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Author Topic: Mystic Messenger  (Read 5633 times)

Welu

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Mystic Messenger
« on: 13 Sep 2016, 11:37 »

This is a phone game I've been playing for the past week. It's a dating sim and it's hilarious.

It's such a unique interface because it's made to look like an app that handles emails, chatrooms, texts and phonecalls. Basically, you're a girl who through mysterious means gets thrown into contact with a group called the RFA (Rika's Fundraising Association). Since the death of Rika, the group has somewhat disbanded until you show up and get Rika's former job pushed upon you. This basically means you get guests "emailing" you and you have to convince them to come to the party by picking the correct response.

The dating sim bit is that the RFA has a bunch of pretty anime boys that are thirsty as fuck for you.

  • Jumin - The rich but cold business man who really loves his cat.
  • 707 - The wacky genius hacker who is secretive.
  • Yoosung - The cute, childish student obsessed with video games.
  • ZEN (that's how it's written) - The hot and I guess bad boy one, who is also an actor.

There is also V, Rika's former partner and leader (who seems to be unromancable) and Jaehee, Jumin's female assistant who you can build affiliation with but I'm not fully sure why yet. I think there seems to be a bit of friendship building as well as romance building.

It uses your phone's clock over a course of ten days and you have to log in at times through the days, or it'll alert you, to a chat being open or getting a message. If you miss a chat, you'll be able to read it but not interact and the dialogue reflects that you are or aren't there.

My personal experience so far:
As I do with most games that involve choices, I tend to pick the ones that feel natural to me first. Then if this leads me upon a certain path, I'll then stick with it. Doing so has led there to be feelings caught between me and ZEN and it's so funny and awkward and sometimes cringey.

This is my first run and it seems at least with the ZEN character, basically to get him to like me, I have to pick the responses that say I think he's the most handsome man to exist ever... Even when I'm talking to other characters. It's a really fun way to play this type of game and can kind of mess with your head to have these fictional characters talking about and to "you" in a way.

There's a few translation issues, spelling mistakes and slightly off word choices but nothing that makes the game too unclear. It can be a little slow to load and you'll see the loading screen a lot. It's not so long as to make it not worth it, but it's frustrating when you have to jump back and forth between the options. It's also easy to hit the wrong button or not have it register the first tap which can slow things down more. Maybe it's my phone (Galaxy S5) or maybe the game is a little inefficient. Obviously though, I'm still playing it and enjoying it enough to talk about it.

The characters are a bit one note but it's fun and once the game realises you're building a relationship more with a certain character, it becomes all about them so it's hard to learn more about the others. It's built to be replayed and I'm happy with that.

Later on there's visual novel elements where you get to watch and take part in scenes outside the chatroom.

There's free-to-play elements where you can buy hourglasses, which let you access all chatrooms of a day for 24 hours or make phonecalls to the characters. Since the game updated some bug issues, they gave free ones and I tried calling and it's pretty fun to do so. You need to pick the time carefully because if it's late the character might be sleeping or busy during the day. You don't want to spend money to get their voicemail, even if they've gone to the effort to make them entertaining too but it's not interactive then. The characters also periodically call you. They're voice-acted well, for what I can tell with them speaking in Korean, and the characters sound pretty distinct from each other. There dialogue is written on the screen in English too.

I'm currently on Day Seven of Ten and I'm a little sad that I'm going to see this storyline end soon. I wrote way more about this than I thought I would but this game has been my entire life the past week so I had to share about it.
« Last Edit: 13 Sep 2016, 11:48 by Welu »
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