My thoughts on the first 4 games
I finished Chaos;Child not that long ago and am currently replaying Steins;Gate before jumping into 0 and was trying to figure out why I enjoyed Chaos;Child less than Robotic;Notes and Chaos;Head (I have always been a big fan of time travel and would have not played the other games if not for Steins;Gate, so it will hold the top spot for me and that's also why I don't really talk about it here, C;H, R;N and C;C all feel new to me so I wanted to think about them)
I will always remember the Natsumi hand scene before Taku goes to o-front
the way the scene was done, with the phone ringing with that happy go lucky melody that you know is Natsumi's ringtone, when you notice it comes from that weird box and you dread what's inside, is it only her phone ? or more ? and when he finally opens it, it's just so perfect, that whole scene is horrible in a good way and you really feel utter despair at the sight of the severed hand
I also really liked Natsumi's character and the way she seemed to be on Taku's side the whole game even though he always acted like a dumbass with her so I felt really bad for her, not knowing is she was still alive or not and everything
during the whole game you were really with him in his container with his pc making noise, you kinda felt the dread he was feeling
In chaos;child it feels a bit different, I think I unironically prefer the end in Kazuki's route because they manage to actually kill Wakui whereas in the true end he's just there and Takuru goes to jail for the crimes and that's it
it feels very bad, it leaves a bad aftertaste that the other 3 games really don't have
also the stakes in chaos;child are very mild in comparison to the other 3 games
if I were to rank the stakes it would be:
Chaos;Head = Robotic;Notes > Steins;Gate >>>>>>>>>>> Chaos;Child
sure you learn a lot of stuff about the CO300 (in Kazuki's route especially) and stuff about gigalomaniacs, Sakuma is a cool antagonist and Serika is too even though I wouldn't really consider her a pure antagonist
and sure, not everything has to be world ending for it to matter obviously but it's kinda the shtick of these games
if the stakes are not high then I personally don't really feel the same way about the story as a whole
the first 3 games all have their own human domestication project ongoing (Noah II, Time travel Dystopia, Project Atum/Mars) but Chaos;Child has none of that
that doesn't make it bad, I still really enjoyed the mystery and the cast but it just feels kinda empty after being done
also I'm kinda mad that we didn't get a single moment of Momose not larping, they clearly showed us in C;H that she is on the CO300 side but we didn't even get a glimpse of that
I mean sure she acted strange at some points and I wrote about it in my notes when I thought she was going to inform the CO300 and stuff, but we didn't get anything too concrete, I hope she's there in A;C
also I didn't really enjoy the delusions in C;C compared to C;H
in C;C they don't really make any sense, Takuru is a lot more normal than Takumi and the delusions often feel really out of place
whereas with Takumi you felt that when he was in a delusion then he really was in it, and sometimes you couldn't really tell if the delusion was real or not when he was going kinda crazy near the middle of the game
I feel that in C;H delusions really added a lot to the game and were really present all the way to the end, whereas in C;C they completely stop appearing after chapter 5, they spam them early and it feels weird/boring at times and after that they completely stop using them, and you just have a choice at some point that's not even a delusion and is just a joke
like they felt really unnecessary overall except in Uki's route
so that's also something I didn't really like
and yeah, the true ends of the first 3 games feel way more satisfying than the true end of C;C
I still liked C;C as I said, I think the segments with the map were cool for the most part, all the stuff with the sumo stickers is also nice and unsettling in a good way
the whole infiltration of the hospital's basement was very creepy and well done, the restlessness with the pyromaniac and not knowing if one of them was going to be killed on the days of the new gen killings was very tense and cool, the revolving dead incident is very well done, very unsettling
when Itou kills Yui is also a very intense and fucked up moment and you really feel that despair that Takuru is feeling
Itou really is a goated char though with how hard he tried to remember to give Takuru some hints as to who could have mind controlled him
The final scene with Sakuma was cool, same when he remade Serika, it felt like the right thing to do and was well done
my true gripe is just with the true end mostly
also the Chaos;Child syndrome adds a layer that I didn't really pick up upon but was hinted at the whole game, it was definitely something I didn't see coming and makes a lot of sense in the context of the true end and the whole game
it just feels a bit disgusting when you start to think about it but that's fine
but yeah, the true end is mostly to fix the Chaos;Child syndrome and that was cool, but the fact that Wakui is alive and well at the end and our MC just goes to jail really does leave a very bad aftertaste in my mouth
couldn't they just pin all the murders on Sakuma and at least not have Takuru be in jail ? I mean Takuru is kinda responsible because he created Serika in a wrong way and she ended up doing all that horrid shit, and I get it that remaking Serika kinda absolves her of everything and so Takuru takes the blame for her but like, I'm sure they could have somehow made it so Sakuma took all the blame
Also the fact that gigalomaniacs apparently can just "give up" their power is kinda ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
I'm not a fan of that, it's not really explained so far, and Wakui assumes he can regain them later so like ????
same for Takumi he said he lost them, maybe for Takumi it makes more sense that he lost them after the destruction of Noah II but Takuru explicitly says that he gave up on them
I get it that he feels bad about Serika but man these powers would have been pretty useful against Wakui wouldn't they ? feels kinda lame
and the lack of a real threat kinda makes it feel pointless in a sense, they fixed their own little inner dispute with Serika and then that's it
One thing I really did like though is that you really feel the aftermath of the events of Chaos;Head, especially the third melt and you really see what happened to the people that went through it, in C;H the game basically ends after the third melt but there you really see the lasting consequences of it and how bad it really was. You knew it was absolutely horrible in C;H but you didn't really feel it, in C;C you truly do feel it and it makes it very sad and impactful, you truly feel for the victims
I thought that was really nice
but yeah, when comparing C;C to the other 3 entries I think I enjoyed it a bit less
also I didn't really talk about R;N, but I really liked R;N overall because the mystery with the Kimijima reports was very compelling to me
you learn a lot of stuff about the CO300 which I really like because they are the main antagonist of the series as a whole
all the C;H and the S;G characters interacting on Twipo was really fun to read, I also really liked that you could just open up Iruo pretty much whenever to try to spot little details and stuff
literally every time we switched areas I opened up my pokecom, read twipo and booted up Iruo to try to see if there were some stuff hidden
and that didn't feel like a chore at all, I really liked doing that, especially the Twipo reading
also randomly opening Iruo and seeing Airi was really creepy near the start and that gradually shifted to being something you were happy about
There were a lot of plot twists I didn't see coming at all, like with Kimijima actually being the main antagonist, Sawada being the absolute fucking goat and all the stuff with Noah IV and the giant obelisk and that made me like it so much more
I didn't really care about giant robots/mecha before and I still don't really care about it now but I still really enjoyed the game a lot
The death of Mizuka was horrible and extremely tragic but very well done, you really felt it
The final fight is also really satisfying but that's more personal, I really didn't like Misaki all that much because I believed she was just obeying Kimijima because she regretted her choice and that didn't make sense at all to me that she would willingly choose to kill 6 billion people but I guess mind control kinda gets her off the hook for that
the only gripe I really had with R;N is the way they made character routes
considering they are all canon and happen chronologically why did they do them like this by making us go back to phase 5 every single time
that felt really unnecessary and kinda killed the flow of the mid game for me
in Steins;Gate and Chaos;Head the character routes are not canon, only the true end is so it felt really weird at first reading the Nae route and wondering if it's canon or not and then the Junna route and then realizing after the Junna route "oh so all routes are canon and happen chronologically"
maybe I missed something there but that felt really weird
and then in C;C they went back to the character routes not being canon but the true end happens after the normal end so the normal end is still canon I guess
i'm replaying S;G right now to pick up on everything pertaining to the sci adv universe as a whole that I missed during my first reading because I read it before C;H at the time