Review – Tokyo Chronos & ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos Twin Pack

Despite being in the gaming space for over a decade, VR still tends to be a final frontier for many titles. Sure, VR has been great for horror games, action adventures and crazy rhythm experiences, but some things remain woefully untapped.

MyDearest is taking some big swings by attempting to bring the idea of visual novels into the immersive world of VR, and it’s important to recognize and support these efforts. I love to see something new coming and have a serious interest in the creative process, even if it isn’t exactly what I had hoped for. Which is why it makes sense that their first port to the Switch is not a singular release, but, instead, a double pack of their first two titles, Tokyo Chronos & ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos.

Both games are not exactly what you’d call visual novels, though I suppose they’re as close as you can get in the virtual reality setting. Putting the player in a first person point of view, your movement doesn’t advance the game but rather gives you a more detailed perspective on the world where the game takes place.

For Tokyo Chronos, for example, you’re able to engage more with individual characters as they speak and monolog, and you also have the option to turn away from them  to lessen or even quiet their speaking entirely. This could be construed as a fun bit of engagement if it wasn’t for the fact that the NPCs will continue to blather on regardless of if you’re paying attention to them or not. Just like in real life.

Tokyo Chronos is a great example of how we need to walk before we can run when it comes to the advancement of technology. When you look at systems that Nintendo has put out, they often have solid titles to help promote the new technology: Super Mario World, Mario 64, even Breath of the Wild is a launch title that got people immediately on board with the new capabilities of their machinery. But Super Scope 6 was little more than a tech demo that showed what could be done, not necessarily how fun the Super Scope could be (that was on the shoulders of Yoshi’s Safari). So creating a visual novel in VR was a necessary step forward to making some new progress in the world of helmet-clad gaming, but the product is, well, up for debate.

Tokyo Chronos takes place through the eyes and voice of Kyosuke Sakurai, a high school student who suddenly awakens in an alternate pocket reality of Shibuya. The city is almost completely empty and is sealed off from the rest of Japan, and it appears most of the electricity and infrastructure (such as the trains) are not working. Sakurai quickly realizes he is not alone, and happens to be stuck with seven of his former friends from years gone by. The eight are reunited under a sinister banner: one of the screens on a Shibuya building suddenly blares to life, casting the ominous text “I am dead. Who killed me?” The group must now work together and independently to figure out the mysterious question, as the answer is obvious: one amongst them is a killer, and may kill again to keep that secret.

Let me start by saying the concept is a bit tried and true but ultimately excellent. You get a chance to talk to all of your friends over the course of a run, get some information from each and then piece things together. The isolated Shibuya might ring most true with The World Ends With You or even the TV drama Alice in Borderlands, but that doesn’t make it any less of an effective setting when it comes to making a pocket world. For those who’ve visited Shibuya, you have a hard time imagining the pulsing, undulating city that screams with life to suddenly be quiet and still. The backdrop is perfect for a murder mystery, particularly one with such a supernatural appeal.

Moreover, Tokyo Chronos doesn’t hesitate to ask a ton out of long time VN players from the drop. I don’t think it’s any spoiler to say that your first playthrough of the game will conclude unsatisfactorily, and with a good amount of frustration. There’s only one choice to be made for the entire initial run, you get a bad ending of sorts and, if that was it, you’d think the game was awful. Much like World End Syndrome and the like, you need to remember what you remember (and the Kyosuke will remember as well) and you take it from there. Now the game becomes more engaging, more detail oriented, and a greater chance for engagement and, subsequently, bad endings that are more surprising.

If Tokyo Chronos had appeared on the Switch in a flattened, 2D visual novel, I would have been over the moon with the concept and execution. The voice acting is truly superb, capturing a lot of nuance and implication from the very beginning. The characters of Karen, Yuria and Lowe are particularly memorable, with the latter being sometimes over the top. The soundtrack creates a gorgeous ‘scape of this bizarre and menacing world, and the character design looks quite solid. I really wanted to like this game because I knew what it meant and where we were going, and I wanted to be along for the ride.

Instead, since it’s a VR title first and a VN second, I felt like I was being forced to watch a film I wanted to see through a lens I didn’t particularly care for. The first time I saw Alice in Wonderland (the 2010 version), I was asked to put on some silly glasses so that it felt like Johnny Depp was coming right at me. Instead of it elevating the performance, it distracted and took me out of the moment. Likewise, every time the camera whipped wildly to the left or right to focus on someone speaking, I was keenly aware that is not how I would react in a group of seven friends who are all jockeying for attention during a discussion. I would pick one friend and exchange reactive facial expressions the whole time until Jenn got pissed and asked us what we thought was so funny.

Additionally, a majority of Switch players have to use Joycons in one form or another, and the player who has never experienced drift is like finding someone who genuinely doesn’t know what the big ball of fire in the sky is called. Nothing takes you out of it quite like looking at someone who is positing murder theories when your gaze just slowly starts moving up and to the left until you’re staring at a building on the horizon. I thought it was intentional the first few times until I realized hardware failure was creating a bored, unimpressed protagonist the likes of which we’d never seen before. Not the game’s fault, but something I still had to contend with nonetheless.

Players who then move onto ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos might be surprised by a few things. Firstly, MyDearest seems to have learned a lot about what it means to make a VR visual novel. They stop trying to keep it in the pocket of just read and answer and make it infinitely more engaging from the drop. You have the option to search around the room to find items that move the story forward, though it never goes as far as a point and click exploration and keeps things more limited. You get to do several more exchanges from the very beginning that allow for a different ending even for your first run, though, like Tokyo Chronos, you’re going to want multiple runs in order to figure out the full nature of things.

For ALTDEUS, you’re in a future where massive alien beings called Meteoras have appeared and constantly threaten the existence of humanity. Now forced to live underground, scientists and military personnel have worked together to create Makhias, massive robots that can be piloted by a two being system in order to fight back against the Meteoras. Chloe, our protagonist, has an ax to grind, as she witnessed the Meteoras murdering her friend, Coco, years before. Assisted by Noa, an AI idol whose design is based on the departed Coco, Chloe must face her greatest challenge yet: the sudden appearance of the same Meteora who killed Coco and the command to capture, not execute, the being.

You can say one thing for certain about MyDearest: they wear their influences on their sleeve. If you’re playing this game and aren’t instantly bombarded with several connections to other very, VERY long standing anime and game ideas, then you’re in for a treat. For the rest of us who at least are tangentially aware of Neon Genesis Evangelion or RahXephon you’ll be pleased to know the similarities are there but not overpowering. ALTDEUS adds a lot of flair by incorporating in some very clearly evil elements to the controlling corporations from the drop and some decent world building in terms of what the underground society appears as.

Even though it hit congruent beats to Tokyo Chronos, I found ALTDEUS to be far more satisfying. For one, outside of the better attempts at VR game making, the developers seemed to have found their stride in pacing. Instead of feeling like I was driving along until I suddenly slammed into a wall, there were numerous stop signs and avenues that were more clear and clean in terms of when the twists were coming. The dialogue balance was higher, giving the game a chance to just talk at you for a while instead of constantly whipping you to and fro. The clear indicators as to how your conversation choices affected your character (increased loyalty, decreased clear thinking) allowed me to roleplay more succinctly than I normally would in a visual novel game.

Additionally, I just loved the concept more. While there’s nothing wrong with putting teens in a life or death situation (hell, I LOVE that setting), there’s something timeless about facing an enemy greater than humanity while also contending with infighting that threatens the human race. Chloe can easily go from an obedient drone to a rebellious maverick in the course of a single play, and the cast really gives it their all, particularly the maniacal Julie (who reminded me of Yuria’s evil sister). Plus the bonus layer of talking about life through the lens of AR in order to ignore the desolate sanitarium into which they’ve all taken refuge is poignant and somewhat droll given the VR nature of the very game. It’s just well written, and I love that.

But, and I know I’ve said this before, CHANGE TO JAPANESE VOICES AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. While the English voice cast did their best, the actress for Coco sounds flat and robotic, which takes you way out of caring about her affection for the world and Chloe. Some of the other characters deliver solid performances in English, but the Japanese sparks more. The thing that irritated me the most was when the actress who played Chloe said “Coco.” Which she does a lot. There’s this drawn out quality to it that made me think Sterling K. Brown was mocking the game the whole time.

Lastly, it should be noted that, except for a small bit towards the end of your second (minimum) playthrough of ALTDEUS, there is no direct connection with Tokyo Chronos. You can enjoy the story as its own vehicle and not worry if you missed something in the whole murder mystery to tie up the robotic existential crisis. I can understand a bit of the titular overlap, but you don’t need to view this as one being a mandatory play to enjoy the other. 

Having said that, I think players who pick up this duology should absolutely dig into both Tokyo Chronos and ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos. The two titles together showcase both the thinking and evolution of MyDearest as they continue to explore this gaming space. Tokyo has the markers and clear design delights of a great VN, and ALTDEUS has some spacial work and better comprehension to craft a game in the VR world. The two together are great moments of what I’d call visual novel adjacent, and they give satisfaction in an overall sense that the two games separately might not have delivered. If you can only play one, get ALTDEUS, but this double set gives players plenty to ingest while also giving you one more reason to investigate Dyschronia.

Tokyo Chronos & ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos is available now on Occulus, Playstation VR, Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Tokyo Chronos & ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos. was provided by the publisher.