There’s a scene in Wayne’s World, which you’ve seen 9 times if you’re in this site’s target demographic (American, mid-40s, name starting with J) where Wayne laments his misfortune directly to the audience in an unappealing way. “I’m being shit on. Shit on,” he says. The camera begins to pan away from him, the joke being that the audience doesn’t want to waste time with a whining loser. This is my short review for this game – I am the audience and Chaos;Head is Wayne Campbell in the brief moment he is uncool. But I will add some more words for people who demand actual information in their game reviews. You know, nerds.
I started Steins;Gate because it has a reputation as a great visual novel and after Looping Rage, that’s what I needed. But about 3 minutes in I realized that S;G was not the first in its series, so I checked Wikipedia and then my list of ‘eShop games bought on sale I don’t remember I have’ and discovered Chaos; Head on both (the version I played has the word ‘Noah’ appended to the title to designate it as the rerelease with improved graphics, rounder letters, twice the punctuation, etc.). Each game in this loosely related series has a blurb of incomprehensible English in its title art, apparently.
If you are God, and the delusion becomes reality.
About what kind of the noids you get?
Is it the sensual world? The despotic society?
The destructive sanctions?
Or…
That’s from the Chaos;Head title screen. It’s wild that no one on the localization or marketing team stopped the game from being released in English speaking territories with whatever the fuck that is as part of the game’s logo. At least reading it makes me nostalgic for the time in my life when I was playing Lux Pain – that entire game reads like this blurb. Luckily for the literate, Chaos;Head is generally well written. This does not mean the story, characterization, or any other literary elements are good; it only means the sentences are coherent, word choice is acceptable or even interesting at times, and other mechanics of the use of language are all capably localized.
Chaos;Head stars a pathetic incel, whom the player is lucky enough to control. In a time of growing fascism (the federal government is trying to open a new detention center a few neighborhoods over and for some odd reason, aren’t listening to our protests), I am uninterested in playing a fictionalized innocent version of this sort of person. The authors portray your character as awkward and anxiety ridden but do not take the next step of analyzing what his worldview would be. In real life, he would be a deeply misogynistic person but the game contains his objectification of women to constant drooling over a large breasted, 16 year old anime character (portrayed with visible nipples) and the occasional comment that wanted to make me die. You know, stuff like being upset that his younger sister isn’t cute enough to want to have incestuous intercourse with. Also, your guy is always thinking about hentai, including any time he has to interact with a woman. So I will amend my point to say that he is deeply misogynistic, but the game never really calls a spade a spade by exploring what these kind of thoughts would do to a person’s overall view.
There is some odd pretzel logic going on that verges on self-awareness. The main loser knows a jock who only sees women as objects and the loser finds this distasteful. Maybe this dynamic is supposed to be a critique of how the nerdy perverts think the jocks are shallow but are actually similarly one dimensional. Maybe the game knows your character sucks. It’s a bold move to insult the primary player base of your work, but if that’s what it is doing it’s subtle enough that a cool, sex-haver like me couldn’t tell for sure. Your character mocks his sister’s penchant for vacuous consumerism at one point yet he cannot wait to buy any new anime figurines for sale – that felt more obviously like commentary from the writers. There could be some cultural and societal contexts I am missing here, but that’s a dangerous door to open. Sexists love claiming that sexism from other cultures is actually deep and meaningful. Racists with anime avatars suddenly become open-minded relativists when sexualization of women, often minors, enters the discussion.
Playing as someone I wanted someone else to kill undermined a lot of the would-be tension of Chaos;Head. It’s hard to feel a growing dread when you legitimately hope your character is murdered as soon as possible. I suppose there was tension in the, “fucking kill me already, this guy makes Ryo Hazuki look emotionally available,” sort of way. As the plot unfolds, you see things from other, less bad characters’ view points and going back to main character sucks because he sucks. Because of the sort of game this is and the audience it’s appealing to, there is a cadre of highschool girls/women who are all deeply interested in him, however.
I initially thought that, despite the constant references to hentai, the character art was subdued and measured. That is until I finished the game and realized (only via internet research) that you can make plot selections at specific points that don’t seem to do much beyond show a fantasy version of what could happen. These alternate scenes usually include teenagers in their underwear, often ravenously attracted to the main character.
I have some final complaints about said main character, at least for this paragraph. The game offers no visual way to distinguish narrative text versus speech actually being said aloud in the world. The narrator is usually the main perv but can also change to an omniscient narrator and there is never any indication of the change. And my final complaint about the MC, at least for this sentence, is his voice actor is abhorrent, or at least what he was asked to do is. I had to turn the volume off to avoid the constant pathetic noises.
For an adventure game, Chaos offers an unacceptably weak sense of place. I have played some mediocre Japanese adventure titles (like Junko Kawano’s time traveling duology) that coasted largely on their feeling of a tangible place. Unfortunately, another fucking Japense high school does not cut it for me, and somehow even Shibuya, an actual place, lacks any sense of heft in Chaos;Head.
Lazy Stereotypes
An overweight CEO demands someone pay the usual fee for services but instead accepts pastries as payment. This reminds me of the similar stereotype found in Japanese adventure game Root: Letter. I also have some old memories of Arino from Game Center CX making frequent jokes about his overweight assistant director. I am not Japanologist, but it is possible that “ha ha you are fat,” style jokes are more common, if not just openly acceptable, in that country than a place like America, where we are both less judgemental but also mostly fat.
The actual content of the game contains a good amount of edgelord material that is largely more silly and dumb than scary. The ongoing murders, which are kind of the centerpiece to the entire affair, are pulled straight from a 14 year olds brain (but not one of those cool kids with the chain from his pants to his wallet). This significantly undercuts any potentially building pressure. Perhaps if the same crimes were presented with a defter hand their creepiness would land more effectively, but as they exist in Chaos they are more likely to elicit eye rolls than chills. Speaking of deflating tension, the foreshadowing in the story transitions from hints to obvious and then simply pestering. The player understands some of what’s going on many, many hours before the character does.
For much of the game I was left with the thought, “please, something happen.” But then when it did, I was inevitably left thinking I should be careful what I wish for. Head is riddled with the same shortcomings I’ve found in other Japanese visual novels. Vague points about the internet, media, and people just wanting amusement, people being uncaring, yadda yadda… – Head reminds me, again, of Lux Pain in its unwillingness to clearly point fingers at real life ills but instead lean on vague, metaphysical, mealy-mouthed shit. And like Rage Looping, anything can happen and anyone can do anything and it may or may not have happened and they may or may not be themselves. These games think the in-universe rule that there are no rules is cool and exciting, as opposed to game world and plot ruining.
The poorly paced, overly abstract, and overwrought ending is reminiscent of Earthbound, only without being executed well or the hours of excellent game before it. The entire premise of Chaos hinges on the bad guys not immediately winning, which they could have done for 99% of the game, or possibly before the game even started. As is traditional for weak, status-quo-endorsing sci-fi, the character who wants to end greed is the bad guy.
Of course, the antagonist is a figure mired in shadows, pulling strings yet out of sight. Science fiction and conspiracists love the idea of a shadowy cabal secretly coming to power via manipulations behind the scenes. The illusions of freedom and choice, the belief that success has anything to do with merit, and an innate belief that the world is just prevents even the more insane conspiracy nuts from just seeing what’s plainly happening. We know who has power, we literally have their names and watch them control things in front of our faces. Most of them are featured on an annual list put out by a magazine celebrating their power.
Capitalism loves egalitarians as bad guys. I caught an episode of some British nun detective show my parents were watching the other month, likely Sister Boniface Mysteries. The bad guy of the week was a communist disgusted by inequality and privilege and instead of responding to what he said the show just made him a bad person. Undermining the speaker is easier than intellectually parrying with ideas. Chaos is yet another in this mold; the bad guy is bad because he is personally evil and I’m good because I’m controlling me. The game even calls this out explicitly somewhere in the final scene. Which I guess is respectable?
I would recommend you do not spend time controlling this digital character. He whines constantly, is a sexist incel, and overall sucks. At best for you it would be a parallel move. Here’s hoping Steins;Gate is better, though I am not hopeful. Apparently Chaos;Head has a “critical” view of an otaku whereas Gate is more embracing of its loser character.