it was born out of the same Gibsonian roots as the rest of this bleak genre.
It's a colourful world, this 2064. Technology is king, of course, but its people have learned to live pretty darn happily with them, whether they're corporate scientists or just a relatively poor journalist. Even the "minority race"--as in genetically modified humans, in this setting--who were supposedly marginalised seems to be doing pretty okay. Sure, there are protests and lawyering and the ilk, but they're explicitly, no double-taking, shown to be peaceful. Just the like the rest of the game. Placid, peaceful dangers. It taste less cyberpunk, more a futuristic anime.
But, come on. Anime's not a bad thing, and although cyberpunk could be a misnomer here, if you take out the exaggerations, take all the edginess out, Read Only Memories plays pretty well into the genre.
So. A colourful, peaceful, technocratic world. Cyberpunk has a whole lot of classic tropes to go on with it, but at its core, it's mostly an exploration of a future where technology have advanced so far and has become so pervasive that society lives at its mercy, and by extension, at the mercy of those who control it. Read Only Memories, contrasting others in the genre, takes on this with a lighter tone and, come on let's just spill it out, more realistically.
The game tackles a lot of issues as it progress--machine sapience, genetic modifications, societal prejudices, corporate overlording--and while I find it a bit too sermonising, they actually flows pretty well. The cast is diverse, a heck lot more diverse than you see in most fictions nowadays, and how they act and talk and treat you, it feels natural. With the numbers of issues it tackles, I had this feeling that the game is going to follow its own agenda, nevermind a believable story, but nope. It's lively, it plays its element together well, and while the story is anime-style ridiculous, it's pretty good.
[caption id="attachment_175145010" align="alignnone" width="600"]
Yes, Pat's a bear. It makes sense in context, trust me![/caption]
The characters are great, too, and for the length of the game, there's plenty of them. They're all lively, colourful, and though a lot of them use character stereotypes, I think they mix the tropes well enough that it doesn't feel like stereotypes. At least not too much. At the very least, they suit the setting.
Okay, fine. They're not very believable. They tend to stick with just a couple of dominant tropes. But they don't have to. They're actors in a play. They suit the setting.
You better get used to the setting and those characters, though, to even at all enjoy the game, because there's whole lot of conversations. Read Only Memories's the sort of game that focus more on its characters interaction than in its story.
Not that the story's bad, it's just it's nothing really new, or even interesting. It doesn't contain any twists even though it's the sort of story that needs a twist badly. It has its wham episodes, which are indeed whammy and, added with its visual and sounds, quite a powerful jab. But if you just look at the story itself, without enjoying the character interaction, without enjoying how well the visual, the sound, the setting, the everything play with each other, it's a disappointing mess.
I don't have to talk about the visual, do I? It's really good. It's a pixel art heaven. It's me being wowed every time a new character portrait shows up. Then again, I'm a big fan of pixel arts. If you're not into it, it's possible that the game's going to break your eyes or something.
So. So Read Only Memories might not be that great, might not be up to anybody's taste if anybody expect anything that it is not. But it is a lovely little game, and one that knows exactly what it is, and how it can be the best at what it does. If it seems like your kind of jam, with its light-hearted cyberpunk, pixel arts, and you're perfectly capable of saying "lol what is a story I love the characters and settings enough" at the end of the game, it's definitely worth a try.
