Kotodama: The 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa

Genre: Visual Novel / Match-3 Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Kotodama is a Visual Novel game that occasionally shifts genres to become a Match-3 Puzzle game, with ecchi elements thrown in for good measure. This game came out in 2019 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch, with the Nintendo Switch version of the game adding some very good optional touchscreen controls that likely make it the best version of the game.

The presentation here is decent, with some nice (but somewhat generic) character art, appealing backgrounds, and overall polished menus and transitions. This is all paired with a decent but repetitive synthetic soundtrack and full Japanese-language voice-overs for the game’s dialogue. While none of this is in any way impressive or groundbreaking, it is nonetheless a solid presentation that works well for the game.

The story here puts you in the role of a transfer student arriving late in the school year who is quickly befriended by an enthusiastic young girl who quickly drags you into her small school mystery club, whose intention is to investigate the so-called seven seemingly-supernatural mysteries of the school.

Luckily for you, your character has a bit of a supernatural secret of your own – you’ve formed a pact with a cute cat-like demon (that only you can see) who can use your magic abilities to jump into a metaphorical Match-3 Puzzle game to unlock the secrets of someone you’re talking to, with winning these Puzzle sessions acting like a brief truth serum on your unsuspecting target. However, it does more than that, as making matches in this Puzzle game will cause your target (male or female) to moan and yelp, gradually having their clothes stripped off of them until it is implied that your character has finally stripped them nude (though, to be clear, the game contains no actual nudity).

And here’s where I have to address one of this game’s major problems – it clearly can’t decide what it wants to be, and its failure to commit seems to have led to nothing in this game being done especially well (well, beyond the presentation). The story is far too slow-paced, and it’s not especially interesting. It also can’t decide on a tone, with most of the story being fairly mundane school stuff, but then occasionally changing over to topics of suicide and animal abuse. And to be clear, this game never quite enters horror territory, but these serious elements feel very out of place for its otherwise lighthearted tone.

Also out of place are the aforementioned ecchi elements, which only seem to have any presence in the Puzzle sections (the game’s Puzzle Mode is even alternately called Fantasize Mode), and while they’re just skeezy enough to make this game something you won’t want to play in front of others, it’s so PG-rated that it’s far from titillating.

The game’s indecisiveness also causes problems for its gameplay. On the one hand, you have the Visual Novel stuff, which isn’t just slow-paced and can’t decide on a tone, but the Puzzle sections break up the pacing in a way that’s frustrating – they’re not frequent enough to work into the flow of the gameplay, and as a result, they just feel like an interruption to the rest of the game. On the other hand, you have the Puzzle sections, which are decent enough but nothing special, but the game doesn’t let you access these Puzzles on their own until you encounter them in the story, and even then they’re extremely light on content, with no Endless mode, no Challenges, or anything like that.

In the end, Kotodama isn’t a terrible game, but its various elements are scatterbrained and don’t mesh together well, and the game’s inability to focus means that nothing is done especially well. The Visual Novel elements are slow-paced and can’t settle on what tone to aim for, and are frustratingly broken up by the Match-3 Puzzle elements, which are feature-poor and inexplicably joined by ecchi elements, which aren’t especially enticing and not reflected anywhere else in the game. I feel like if this game’s creators just picked a lane and worked to ensure that one thing was as polished as the presentation, this could have been a great Puzzle game, or a great Visual Novel. Instead, it’s a jumble of incomplete pieces, and not really worthwhile no matter which part of this game caught your interest.

tl;dr – Kotodama is a game that combines Visual Novel and Match-3 Puzzle game elements, with a story about a transfer student getting wrapped up in a search for answers to their new school’s mysteries. The presentation here is good, but everything else about this game is an indecisive mess of various elements that don’t mesh together well at all, and as a result nothing here is done very well. While not a terrible game, you’re better off going with another game in whichever genre most interested you about this game’s cobbled-together pieces.

Grade: C-

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