

Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos
Dischan Media · 2013 · Visual Novel, Indie, Anime, Sci-fi, Episodic
PC
Mostly Positive76% · 630
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About Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos
From Dischan Media, creators of the highly acclaimed Juniper's Knot, comes Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos.
Dysfunctional Systems is a visual novel series featuring Winter Harrison, a student mediator from a utopian world. Learning to Manage Chaos is the first entry in the series.
What is a mediator? A mediator is someone who travels to chaotic worlds, attempting to resolve the issues plaguing them. The first entry in the series follows Winter's second mediation, where she shadows the experienced and aloof mediator: Cyrus Addington.
Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos features two distinct endings, unlockable bonus art, an animated opening video, and a jukebox of in-game music.
A visual novel is a mix of choose your own adventure books, comics and manga, music, and animation. Play through the story and make choices for the main character to change the outcome of the episode and the events of future episodes!
All Steam purchases of Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos include the official soundtrack absolutely free! Enjoy a total of 18 tracks, including a full rendition of the Dysfunctional Systems opening theme, in both MP3 and FLAC. The album is included with the game files. To access, right click the "Dysfunctional Systems" entry in your library, click "properties", then go to the "local files" tab, and click the "browse local files" button.
Dysfunctional Systems is a visual novel series featuring Winter Harrison, a student mediator from a utopian world. Learning to Manage Chaos is the first entry in the series.
What is a mediator? A mediator is someone who travels to chaotic worlds, attempting to resolve the issues plaguing them. The first entry in the series follows Winter's second mediation, where she shadows the experienced and aloof mediator: Cyrus Addington.
Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos features two distinct endings, unlockable bonus art, an animated opening video, and a jukebox of in-game music.
What is a visual novel?
A visual novel is a mix of choose your own adventure books, comics and manga, music, and animation. Play through the story and make choices for the main character to change the outcome of the episode and the events of future episodes!
Soundtrack Included
All Steam purchases of Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos include the official soundtrack absolutely free! Enjoy a total of 18 tracks, including a full rendition of the Dysfunctional Systems opening theme, in both MP3 and FLAC. The album is included with the game files. To access, right click the "Dysfunctional Systems" entry in your library, click "properties", then go to the "local files" tab, and click the "browse local files" button.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
I come back to this game from time to time to listen to the music. It was great and the premise was refreshing. What killed it? The developers incompetence. Various financial issues hit them. They were overpaying for artists and apparently at one point they paid an artist and coder in advance and they ghosted the developer. This could have been a very successful series if the developer had hired competent staff and made them sign binding contracts to ensure their work was finished or they would be forced to pay back the money they received. If you play this game and like it as much as I did you should always ask yourselves. How incompetent do you have to be to ruin a game with a premise, prologue, art and music this good?4 found this helpful
Well, this is quite the waste of potential, the setting was quite interesting, too bad it seems like there are no plans to ever finish the story. I cannot recommend it, but I don't think it would be fair not to give it a positive review.
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. The basic idea behind this visual novel is interesting, the only problem is that it's not executed well enough. Essentially, it's Star Trek without the Prime Directive (the clause in Federation law that, in the series' universe, stipulates that neutral, pre-warp worlds cannot be interfered with, except in very specific circumstances). Instead, in this game's world, the utopian society from which the protagonist comes actively intervenes in the businesses of other worlds to - supposedly - improve their lot. The problems begin with this concept itself, which is somewhat reminiscent of the "civilizing mission" of 19th-century Europeans: if Star Trek's Prime Directive can be said to amount to a dubious stance on first contact, one that is perhaps too rigid for (literally) an entire universe of possibilities, it's nevertheless much wiser than the idea of purposefully going out of one's way to "help" less developed cultures. Still, this is a premise that, even if a little odd, could work out fairly decently, if it weren't for the story's many shortcomings. For starters, differently from Star Trek (whose creators possessed a superior level of intellectual c…
It's been 84 years...... It's a shame this game is discontinued.
Very few choices to be made. The story isn't particularly gripping, and the multiple endings aren't interesting enough to run through it more than twice. Skipping works wonders.
It's not worth $5, I'll say that much. Most of my playtime was from me leaving the game running and doing other things, it's only 1-2 hours. It's basically just the prologue. It's extremely unfortunate this was abandoned. It had so much potential and what little is there is interesting. I wanted to dive deep into this world, but there's nothing more. This is it. I think the company even went out of business? No update on their website since 2020. I'm sure COVID took its toll. I doubt this will ever be finished, but it really is a shame. The main character is cute, and I loved how the relationships were developing. I desperately wanted to see more, especially of how things went with Cyrus, but... Oh well. Guess I'll have to see if there's any fanfics I can read instead.
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