Since it was Halloween last night I decided to play one of my visual novels for the first time.
Saya no Uta [The Song of Saya]
This game is ****** up. No joke, haha.
On a serious note, the game (despite being relatively short, around 6 hours overall for me to get all endings with save points) has a really good story to it. There were quite a lot of scenes that made my jaw drop when they occurred on the screen. Gen Urobuchi did a really good job writing this story and I have to give him props for it as quite a lot of the background story was explained in certain parts of the novel. Now just to note since the version I have is the 18+ version there are quite a few H-scenes in the game (about 5 overall). The first one literally appeared completely out of nowhere and the fourth one felt like Saya just photo bombed a picture (if you played the game you'll know what I mean).
Now what about the endings? [SPOILERS]
- Ending 1 was the first one I received, this was more of a cop out in a way because he basically gets his senses back to normal and then later sent to a mental hospital due to the next door incident. I figured it was a nice ending since no one in the main core group got killed aside from Koji's girlfriend.
- Ending 2 and 3 took a different direction. The background behind Saya and the person she was looking for was explained and **** just gets weird when Omi gets turned into a monster like the next door neighbour. The difference between 2 and 3 is that one group dies while the other doesn't, and vice versa. Out of the three endings in this game, I'd say both endings were probably equal to each other in certain extents though I did prefer Ending 2 since it gave Koji some closure between him and Fuminori and the events that happened. Of course it wasn't a happy one but it felt quite strong in the end. Ending 3 was also good but that felt like a Neutral/Bad End in one perspective, then again so did Ending 2.
To conclude, Saya no Uta is worth checking out if you like Gen Urobuchi's works and want to try a horror esque visual novel. There are options to censor the graphic content when you create a new game for those who dislike that type of stuff. For the price I spent for it, it was too much due to the length. I'm not sure if I should keep hold of the game though, the UK law probably doesn't allow this stuff unless it's for private use.