Losing your team has weight and pain because you had time to develop attachments to this confused and scared band of kids. The game makes you care before it brings down the ax; you haven’t lost a random Joe, you lost people that mattered. It’s a tactic designed to hurt, and it works.
It’s that wonderful time of year where I get to focus on visual novels centered on the creepy, the terrifying, and the downright spooky. Ghosts, demons, mysterious happenings and the like all take center stage this month; sadly, however, our first VN was less horrific because it presented a dark story well, and more because it represents a colossal and exhausting waste of hours that I’m never getting back. Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa is a middling mystery utterly dragged down by the tools you must use to solve it. The premise of Kotodama is pretty standard anime fare:
