World End Economica: Episode 1
- Linux
What is this game?
I was absent-mindedly looking at GOG sales and this title caught my eye due to recent events (by recent I mean 2020 and later, of course). Also I found out that it was written by the creator of Spice & Wolf, and while I've never read it or watched it, I thought I could expect good writing.
WORLD END ECONOMiCA, or WEE for short (hehe), is:
A three part visual novel set in the far future on the Moon, 16 years after humans have begun to colonize it. A young boy named Haru has been chasing his wildest dream. His dream is to stand where no man has stood before, and in order to do so he needs capital, a ludicrous amount of capital. What better place to get that amount of capital by using the stock market?
Did I enjoy playing it?
While the title sounded cool, the premise (for episode 1 at least) did not, I expected the protagonist to be kind of a jerk. I was right, the main character is absolutely insufferable until about 70% in. Other than that, the characters are interesting, the worldbuilding is nerdy but not too heavy on exposition, and regardless of how I feel about such things, they did make an engaging story about the stock market. My only other complaint is that none of the artwork is exciting (the game often describes very fun low-gravity parkour while literally showing a black screen), and neither is the music. I don't know if that's common for visual novels since I rarely "play" those (I read Chapter 1 of Umineko about a year ago and never got back to it, that's more or less all of my experience with the genre), but regardless, this one is a 7/10 for me. Curious about what happens next, but it's a shame this VN is so expensive (so far it has not taught me how to become a millionaire so I view it as a bad investment)
Playing it on Linux, or low-spec hardware?
- Again* I encounter the issue where the native Linux version is straight-up broken with most non-English locales. It's the same problem I'd described in my post about The Silver Case (what is it with VNs written in Unity being broken like this?). Any region which uses commas as decimal separators is affected, because the game's file format is expected to use a dot for the decimal separator, or something stupid like that. So you have to run it with the environment variable value LANG=C.
-- gardenapple 2022-08-26