Another madness
Six years have passed since the events reported in Chaos; Head (the knowledge of whose story is not needed to appreciate this title, well to emphasize it), when a tremendous earthquake, incredibly concentrated in Shibuya’s only district, Tokyo, soil is one of the most populous and living areas of the Japanese capital.
Le ferite lasciate dal sisma sono profonde, ma lo spirito nipponico è forte: gli abitanti hanno ricostruito i palazzi a prova di sisma, seppellito i numerosi morti, ripreso la loro vita quotidiana, per quanto lo strascico di quanto successo alberghi ancora nelle loro menti.
Takuru Miyashiro paid a very high price to the catastrophic event, losing one of the parents and the house where they all lived: young people, they know, are quicker to recover from trauma but Takuru’s soul, since that day, it has not been the same. Despite the friendship of Shinji Itou, a faithful companion, and that even stronger than Nono Kurusu’s sister-in-law and Serika Onoe’s childhood friend, with whom she also shared the traumatic moments of the earthquake, Takuru is an adolescent who is unhappy, insecure, reduced to living alone in a caravan in a park inhabited by the thousands of homelessness generated by the earthquake.
To attract the attention of Takuru, a computer expert and curious by nature, a series of bizarre accidents that resonate with what happened in Tokyo years ago when murderous and obscure murders had been renamed to New Generation Madness: a streamer of Success is the first to lose life in underly dubious circumstances, seemingly automating before the webcam during a live.
We stop here, because in a visual novel interweaving is the greatest source of attraction, but what surprised us with Chaos, Child was the absolute naturalness with which, after a slow start, where the cast looks like a collection of stereotypes typical of Japanese culture of the last twenty years, history and characters take shape formidably, almost without the player noticing it.
From situation to situation, scene scene, each of the protagonists reveals something new of itself, revealing itself faceted and deserving to be heard: the interactions between the characters, their internal torments, their motivations make them tremendously real, despite some of the starting assumptions are exaggerated, in full Japanese style (just think of the recent Danganronpa V3).
Another distinctive feature of production is the discreet rhythm, especially when compared with some recent congeners: although, like many Japanese productions of recent years, we would try to call it trotting, Chaos; Child is a visual novel rarely indulging in prologue dialogues; which, in fact, loves to conceal information of great importance in exchanges to secondary appearance.
Regarding the interweaving itself, though far from the peaks reached by the two Steins; Gate (especially the second, as far as we are concerned), the story underlying the events is captivating, full of strokes, unpredictable to the ending: the presence of numerous different epilogues (six o’clock in all, though with only our own time we have only seen two) and parts of the fiction that can not be seen during the first run, however, greatly favors re-playability, longevity already sustained for the first full game.
