A few days ago I got to play a re­cently re­leased Dis­chan visual novel called Dys­func­tional Sys­tems. The ex­per­i­ence play­ing it was as good as I ex­pect from any game I de­vote time to, how­ever I found it a bit lack­ing in re­search. If you’re in for num­bers and phys­ics rather than gam­ing, you may skip to the second part.

As can be de­duced from books I’ve read, stor­ies set in the fu­ture and stor­ies where highly ad­vanced tech­no­logy is com­mon, people cre­ate stars purely for en­ter­tain­ment are my fa­vour­ite. In short I like Sci­ence Fic­tion a lot.

When I first saw that Dys­func­tional Sys­tems’ story is based on Sci­ence Fic­tion I was rather scep­tical about the pro­spects of it. You rarely see a Visual Novel and SF in a game at the same time, which is also a reason it is hard to ima­gine what kind of game could be pro­duced by mix­ing these two in­gredi­ents. I have to say that people at Dis­chan squeezed the full po­ten­tial of this mix and made a great game which ex­ceeded my ex­pect­a­tions by, like, a lot.

The blood of any game, art, is beau­ti­ful and pol­ished – I don’t have any ob­jur­ga­tions re­gard­ing it. As far as char­ac­ter art goes I find Waverly to have the best (cutest) one – Win­ter’s design simply did­n’t fit my taste. Bundled ex­tras are worth a look as well, but while tinker­ing with the source files I found an awe­some im­age that people at Dis­chan ap­par­ently for­got to in­clude. The mis­take seems to be fixed in the cur­rent build though.

The soundtrack – a pack of awe­some mu­sic by Com­bat­Player worth at least as much as you pay for whole game is also in­cluded into the deal. It’s avail­able in MP3 as well as in FLAC, which I really ap­pre­ci­ate.

The short play­time might be the biggest one of the few quirks Dys­func­tional Sys­tems has. We are prom­ised up to 5 epis­odes though, so both the short­ness and rather ab­rupt end­ing can be over­looked. Other than that, this game is worth all the teas and beers the per­son, who was kind enough to present me this game, owed. Thanks!

The next part of this art­icle con­tains spoil­ers so I split it up into two dis­tinct art­icles. If you either already ex­per­i­enced the game or just don’t care, you may con­tinue read­ing.