TOKYO CHRONOS

I just want to gaze at the sky...

A lovely little visual novel, although obviously limited in scope. Follows the story of a group of eight childhood friends. Despite looking tropey at first it's surprisingly heartfelt, really rich with sentiment and emotions, and its characters feel realistic and lifelike. In particular it's nice that each character feels well-considered, and that it feels very believable that these characters were friends as kids. It's executed well enough that you can basically forget that it's paced on the slow side... If not for the weight of having to wear a headset the whole time. Its use of VR is not particularly novel outside of a few scenes where characters are super close to you (you could tell me that the environments were mostly out-of-the-box assets and I'd have believed it), but it is nice to be able to see where each character is looking and how others react while they talk. Plot-wise, the game goes back to the start one time, which is admittedly a little annoying considering a lot of scenes are identical, or nearly identical to the point I frankly couldn't tell that something was changed but evidently invalidated the "Skip" button. That said the framing method is interesting, so …

I can't comment on the story because I couldn't get over the scaling, which is a shame. I was excited for a VR visual novel. Not only is the world huge, but I'm huge compared to the world. The player is like 1.5 times the height of the other characters, even at the lowest height setting. Because you can only perceive yourself as "you," not as a giant, it feels like you're hovering up in the air on a drone or sitting on a lifeguard chair or something. Having to constantly look down to see what's happening is a prime recipe for vertigo. I thought something was broken when it first loaded. There should be no reason to have to look at your feet to interact with the button interface in a VR game.

This is the first time I spent 14 hours in a VR reading, reading, reeAAA (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ At some point I was begging for this story to just end, it was like a torture. But on a serious note, there are quite many flashbacks where you simply read text and look at still human silhouettes. Not all of them are boring, but yeah, this is my biggest complaint. Other than that, the story was actually quite unique and the characters were interesting as well. Overall, a good VR VN, 7.5/10. Also, the first game I finished 100%.

While I marked my review as "Recommended", keep in mind that I'd rate this game a 6/10 at best, and I'm mainly being generous due to historical context (it came out during the early VR boom when the technology was still in its infancy; as a result, the VR features in this one are pretty barebones at best. If you're looking for a VR game with some degree of interactivity, then this ain't it, chief). The story itself is fairly decent, if a bit short and somewhat linear for a visual novel (while there are certain choices you can make, all of them lead to a series of very short routes which you'll have to complete anyway if you want to unlock the true ending) but personally those shortcomings weren't enough to detract from the overall plot. The characters are rather simple but likeable, but again, if you've played better VNs before (yes, even the Studio Key ones, I know who you are) they won't exactly blow your mind. I feel like TOKYO CHRONOS was the devs' first foray into the VR market, and judging by how basic it is it certainly shows. Thankfully they seemed to have learned from their early mistakes, because their next entries in the series are considerably more interactive in…

So I played Tokyo Chronos after Altdeus, and even though Tokyo Chronos is missing some more of the interactivity that Altdeus has, its still a wonderful game and story and having the mystery unfold before my eyes is amazing, though on my 2nd playthrough I do feel like certain parts could of been skippible since I didn't notice anything really new apart from small subtle lines in said parts. Also the scaling threw me right off, but I adjusted the world scaling in Steam VR's Video Advanced Settings, it did cause some of the special scenes to feel weirdly sized (like baby hands), but for the rest of the game I just enjoyed being the correct scale as everyone else. I do understand why they did it, the best resolution at the time was the HTC Vive, but I was playing this on the Vive Pro, so I could actually see a lot better. Either way, I enjoyed it, give it a go, probably don't play it all in one sitting like I did, or do, I'm not your legal guardian.