A psychological thriller from beginning to end, Raging Loop takes the deduction out of the players hands and leads them on a visual novel that ranks among Uchikoshi's notable works.
Raging Loop is a breathtaking and entertaining title in Horror genre, and while we already saw most of its ideas in other titles, the amount of freedom it gives to the players really lifts it up and makes it one of the best in its genre.
[This review is spoiler free]
You need to have a basic understanding of Japanese(or perhaps Asian) culture in order to have a better experience on this game.
Raging Loop did a good job in telling a full story, and give a clear explain to most of it's story arc at the end.
Every character's move is reasonable, and you can see what they thought after you went through the whole story.
Voice actors did a great job, and almost every line had been dubbed, NC!
If you enjoy Werewolf, it won't let you done~
It is a port from mobile phones, it has over four years and it shows...but Raging Loop's mix of Japanese folklore and whodunnit story had us hooked until the end, and we recommend it to visual novel lovers.
Raging Loop is an entertaining game, but it does not meet the problems that leave us better exponents of the genre. In fact, we are facing a title focused on horror that in many occasions does not scare enough, something that quite remains to the experience.
A tremendous story with many twists and turns. Has a similar feel/atmosphere to the Danganronpa games, albeit a lot less interaction and more of a pure visual novel with choices. Hugely enjoyable.
An interesting visual novel that's a bit all over the place, but not bad.
Comparing this game to Danganronpa and Zero Escape, the story is much more intelligent and well done than Danganronpa, but not quite as good as the first two Zero Escape games. Unlike those games, there's no investigation or notable gameplay mechanics. This is a pure visual novel.
As you can probably guess by the title, your protagonist loops through the same events (like Groundhog Day), and is ultimately trying to end that cycle while trying to keep himself alive, other people alive, and learn why this is all happening. The loops consist of you visiting a small superstitious village at a time when supernatural/psychological forces cause the inhabitants to want to kill each other.
In this village, mists come around every decade or so, which signifies the return of the wolves. The wolves secretly possess a small number of villagers and kill one villager per night. All villagers meet during the day to decide which of them are wolves, and can kill one villager per day. Some of the non-wolf villagers gain abilities, such as being able to determine whether the person they killed the previous day was a wolf, or protecting a single person from being killed by wolves at night.
You spend a lot of time with the villagers, each with their own interesting personalities, while you primarily work to stay alive through three major loops, where you have a different role in each.
The story is full of minor plot holes and a few moderate ones, so don't expect expert writing here. The game focuses less on making a believable story and more on making interesting situations. And the situations sure are interesting.
Without spoiling anything, the first main loop is a warm-up, where you get acquainted with its characters and rules. The second is where you have more control and things get more serious. The third loop is downright evil, due to you taking a more active role in cheating, lying, and murdering. It's the sort of route that, if the whole game were like that, video game ratings boards would have surely not approved the game. Though near the end of the third major loop is where the decent writing ends. Believability goes downhill and plot holes go up from there.
It's a shame too. At that point, I was looking forward to another day or two of meetings with the villagers to decide who to kill next. Stakes were very high, but it all fizzled out into near-nonsense.
The post third-loop gameplay takes about as long as each of the three main loops and consists of you primarily going back to different points in the story and "unlocking" answers that you couldn't choose before. This leads to long and not-always-relevent expositions about the villagers and their history. You use the information gained there to go back to the end of the third loop and get the "good" ending. Well, that's what the game wants you to think happens. The problem is that the information gained was not adequate enough for the protagonist to make the decisions he made. It's like he was just guessing and all of his guesses ended up being correct. So it unfortunately didn't end on a good-writing note.
I'll also point out that the choices in the game are very limited. Don't expect Zero Escape levels of choices and trees. There's really only one main path and if you make a bad choice, you quickly die and get to retry. Making bad choices sometimes gives you keys to unlock better choices, but it does this arbitrarily. You don't learn anything from making a bad choice that would cause you to make the right choice next time; it's just another random choice based on what the writers were thinking. You could have easily made that choice the first time, but the writers didn't want you to because they have a specific path that they want you to follow.
So it's not a bad game, but really should have ended at the end of the third major loop. Fans of typical Japanese mystery/murder visual novels should definitely give it a try. If you like intelligently-told stories, you might not like it so much, but give it a try if you run out of other games to play.
I really wanted to like this game, and there are so many cool aspects to the first 3/4 of the game, but things went so off the rails and by the end there were so many story holes, plot conveniences, and overall confusing or frustrating elements that the game ended up leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
The voice actings, characters, and story elements are interesting.
But it gets weird and boring after about 70% completion of the plot.
If you love Japanese culture/cult, you might like it but the story development and explanation are quite uninteresting and boring.
I would rate it 8 out of 10 if I stopped playing at the 5th chapter.
It still is a good game. you should give it a try if you are into visual novel games.
SummaryImmerse yourself in a thrilling psychological horror story taking place in the secluded Japanese village of Yasumizu. A heavy mist surrounds the place, preventing everyone from ever leaving. Ancient gods have come back to hunt the villagers down one by one. The feast has begun… can you escape the village alive?