World’s End Club - Two authors subverting their tropes
If you're a fan of the Visual Novel genre with a slant on the investigation side and you were really active on the internet during the 2010s, you’ve most likely heard about these two franchises: Danganronpa and Zero Escape. Danganronpa in particular has reached an incredible level of success that put his author Kazutaka Kodaka on the spotlight. Zero Escape unfortunately couldn’t reach the same level of success and it was always on the verge of being shot down, but it was thanks to the support of a very devoted fanbase that Kotaro Uchikoshi finally managed to complete his work and he’s still a very respected author of the genre to this day.
In 2017, after both series reached their conclusion, Kodaka founded his very own video game company call Too Kyo Games and Uchikoshi was soon to follow into the project, and as much as neither of their titles managed to reach the same level of success as Danganronpa did, they’re still pretty active to this day with their last work The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy coming out fairly recently.
Both series shared many features, mainly the isolation of a diverse group of people forced to fight for their own survival while an unknown entity was pulling the strings behind the curtains, usually represented by an animal mascot or a person wearing a mask, and finally a very dreary and pessimistic tone throughout the story. Our characters are constantly pushed to their limits in order to survive and you can often see even the best of people fall under pressure in a situation where the biggest weapon you can have used against, is your trust in other people.
Both Zero Escape and Danganronpa are series that I really enjoyed, and maybe one day they’ll find their own place on this blog. If it wasn’t for the fact that we are talking about two trilogies when put together can very easily reach a couple of hundred hours of gametime, I’ll totally suggest you to play them both before World’s End Club. It’s not like there’s any kind of continuity between them but I feel it’s very important to know the background from where both Uchikoshi and Kodaka came from, because this work is a complete subversion of the type of work they were most known for.
World’s End Club
About the Plot
The story starts in 1995, a group of children from a Tokyo Elementary School are going on a school trip when suddenly, a meteorite strikes nearby and the bus got struck by the aftershock of the impact. Once they come back to their senses they find themselves in an abandoned amusement park where a robot called Pielope will force them to play a so-called Game of Fate in order to grant the freedom to the winner, with the threat of death if they refuse to take part in the game.
Unfortunately for Pielope, the game doesn’t go according to plan and the group manages to escape their captives, but what they thought was freedom will turn out to be just the beginning of their new adventure!
The group find themselves at Kagoshima, a city at the very south of Japan about 1200 km (about 746 miles) from Tokyo and the bus who was taking them on a school trip is missing. Not only that but the entire city is completely devoid of human life and populated by very weird and aggressive creatures. With the memory of the meteorite still vivid they wonder… has the world really ended? Are they the only survivors? And why are they so far from home?
Full of questions and without any answers the group only has one choice: return to Tokyo and hopefully find some other survivors along the way. The road is very long and they can only travel by foot, but these children aren’t just some random kids, they are the Go Getters Club, friends since forever and together they would stop at nothing and overcome any obstacle in order to return home.
From the moment the game of fate went haywire, I was captivated by what events would unfold! This is a story directed by two creators who turned that narrative trope into their strongest suit, it became their own brand. They wanted to subvert the expectation of everyone by making the players ask themselves “What would’ve happened if everyone managed to immediately escape that situation alive and well?” instead of being forced in the deadly game until the very end.
By shifting the story focus on the outside world, with these children desperately trying to return home, you center the conflict not just on the obstacles out there but also on all the arguments the group itself might have along the journey.
Of course there’s no shortage of mysteries since the very beginning. Has the entire world been annihilated by that one meteorite? Where do all these weird creatures come from? Why has the group awakened so far from Tokyo? Who’s hiding behind Pielope, is maybe someone from the group itself? And what’s the nature of all these powers the children seem to be developing? All of these mysteries do a ton of heavy lifting to carry the story forward and see what the group might uncover in their next destination.
The characters are all varied and really likeable. Together they form the Go Getters Club, a group of very close friends that got together during their elementary school years and their camaraderie is shown incredibly well during the course of the story. While their presentation makes them seem like stock archetypes, they have a lot of nuance that surprised me on some occasions and make them all very enjoyable. There isn’t a single character that I didn’t like or left me in complete indifference, one way or another I ended up liking all of them, which isn’t an easy task with a twelve character cast.
The ones I liked the most were: Aniki and his sensibility hidden behind that edgy lone wolf attitude, Pai who not only had a really cute relationship with Aniki but was also ad adorable mother figure fo the whole group; Nyoro who not only surprised me by proving herself really passionate and well versed in science, but she was also the one constantly cheering the grupo into never giving up; Tattsun for wanting to escape his image of goody two shoes and become more rebellious and finally Kansai, the loudmouth brat that would learn during the adventure what really means to be a leader.
Often there’ll be arguments that will cause the group to split into separate branches and the story doesn’t waste any time with making the characters empathize with each other and understand their reasoning. The central theme of this entire story is how our bonds with the people we care about the most will survive even the worst adversities and how our friendships and emotions are something that we have to defend tooth and nail because that’s what makes us humans and makes us keep going.
The tone in general is pretty optimistic and happy, maybe a bit childish at times, but it’s good to see all these children pushing themselves forward despite everything thrown at them, to see how much they cherish their friendships and how hard it is for them to be separated, because they love their friends so much and they constantly learn from their mistakes. I was also very pleased to see that the usual mascot character in this game wasn’t an omnipotent being but instead it was constantly beaten and upstaged by the main characters… It was cathartic for me, especially after having to suffer Monokuma in Danganronpa being an annoying untouchable god for three whole games.
Don’t get me wrong you’ll still get a lot of adversities, but the mystery really does pull its own weight in carrying the story forward without having to put our characters through hell and generally having a dreary or, dare I say, despairing tone throughout.
I also really have to praise the character designs by Take, an artist that is already well known for her work in Pokèmon Sun\Moon and Sword\Shield. All the characters are visually eye-catching and memorable, instantly conveying what archetype they’re representing. Although I’m not gonna lie that I spent a lot of my time wondering what kind of Pokèmon team they would be sporting. I can’t help it sometimes my mind just wanders off on its own, does that happen to you too?
The soundtrack is also really catchy and enjoyable, with songs that won’t leave your head after playing, especially the Go Getters Club theme is something that I will keep humming to myself for a very long time. Praise to Jun Fukuda for his work on the soundtrack.
About the Gameplay
The gameplay in World’s End Club is a mixture of puzzle-game with platforming elements and a visual novel. The game is structured in a series of bite sized chapters that can be story segments, action segments or camping segments.
The story segments are pretty self explanatory, the camping sequences are where you get to speak to all the characters in and get their point of view on the current situations, these are the moments where their characterization and character evolution shines the most and thus I invite you to never skip these segments. The story will at times branch up into different segments and if you want to get the true ending of the game you will have to play all of them.
The action segments are the ones with the most interactivity for the player: these are linear segments where we are in control of a particular character and we have to use their ability to overcome a set of obstacles on our way to reach the goal, whether these are monsters, traps or some puzzles that we need to use our cleverness to resolve. Every character has a different special power, mostly used to attack the enemies but there’s also powers like inverting gravity that will come very useful in exploration.
Every skill has a bit of delay to its animation for the characters that use it, and to make matters worse the collision detection isn’t exactly the best. I’ve noticed times where it seems my character was in the clear of taking any damage but ended up getting hit anyway. It’s nothing game breaking you can’t adapt to, but thanks to this I ended up dying more times than I expected to.
I would’ve also enjoyed it if the game didn’t limit itself to just one character at a time, but would let you switch between characters on the fly in order to deal with more complex obstacles and maybe some fun power combinations.
Personally I haven’t much more to say about the gameplay. It's functional, a bit clunky at times, but at the end of the day it’s still fun and accessible to everyone. The real meat of this game is the plot and characters, not so much the gameplay sections.
In Conclusion
I loved World’s End Club! It’s a game with obvious flaws but the story, characters and tone of the adventure more than make up for it and as a result is extremely enjoyable. I admit that most of my enjoyment comes from being familiar with the previous work of the authors and I felt like this game was a way to reject that kind of dreary storytelling for once and try to reestablish themselves. It’s hard for me to imagine how I would feel about this game if I experienced it in a bubble without previous knowledge but even then… I don't think that can take away anything from the really good story, capitating characters and pristine presentation.
The game is available on Apple Arcade, Nintendo Switch and PC, and it’s pretty easy to find at a cheap price nowadays. I really recommend it to everyone, it’s not overly long and its episodic nature makes it really easy to digest in small doses.
If you ended up playing it, let me know what you thought. Especially if you, like me, are fans of both DanganRonpa and\or Zero Escape! For everyone else who already played it follow me to the…
SPOILER SECTION - Proceed at your own risk
Let’s start with the cover girl of this game, Vanilla. I admit that the cover completely influenced my experience with the story, I was constantly eyeing her with suspicion waiting to uncover her role in the bigger picture. Maybe she was the one behind Pielope and all that was happening… but never I would expect her to be a ghost! For the entire time Vanilla is a spirit that could be seen only by some members of the party and it’s all handled incredibly well! The game does sprinkle around some clues with some dialogue not really matching once you start thinking about it, but once the truth came out, I was stunned.
This revelation is also one of the key moments for her brother Aniki, who one year after her death is still mourning and unable to accept the truth, still feeling responsible for everything that happened. He’s the one who most fiercely opposes the idea of her being still there as a spirit, being basically their guide in this world, but once even Aniki is able to see her spirit, it leads to one of the most touching scenes in the entire game.
Vanilla herself is a very well written character: because of her nature she’s always one step ahead of everyone in the party and thus tries to help and support them as much as possible, but she’s not always stoic about the situation. Her facade of bravery slowly crumbles the more she realizes that despite everything she tries to do she can’t be with their friends anymore like she used to, she wants to play with them, joke again with them, hug them tight… but no matter how hard she tries not everyone can see her. There are a couple of times when she’s about to give up entirely, but she always manages to fall on her back and keep going despite everything.
So, who’s the mastermind behind everything? It’s an artificial intelligence called MAIK: its purpose during creation was supporting and helping humanity, but just like many other AIs in fiction, it reached the conclusion that the only way to help humanity was to destroy it… Not by killing us mind you, just making us void or our emotions. In the years since its creation, it sent into the world some nanomachines with the sole purpose of completely suppressing human’s emotions and will, driving all the humans who fell slaves into hiding underground. The Go Getters seem to be the only ones capable of resisting its influence, and it’s at this point that MAIK tries to use them as “Shepherds” for humanity, turning them into the ones that would preach about its teachings driving the apathetic humanity towards their future, and it’s for this very purpose that two robots infiltrated into the group… Reycho and Pochi!
Reycho is presented as the silent protagonist being controlled mostly by the player, but in reality for the entire time he didn’t have any autonomy of his own and was actually remotely controlled by Pochi who in the meantime was pretending to play a video game. Not only Reycho being described as a “Robot controlled by a outer entity” was such an obliteration of the fourth wall that I busted out laughing, but this is also a great turning point for a character like Pochi who for the longest time just felt like the nerdy archetype and not much else.
Pochi’s only purpose was being a spy for MAIK, but living with the Go Getters and actually spending time with humanity he actually learned about it and where their strength as a species really comes from, and thus understood that MAIK was completely in the wrong. Their friendships, arguments and conflicts can both drive humankind in both doing something great but also something terrible… and all of these actions are important because once we are deprived of the ability to actually express ourselves, then the world is completely over. MAIK unfortunately is stubborn in its own way and doesn’t wanna listen to reason.
Watching all the kids in the ending unite themselves and destroy MAIK with the sole objective of saving everyone they hold dear is one of those endings that really does good to your heart. Yes, at times it feels like the game is stretching itself a bit in order to give a happy ending to everyone, but you know what… That’s perfectly fine for me. This is a story about a group of kids who value their lives and friendships so much that they won’t stop at nothing in order to kick the ass of an AI that thinks it holds all the answers for a humanity that it's completely unable to comprehend.
And let’s say it, during these times it really is the kind of story we need!
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