Mono no Aware wa Sai no Koro
Entry posted by Clephas
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The review below was done by fun2novel and edited by me. One word about the title that might be interesting to you is that 'Mono no Aware' is a term for the 'awareness of impermanence', and it is one of the fundamental concepts underlying the traditional Japanese views on life and death and mortality.
In essence Mono no Aware wa Sai no Koro is a Japanese take on the film Jumanji staring the late Robin Williams (Clephas: I cried when he died for a week straight...). However, this is doesn’t give you a solid idea as to what kind of a game this is. In Jumanji people who played the a game were experiencing strange things as the game manifested in their own world. In Mono no Aware wa Sai no Koro (MonoAware from now on), on the other hand, the characters are the ones who get transferred into the world of the game and must travel between different squares on the game board by tossing dice.
This new world of the game board brings its own set of problems and mysteries. The main mystery is why are these characters are there and who brought them into the game. The mystery is further complicated by the fact that they all lost their memories and remember nothing of what happened before they started playing strange game. The characters physically disappear and reappear on different squares of the game board as they move after throwing a dice. Each square has a certain objective that the players might or might not do. The board is also non linear in some places and allows the players to move in different directions, and thus some (in game) players will advance towards completely different locations on the board or even reach an ending.
All this doesn’t matter to the reader of MonoAware, because this is a multiple route mystery, and you are forced to get every ending in a certain order. There isn’t any kind of gameplay here, you don’t get to toss the dice yourself, and it is all taken care of for you by the story. When you get to throw the dice you’ll move a certain number of spaces, this will lead you to an ending, which after watching it, will unlock a different result of the dice. You then reload, toss the dice again, and get a new number and the story moves in a different direction from there. The lack of interactivity doesn’t leave a negative impression, because the reason to play MonoAware is the story, and the only thing that a real dice game would have brought is a lot of randomness and frustration for players. It would have been too distracting.
The story is very appealing and has a great mystery hook. On the other hand, the longer you read it the more problems that will come to the surface. The focus of certain scenes is a complete miss in terms of tone and how it connects to a previous scene, the next scene, or even to something that was said just a moment ago. This drags the story quite a bit, since these moments don’t have any real involvement in the story and mostly serve as wannabe comedic interactions between the main cast. Speaking of which, the cast is not that great either, which might have been fine if the writers had handled the plot effectively. However, since it doesn’t and the slice of life scenes aren’t really that interesting the story feels like it is all over the place. This is not to say that the game is boring. It’s simply not tightly focused on what it wants to do.
The presentation overall is average. The art is nice but not exactly eye popping, and the same can be said for the music and the voices. It’s all so average. The game uses an eye blink and lip-syncing system that is absolutely terrible. Character designs are good. That’s about all I can say about the presentation.
I am purposefully trying to avoid saying anything else about the plot, narrative, and characters. Everything you need to know about the game and whether you’ll find it appealing to you or not has already been said in the summary on vndb. It’s an accurate description of MonoAware and if it makes you want to play this game then you don’t need to know much more than that.
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