Happiness at all costs

Psycho pass mandatory happiness review

Set in the universe of the Psycho-Pass anime,psycho-pass: mandatory happiness is a visual novel perfectly in line with the contents and rhythms of the original work; obviously there is no visual action that distinguishes the product of animation but the story, the characters and twists are not at all obvious or inferior to what the pen of Gen Urobuchi has initially created. There are some negative aspects that influence this interactive novel but not so serious as to undermine the intrinsic quality of the game.

Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness is a visual novel that should not go unnoticed

THE ELEGANCE OF CYBERPUNK

It is difficult to speak in depth about a visual novel without being able to make precise references to its plot but to safeguard your gaming experience we will tell you the strict essential. But first it is interesting to understand the setting of happiness is mandatory psycho pass, or the Psycho-Pass universe.

The anime is set in a future in which the destiny of men has been entrusted to the Sibyl System, an information system capable of reading the attitudes of human beings and placing them at their best within society; to safeguard harmony and the law, the Sybil System is programmed to decipher the Psycho-Pass of every human being, or the degree of latent crime determined by the mental state of the individual.

For this reason the dystopian society of the future shuns the stress and the deepest feelings, living in the most absolute rigor and slave of medicines and psychological therapies.

Psycho pass mandatory happiness trailer

The operational extension of the Sibyl is the Department of Public Security, composed of inspectors and executors: the former conduct investigations and watch over the seconds while the performers are latent criminals who can no longer aspire to a clean Psycho Pass, having as their only alternative, in addition to detention, the ability to hunt down other criminals. Both then use the Dominator, devices directly connected to the Sybil that come into operation only by reading the target’s Psycho-Pass …

In short, interesting assumptions and set in a first class cyberpunk universe!you do not have to have seen the anime to understand the narrative universe, on the contrary, paradoxically it represents a delicious appetizer before enjoying the animated opera, also because at the narrative level the game is placed somewhere between the third and seventh episode of the first season.

In the incipit of the game we see a mysterious hacker take possession of the mechanical body of an android kept in custody at the medical laboratories, aiming to use it in order to make people happy (and here is explained the title of the game); a seemingly obvious cliché that however has always given great appeal to the cyberpunk genre, after all so many great works of the genre share the narrative cliché of the hacking of androids and cyborgs … the ginoids of Ghost in the Shell in this sense make school.

At this point we will be asked to choose between two characters or Nadeshiko Kutagachi and Takuma Tsurugi:the first is an inspector who, due to an accident during his training, remains injured and loses his memory completely, while the latter is a performer, who has become such because he has rebelled against Sibyl’s sentence.

Next to the antagonist and the two protagonists we will find all the members of the first division of the PSB: the two inspectors Tsunemori and Ginoza, the performers Kogami, Masaoka, Kagari and Kunizuka and the blonde analyst Karanomori. All the characters, both unpublished and original, are well amalgamated in history and dance in a complex narrative plot that lasts about a dozen hours, multiply exponentially if you decide to replay the title with the second character and exploring each narrative branching.