WORLD END ECONOMiCA Review

WORLD END ECONOMiCA is a digital novel (call it a visual novel if you want) with a script by Isuna Hasekura, the author of Spice and Wolf. The project seems pretty active online — it’s on Steam, it ran a Kickstarter to fund translations into various languages, and there’s even an official Chinese patch for the Taiwan market. Only episode.01 for now. Since this is a story about finance and stocks written by an actual novelist, I went in expecting good things from the plot.

The playtime isn’t exactly long, but it’s not short either. After finishing it, I felt the game has quite a few problems.

First, the art

Character design is by Kazuki Kouzuki. Never heard of him, and I couldn’t dig up much info — sounds Japanese, but the art is straight-up Western style. Typical Japanese art means delicate, slender girls. In WORLD END ECONOMiCA, not only does the male lead look like he walked out of an American comic, but the heroine — the actual main draw — is drawn weird as hell. Maybe the script keeps insisting she’s emotionally stunted and always glaring at the protagonist with pure malice, but even so, you don’t draw a heroine like a freaking ogress. I used to think the ogress in Sakura Fubuki was the limit. WORLD END ECONOMiCA’s heroine goes further. That one CG of her on the Steam store page is literally the only viewable image of her; everywhere else, including her sprites, she looks murderous. Then late in the story the script keeps saying she “looks like a beauty” — bruh, how am I supposed to believe my own eyes?

Aside from the heroine, the second girl, Lisa, is drawn like a muscle woman. Not the Mikasa kind — I mean the kind with the physique of a hulking Western dude. The third girl, Alice, seems designed to pander to the trap crowd, deliberately drawn to look like a boy. She looks off too, though after comparing carefully her proportions are actually fine. It’s just that drawing her this way really doesn’t make her cute…

The Western style isn’t the crime here. The crime is… please, at least draw the heroine properly, thanks. The way she looks isn’t acceptable under either Western or Japanese style.

Second, the system

I don’t know if it’s because chapter one has no branching choices, so they set the system to have no skip. That could be an excuse, but it’s absolutely no excuse for having no backlog. This game also made me appreciate how mature the typical Japanese visual novel engine is. In WORLD END ECONOMiCA the text box is gigantic and the sprites sit way too low, so you only ever see the top half of a character — chest and up, a sliver. Everything below is cut off. Meaning the person talking to you is just a face. What’s the point of the sprite then? Then there’s the inexplicable title button. Why is it there? And that massive decoration next to the text box — what the hell is it for? Nothing but blocking the screen. Minor details, sure, but they really kill the mood.

Credit where due, they put a lot of work into multilingual support. After installing multiple language packs you can pick the game language, and that part works well. But Katawa Shoujo did the same thing, with a more complete system, and more importantly it’s open source and free…

Finally, the story

I said I came for the writer’s name, so I can put up with the system and the art. But if the story disappoints me, there’s nothing left. And… the story really isn’t good.

It’s set on the Moon in the future. The male lead is a Moon native and a short-term trader aiming to get rich. The heroine is a math genius who knows nothing else. So the plot is the guy teaming up with the girl to make bank…

They call it a finance story, but honestly the first 60% has nothing to do with finance. It just shoves in a few little trading episodes along the way to remind you finance is still a thing. That stretch drags on forever — the heroine’s introduction, the squabbling between her and the lead. It could’ve been a flashback, but they wrote it out in full. Sleep-inducing. Since the game is split into three chapters, I get why chapter one is like this: it’s basically a prologue. Only near the end, when the lead takes on the challenge and starts seriously trading stocks, does it get interesting. But most of the market scenes are boring and overly idealized, and unlike Steins;Gate or Robotics;Notes it never explains the jargon, so you’re lost half the time. The real climax is Barton’s appearance. Barton’s understanding of the market and finance, and his conversations with the lead — that’s the only part of the game with real substance. The showdown is about observation and reading people, not calculation, and the lead ultimately loses on exactly that point.

The climax lasts maybe 20 minutes and chapter one is over. I predicted the ending: the lead fails for the first time and also cripples his leg. The leg thing seems like nothing but a setup for future revenge, so it doesn’t mean much.

All in all the story doesn’t satisfy me. It could easily be compressed into 30 minutes, but it drags out tons of unnecessary stuff, and it’s even packed with tasteless fanservice and moe baiting (paired with that hideous sprite). To this day I don’t get why the Japanese scene is so obsessed with the on-off switch moe mode. I just don’t.

I never read Spice and Wolf carefully, but this game makes it clear Hasekura really does understand finance inside and out. The genuinely fun part is the naming of the lunar financial district: Schrödinger Street. That’s one way to capture how fast the market changes.

So after all this, is it worth playing? My take: unless you’re a true Hasekura diehard, or the game drops to $0.99 on Steam one day, don’t buy it. That said, it’s not completely worthless. The music was made with people from Shoujo Byou, and it’s decent enough. The OP and ED are also solid. Too bad I have no idea where to download them…

Lots of ACG works try to work finance into their stories, and most of them come off stiff or turn into a joke. Maoyuu, the late C, even the original Spice and Wolf — in the end it’s just people jerking off to the wolf girl. Guess ACG works still have a long way to go before they can flex real sophistication…