Alright, fellas, let’s address the elephant in the room. There’s a lot of fat tits in this game. It doesn’t take someone with their ear to the ground and their heart with the masses to see that younger generations are taking to puritanism like flies to shit. Go ahead, take a trip through the comments of ANYTHING relating to the human form, whether it’s sexual or not. Hell, you’ll probably see it if it’s related to anything anime or drawn women. It’s gooner this, gooner that, gooner you, gooner me. A catchy and easy label to toss at things with titillation because it’s now seen as strange to see a fictional person and think “hot”. Now, I’m no member of MENSA, but I’m starting to think the socio-political landscape in English speaking countries is about finished with rotting a fist-sized hole into most everyone’s brains (everyone being anyone permanently strapped into the news cycle hell machine). I mean, remember when it was the left calling characters like Bayonetta and Elvira male-gaze-sexpot-fantasies only for the most lonely of men. Aside from all the nigh comic-book villain level actions, words and moves that the current administration is doing, they’re molding and mushing the brains of a generation already use to censoring themselves via the words unalive and PDFile (among many other things). So I guess it doesn’t really strike me as all too surprising that many would look at any game with any form of overt sexual imagery as crass, low-brow, uncouth, unworthy of consideration and overall anathema to art (look at how people immediately talked shit about DOA when Itagaki passed). When I saw Sense for the first time on Steam, the “presentation” on display had me leaning forward in my chair, one eyebrow raised and rubbing my chin like I’m reflecting on my gilded Chinese empire. I would then look at the reviews and see only one of two things. Either it was people going “girl hot yippee” or people not giving it the time of day and only looking at the flaws. As mentioned before, that notion bothers me. Why can’t a character be taken seriously if she happens to have a huge rack? Why can’t someone do both? Why can’t I ogle tits, but think about the hegemony monitoring the daily lives of its destitute citizens in a globalized police state? Well, nothing, really. A large majority of people who play this game, from what the comments and reviews tell me, haven’t tried to engage with the game on its level. So I slapped down the price of admission on the counter and found my way into the little theater all the way down the hall next to the emergency exit and sat my ass down to see if my little gamble would pay off. I’d say it did. You’re not gonna see BAFTA give this its flowers, that much is certainly true, but it definitely isn’t a bimbo. Throughout my three *damned* playthroughs, (which I will discuss later) I definitely started seeing the vision SUZAKU had behind the game. Sense takes place sometime in the not-so-distant future of the 2080s, the entire world falls under the thumb of three ultra corporations that have inched their way into every facet of modern living. The outlawing of theistic worship aside from Buddhism and Christian idolatry being burnt away, gutting the theological traditions of old in order to bleach identity and culture homogeneity. The entire world is balkanized and changed, Hong Kong is no longer even a concept and Neo-Seattle, unfortunately, is reality. If you can suspend your disbelief for just a moment and believe that a pretty, well-endowed woman that is into all the male hobbies is going on her very first date at the age of 25, you can suspend your disbelief for a large majority of what this game has to throw at you. Walking through the first couple of areas of the game, I can definitely tell that the dev has a type, that type being E-Cup women. Talking with the NPCs littering the piss-soaked streets, getting a feel for the land, feeling the pulse of the heartbeat, I’m starting to get into it. Sure, there may be a couple of misspellings and cases of poor grammar sprinkled here and there in the text box. Yeah, it caused some confusion when Mei’s (the protagonist) date was referred to as “she” and then later referred to as “he” for the remainder of the game. I’ll admit it, I chuckled whenever I died (only because I wanted to see the death screens as this game is pretty easy) and saw “SYTEM REBOOT ERROR” in the upper left corner. Whenever Mei runs, because of the way that the game is animated, whichever leg is closest to the camera will look like a cardboard cut-out moving in the wind. You WILL get numb to the sound of Mei’s heels tap tap tapping on the molded over wood floorboards underneath her, it will not change, you will adapt or you will die. You might raise an eyebrow at the VA for Mei delivering some, for the lack of a better word, peculiar deliveries. All these things listed out make this game seem amateurish, which it is, but that’s not a bad thing in the slightest. For all the “eccentricities” that Sense has, there is plenty of good here that caught my eye. The quality of the art on display from characters to environments to monster designs are nothing to sneeze at. The ghosts that haunt the ramshackle hallways and dimly lit rooms are falling apart. Their necks are twisted and snapped, bones jut and jag. Limbs and skin has become mathematical angles. Their wails and moans echo throughout aching floors and croaking walls. Some have been reduced to little more than approximations of man, having been consumed by decades of hate, sorrow, wrath. Other ghosts, well, other ghosts sure know how to rock some heels. As mentioned before, this game is not afraid of the female form and all of it’s exaggerations, I can respect the vision (I am a simple beast). The story is told through environmental story telling, journal entries and inference. Sometimes, you have to go further back into your journals to figure out some of the puzzles, while not breaking new ground, it was cool to see that reading all the journals came in handy. While it’s definitely not the best way to tell a narrative to your audience, I can appreciate that it’s taking itself seriously. It’s earnest and I appreciate the game for being that with me. The ambient tracks and the soundscapes for the halls really stuck with me. In-between exploring, you’ll be left in the creaking song of infrastructure left in isolation, of settling wood and hymns of empty space. Sometimes, you’re thrust into thrashing notes and violent rhythms, no rest, no ease. Gotta give credit to whoever worked on the sound. It really made my first go-around tense all throughout. Which leads me to THE big gripe I have with this game. This game has new game+, and with all decent NG+, it adds things and content to the game thus incentivizing players to give another go around the block. We’re all familiar with the concept. Sense does this via hidden costumes and a new enemy that can’t be exorcised, cool. It also has a secret ending, the original ending is more vague and less hopeful while the hidden one is shows a bright future, cool again. What doesn’t sit right with me is why is the hidden ending locked away behind a third playthrough when nothing is really being added on said third playthrough until the very end? The game isn’t hard at all, NG+ doesn’t really increase the difficulty aside from taking autosaving away, why couldn’t it have been just on the second playthrough? It’s kinda pointless and unnecessary. With a narrative already throwing ifs, ands, or buts, I would’ve liked a bit more. But hey, if something already has me going through it a third time and that’s all I can really say negatively about it, it did something right. I expected little and came away satisfied. Thanks Sense, you minx, you. When you come for the giant boobs, but stay for the generational mysticism and parental trauma.
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