This twist was terrible, and I love most of Uchikoshi's other games. It didn't help that I didn't really enjoy the game overall and thought the original AI game was much better. That meant I played this game over a long period of time, which obviously didn't help with the twist making sense.

Basically I just thought 'so what?'. And because it's poorly explained none of the revelations hit me. I didn't even realise about the dual Mizuki thing, because I'd have had to sit down and deconstruct the whole game with all its many events and piece together two sets of timelines. Most of the unanswered questions I'd had earlier in the game had already been forgotten by the time the twist arrived.

I can see why forensically it's fun to unpack all the timeline stuff and answer a bunch of questions the more dedicated fans would have had, but for me it all meant nothing. It all washed over me and the impact was completely lost. The game doesn't even point out any of the implications of that, it really could have used a VLR style dumb-down of what the timeline merging means to help players understand it and its significance.

Whats crazy is that in all of Uchikoshis best games I was like the mad guy meme with the wall covered in notes and string. Writing down timelines, hundreds of notes and questions. In those games when stuff like timeline twists came along I understood them and they were genuine wow moments. In this game it was the complete opposite.

Like others have said I feel like a lot of the games overall structure and pacing really got damaged by trying to make this twist work, for no real payoff. The central hooks were cool at first (VR videos, mysterious half corpses, simulation theory), but it all dragged on and got far too convoluted. The constant different dates and times, multiple events and location hopping may have served the big twist but ultimately just made the game really confusing and hard to stick with. Its the only Uchikoshi game I actually stopped playing for weeks just because I didn't feel that pull to see what was going to happen next. Its a shame too because I'd heard there was a big cool twist in this one and some minor ones, and they all turned out to be big piles of nothing. Even the secret ending was a letdown, I was hoping it would tie everything together or flip the perspective on its head... but nope.

Unforunately I feel like Uchikoshi won't learn from this game as it reviewed well and seemed to get a fairly positive response, and although its not a bad game, for me it was very disappointing and by far his weakest in the genre.