Angel Beats! first beat
05-05-2020, 09:37 PM
The story of the visual novel is to be based on the Angel Beats! anime series. The player takes on the role of Otonashi, a newcomer to the Afterlife who finds himself in the middle of a struggle between a group of students who call themselves the Shinda Sekai Sensen ("Afterlife Battlefront"), or SSS for short, and a mysterious girl who is known under the alias of Tenshi (Angel). The story will undergo changes from the original anime and will include story routes with each of the characters. It also stated that Otonashi will be very different than his original personality in the anime, and will change according to the choices made by the player.
The translation of this has been released by Alka Translations just a few days ago, and I bought this (it's available digitally on dlsite) and as someone who has never seen the anime here are my thoughts so far:
This is more of an adventure game than a visual novel. There are tons of choices to make, a guide the translators made said that a single playthrough can have up to 200 choices, and this game keeps track of all of it. The protagonists personality is also not like it is in the anime and can be determined by the player to a large extent.
You don't need to have any knowledge about the anime to play this, it follows the anime to episode 11 (I think) and diverges from there.
For some reason KEY decided to split the Angel Beats VN into multiple parts ,6 in total. The first one has romantic routes for the characters Iwasawa and Yui, a friendship (?) route for Matsushita, and a mini route for Hisako that's apparently dark enough that the person who translated it warns not to do it if your not in a good headspace. Unfortunately there has been radio silence from KEY about where the other parts are and it's been five years sense 1st beat was released so it doesn't have routes for anyone else in the anime. So if you want a route for Kanade, Yuri or Hinata your out of luck unless they decide to release more parts after Summer Pockets.
I'm still going through it but figured I'd ask: should I upload a walkthrough onto my google drive in case anyone decided to buy this?
