Total Upheaval DEMO

I played the demo, and I enjoyed it a lot! I find it cool that you guys put everything together like this despite a lot of the assets still being placeholders. The project itself already shows that there's been put a lot of heart into it. Kudos!

I was sad to hear you guys are canceling the Kickstarter, but I also understand where you're coming from. I will patiently wait for your return with an even more polished campaign. 

Killing/mystery games are one of my favorite genres of games out there, so I'd like to wholeheartedly support you guys on this project. It's really cool that you're working on this. I'm interested to see what you'll have in store for us! :)

Loving the game's designs and aesthetic theme setting! Looking forward to the potentials this project will bring, meanwhile I wanna share some of my thoughts ^^

[ Spoilers ! ]

What I like: The story was quite easy to understand, there are some interesting mysteries here and there, like woah Jai I'm keeping my eyes on you... Overall my favorite part was the minigame, it was a nice experience and it would be fun seeing more unique interractions for players, after them reading through long dialogs.

Characters have quite personalities, I hope all of them get their time to shine! Blaire made me chuckled a few times.

And also Kouji have my heart haha

What I dislike: Even if I enjoy it, the sudden minigame really caught me off guard and I was confuse on what to do with the lack of tutorial... Don't expect players to catch up so quick! 

And what suppose to be the most thrilling part, the grand reveal that this is a killing game... I feel very little emotions it... The character's reactions feel unatural. Like the fact that they might be stuck in here forever and will be obliterated from miniguns if they fight back, didn't make much impacts at all...? The protagonist never cast any of his thoughts about it... Even Eira, the one who appeared to be very concern on people's opinions on her, didn't say anything about this event at all! Like I'm seriously hooked, but there are so little to see!

[ End of Spoilers ! ]

Aside from the few fonts errors and audio glitches, I do think this series have grasped my interest. Best of luck on the kickstarter and all the one who is working on this project!

Played this game for its Grade A Husbandos (and by that I mean Boss). FULL REVIEW will (hopefully) appear on igdb. Since itch.io word limit is my worst enemy, this review will only cover the game's writing.

I’m a huge supporter of developers taking their Danganronpa fangames and transforming them into original projects. Even though this is only a demo, the team clearly has a lot of passion for their work. I really want this game to succeed, so I’m writing this review in the hopes it can help the team in some way.

I want to preface that I mean no ill will with anything I say in this review. I can be very blunt, so please keep that in mind if you are sensitive to that sort of stuff. I've played through the game a few times now, but I still may have gotten some details wrong, so sorry in advance if that happens!

<SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT>

Writing

There are absolutely things to like about the writing of Total Upheaval. I loved the subversion of Vicente’s handicap not being responsible for his retirement, and I liked Mia’s character a lot. She seems like she could be really cool, and I look forward to what they do with her! 

However, I feel the rest of Total Upheaval’s script is in need of some serious polishing. Writing is the backbone of video games like this; a good script can save weak art, but good art cannot save a weak script.

Little things

What I noticed straight away is that the game throws buzzwords at you from the very get-go. NEXT? MIRS? Gray? R&D? Bottomless Cup? REDACTED!? Slow down, it’s been like two minutes! The world of the game does sound interesting, but not all of it had to be divulged in the opening scene of the game. I think Total Upheaval should've eased you into things by only discussing MIRS and the NEXT World Conference first, and then introducing the rest of the lore through bits and pieces across the course of the demo. I also think the game needed to open with something more interesting than two random friends having small talk in a bar (for the record, this is not the last time we’ll be forced to sit through small talk, so put a pin in that). 

Another issue which surfaces in the Chapter 0 Prelude is the really abrupt transitions between scenes. One second you're chilling in the bar, the next...boom! You're suddenly in the Boss’ office. I think a simple fade transition would fix this.  

As for more general concerns, I'm not really feeling the whole third person narrator. I don’t know why the game didn’t go with a first person perspective. Having to deal with this omnipotent voice constantly sticking its beak into conversations really takes me out of the moment.

Also, pleeeeease don’t make your characters say “poggers” and “boomer”. It’s seriously going to date the game. There are ways to incorporate slang and memes into your dialog, but this is not it!

Small Talk

Now I want to talk about an overarching issue with the game that really bothered me. Too much screen time is given to completely irrelevant conversations. Every single time this happens, it drags the plot to a halt, and I have to wonder why this stuff wasn’t saved for the game’s later chapters. 

An example of this is Chapter 0 Side 1 “Nora’s Island Life”, which is dedicated entirely to small talk between some characters we met earlier. These kids just start speaking ad nauseum about islands and aunts, and I’m sitting here twiddling my thumbs wondering why on earth I’m supposed to care. It reminded me of a scene from Trauma Centre: Second Opinion where two surgeons and a nurse are discussing vacation plans. While this is happening, their patient — who needs an emergency tumour removal — is just waiting for them in the operating theatre. Like, is anyone going to talk about the besuited robot penguin? Or the blue gas? Let’s save the intimate family talk for the free time events, people!

To be honest, I’m unsure whether or not these particular characters were aware of Kingpen at this point. If so, they’re crazy nonchalant about the fact a talking penguin has been communicating with them over TV. If not...well, they didn’t seem all too phased when Kingpen later appeared on TV (for context, he was asking everyone to meet at the dining hall) so I guess it doesn’t really matter. 

Which brings me to...the fishing minigame. Why the heck was this in the middle of the demo? Friendly reminder these characters have been kidnapped (although they, for some reason, seem to believe it’s all part of the conference — the amnesia and being knocked out with gas included. It would be fine for some characters to think this way if Lafayette called it out, but he thinks the same thing! Why? Because Kanna, one of the conference hosts I think, is “eccentric". That guy is so silly, knocking out 18 people and moving them to an unknown university…).

I’m not even going to lie, this minigame left me flabbergasted. The fact the conversation even drifted to fishing was confusing enough as is (seriously, how does any of this further the plot?), but to then be thrown into a  minigame? I literally stared at the screen and said: “what?”. It feels like the developers really wanted to include some sort of minigame in the demo, so they shoehorned this in without any real regard for how it would affect the game’s pacing.

A similar situation happens in Chapter 0 Side 2 “Wanderer of Ice”. With the previous scene (Chapter 0 Part 2 "Second Meetings") ending on Kingpen asking everyone to meet in the dining hall, you’d think we would immediately progress to the dining hall. Instead, the game jumps to Eira and Blair in the storage room. What follows is, once again, small talk. The girls discuss Happy Feet and other topics, all of which seem really irrelevant to the situation at hand. Well, I guess Happy Feet is sort of relevant, considering there’s a robot penguin running around. Speaking of, these girls are oddly composed over the fact a robot penguin wants to meet with them face to face. 

This scene would be very cute if we were a chapter or two deep into the game, but the decision to have it precede what is arguably the climax of the demo killed any tension that was being built up, and I really cannot understand the reasoning behind this choice. I don’t want to watch these two weird little girls talk to each other, I want to go to the dining hall!

The last example I’ll include is Chapter 0 Part 3 "Let's Play a Game". After threatening everyone with machine guns, Kingpen places a bunch of food on the table and leaves. For some reason, the students are quick to start chowing down. I’m surprised anyone has an appetite after being told by a robot penguin that they may never see their friends or family again (not to mention, the machine gun thing). There’s a reason Danganronpa always saves mealtime for the day after the killing game reveal!

…Okay, I said that was the last example, but I really need to talk about Chapter 0 Part 4 “Morning After Milk Tea”. 

We cut to the next day, and Kiana is happily preparing breakfast while chirpy music plays in the background. The first thing I’m wondering is: did everyone forget we’re in a killing game? Where’s the gloominess? Why are we in the dining hall talking extensively about coffee and milk?

The issue isn’t that the characters are having breakfast (it’s a new day, people get hungry!) but that an absurd amount of screen time is dedicated to the characters talking about coffee. It honestly felt like reading a boring discord chat log. I don’t care about coffee, gimme some drama!

Small Talk: Second Opinion

Nothing showcases the script’s muddled priorities more than comparing the number of lines in each scene.

Chapter 0 Part 3 "Let's Play a Game" is split up as such (since I counted the lines myself, the final numbers may be a digit or two off. I'm also a bit sleepy at the time of writing this lol):

• Lines 0-29: The characters enter the dining hall 
• Line 30: Kingpen appears.
• Lines 31-97: The killing game is officially introduced. Machine guns descend from the ceiling and threaten the students.
• Lines 98-158: Kingpen explains the rules of the game and leaves.

From this, we can conclude that around 158 lines were dedicated to the demo’s most important scene: the reveal of the killing game.

Now let’s look at how much screen time is given to the party, which immediately follows Kingpen’s departure. I’ll be including the after party (Chapter 0 Part 3 “The Somniac’s Club”) in this count.

• 159-229: Characters eating
• 230-302: Brook, Fyodor and Hisato get drunk 

The party has around 144 lines in total.  Almost the same amount of screen time was dedicated to the characters eating food and getting drunk! This party is not so important that it should take up as much screen time as the literal climax of the game! 

On the topic of food, Chapter 0 Side 4 “Morning after Milk Tea” spans around 99 lines in total. That’s 99 lines of character pi**farting around in the kitchen and talking about coffee! No plot development. No nothing. Only small talk. Does the game think this is as interesting as actual drama?

Speaking of no drama...

All of this brings to light another huge problem with the writing: the characters’ behaviour.

Most of the time, these people seem totally unfazed by their horrifying circumstances. When they do react, it's usually extremely short-lived.

The cast questions their surroundings so little that the story ends up becoming frustrating to read. It’s one thing to have a couple people try and ignore the situation (after all, that might be their way of coping with the stress), but it’s another thing to have almost all eighteen characters act like this. 

It was refreshing when a character actually behaved reasonably, such as Fyodor and Zuri asking why everyone was so willing to move on from the whole machine gun thing. Even then, Fyodor and Zuri are also guilty of inappropriately timed small talk in other sections of the demo.

This isn’t everything I took issue with, but for the sake of time, I'll move on to the characters now.

Characters

Lafayette

Warning: This is going to be veering into SUPER subjective territory.

Going into the game, I was expecting this guy to be a stoic, quiet, untrusting kind of character, so I was pretty disappointed to find out he was every bit as generic and naive as your average anime protagonist. Maybe that’s the point; despite what his design may imply, he’s actually just a normal guy. At the same time, it feels like the game missed an opportunity to make him a byronic hero:

“The Byronic hero is a character type often associated with the English Romantic poet Lord Byron, but with roots extending back to Hamlet. Byronic heroes are arrogant, intelligent, educated outcasts, who somehow balance their cynicism and self-destructive tendencies with a mysterious magnetism and attraction. This type was adopted enthusiastically into the Gothic aesthetic, where characters...could manifest their brooding discontent in truly horrifying ways.”
- Marquette University, Glossary of the Gothic: Byronic Hero.

Basically, not an anti-hero, but not your typical protagonist either. Someone a little more broody and morally-grey. You see this pop up a lot in mystery noir, usually in the form of hardboiled detective protagonists. Considering the “old-timey” aesthetic of Total Upheaval, taking Lafayette in this direction seems like a no-brainer. Just imagine it: a stoic, angsty, dark protagonist, being surrounded by all sorts of colourful anime characters. That’s asking for some awesome dynamics!

To be fair, the game does suggest some hidden badass-ery. During the scene where Kingpen brings out the machine guns, Lafayette, “seemingly on instinct” (a very deliberate choice of wording) pushes the entire dining table over (for the record, I have no idea why they didn’t have the muscular characters tip the table over, instead of Lafay doing everything while these superstar athletes stand around being useless) and also recognises the exact type of machine gun Kingpen was using. The game seems to be suggesting Lafay is more than just a mere handyman, but the experience fell flat for me because it called the rest of his personality into question. Not in the cool “oh crap, who is Lafay really?” way, but in the sense I immediately asked “you mean to tell me this same guy wouldn’t pick up on the red flags characters like Jai are giving?”. 

Side tangent, but I really dislike how Jai practically forced himself onto you. He just...*became* your friend almost instantly, and for some reason Lafay lets it happen. The game feels like it’s propping Jai up to be some sort of mysterious, Komaeda adjacent character; his bio is blacked out, he seems more excited by the idea of a killing game rather than scared, and to top it all off, he’s your pal throughout the game’s beginning. The problem is, Lafay and Jai become buddy-buddy way too fast. Even Hajime needed some time to warm up to Nagito, and Nagito started off SDR2 acting like the nicest guy you've ever met! Granted, I'm assuming the game is trying to take Jai down the Komaeda/Kokichi route. They may do something completely new with him, and that would be interesting to see!

Anyway, back to Lafayette. This guy was prancing around like he was John Wick; identifying guns at the speed of light, tactically knocking over furniture to take cover with (though I’m not sure why he thought a table would protect him, since I’m pretty sure the bullets would go straight through it), dude was giving Izuru a run for his money. He’s clearly used to dealing with life or death situations, and has more experience under his belt than the average person his age...so wouldn’t a guy like him immediately see through and/or question Jai’s friendly charade? Wouldn’t he be accustomed to dealing with the dregs of society (or whatever forces have led him to become John Wick 2.0)? It feels like they’re trying to make Lafay both a badass and a cute naive protag, and the balance just doesn’t work. 

That’s not to say you can’t have Lafay display some level of naivety. He’s still young, after all. Maybe he has a very black and white worldview that has been cultivated from his experiences with the underbelly of society (or, again, whatever forces have led him to become John Wick 2.0), which causes him to view characters like Brook as criminals, and characters like Eira as innocent and unthreatening...only for those same characters to subvert his expectations later on. Maybe Brook ends up being a trustworthy companion to Lafay, or Eira is far more intelligent and morally-grey than she lets on. In either case, Lafay realises the world is a lot greyer than he thought it was. That’s just one example, but I do think it’s possible to show the audience Layfay still has a lot of growing to do without making him seem like a totally different character.

The alternative hero angle would also be interesting because of Lafay’s age. Most of these hardboiled detective types tend to skew a little older, since their cynicism towards the world has been shaped by their life experiences. So to have a 20-something-year-old conduct himself in the same way they do creates a lot of intrigue. I could see Boss being an unhealthy parental figure who molded Lafay into the person he is today.

This isn’t me trying to say “Hey, Devs, use my idea!” or whatever, I just really want to stress how much potential Lafay as a character has. It feels like the demo has done him a serious disservice by making him another boring anime protagonist. He honestly has the personality of a brick wall right now.

I don’t know the full plotline, and I’m not about to say I know these characters better than their own creators (maybe he *is* supposed to be a more subversive hero, and the demo wasn’t able to express that aspect of his character as best as it could), but I do wholeheartedly believe Lafayette needs a little more tender loving care — especially when his beautiful design is such a big draw of the game. I’m probably biased in saying that last part, but then again, he *is* plastered all over the promotional art, and described in universe as being very attractive, so...*shrugs*

The Cast

This game has waaaay too many characters. If you combine the main cast and the side cast, you have a total of 24 characters in one tiny demo. Yeowch! 

I think it would genuinely benefit the story to lop off some of the main characters and all of the side characters (excluding Boss, due to his relationship with Lafayette). So many characters blend together and lack a voice of their own. There’s just nothing differentiating them outside of appearances!

The only ones which jump out to me as having a semblance of interesting characterisation are Blair, Lotte, Jai, Eira, Kiana, Mia, Kanna, Hao, Fyodor, Hisato, and of course Lafayette and Boss (albeit because of their potential). From what I’ve seen in the demo, Willamina, Brook and Clark seem like they could be combined into one character. Same goes for Zuri, Vicente and Olivia. Nora could either be merged with Eira or taken out completely. Granted, this is based only on the events of the demo. These characters may go down very different paths in the final game! Still, I think a demo (no less one with a Kickstarter campaign) should make its characters feel as distinct as possible, and Total Upheaval fails to achieve that.

In Conclusion

As of right now, Total Upheaval reads like a reskinned Fanganronpa, and I think the game is hurting itself by sticking too closely to the Danganronpa formula. I’m not sure if the developers are planning to go the six chapter route like Danganronpa did, but I honestly think this game would work better with less characters and a shorter plotline. Currently, the team doesn’t seem equipped to handle a cast of 24. The game is sorely in need of more writers.

There is a good concept here, but a huge wall has been built around it. If it wants to escape, someone else needs to break through the wall. If you’re worried climbing into a bulldozer and totalling the wall might crush the concept stuck inside, consider going the way of the Jenga player. Carefully remove some bricks from the wall first, and see if that leaves a wide enough opening for our concept to squeeze through. 

What do you do with the rest of the wall afterwards? The choice is up to you. Does the wall offer stability, or is it an obstruction? Only time will tell.

That’s about it from me. I look forward to how this project progresses! 

Bon voyage! Kia koa! Arrivederci! 

@ Boss if you’ve ascended the fourth wall and are reading this DM me I am your biggest fan

This looks fantastic! Will give the demo a try and I really hope the kickstarter and proyect are a success!