The visual novel industry is no stranger to eroge; in many aspects, they're what made the genre exist at all, and you could even argue that's still the case. Some titles are silly romances, some are terrifying and disturbing horror, and some are thought provoking, psychological narratives. Today's game, Tokyo NECRO, is squarely none of the above, fitting more into the category of the big dumb action movie that would rather blow stuff up than talk about anything deeper. Don't misunderstand me, that's not to disparage action films — they just have a different focus than the things I typically enjoy, but from Nitroplus (now Nitro Origin) I've come to expect that outwardly simple pieces might be hiding something more interesting beneath, and today we'll see how this title measures up. Speaking of expectations, we've got a lot to talk about today, so let's jump right in.
My Expectations
My expectations for Nitroplus visual novels are quite high, as they've shown time and time again they have an eye for quality in every regard. I knew from the start that this was an adult title, and would have a variety of h-scenes. While I'm not the target audience for these, as I'm asexual, I can tell when they're done well, and appreciate when they're used for important narrative purpose. I was familiar with the designs of the main characters, So'un and Ethica, and expected a lot of tight leather and flashy outfits and designs. I was also aware that the game was utilizing 3D animated cutscenes; I hadn't seen those at all, but I had seen the opening animation on JAST. Nitroplus are the masters of music and sound design in the VN space, so I expected quite a bit there. In terms of the writing, I knew that it was a cyberpunk zombie thriller, so I expected something on the darker side with a lot of action, but that it would explore deeper themes. Otherwise, I went into this mostly blind.
As a heads-up, I'll be keeping this review free of important story points, but I will discuss how it handles various aspects of its graphics and storytelling that may extend into later parts of the game. If you want to go in mostly blind, my verdict, as always, is at the bottom of the review.
What is Tokyo NECRO?
Tokyo NECRO is set in the Frozen Capital, Tokyo, after a series of wars, diseases, and global climate disasters isolates much of humanity from each other, stranding them in a few habitable zones that can be powered by geothermal energy pipes. During the war, people developed Lemures, a substance which can be injected into corpses to reanimate the dead so long as their brain is intact. In current day, necromancers are a scourge that actively seeks to disrupt society, so the military government contracts specialized mercenaries called Living Dead Stalkers to destroy zombies and hunt down necromancers. Our protagonists, Nagaoka So'un and Kibanohara Ethica are two such living dead hunters, who become wrapped up in a plot by a necromancer group known as the Suicide Wannabes after finding an amnesic girl named Hogyo Iria in the trunk of a car while on a hunt. From there, the group work together to find out who Iria is, why she was kidnapped, and what the Wannabes have in store for Tokyo.
Graphics
Tokyo NECRO's visuals are all over the place, in a shocking turn of events from Nitroplus. The quality of sprites, backgrounds, and even the 3D models is wildly inconsistent and disappointing. The design of weapons in the game are pretty great, with Rabbit Punch and the Re-Eliminator being very flashy, but nowhere near as interesting as the weapons the villains have, as it should be. Sprites for main characters are generally well-composed, but the proportions of the female characters are excessive, even for an adult game. Nearly every woman's chest is much larger than their head, and clothes are always skin-tight, even in places where it doesn't make sense. Ryoko in particular is a big offender in this aspect, looking almost alien in some scenes, but we'll talk more about her problems later. Most clothing designs are very cool and clearly inspired by both cyberpunk media and zombie thrillers, but many of the womens' outfits trend more towards "boob armor" than I'd like, even for an eroge. Most of the antagonists and big boss monsters are rightfully imposing, but some look goofy and unfinished, as if they were simply photo renders of the entity's 3D model. By contrast, very little care seems to be put into anyone who isn't a main character or big boss monster, with many zombies being fuzzy, lower quality images, which would be more okay if we didn't see so many of them and they didn't frequently repeat.
Backgrounds fare about as well, with many of the backgrounds being fantastic pieces of art, and some being blurry and unfocused, almost as if they were unfinished. You'll get breathtaking images from rooftops or inside specific buildings, but street areas like the Cyber Kaminarimon or the backstreets just don't look as good, which is sad for the places that we return to more regularly. Moving to the 3D models, how are they? Well, they're not great. The quality of the models is similar to something like RWBY, or perhaps a little worse. That'd be fine if the animation was good, but you can tell the team was not used to implementing 3D animation. Nearly all fight scenes are in 3D, and the early ones are abysmal; they are stiff, disjointed, and nothing makes contact. However, across the game's runtime, you can see this improve as they learn how to do things. The places where the 3D animation really works, though, are in the simpler cases of transportation, military vehicles, and the cutscenes on the Information Highway. The latter looks really nice, and while I don't think it justifies the use of 3D in this particular game, it was a welcome relief that kept me from writing off the 3D as a whole.
CGs are the heart and soul of visual novels, as I always say, so what about the ones here? Well, I can say unambiguously that Tokyo NECRO's live up to expectations. The action CGs are flashy, the h-scenes look good and are well composed, and the daily life and emotional scenes fit the tone and are well-drawn. Only in a few places did I see a CG where I said "that doesn't look quite right", and usually it was due to the aforementioned proportion issues. They work, plain and simple, and I don't really have much more to say about them.
Music and Sound Design
Nitroplus can sometimes waiver on writing quality or graphics, but they truly never miss when it comes to music and sound design. It seems that across their years of working on adult titles they correctly identified that music and sound design are critically important to everything they do, and they make sure to keep great musicians and incredible sound technicians on payroll. Tokyo NECRO is no exception, and in terms of sound specifically is such a visceral, disturbing, and immersive experience that I have to give the entire sound team huge props. Every pop of bone, grinding of steel on steel, stomping of feet on the dance floor, or the sound of flesh being shorn away is incredible, truly a testament to how much focus was put on that area of development.
The music in this game isn't to be outdone either. Every track is extremely solid, although sometimes feeling a little generic for those playing in the lower-intensity scenes. The action scenes have a variety of rock-and-roll pieces, with heavy driving guitar and percussion that almost brings me back to the action movies of my childhood. My personal favorite is 死者再殺 (Re-Killing the Dead), So'un's battle theme. It's got that cold, far-future sci-fi quality to it before kicking into full gear, and it amps the mood to 11 every time. I love it. Similarly, Hi-Fight and Dead of Dead are both solid battle tracks, and the variety effectively keeps every scene from feeling samey. The game's main theme is a very anime-adjacent Japanese rock ballad called Tokyo Requiem; I'd heard this before I bought the game and thought it was great, and the full version in-game is just as good. The real impressive piece, though, is the ending theme(s), Assembly by Substance-Concept. The way this was made is great. The original song was created by a subset of the sound team, with vocals by Sakura Tange. However, while doing so, they entered her vocals into an in-house virtual soundbank, similar to something like UTAU, and created a number of other tracks that are the same song but in that vocaloid-sounding style that fits with Substance-Concept as a character. The artistry on display is quite impressive and every version hit me with that perfect level of catharsis after a long route of emotional dissonance, tense action, and death.
Gameplay and UI
As a standard visual novel, the gameplay in Tokyo NECRO's pretty simple. There are two binary choices rather early into the story that determine which of four routes you're on, and what happens to each of the two main characters. Some story bits are unique to each of the two choices, some are shared between all routes, and some are unique to the specific route you're on. In general, I like what they did with this, but I think the main problem is information disparity. One route is core to the true ending, in that the true ending is a branch of that specific ending, but because you can pick any route except the true ending route in any order, you can pick the "main" route first if you want, and have no idea you're doing so. The other routes have varying amounts of plot information, with one of them having basically nothing. Picking that one first almost got me to drop the game, because I assumed the story was simply going nowhere. I think it's mostly just bad execution on a solid concept, though, rather than a bad concept itself.
The user interface is mostly very pretty fluff. It looks cool, and it's all very aesthetically fitting. The save screen is the most egregious thing, in my opinion, because it's a full 10 second loading animation any time you open it up, even if you accidentally hit the hotkey. The game boots up to a really cool pseudo-command line that works like a very limited text parser, and while it's a really neat idea, the process of opening the game is so long that it made me consider leaving the game open instead. It's not all bad, though, because one thing I really liked is how they easily differentiate which character is the current viewpoint through the textbox and click-to-continue indicator. So'un's textbox is square and rigid, with a very basic circular arrow, while Ethica's is rounded and has a more industrial cycling pair of arrows. It's a small thing, but it really helps aid in reading the story. The CG gallery, music box, and terms glossary are all easily accessible, with key terms highlighted in text during the story to be clicked on in case you want or need an explanation. It's great, and unfortunately not entirely standard within the medium.
The Good, the Bad, and the Inconsistent
I said earlier that this game is extremely inconsistent, and that includes the storytelling. First and foremost, the translation for this game is subpar. Several proper nouns are inconsistently localized across the many times they're included. I noticed a number of grammatical errors across the script, and while those are bad, they're also the easiest nitpick. Character motivations are all over the place, especially when it comes to the villainous characters. None of the antagonists' character traits come up at all until they're specifically discussed; there's no foreshadowing or characterization of any kind other than "we're evil and imposing", and then at the 11th hour some of them get an explanation for why they're evil. For a story that lasts a total of 40 hours, I'd really liked to have seen more from them, as they aren't even really on-screen for most of the story.
With the few dynamic characters, rather than an arc, they change all at once, with the exception of Ethica. Ethica is, by far, the best written character, which is great for our lesbian representation to get the spotlight, but it sucks for every character she needs to interact with. As I mentioned earlier, characterization is inconsistent, but the lows are much worse than the highs. Nearly every woman in the story is simply reduced to a sex object. They get no characterization, existing solely to exposit, maybe be a motivation for the main characters to do something, and then either participate in an ero scene or die, or sometimes both. It sucks especially in the case of Ryoko, who is such a non-character that I think the game would have simply been better without her in it. She's like the horny version of comic relief that simply sucks all tension out of the story, pun intended. Walking around the office in hyper-stimulating lingerie because you miss your husband is not a real character trait. Being the group mom that cooks for everyone isn't a real character trait. She has no motivations; she exists to exposit, which really sucks for a character so core to the cast. Kiriri and Kazuma aren't much better, but at least they have things they want, sometimes.
At the end of the day, this game is a big dumb action movie in VN form. It doesn't actually end up committing to saying anything at any point, simply hinting at interesting themes and saying "look at this!" while immediately scuttling it away when it's time for the next action sequence. I actually really like the idea of using an ero game to link sex and emotion to the fundamental basis of what being human is. I don't agree with it, as an asexual person, but I think it's an interesting direction to take a story in. For a game trying to link humanity to sex, the writer definitely felt like undermining it entirely by killing a ton of sex workers. It's absolutely astounding how every single generic person who dies in this game is a sex worker, and it's even more astounding how a significant percentage of the zombies that are killed are, too. For me, it was something I noticed pretty early on, thinking it might want to subvert that theme for the purpose of challenging the thesis, and I was let down.
There are some other subthemes that I won't really get into here for the purpose of avoiding spoilers, and they're handled a bit better, but it seemed like the writer wasn't entirely ready to commit to that being the game's major theme. Shimokura Vio was the lead writer on this game, but didn't develop the setting, which makes me feel as though he and the original scenario designer just didn't align. Shimokura has this way of writing that is exhausting, and it doesn't help the abysmal pacing of the story that it has so much repetition. After the 2nd or 3rd time I read "I am a machine that converts input to output" or was reminded that you need to destroy the head to kill a zombie, I no longer needed to read that anymore, and yet it persists the entire runtime. It ruins things you're excited about in a very sinister way. The way the character interactions are written ranges from fine to miserable and trope-addled, and it entirely depends on what characters are in the interaction. It's a big mess, and outside of Ethica's story segments, I can't really give them any props on it.
The Verdict
Tokyo NECRO is fine. It's not the worst visual novel I've ever read, but it's far from the best. Its writing managed to take a setting I was extremely excited about and turn it into something that says nothing and doesn't even consistently look pretty. The writing is inconsistent, repetitive, and exhausting to get through, and all said I can't give this more than a 6/10. If you do plan on buying it, get it on JAST, or get the de-censorship patch there if you bought it on Steam. There are a number of moments that shine through, hinting at a story that could have been incredible. At least a bad action movie can handle their fight scenes.
