2026
By: Alexander Holmes
Death End ReQuest is a strange little RPG.
I picked it up mainly because it was inexpensive, on sale, the battle system looked weird, and I was in the mood for a JRPG/Visual Novel type game since I played one. And, for as much as people are getting tired of moe anime aesthetics after the explosion of Hoyoverse live-service games, as a long-standing anime fan it's an art style I still rather enjoy. Even though I probably should have anticipated that the title would be this exact level of casually raunchy.
On top of that, the premise of the game's story is that the player will explore a dead MMORPG called World's Odyssey, and uncover the mystery that lies within. And that is an interesting premise! Having watched a few videos by Eurothug's videos actually exploring the nearly abandoned spaces of various MMOs, there is a lot of room for mystery and atmosphere in that kind of setting. Spaces once meant to facilitate social experiences with sometimes very light gameplay create an eerieness, wherein you expect to see a person around any corner, and yet you don't. It is the kind of place where one expects mysteries to be hidden.
Death End, however, isn't that. It is a mystery game, but very much through the lens of the visual novel. Best described as, “one of those fucking things,” Death End is an isekai set in a video-game inspired fantasy world, but it innovates by regression. Going back to the premise of the .Hack series, Sword Art Online, or Digimon, where the real world still exists and is relevant to the digital world that the characters are trapped within.
The game has two layers. A linear RPG with a unique battle system, but taking place in a game world that is falling apart. Bugs, visual distortions, collision errors and the like impede your progress. But within the game-world you will uncover clues that inform events in the real-world.
The real-world layer is the visual novel. The story of how this broken MMO remains playable and how to save the characters trapped within entraps the protagonists is a mystery that draws heavily from historical conspiracy theories and obsession with the occult. As the characters solve mysteries with the aforementioned clues, they are able to correct bugs in the game, and enable forward progress.
But Return of The Obra Dinn this is not. It's an easy, breezy story where the fun of solving the mystery comes in the same vein as trying to solve a mystery novel before you reach the final chapter.
What really stands out is the battle system.
If you’re expecting a turn-based JRPG, then yes, technically that is here. However, it may be more accurate to describe the battle as a game of billiards or 9-Ball. Your standard attacks have an effect called “knockback” which allows you to fling enemies around a circular battlefield. Knocking the enemies into other characters or into the walls of the arena results is bonus damage and more bouncing. Allowing you to bank enemies off each other in a beautiful display of slapstick triviality.
But, because this is a JRPG, you just know that there are systems on top of systems here. Characters get standard level-ups and equipment bonuses, but you earn new and stronger abilities by trying different combos of existing abilities. Improve as you go; somewhat like Quest64. Getting overpowered is trivially easy, to the point that you'll solve most encounters quickly, and switch to experimenting with new ways to explode the field more efficiently.
There is also a “Corruption” meter for the battlefield that can be manipulated by the player throughout a battle. By keeping the meter low, the player can use special moves, or summons, all themed around rewriting the code of the game in real time to cheat your way to victory. Alternatively, you can increase a character-specific corruption meter at the expense of health-damage to unlock a super-form, and an even more powerful final attack! But don't worry about that cost. Characters heal after using the super-move, so the deck is seriously weighted in the players favor once they learn to keep HP and MP balanced.
That said, around chapter 5, the breezy pace at which you will proceed through both the story and the battles grinds to a halt. You become more reliant on the rock-paper-scissors game of player-elements and enemy-elements, which was largely ignorable for the first half of the game. And without the ability to swap characters like in FFX, you’re often just left without the element you need. The repetitious nature of spamming the strongest attacks to instantly end battles stops being fun once mobs become time consuming and bosses become anti-climatic.
I dropped this one about halfway through the game, even as I was in the midst of the sunk-cost fallacy of my recent purchase. So I will never know if the story gives way to exploring its themes of corporate corruption and digital consciousness, or if it just continues to be a sequence of cameos for popular occult conspiracies and creepypasta mentions.
Thank you for watching, and stay true.