PSYCHO-PASS: MANDATORY HAPPINESS
We’ll pass
There’s the makings of a great game here. Criminals are identified and collared pre-crime based on their psychological profiles, rendered as a ‘Hue’. The challenge of maintaining a healthy Hue as you explore knotty moral dilemmas could be a good one (think of something like Fahrenheit’s mental health meter1), but it’s poorly handled in this limp visual novel.
Built around four race-against-time cases, you’re rarely given enough junctions to feel like you’re shaping your character’s fate. The outcomes of the decisions you do make are often pure coincidence. Choosing to visit location A over location B has nothing to do with moral judgement, so the resulting Hue change feels arbitrary. Every ending you reach is the result of dumb luck.
Of course, the appeal of any visual novel is picking over branching routes until you uncover every ending. Here, those variations just aren’t compelling enough, forcing you to endure long stretches of tedious action delivered in flat, uninspired prose for a few minutes of payoff. Using multiple save files helps cut through the legwork, but even so these are underwhelming outcomes.
Even the offer of two character paths falls flat, as exploring one route only spoils revelations in the other. I uncover the meat of the mystery in my first run, undermining subsequent playthroughs. The way the yarn cordons our heroes off from the main cast, so not to interfere with canonical anime events, 2 only adds to the sense of unimportance. A solid idea, but that’s all.