[quote name='Dead of Knight']Not really harsh at all compared to my posts. :lol: Besides, I found Jake Hunter enjoyable for the grand total of $14 I spent on playing it. I'm still thinking about this one.[/QUOTE]
I liked Jake Hunter (I had a Saburo Jinguuji artbook that I got from a sale), but Time Hollow blows it away. Well worth my money.
Here's a review I posted elsewhere:
Life is full of regrets... "If only I could
have... If only I said... If only I didn't..."
If only we had the power to change
the past.
No, that's not an excerpt of text from the books in Braid, this is...
Time Hollow
Time Hollow OP
This is a new anime-styled adventure game on the DS, from the guys (or at least, the director) that brought you
Shadow of Destiny/Memories on the PS2.
You star as Ethan Kairos, a boy who wakes up on his 17th birthday to discover that not only are his parents suddenly missing, but apparently they've disappeared
12 years ago. The night before, they mentioned that they had something important to tell you on your 17th birthday. Did that have anything to do with their disappearance?
The only way to get to the bottom of it is the mysterious note and magical hollow pen delivered to you via your cat, Sox. "Go to the school's dump. May 7th...seven hours ago."
Huh? What does that mean?
GAMEPLAY
The game plays out like a classic adventure game, ala Phoenix Wright and Hotel Dusk. The interface is very similar to Phoenix Wright's exploration and dialogue; plenty of text and locations to point and tap through. The interesting thing about these backgrounds though is that you can scroll/move left or right while looking at the "2D" background, and they're dimensionally spaced, so objects in the foreground will shift faster than those in the background. Objects hidden behind foreground shrubs will become visible, and you can see different angles into a doorway. It's a very neat effect.
Ethan experiences flashbacks of the past. These are memories that are affected by every change in time, but these are also memories that, once you discover their correct time and place, you can alter with the Hollow Pen. Once it glows, time will freeze, and drawing a circle in the right spot will open a portal to the past.
A past which you can alter.
The top is a flashback, and the bottom is the present. In this instance, there is a box and a note in the past which you can pick up from the past, which wasn't available in the future because the garbage was disposed.
But be careful of how you alter the past, because each alteration will have a butterfly effect with unforseen consequences. Ethan will retain his memories, but he will also gain new memories as the present changes around him due to these alterations. You have to use these new memories/flashbacks to solve the mystery of the disappearance of your parents.
STORY
With all these twists in time, you need to think fourth dimensionally to wrap your head around all these changes to the past and present. For instance, there was a traffic accident where a fridge fell off a truck and killed a girl riding her bike. To fix this, you may disable her bike, but this ends with the fridge falling and crushing a poor little puppy dog instead.
Then, when you save the dog, it later causes your dog-hating friend to become startled and angry, ending up with him murdering the girl on bike's boyfriend. You get the point.
Speaking of friends, the character list is pretty limited (around 12 characters) but each character earns their place with personality. You have your closest buds; Vin Threet, a former basketball star with a career ending injury, Ben Fourier, the glasses-wearing kid with a crush on the girl on a bike, and Morris Fivet, a overly-studious guy that's being pressured by his parents.
And Kori Twelves, who suddenly appeared in your life as a student, but you don't remember her at all in your previous timeline.
(Yes, almost all the character's last names are numbers of the clock.)
While the game is somewhat short (5-10 hours) and linear (there are alternate things you can do which don't really affect the overall ending) and even with an alternate ending (new game+ where you start off with all your memories and you can solve the "mystery" within 10 minutes), I enjoyed it. The way time played out reminded me so much of Shadow of Destiny. The way dialogue is handled is very Phoenix Wright'ish, except instead of sprites, you have a wide variety of close-up anime facial emotes to convey the conversation. The music is decent, with a few remixes of the intro music thrown in there. The puzzles are a bit on the simple side, because it can be obvious what needs to be changed, but it's great for those who play these for the story and the experience.
I love my DS over PSP.
