I've been playing Reverse: 1999 again in an attempt to pinpoint what exactly is bad about the game, why it pushes me away so easily, despite myself being interested in it! It's "style with no substance" sure, but in what way is it style and in what way does it have no substance?
Part of it is the bad localization. But how bad is bad? And how much of it is stylistic choice? And how much of the stylistic choice is still bad even if it's deliberate?
Some of it is just objectively bad. When loading it says "No data is used in this process" when what it wants to say is that no data is being downloaded. The audio settings have options for "SFX", "Music", and, confusedly, "Audio". That third option apparently just refers to the voice over. Skill descriptions sometime use different phrasing for the same effects, making party-building more exhausting that it should've been.
But on to the story, for most of the time, the localization is... fine. There are grammatical errors. Here, and there, and here again, and there again. A thousand little cuts, which on most games-you-play-on-public-transport, they're fine. But Reverse: 1999 prides itself in being stylish, which in writing translates to, for lack of a better word in my head at the moment, tonal control. Two people from different backgrounds would speak in different ways. The specific diction that they pick matters, not to mention the specific ways with which they'll mangle English grammar. This is delicate stuff, and the English localization somehow managed to both crash through the whole thing with a giant hammer (i.e. flattening everything) while also obsess too much about little details that they don't care how incoherent the whole dialogue ends up being.
The end result is something of a tonal whiplash. It somehow feels like the characters aren't all in the same room speaking to each other. At the same time, you can't get a good read of who these characters are and what they bring into the conversation.
It'll be nice to blame all this on the localization, but I think the fault is somewhat at the original writing too. The mishy-mashiness of it all. Reverse: 1999 is, let's be honest here, a collection of national stereotypes. This isn't a bad thing in itself. Stories aren't meant to closely resemble real life; they thrive on exaggerations and amplified personalities. That the real life inspirations gets reduced to an aesthetic isn't a bad thing by itself either, especially since R:1999 do this to pretty much all culture equally (racism is racism because of power dynamics, but that's a discussion for another time). The issue is that sometimes R:1999 chases that aesthetic too hard that the characters kinda... doesn't feel like people. They're a collection of quirky traits and aesthetics and real life inspirations, but they don't feel like a coherent person. Yet.
Yet. Gacha games are notorious for only opening up after you've played for a while. Maybe I just need to spend some time with it. Maybe the writers and localizers just need some time to get used to writing it, and it'll get stronger in a while.
At the moment though, I don't think I'd be recommending Reverse: 1999 to anyone, unless you really are just looking for a fancy visual diversion. I can't even recommend it from a gameplay perspective thanks to the aforementioned inconsistent skill descriptions. I also think the user interface could use some work, but then again I said the same thing for Arknights and I'm fine with it now, so that's probably just something you gotta get used to.
