Date A Live: Rio-Reincarnation Review

Publisher: Idea FactoryDeveloper: Idea FactoryGenre: Visual NovelPlatform: PC, PS4

- Shayne Brown

Visual novel games tend to have to work extra hard to reach the kind of acclaim that most other games do. Since they tend to be light on any truly interactive gameplay, they have to make do with story, characters, and graphics.

Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation manages to fall a bit short in regards to story and characters (as is to be expected of a harem dating simulator with a single male protagonist), but the graphics more or less make up for it; they are absolutely stunning. With each scene having IMAXlevel quality (and some pretty decent voice-acting), what Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation lacks in an original plot, it more than makes up in giving you a feast for the eyes.

The plot goes a bit all over the place, trying to mash together high school romance, epic sci-fi, and drama into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a game. It takes place in an alternate Earth where catastrophic events known as “spacequakes” can happen at random (and kill in extremely large numbers), the worst being 30 years before the story begins proper, which had a death toll in the hundreds of millions.

The protagonist, Shido Itsuka, has become accustomed to this life like much of the populace. His school holds spacequake drills, there’s a special defense force in charge of repairing the damaged areas, and for the most part, things seem relatively under control.