Plus or Minus
Hate Plus takes a tangentially-interesting topic - the mysterious backstory of Analogue: A Hate Story - and runs a whole new log-based narrative with it. Generally speaking, Hate Story and Hate Plus share the same mechanical components, but implement them in different proportions; and to cut to the chase, I think the former struck a better balance than the latter.
Hate Plus retains its predecessor's focus on reading walls of text to learn about a long-dead civilization. And as before, with very few exceptions, these logs are in the form of personal diaries and reports. The author once again shows real talent for writing topically and emotionally diverse prose -- aside from a small handful of logical leaps in the plot structure, the story told here is genuinely fascinating, thanks to the log-writers' impressively nuanced perspectives. I might accuse some of the side-stories of getting a bit too distracted in their own erotica, but, maybe that's the point. Although there is a tense political and cultural story at the center of Hate Plus, the humanity (and inhumanity) surrounding it is a stark reminder of what happens to ideals and ambitions when they clash with real society.
Yeah, I enjoyed the historical storytelling of Hate Plus more than that of Analogue. But there was more to the first game than just that: specifically, the involvement of the game's AI characters in the story itself, and their (one-sided) dialogs with the player. Analogue's story was told not just through logs, but also through the effects these stories had on "live," interactive personalities. This mechanic is almost totally missing from Hate Plus, which is heavily streamlined toward clicking on and reading log entries. On the rare occasions when the AI personality does interject, the exchange feels like a total throwaway. (More on this in a bit.)
Another Analogue mechanic that's lost in this sequel is, well, the semblance of gameplay. Analogue barely had any, but there was some strategic and time-intensive thinking involved in selecting an AI to speak with, and in solving the meltdown "puzzle." In Hate Plus, the AI choice doesn't change at all from beginning to end, and there are no real-time events. With two unfortunate exceptions.
If not for these, I would happily have remembered Hate Plus as a pretty-good visual novel with great writing and some boob-fondling. But one of the game's scant attempts to implement gameplay is a rest/recharge timer, which, twice through the game's duration, counts down from twelve hours before unlocking more content. Twelve actual hours. Such that the player is expected to quit and come back the next day. Considering that the game has about three hours of story to read through, and that the game is essentially a book, this is sort of pants-on-head ridiculous. Of course, searching for it will reveal an easy workaround to skip this countdown, but the game then disparages you for doing so, which is a bit off-putting.
And then there's the cake. The game asked me to bake a cake. It gave me a recipe! If one were to search this video-game-centric blog for any indication of my cake-baking interest, one would not find any. (Though on searching myself, I do apparently have a predilection towards the phrase "icing on the cake.") Unfortunately for me, Hate Plus gave me a Mass Effect-like non-choice between playing along with the cake routine, or bluntly and profusely disappointing the game's only interactive character. And extra-unfortunately for me, "playing along" with the cake routine wasn't really even an option, as the game implemented some hidden timers to "wait" for me to collect ingredients and implement a recipe. I got caught in a maze of dialog options here, repeatedly being sent back to cake-baking, until I gave up, reloaded a save file, and said -- no. Fuck the cake. Fuck it!
Dear Christine Love: if you want me to bake you a cake, you're going to have to ask me to bake you a cake. I will not bake a cake for a video game. It's not happening.
Notwithstanding that I could, eventually, work around these outlandish timers and dialog circles, the fact that they make up the only substantial "gameplay" in Hate Plus evinces a gimmicky, desperate design. And when you bundle that up with a comprehensively awkward UI, and the distressingly poor visual performance (which frequently blinks and stutters despite being no more sophisticated than a low-resolution Flash animation), the conclusive result is that the log-reading story is the only thing that Hate Plus has going for it. That story is good, but ... nothing else about the game is.
The author can clearly do better than this, because Analogue: A Hate Story was better than this. There may not have been much to its gameplay, but there was something, and what was there was much more enjoyable and satisfying than running down a clock. (To wit: I gladly replayed Analogue to experience its different endings, but have no such desire for the sequel.) Frankly, Hate Plus would have been better off as a pure text adventure - maybe plus the soundtrack - than as this mish-mash of great writing and insane game ideas.
Better than: Little Inferno
Not as good as: Analogue: A Hate Story
Steam Achievements' troll level: over 9000
Progress: Finished with *Hyun-ae.