finished playing paranormasight & 100%ed the achievements! a couple of comments:
i LOVE the art style. wish the VN was longer.
the main characters didn’t use their curse abilities often: i wanted to see a lot more character deaths. we get all this talk about having a Super Cool Murder Weapon and never use it except in a few instances in harue’s route.
… speaking of harue. her route is the most interesting because she doesn’t get a yes-man partner like tetsuo and yakko. richter is her ideological opposite & very disloyal. it is fine because they have good chemistry. buuuuuut i feel that the writer really wanted to write from richter’s POV and harue was a convenient excuse to give him a curse stone without the icky “killing” stuff.
cabanela > richter. yeah, sorry.
in the realm of michael jackson-inspired detectives, ghost trick’s inspector cabanela stands head and shoulders above richter kai. richter, the ex-cop turned private investigator, is very weird about being involved with a murderous housewife, and he dances around violating his morals in a very weird way.
he says he won’t help harue kill anyone, but he’ll lead her to other curse bearers in hopes that they have already killed someone and harue can just… pick up their stones opportunistically. but then, in one ending, where harue actually kills someone in front of him, richter doesn’t turn her in. he just tells spooky ghost stories about harue? what the…
major props for including bad endings for the main characters. i really miss when shu takumi included bad endings in ace attorney (1-5 & 2-4 are the only ones iirc).
wishful thinking time: the writers should’ve leaned harder into harue/richter & made richter a homewrecker. he is not very complex. he’s weirdly principled yet self-interested & it makes you question why he’s helping harue.
richter says to harue “I’m not trying to be a hero”, which would imply he’s only taking her job for the money, but he quit his job as a police officer because he was fed up with the corruption in the force. the math ain’t mathing.
instead, imagine a scene where harue finally goes through with killing someone to bring her son back, but richter gets on his knees, intervening in the attempt, and begs her not to become a murderer? by begging harue to move on from her dead son; richter looks selfish and desperate & it adds much needed complexity to his character.
he would be implicitly saying “i only agreed to help you because i was hoping i could change your mind.” it solves the inconsistency of “richter says he is taking harue’s case for the money but he had a better job that paid more before.”
which maintains richter’s “romantic” yet “impractical” characterization. richter’s whole concept is that he is a talented detective, yet his private investigation firm is losing money because he can’t stop taking unprofitable cases.
he’s the classic self-saboteur archetype.