Chaos; Head of Noah and Chaos; The child goes on sale October 7 in a twin pack. Although we’re analyzing them as a video game (technically it is), it’s important to emphasize that both are visual novels, meaning they’re a succession of scenes and lines of text in which we hardly ever interact.
Besides, they both belong Scientific Adventure, a universe of diverse visual novels complemented by manga and anime (and sometimes video game adaptations) whose common point is the science-based puzzles and mysteries. That’s why here we find mysteries that push the boundaries of reality, from quantum physics to the esoteric. They’re not so connected that you need to have played other titles to understand them, but they do have some similarities. Do you know Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson? Well, here one could find a parallelism of its structure in the anime genre.
sort it all chaos
Both Chaos are remasters of visual novels that came out a long time ago. In case of chaos; HEAD NOAH marks the first time the game has been released outside of Japan since its PC release in 2009, during Mayhem; Child already had an edition on PlayStation 4 in 2014. Both versions come with technical improvements with a good HD facelift, as well as new opening sequences and a retouched soundtrack.
If you’re hearing about them for the first time but are curious to try them, you’re probably wondering where to start. We recommend starting with Chaos; Head Noah, especially because this game came out in 2008 and its story takes place in the time before Child, while this is a game from 2014, which also means a qualitative leap in the menus, interface, aspects and animations that they will make it more difficult for you to later adapt to the other.
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A world swallowed up chaos
in chaos; Head Noah our first protagonist is Takumi Nishijo, a young man who is in his penultimate year of high school in the Japanese country. Nishijo’s life is not normal at all, he is a young man living in a shipping container on top of a building in the well-known Shibuya district of the Japanese capital. Takumi tries to live a life that separates him as little as possible from his computer, where he plays an MMORPG in which he is the best. The young man only attends his institute a few days a week, where he tries to escape the stigma of being an A Ikikomoriyoung people who have lived with computer games without leaving home or having a direct relationship with the world.
Aside from his strange life, Takumi Nishijo begins to have other problems. In the chat of the video game in which he thinks he is a true god, an anonymous player sends him some photos of crimes that haven’t happened yet. Soon the young man will be involved in the investigation of these murders that are happening in his neighborhood and to which he is linked without knowing why.
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On the other side is Takuru Miyashiro, the president of Hekiho Academy’s newspaper club, who will try from his trailer to investigate the murders that are once again ravaging the Shibuya neighborhood five years after what happened in the chaos; Head. Miyashiro must figure out who is causing these murders and how they are connected to some people who are developing psychic powers around them.
But if there is a true protagonist in either novel, it is neither Nishijo nor Miyashiro, but Miyashiro himself. Shibuya. The neighborhood of lights in Tokyo is the perfect setting for what happened in both games, it’s the microuniverse where terror will move, avoiding the theoretical happiness that radiates from the most famous neighborhood in the land of the rising sun. It’s not the Shibuya that we see in animes or documentaries, it’s a dark and cold world where the inhabitants move without knowing what’s happening to our protagonists.
Both games deal in some way with the true nature of the Japanese country, its obsessions and fears. They address the social exclusion within the youthful middle class. They perfectly reflect what type of content they consume, immersed in Japanese animation but far removed from their themes that reach us in the West.
Although obviously thrillers, the structure of the two novels will follow a similar structure to that of the dating games so popular in Japan. The protagonists will go through chapters divided in terms of relationships that they will build with classmates or relatives that will reveal different features of the plot. Although the structure is the same, nothing further from reality, not only is Chaos not a game of this nature, it will even be ironic about it on several occasions.
In playable terms, both novels offer little or no opportunity to surprise us. The two games base their dynamics on reading texts and pressing the next button. They’re purely visual novels, so our choices are pretty much nil. The few choices we face will at best serve to unlock alternative endings or side stories, but they won’t be crucial. In fact, the scenes unlocked are hallucinations of the protagonists and almost never actually happen. It’s important to highlight this since both games have an approximate duration of 30 hours, which can be a little tight if we expect puzzles or other challenges.
Chaos; head and chaos; Kind, are oppressive, tense and will glue you to the screen for the duration of the story. Each game has an atmosphere all its own, with Head having more psychological terror while Child explores more gore and sadism. Both have received a very important facelift, but it’s a bit disappointing that they don’t have any puzzles or choices that make development more enjoyable. In addition, both stories were very successful in Japan, which led to their adaptation in anime series. Perhaps an animated scene from the series would have been welcome.
As is usual in this niche genre in this country, both adaptations come with voices in Japanese and lyrics only in English. At around 30 hours per story in a foreign language, if the story doesn’t grab us enough, it can lose us interest.
