Game review: Time Travelers

Just finished Time Travelers on my Vita and I feel a huge need to write about it. Two weekends ago, I was checking out the PSN store somehow got the demo and to my surprise, the game had furigana! Japanese games don't usually have furigana. The only one I know which has is Pokemon. I'm so tired of looking up kanji through kanji recogniser or through radicals. Its so time consuming. With furigana I just type the pronunciation in my dictionary get meaning and I'm off to the next line.

Time Travelers is an epic visual novel type game. You have 5 characters with their own storylines and you continue until that character meets his/her end and you travel back in time to fix things, usually involving a different character to do something. Think of five parallel storylines and you're jumping between the characters and into the past to fix things so the story can move forward.

That's how the switching between characters and replaying the past thing looks like.

That's basically the extent of your control besides quicktime events, making decisions and answering questions. There's usually a 5 or 10 second countdown to make decision so I can only read the first choice by the end. Storyline is great and it took me about 16 hours to finish and there's probably an hour or two of kanji searching and cigarette breaks in there. The main reason it took two weeks was that my head hearts from reading too much Japanese.

So that's how you market gaming to Japanese girls...

Being a sort of interactive anime, it does run into the same problems that plague most anime and doramas. Tendency to for too much melodrama and even sacrificing attention to detail to do so. There are parts of the story that just infuriate me but because its a game and not an anime, I'm more willing to let things slide. Halfway through the game I was thinking Time Travelers would make a great action dorama/anime but towards the end when all the super cheesy stuff happens, I changed my mind.

Great music and probably not as good as Stein's Gate. I've got Stein's Gate on my Vita but the Japanese is a lot harder than the usual game so its sitting on my to be played list. The furigana means its a great game for learning Japanese and its pretty easy to understand except for some of the sci-fi stuff. Also look out for plenty of references to Back to the Future. Time Travelers is a hodgepodge of different stories from terrorism to high school romance to otaku hero wannabe comedy. Sometimes to mix of storylines is jarring but most of the time its pretty cool and they are a lot more wow moments than uuggh. Not a must buy game but I definitely had fun.