That’s quite a bit different in Robotics;Notes

Assuming you even know the right area to check, it’ll still likely take you a few minutes to find them – completely discounting the fact that for some of them you may just not know which area they might be in, and find yourself at a complete loss

As cool as this interactivity is – and make no mistake, I definitely think it’s very cool for the genre – I’m of two minds about how these features impact the pacing of the story as a whole. Let me explain: in most VNs, character-specific routes would be their own thing, and either one of them would be “canon”, or none of them are, and they’re used as alternative routes to the “true” ending. While the method of unlocking these chapters bears quite a bit of resemblance to the methods that you would take to unlock the True Ending in, say, Steins;Gate – each and every character-specific “route” is canon, as they take place during different parts of the timeline. You still view these chapters in chronological order when you unlock them – you have to have seen the previous chapters first before you can unlock later ones – so at the end of the day the whole system feels a bit counter-intuitive. When you finish a character’s “route”, you’re dropped back to the title menu, instead of immediately progressing to the next one. Even if you have the next chapter unlocked, you have to access it either through Daily Records – if you’ve already reached it at least once – or by reloading an earlier save, and meeting the triggers to start the chapter at the designated cut-off point for the “common” route.

I can see what they were going for with this, but man, I can’t say that I’m much of a fan with the implementation. First off, if the narrative is going to be completely linear, with each of the character routes themselves being canon and themselves part of the main storyline, it feels incredibly pointless to force players to backtrack to continue that Mulheres tailandГЄs main storyline every time they finish a character-focused chapter, even if they had previously met the criteria to unlock those connecting routes. To make matters worse, since you have to do these character routes in order anyways, it’s incredibly aggravating that the game won’t outright tell you which character to try and unlock a chapter for next – it’s all trial and error, and especially for the first couple of routes you’ll be stuck bashing your head against a wall if you’re unlucky enough to try the other 2 routes first before you guess the right character to start off with. That’s not even to mention that you have to catch the relevant Twipo posts to reply to and utilize the right responses every time that it is necessary.

That would be bad enough on its own, but then each route has at least one Kimijima Report that the game will eventually ask you to scour at least a handful of backgrounds for – and these things absolutely love to camouflage themselves

It just absolutely butchers the pacing unless you use a guide, which I can’t say I’m a huge fan of, considering that you have to do that not just once, or twice, but three times. They’re mostly transparent, the only clue that they’re around is that they slightly distort themselves based off of the objects around them. There are guides out there to help you, and you sure can expect us to have our own before the game releases for both of these problems, but while I can understand having a True Ending locked behind some obtuse mechanics – I definitely think that it’s a bit much that so much of Robotics;Notes story and pacing is hamstrung by these decisions and puzzles. Especially when the story is a linear affair at its heart.