SPOILERS AHEAD:
So in a total fit of curiosity a few days before my birthday I didn’t figure that credit card info for my Ps3 would transfer over to my PS Vita. Well I was wrong, so I ended up downloading myself Corpse Party. Well it would be rude to accidently download myself a 20 dollar game and not play it. So I set off to the journey of Corpse Party.
Game play is fairly simple, you move around as the sprite characters and explore the haunted school. What is not fairly simple is figuring out what’s going to kill you, what isn’t, what’s going to lead you to a bad end or what’s going to complete the plot. The worst part about this is sometimes you can make the wrong choice and not know for twenty minutes or more that you’ve messed up and you can even save after a bad choice and screw yourself up completely. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if there was a way to skip dialogue you’ve read before, but there isn’t!
Seriously! HOW was I supposed to know I wasn’t supposed to give them the student I.D. back before finding the baby statue!?
The plot itself it really solid, you start off the game with one of your class mates leaving to move away from the school. So your class rep and resident occult leader suggests a charm she read on the internet. You go to perform it and it messes up, throwing you all into different closed spaces in this haunted school. From here, you split up into different groups for each chapter.
Chapter 1 you play and Naomi and Seiko
Chapter 2 as Kishinuma and Ayumi
Chapter 3 as Satoshi and Yuka
After that it switches between the people who are still alive. Chapter 5 giving you the most playable characters of all the chapters. Each chapter plays out the story, you can either make it through the chapter safely and move on to the next one or hit one of the very murmurous bad endings.
Chapter 2 I think I was buried alive like 7 times before i figured out what to do. I love alternate endings as much as the next guy but as I stated above, there needed to be some sort of way to skip text. It was really annoying to clear some of these parts multiple times.
You don’t come out with everyone you come in with. No matter how hard you try, this might be the other part of the game that rubbed me the wrong way. It had a set thing of students it wanted to live and if you let any of them die, it was a bad ending. However, if you let other ones die, it continues you on to the regular ending.
I wish there was some kind of ‘Good End’ where everyone lived, or perhaps you had more choice in who lived and who died. One of the deceased was one of my favorite characters and even from beyond the grave she continued to be amazing and a real trooper.
Chapter 1 is alright, it’s not the best chapter of the game by any means. Perhaps it’s because I liked Seiko more then Naomi and in the end of the chapter Seiko dies. This best friend group, or girl who is straight [Naomi] and the lesbian that loves her[Seiko]. Begin exploring the haunted school they are in. Though Naomi has a broken ankle that is almost never talked about again in the later chapters when she’s with Satoshi even though the splint that Seiko makes her breaks, huh, didn’t even think about that part until now. It was the first chapter so I don’t remember the details to it too well, the part that screwed me up the most was trying to escape the nurses office when the black mist is chasing after you. You have to look around the room and find some oil to throw on the hair barring the door and then use the lighter on it. Though this only triggers after you try to burn the door down twice. I’m not ashamed to admit I had to look up a guide during this part because honestly I’m not sure how you’re supposed to figure out some of these things on your own.
Naomi, being thrown to the brink of insanity by this place yells at Seiko and causes a huge fight between them. The group breaks apart and you play briefly as both of them. Seiko hears a voice and goes to follow it, the next time we see her is hung in the bathroom stall in the girls bathroom on the third floor. This is not a death you can stop, either option you pick leads to her dying. I was not pleased with this at all, I honestly really liked Seiko and was rather angry this was how the chapter had to end.
Chapter 2 was a lot more interesting of a chapter but where I had probably one of the hardest times. You start off the chapter with three characters actually, Kishinuma, the school bad boy. Ayumi the class rep and resident occult leader and Ms. Yui the homeroom teacher. You loose her rather early on in the chapter unfortunately and that leaves you with the two students to go looking for her. The game will often have ‘earthquakes’ which is actually the school shifting around. After a ‘earthquake’ things that were open to explore before might be closed off and other places that weren’t open before might be open now. In this case, the class room that the teacher got injured in so you won’t be finding or saving her for the remainder to the chapter, don’t even try.
You wander around a bit until you walk into the room where you find the child ghost. This little guy might look cute at first but he is the bane of your existence! You’re told not to look him in the eyes, which is pretty easy in the room itself when you get the item you need, but then you move on with the plot and the blasted kid invades the hallway and follows you and if you don’t walk carefully and trick him into getting caught up on the holes in the hallway. You’ll get moved to a cut scene of Kishinuma getting buried alive. You have NO idea how long i took me to figure out the path to get past him or what I was supposed to do next, I was so sick of reading the part where you get buried it was maddening.
This chapter contains probably one of the more brutal deaths of the game, the girl who was going to be transfered at the start of the game. Mayu, is flung by two of the ghosts into a wall at high speeds and well. Let me tell you, the result does not look pretty at all. I pride myself on a high constitution and if this game was in any higher resolution then it is, I probably would of thrown up. Thank goodness for low graphics. No, there is no way you can save her by the way. This chapter also has a fantastic fake out as well, but i’ll talk about that in chapter four.
Chapter 3 is a pretty good one if you care about Yuka and her quest to go to the bathroom, I’ll rant about my feelings on that one later. This chapters best moment is when you discover the second building to the school. You move across the walk way and Yuka and Satoshi figure that the woods outside would be a good place to go to the bathroom. So Yuka heads back out and you encounter the ghost with an eye missing. She’s really freaky and if you don’t run away from her right away, there is a really freaky scene of her scooping out Yuka’s eyes with scissors. Yeah, as you can tell I failed to run away in time once.
Once Yuka gets inside from that scene, her brother is missing. She begins searching for him and runs into someone she thinks at first is her big brother but it’s another human that’s been trapped in the school. His name is Kizami Yuuya, and my initial reaction to him was “Oh DAMN, he’s SMOKING!” He says that he’s lost his little sister as well and offers to go with you to find your brother and his sister. We find out between here and chapter five, everything with Kizami isn’t exactly on the up and up.
Chapters four and five are super spoiler heavy, if you don’t want to know critical parts of the plot please stop reading the review here!
I’ll sum them up in a few words: This stuff is fucked up. The real core of the plot shows itself to the characters through a serious of flashbacks but not before they appease some of the ghosts by returning the tongues that had been cut out of their mouths at the time they’ve been murdered.
Chapter 4, we find that Kishinuma, who at the end of chapter two was dead is not actually dead. It was a fantastic fake out, I was sitting through all of chapter three being mad that both of my favorite characters from chapters one and two were dead and then bam, he’s not dead. Good fake out game. Kishinuma and Ayumi gather slowly the three tongues of the children. One of which is out by the pool in which Ayumi almost drowns, this is another case of “HOW COULD I OF GUESSED THAT?” you pick up the key to the pump room, you see waves in the pool. My first assumption is to drain the pool, well that brings you to a bad ending. What you need to do, is run to the locker room, see Ayumi isn’t there, then go into the water. (which if you read the dialogue of Kishinuma saying he can’t swim makes no sense at all) Then you have to find the exact place the ripples were, dive down and get her before the timer runs out! Another one of the tongues is under the floor boards, and so on and so forth. Once you return the tongues to the kids, one of the kids lets the two characters back to their own world. However, that’s when the plot twist hits like a two ton truck. The murderer is not the teacher like we once thought, but one of the supposed victims ‘Sachiko’ and the reason everyone ended up where they did was the charm was flubbed and they angered Sachiko.
Now we come to Chapter 5, this one is much longer then any of the others and has the most bad endings that you can encounter of all of the chapters. You play as everyone left alive at this point, meaning Satoshi, Naomi, Yuka, Ayumi and Kishinuma. Ayumi and Kishinuma after finding out the truth head back to the school to help their other friends escape. That is, if you make that choice, the first choice for a bad ending comes very early on where you can make it so Kishinuma decides not to go with her, this is a horrible choice and is a round about way to a bad ending you’ll get in about twenty minutes so if you don’t want to waste your time on that, chose to go back with Ayumi. On another play through, I say it’s worth it if only for his love confession to her but do it when you’re trying to collect all the bad endings. You have to be pretty careful about everything during this chapter, something as simple as meeting the two groups up too early can spell a bad ending for you or leave you angry and frustrated trying to figure out what to do next. The story takes an even more messed up turn when you learn about the Principal and Sachiko’s mom who used to be the school nurse before her untimely death at the hands of the principal. Reading the nurses diary is pretty erie. Oh though not as erie as something earlier in the chapter. When we first start up with Yuka again, she discovers that Kizami has murdered his friend Kurosaki and desires her to be next. Maybe she should of played the cute little sister card, it might of pacified his crazy. Any which way it leads to a chase scene with the creepy sounds of him calling out for you before his demise in the nurses office.
If you play this chapter correctly you can appease Sachiko and begin running out of the school, though there is no real run function in this game. If you are luck enough to make it outside before the 7th bell, you’ll be fine. If you’re not, the school creates a new malicious spirit or a new Sachiko and you’re trapped there forever.
The characters are well for the most part fairly enjoyable. Everyone likes different types of characters and I can see where some people would come from in liking characters that I didn’t…
Except for Yuka, how can ANYONE like Yuka? She’s really REALLY annoying! I mean, she plays no real part in the story other then being Satoshi’s little sister and thus if you let her die it’s the trigger to a bad end. Other then that, it’s Yuka and the great quest to go to the bathroom. Seriously!? There are holes all over this hell hole, just pee in one of them! Oh god, what are you going to hit, someone’s corpse!? Big whole barring you from the bathroom stalls, pee in it! Stop complaining, stop whining for me, I DON’T CARE! The only good thing to come out of her story line is Yuuya Kizami and I use the term “Good Thing” lightly considering he’s a deranged psycho who murders people….he’s REALLY hot though, what is it with hot guys being psycho?
She’s 14 for crying out loud and she acts like she’s four! Also, the part where she pees herself, takes off her panties and then talks about the wind on her…well um, game, game no. Game stop, Pedo Bear is coming and it doesn’t look good for you.
Sorry, that rant was rather unprofessional of me. Let’s look at the overall.
Overall: Corpse Party was a good horror game with some generally creepy and interesting moments, the puzzles were a bit complicated at times and I had to resort to a guide more then once but that wasn’t such a big deal. The biggest short coming of this game is the inability to skip scenes you’ve seen before it would of made the game a lot more fun for me. If you like horror games, I would totally recommend this game but just don’t get too frustrated by having to go through the same thing over and over again.
I give Corpse Party for the PSP a solid 7/10.
~Midnight