Let me start off by saying I have absolutely nothing against visual novels, I’ve been through plenty of them with mixed reactions. Some are great, some are incredibly boring. Unfortunately for me, Virche Evermore -ErroR: Salvation- was a little bit too much on the latter. The story itself should be really interesting, especially to me. A village plagued with death, and a girl that this curse seems to be following. Honestly, some of the details are so vivid that it can almost give some death metal lyrics a run for its money.

One of the big issues in Virche Evermore is the way the story is told. When you tell a story through flashbacks, you need to find a way to do it that isn’t just simply repeating the same parts of a story over and over again, while adding small details each time. Especially with being laid out in chapters, having the same story told to you again, with the exact same wording as if it was copy-pasted, less than 10 minutes after the last time it was told to you gets boring really quickly. Especially when visually, there’s not a lot to look at. For a visual novel, the visuals in a lot of instances were severely lacking.

The next big issue is the voice acting, or lack thereof. The minimal actual dialogue reading there is, is only in Japanese. That’s fine, not an issue there, I watch more than enough anime for that to be fine. That said though, the dialogue reading is so far and few between that it’s almost startling when it appears out of thin air. The other issue is that ambient voice lines. Early on, when talking about how some people die, there’s a yell from a young boy. It is repeated over, and over, and over again. To the extent that it loses any actual emotional influence it could have on what you’re reading, because you can hear it’s the same yell copy-pasted into the story so clearly.

Visually though, Virche Evermore really does come through in parts. Yes, there are a lot of sections where it seems like no one could be bothered to draw up something to fill the gaps, but there are other parts that look incredible. The writing, when it’s not being repetitive, and the visuals to correspond with it, when they’re there, are really good. Unfortunately they are let down by a lot of repetition in story and visuals, and lack of visuals in long sections of the game.

Finally, there are small bits where you need to make choices in order to progress the story in different ways. The choices you make do matter and can lead to some characters not seeing the end of the story. The issue was, there are a lot of situations where I found it hard to connect with some characters, making it hard to really care what happened to them. There were sections and chapters I even decided to go back and replay to see if maybe it was my fault (sometimes the ADHD brain kicks in and books are not your friend), with the same result, or even caring less about some characters.

On the note of going back to replay sections, there is a handy “skip to next decision” button that lets you jump through sections of the story. Well, I say this button exists, but the only times I tried to use it, it broke the game each time with dialogue disappearing and not progressing, and in both instances, save progress being lost and needing to restart entirely, hence the longer wait for this review.

In conclusion, because this is a formal essay apparently, most of the visuals are pretty good, and the story is a really dark, anime style story. Everything else slacked and was saved entirely by those two sections of the game. I enjoyed a good chunk of the story, when I didn’t have to restart everything, but in all honesty I never finished it because the second time I lost my save file I was about 6 hours into this story trying to see something and suddenly everything disappeared on me again and I decided I wasn’t going to go through another 6+ hours of the same story just to not care about some of the same characters again. Don’t use the skip button, it’s bugged.

Graphics: 6.5 This is definitely the stand out part of Virche Evermore. Unfortunately, it’s only a stand out at times. Other times, you’ll be facing repeated assets, or just black screens with no pictures at all.	Gameplay: 5.0 It’s hard to fault too much, Virche Evermore literally does what it says, provides you a bunch of dialogue to read. Unfortunately, it’s in a story that gets rather bland when hit with the same repetitive segments of story over and over again.
Sound: 2.0 The over use of repeated “voice” (yells) lines made me want to turn my headphones off entirely so I could at least focus on reading. Some sections are good, but it’s so far and few between that it’s hard to justify wanting to keep the sound on. It’s mostly just distracting.	Fun Factor: 1.0 I didn’t have fun with this story, it’s as simple as that. Between glitches that decided to entirely wipe my save data, leading me to start the entire story again, and the over use of repetition (ironic I’m repeating this point), I don’t have a desire to return to this visual novel.
Final Verdict: 3.5

Virche Evermore -ErroR: Salvation- is available now on Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch

A copy of Virche Evermore -ErroR: Salvation- was provided by the publisher.