Project Dualis – Visual Novel Review

She was suddenly acting like a completely different person…

Project Dualis

Project Dualis was released quite recently and as I began to download it I realised it had a rather large file size. There was voice acting waiting – and a lot of it. There was also supposed to be a literary club, but it had closed down due to lack of members. Even by the end of the story, they had not got enough members to start the club up again.

Length: 30 – 60 min

Link: http://vndb.org/v13209

Story: A boy starts at a new school and meets a girl who has multiple personalities sharing one body. They become friends and school club activities ensue. This was where the story became less interesting as the activities did not excite me. The story continues, you reach the end and everything you would expect to happen happened. I would have liked to explore the feelings of the characters more – it does make a start at thinking about how the other personality would feel at the actions of the other but I would have liked to see it pushed further, with an existential crisis or a few. The game seems to be set in Japan, but they at one point refer to bands who are not Japanese; setting the whole game in an English-speaking country would have worked better for me and would also fit with the voice acting. There were two good endings and a number of not-so-bad bad endings.

Characters: All of the male characters in the story were plain. The female characters were better though and had defined personalities. The back story was quite predictable and I didn’t really get to know enough about them to care too much.

Art: There were quite a few CGs in the game, some with different styles. The abstract CGs were reasonably good, as were the normal CGs. I think a bit more work could have gone into some of the faces for the CGs. Now we move onto the character sprites – these were not as high in quality as the CGs. Some parts looked copied for two characters. The bodies were mostly fine but more detail was needed for the faces. They did have multiple expressions though, which improved them a tad.

Audio: The music was ok – it was from the public domain. This visual novel included voice acting in English. Most of this was quite high quality. The narration was also voice acted – the reason given was to imitate the style of Kyon from Haruhi. Although it would have been fine if you could toggle this on and off, there was no option to mute certain voices so you had to mute everyone if you did not want it on. The file size was quite high due to the audio files.

Other: There was a small gallery at the end but you had to click through all of the route’s pictures to view them. There was also a short word from the author about the production.

I quite enjoyed the concept and there were good results in the art and the voice acting. However, I did not think the story ended up being as interesting as it could have been and mostly just descended into a usual school day. The end of the routes made it a bit more worthwhile. For these reasons, I would give a rating of 6/10.