Divi-Dead

The Good
Well, from the sole start the story just drags you into unknown and leaves you there entirely on your own... with some nice friendly characters around, though. It builds pretty fast its mystery, and soon you start asking yourself questions if this really is the world as you know it. Seems like being on these killing grounds is a very possible way to loose your life, hardly going to cheat the death. However, this game does not give you ways of dying every now and then, no, you cannot die in the game (well actually, the story doesn't let you), except in the ending, but that's completely irrelevant to the topic.

You start as Ranmaru, a transfer student to the school you're in and that's that. It's a private school and one to grants many priviledges (no, I didn't mean sex with other girls around), such as free schoolarship for one thing. But you know what they say, every good deed is guarded by the veil of darkness, and the fact is that you basically didn't come here to be just another ordinary student (though I didn't notice ordinary students here, anyway), but since your uncle owns this school, that's how you gained easy access in here, however, only to serve as some sorta spy for him. But with a good cause, too, as there seems to be lots of strange things happening around, him included, ditto.

The thing is that everyone around started having certain seizures, how or why, the reason's unknown, all you know is that you lost quite of your life due to similar if not the same occurences in the past, but that still didn't make you immune. What lies beyond that disease, and is it a disease, that's for you to uncover.

The graphic in the game is pretty sweet (aww, c'mon guys, I mean it in a technical way, don't get any funny ideas already), and for 1998 using 16bit color mode is something new, hehe, especially 'cos many newer hentai games used 16 or 256 colors only. Still, shots are really nice, both backgrounds and places, and characters. Most of music, which are all midi by the way, are very nice for the background, though some may start being annoying (especially the time of getting seizures, it's not a music that's present then, it's a torment for everyone with good hearing).

Dialogues seems much more peculiar and interesting than in some ordinary hentai games, and most of time when you'll be expecting what you're thoughts are telling you to expect, you'll end up without it, for many times I asked myself if this game has any hentai elements at all. The answer is yes, of course, but somehow the more you shorten your distance to the end, the more you get to see them. Well, they somehow seemed more as a part of the overall atmosphere then just cheap sex as we can get it from some typical big-eyes anime hentai games, and keep in mind that this game was the first one to try going into the territory of not only being suspenseful but having a horrifying scenes and/or atmosphere. Well, of course, they obviously didn't count that we've seen quite worse scenes in many other games, but still, the atmosphere is well made, if this would be some sort of 3rd-person point-and-click adventure, it'd probably be amongst my favorites, but still, they just don't do such games as typical adventures, do they? Is it just me, or are you all at least a bit sorry for lack of such stuff in classical adventures? ;)

One of probably the greatest things in this game is speech. I expected some english voice-acting, especially since I believe I saw on a few places people ranting that japanese voice-acting is great, but english is really horrible. Well, lucky me, but I had a japanese voice-acting with english text (subtitles), and I must say, voice-acting is superb, and a nice touch for a hentai game, from dialogues to moaning :)

The Bad
Well, ending really... ruined it all. I mean, it's less than a simple conclusion. Multiple endings they said, huh? Well, I've seen two of them, and I can't say anything but it's a deceit. It shouldn't even be allowed to be called an ending.

Also, they really overdid with using that music (it's midi file, but really sounds more like scratching the metal multiply to get ten times worse) whenever your character is having so-called seizures.

The Bottom Line
Well, the second one I played from the genre, thus second one I own from such genre, and I must say it really is a great game. I don't find it a waste of money though. But still, it is clearly a hentai game, but twisted and turned to get so many other elements that the hentai genre somehow gets lost in all the myst.