got gifted this 2021-era game randomly by a friend, and ... it's kinda great actually?
it calls itself "brainpunk", which is exactly like cyberpunk only with the word "brain" stuck in front of everything to denote that it's weird psychic technology. this doesn't quite work, but I freely admit that I would definitely 100% call psychic texts "brain messages".
"I AM SENDING YOU A BRAIN MESSAGE. FROM MY BRAIN." <- all my friends would get this Brain Message every single day, until they Brain Blocked me
anyway, first I should cover the bad: this is an anime-style game; some of the characters have semi-skimpy outfits (however there's zero fanservice). the main character in the male playthrough is of the Romantically Oblivious subtype that - naturally - all the girls incessantly flirt with. some of the jokes are ... dated, or poorly translated. at it's heart it's a JRPG, so there's a fair bit of grinding. etc.
now the parts I like: the game is all kinds of fucked up.
[I'll try to stick to non-plot spoilers (i.e. background info) but I probably won't 100% succeed.]
at the start of the game, you pick one of two different characters, which follow two radically different plotlines - I chose the male, Yuito. both characters are psychokinetic (though their weapons differ), both are new volunteers in the psychic branch of the military. after selecting your character you get to watch as the special brain equipment is attached to you and your fellow volunteers/conscripts and you all collapse screaming in agony. perfectly normal start to a game.
yeah so straight away it's revealed that most of the soldiers - not just the new guys - look like teenagers, and are being given grown blockers to slow their aging (to various degrees). if you pay attention to what one of the characters says about how she was forcibly conscripted a few years earlier, you start to realise that the occasional Actual Children you see walking about are extremely powerful psychics subjected to mandatory enlistment when they were very young; they invariably outrank you.
older-looking soldiers are either new adult conscripts (that everyone expects to die) or child soldiers that the growth blockers are ceasing to work on.
also hey there is government censorware in your eyes that prevents you from seeing certain things. don't worry about it!
so on to the game itself. first of all, you don't have skills as such - you modify your own brain. sometimes the map of your brain gets larger and more irregular. don't worry about it!
you are in a squad of guys with variable powers (different to your own) that you can briefly share. as you hang out in your Secret Teen Hideout and become closer and more compatible, this sharing will start to last longer, and you will begin to have visions of your friends that will help you out. sometimes you become them, just for a second. this is normal and fine. sometimes you forget little things, like who is supposed to be giving you orders, or which side you're on, or how you got here, but on the other hand nobody is stopping you from dressing as bad as you could ever want.
haha you can put a stuffed owl on your head! there's a hole in the sky that nobody talks about any more.
after a while, you unlock the Brain Field power, or as I prefer to think of it, AKIRA MODE, where you become psychically overpowered and get to smash everything. your character staggers around drunkenly, clutching their head and laughing and saying things like "I'll destroy EVERYTHING!", "WITNESS my POWER!" and so on. it's unbelievably fun, and will immediately kill you after a few seconds. none of your friends - who see all this - ever tell you to stop doing it.
none of this, though, prepares you for the moment when the media - having had all their computers trashed - releases a sketch of a suspected criminal (the other playable character). I'm putting it behind a break for reasons that I hope will be self-explanatory.
(the effect this picture has on your squad is devastating, by which I mean it immediately cures them of all some of their ailments.)
And finally, closing out today's round of birthdays, Happy Birthday to Hanabi Ichijo, our pyrokinetic powerhouse from Scarlet Nexus.
Edit: It turns out Hanabi's birthday is actually 8/16, not 4/2. Well, we get to celebrate her early and she doesn't have to share her birthday with so many other characters.
March 24th 2024 - I haven’t posted in a while but I’ve got a few weeks off university so I decided to get Scarlet Nexus on sale to scratch that Astral Chain itch and it is really cool!
I think it’ll take more time for it to grow on me because I have to sit through a lot of dialogue and story before getting to the fun action gameplay but the game is really pretty