Lost Records: Bloom & Rage

Let me be blunt: I believe this game is objectively bad. The story is bad and the gameplay is bad, and you should not buy this game. If this game could be scored -1, it should be a -1. The only good things about this game are the animation, voice acting, and presentation. It may seem arrogant to say something is objectively bad, especially if you've played the game and enjoyed it. That's fine, you can enjoy bad things, I certainly do. Yet who am I to pass judgment on whether this game is objectively bad? Surely that's just my opinion? What I'm alluding to here is that things have objective criteria whether we like it or not. If we moved the Mona Lisa to a corridor 100 miles long for you to walk to see it, or if I take anything you like and add 100 hours of random yodelling throughout the content, I'm not improving or transforming it, I'm just making it worse. This is the fundamental problem with Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. It's a game built around telling a story, and any game built around telling a story needs to have a good story first, and then, ideally, needs to give the player some ability to impact that story, to satisfy the game element of it being a game and not just a story. This impact could be minor, I'd point to Life is Strange 3, which is fine but not ideal in my eyes. Baldur's Gate 3 enables far more impact on the outcome, and would be another example. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage only enables the most meaningless impact, such as naming the cat, so the game can later pay homage to the player by mentioning said cat without just saying "my cat." Imagine the effort it takes for the recording studio to record the player's three or four choices and then do the dialogue for the cat whenever it's referenced. The immersion this enables is immense to the player. Sarcasm aside, this is not the greatest sin committed by this game. The great sin is that the story has no plot. It isn't really a story. It's an anecdote about four girls who did some stuff. That's it. The story hops back and forth between them doing stuff, and then reminiscing about doing said stuff in the future. Imagine for a moment that in Lord of the Rings, the first six books were Frodo farming in the Shire. Or that in The Matrix, Neo had to work his office job for 20 hours before anything started. Or that Harry Potter didn't learn he was a wizard until book 10. That is Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. It would be objectively worse for any of these movies or books to delay the plot to this extent. However, those projects could be forgiven for such fluff to an extent, because once the plot starts, it's actually good. Not so with Lost Records: Bloom & Rage: the plot makes little sense, and the reactions the characters have also don't make sense. The romance options seem forced to me; there definitely seem to be canon match-ups looking at the endings, but I could be wrong there. Lost Records: Bloom & Rage earns nothing but tries to take everything from a narrative perspective. The proverbial Chekhov's gun for Tape 1 is a misunderstanding, one so inept and poorly executed that I was confused, confused to the point that I didn't understand the characters' response to said firing of said gun. We've all seen these stories that are built on contrived misunderstandings: she's listening in, but misses when he says "I love her dearly," and only catches the part saying "can't wait to leave her," missing "speechless after the surprise." Such storytelling tropes are fine, and in this example it makes sense for the character to misunderstand; the contrivance comes when you force no clarification from the characters or give inaccurate reactions. It wouldn't make sense for her to say burn his house down for hearing the above, this is an overreaction that doesn't make sense. This is what occurs at the end of Tape 1. There is a lack of understanding of the anatomy of storytelling, and of what makes a compelling story. Again, with these types of endeavours, one always wonders what might have happened if they'd executed it correctly and made something worthwhile. There is a good idea here, probably a potential masterpiece of storytelling, and that is possibly always the greatest sin: what could have been, given the resources and talent on display. And the animation team, the voice actors, and most everyone else at Don't Nod could definitely have made something good here; it just fails on almost every level except the visual. I could mention the gameplay issues, such as the camera recording, etc., but I've gone on long enough.