EVE Burst Error

The Good
The original PC-98 release of Eve Burst Error was one of the countless hentai adventures made for that platform. However, so many people got interested in the game's story that it was re-released for several other platforms, with all the explicit sex scenes removed.

The game's narrative is indeed a commendable effort. A complex murder mystery full of characters, intrigues, and political issues develops in front of our eyes. The good thing about it is that it remains realistic almost all the way. Only near the end of the game there is a decisive turn towards sci-fi, but I feel even that was unnecessary. It is interesting enough to follow the game's story from an everyday point of view, without waiting for some sudden divine revelations or hidden evil within.

The core of the game's story is a political intrigue, in which many people are involved. Very slowly, piece by piece you unravel a mystery that will keep you glued to the screen till the very end. What? Who? Why? You won't know it until the final moments of the game (and even then you have to guess the names of the killers by yourself). There is an enormous amount of characters in the game: about twelve major characters who are all important and relevant to the story. And every character has something to hide. In the beginning of the last day (on the ship) you'll be firmly convinced in one thing: that you can't be firmly convinced in anything. You have the impression that every character keeps some sort of a secret, that every character is potentially the criminal, and till the very end (and even after it) you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys.

The game starts pretty lightly. Kojiroh, a penniless private detective, finally gets a job - he has to find a missing painting. Marina, a super-agent, is hired by Mido, the ambassador of a fictional foreign country, to protect his daughter Mayako. The two stories seem totally unconnected in the beginning, but slowly you realize they are both a part of a much larger conspiracy with tons of secrets and mysteries. There are plenty of suspenseful, movie-like scenes, including finding dead bodies, shooting, and jumping into pools.

Hentai games usually contain very little eye-candy. Most of the time you are forced to stare at still pictures and motionless images of girls. Eve Burst Error also looks like that for the most part, but it also has a few short animated cut scenes. Other than that, the backgrounds are nicely done, and the anime characters don't look as if they were taken out of a picture collection and carelessly pasted over the backgrounds.

I have more bad than good things to say about the gameplay of Eve Burst Error. However, it's not completely awful. Often there is interesting stuff to try, a lot of "thinking" to organize the tremendous amount of information the game throws of you, and available commands that are unrelated to the story and are just there for you to try. Also, the ability to play two different characters and viewing the story from two perspective is a very good idea. Many events get "unlocked" only if you have performed a certain action with another character, so I suggest switching between them as often as possible, rather than trying to play the whole scenario at once.

Many times the game also lets you try some amusing stuff. For example, at one point you can choose what to open: the gate or your mouth. In the midst of a suspenseful situation, you can choose to knock on the door or on your head. It was a nice comic relief in a serious situation.

The Bad
Most of the bad things you hear about Japanese adventures are right here - that those are games for people who don't know how to play games, that those are just series of pretty pictures tied together by a story, that there is zero gameplay in them and no challenge at all. Games like Snatcher or Policenauts at least had a few puzzles and action sequences; others prompt the player to make choices that affect the narrative.

Unfortunately, Eve Burst Error offers none of those. Basically, it pretends to have gameplay. You can control the heroes and tell them where to go and what to do, but it is hundred per-cent linear, without any branching stories or alternate endings. The linearity and the inability to choose would be a lesser problem if the game at least offered some other diversion, but it doesn't. All you do in the game is scroll through endless dialogues, occasionally participating in an illusionary adventuring that allows you to wander around and trigger events, nothing more.

The dreaded "triggering" is back with a vengeance. I complained about those things when I was playing Snatcher, but I didn't realize at that time it could get so much worse. Virtually the whole game is built on those triggers. You constantly get "stuck" in locations and are forced to spend long minutes in front of the same still screen, choosing every option twice or thrice, until something happens. There is no way to tell when this something will happen, when will Kojiroh or Marina finally notice something worthy of notice, or when somebody who was supposed to appear will do so. You just have to go through all the options, often many, many times, hoping to get a different response from the protagonist. Some sequences (finding Mayako in the school at night, hacking the computer, and others) really go too far with that. The game is often frustrating without being truly challenging.

Sure, the story if good, but it takes a very long while until it finally kicks in. The largest part of the game (basically the first two CDs) is dedicated to introducing the numerous characters and preparing the ground for the events to follow. You aimlessly wander around, having lengthy dialogues with everyone you encounter. The dialogues are much too long, full of unnecessary exchanges of repetitive phrases ( "I'm sorry... oh, that's you?" - "Uh?" - The man I saw yesterday?" - "Oh, it's... " - "My name is Himuro. Himuro Kyoko". - "I see". - "...." - "..." - "And you are..." - "Amagi Kojiroh". - "Oh... nice to meet you". - "..." - "..." - "Well... " - "Well?" - "U-hh..." - "Yes?" - "I'll be going now. I'm sorry". - "..." - "See you later, Amagi-san". - "Yeah"). Also, there is just too much accidental bumping into each other in the game. Are they all so absorbed in their thoughts that they don't see people on the streets?

Another problem of the game is the amount (and the quality) of quasi-erotic scenes it contains. The English PC release doesn't have scenes with naked women; instead, it has plenty of scenes with women in underwear. Every female character of the game (and there are a lot of those) displays her panties at a certain point. I think one or two truly erotic scenes instead of the countless semi-nude encounters would have been much more satisfying. More disturbing is the never-ending sexual innuendo in the dialogues. Kojiroh just can't keep his mind on the case; he is more busy making constant remarks about various female body parts and attempting to touch them (which the girls of course don't allow). Again: eliminating this sexual cheese and throwing in a couple of strong erotic scenes would have had a much better effect.

While the narrative is strong, it is also very corny in that specific Japanese way. The fictional Middle Eastern country of Eldia doesn't resemble anything that exists in real life, being a laughable copy of pop-culture Japan populated by big-breasted anime girls. It's hard to take a political murder mystery seriously when an exotic Middle-Eastern queen is an underage blonde, blue-eyed "cutesy" school girl-like character with an obligatory crush on the horny hero.

The Bottom Line
In short, it's not hard to see that Eve Burst Error is a hentai game; removing its glaring gameplay flaws, sexual cheese, and corny story elements would probably require developing it from scratch. As such, Eve Burst Error is one of the better hentai adventures out there; but if you like to actually play your games and not being constantly distracted by adolescent sex fantasies, you should probably turn elsewhere.

The Good
Well, Eve is a very particular game. It's an adventure game but it's a Japanese adventure game. What does that mean? the apparent notion of adventure gaming for the Japanese is that instead of giving you puzzles to solve, you are casted as a character (two in this case) and placed in a certain story in which you simply control the pace at which the events happens. Essentialy, if on an average adventure you could say you are in control of a car and are trying to get from point a to b, on this types of games you are more in control of a train. Get it? You have a certain interactive control of what happens, but not much. Most of the games in this category are know to us as those lovely H-games, but on Japan there's a whole line of titles that work like this (ie: The King of Fighters: Kyo).

Having made that explanation, you can easily dismiss EVE burst error, as nothing more than a glorified interactive movie, but as i said up there, the form, the gameplay, is secondary to the creative content in this game. While most games like Quake (It's always Quake! )are often scorned for having nothing more than fancy graphics, good controls, multiplayer capabilities and zero story or creative elements behind characters, stages, weapons, etc. This game is the exact opposite: you get minimal control (a text based menu where you select verbs which you later aply to objects), practically no eye candy (you "jump" from background to background and characters appear as static images whenever you interact with them) and (worst of all) no 3D card support!! ;) What you get instead is a deeply woven web of characters and situations which make up one of the most intriguing and complex plots you'll ever play. You will encounter everything from startling revelations to dark and traumatic pasts, political agendas mixed with international killers, sci-fi mumbo-jumbo meeting detestivesque "who did it's" and more sub-plots and plot twists that you can find in all of Squaresoft's game lineup, "The Sixth Sense", and "The Game" combined.

The Bad
Having said that, the first drawback this game presents is obvious. If you want interactivity, you won't find it here. There's no challenge at all to the game (you simply can't make wrong choices)The plot, for as good as it is, is completely linear, and as far as I could tell there are just two possible endings, the right one, and the "please try again" one.

The second drawback is less obvious but will become evident once you play the game. Not even the Larry games come close to matching the amount of sexual cheese this game has. The game is filled with bad jokes referring to sexual urges and the like, all of the female characters are wearing (or wear at a certain point) skimpy clothes, you'll come face to face with stupid cornball "misunderstandings" and lots of badly translated cultural jokes (since they couldn't properly translate humorous situations regarding japanese society they replaced them with jokes about Bill Clinton, Lewinski, O.J.,etc.) and worst of all: you'll encounter the dreaded "you are in a game" jokes, you know, the ones that try to take potshots at the fact that you are playing a game and always fall between lame and annoying.

Even though there are several "serious" situations and the game eventually dissociates itself from all the lame humour near the end, you'll still have to endure lots of inmaturity and lame-ass jokes for most of the game. It is a shame that they couldn't make a completely "serious" thing and had to complement it with such bad comedic relief. The fact that the game has a slow start doesn't help either, so you'll reeeeally have to make an effort to get past those jokes if you wanna enjoy the great story that hides inside.

The Bottom Line
Overall, if you are all for story and don't care for nuances like complete interactivity, get this game. Now, once you have it, you'll have to endure wave after wave of cheese till you get the candy you so desire. If you ask me, I think it's worth it, but feel free to run away at the first lewinsky joke. This one will put to test all of your patience and endurance, but I think it eventually delivers.