PARA-SOL Review

I’m pretty sure I’ve said this more than once, but I’ve got a bad habit: I find games by listening to music. This time I stumbled onto the song Octave Rain, thought it was solid… looked it up, turns out it’s a game OP, so I went and grabbed the game…

The game is called PARA-SOL. If your English isn’t terrible, you can tell that PARASOL means sunshade/parasol, so the title literally means “parasol.”

When I downloaded it I wasn’t expecting it to be in Chinese. Fired it up and — holy shit, it’s translated. Didn’t see that coming…

Before playing I checked what Japanese players thought. Most of them said the game “starts out insanely good and then goes insanely stupid later.” In the Chinese community the go-to explanation is more like “I literally have no idea what I just read!”

Plenty of things I don’t understand. I’m the best at reading crazy-people works, so I opened the game without hesitation…

A few days later I finished it… There’s only one route, and I had zero desire to touch a second one…

The reason is simple: it’s way too insane!

Even by the end I couldn’t figure out what this game was trying to say. Judging by the OP visuals and the overall theme, it seems to want to depict “the warmth and beauty of family,” but to depict “the warmth and beauty of family”… did it really have to pull this shit?

The game depicts a future world where “artificial humans” exist. The artificial humans have a “mother” figure, and this “mother” can apparently be inherited or something. The artificial humans are called “parasols,” i.e. Parasol. Then in this future world, the moon can cause disease — when the moon comes out, it fires radiation ray meteors at Earth, and if humans don’t hide, too much moonlight gives you “meteor disease,” whose late-stage symptom is turning into a werewolf-like beast.

My guess is humanity made the artificial “parasols” to protect themselves from meteor disease, but then the “artificial human” organization screwed something up or had internal strife, dragging the protagonist into it.

So the protagonist shows up already shrouded in mystery. He says “I” isn’t “I,” even claims his “current identity is Kojiro,” and that he inherited part of the memories of the previous-generation “parasol artificial human Alyosha.” His purpose is to protect two girls…

Then the story kicks off with the protagonist going to school while bodyguarding, plus all sorts of baffling interjections. Which reminds me, I should explain why I call these interjections baffling.

Because this game is infinitely close to a game I played before called DEVILS DEVEL CONCEPT, or rather it’s worse… At least DEVILS DEVEL CONCEPT had some labels. This game has none.

While digging into the protagonist’s background, new characters keep popping up nonstop, and every new character opens their mouth and dumps a pile of new lore. The dialogue goes roughly like this:

“You finally showed up. How’s the ALSKDJHALSD situation?” “That? QEWQE told me, actually. Oh right, what about the IUYI thing?” “She’s already been taken out by OIYQWE. As expected of a WEQE person. Oh right, another person from QWKJLEH has also pushed out a new OIYU. Thanks to HJASHDK tech, they’ve completely LSKH’d the LSQEQWE, so as a phased-out LASKDH you’d better watch out.”

The hell did you understand any of that? I know you don’t recognize those letters, and I don’t either. In the game they aren’t even letters, they’re all sorts of bizarre names, and nobody ever explains a single one to me. There’s even a segment where a mysterious person in the protagonist’s dream questions him, saying they have a telepathic link and want to confirm it with questions — but the questions are pure word games with no meaning. Then at the very end the mysterious person suddenly blurts out a name I’ve never heard, without even introducing himself, and that’s it.

So the story ends with the protagonist successfully protecting the two girls, letting those two enjoy “family warmth,” and then it just stops…

Let’s sort through it… From the flow I saw, the game seems to be about an artificial human protagonist, manufactured to carry some mission, sent to two girls with special identities to protect them, claiming to be family and letting them feel family warmth. Along the way some villains try to wreck the family harmony and the protagonist takes care of them…

That’s it. That’s all I could understand.

Sometimes I feel I owe DEVILS DEVEL CONCEPT an apology, because at least that game eventually made its theme clear, while PARA-SOL had me in a fog right to the end. And I was playing the Chinese-patched version — I had this feeling of “these are all Chinese characters, why is this more painful to read than Japanese.” I checked the Japanese version too, of course. Even worse…

After clearing one route, I found the glossary in the extras… and honestly those explanations were worse than no explanation. Still incomprehensible, and poorly organized too.

So how do you rate this game? I honestly didn’t understand it at all. It feels more like a plot written by a lunatic plus a worldbuilding-obsessed author with zero storytelling ability. I even doubt whether the dev team themselves could follow it, or whether the scenario writer was drunk or schizophrenic when he wrote this… because it’s complete gibberish. What a waste of the art and battle effects, which are genuinely well done…

I’ve ranted about this kind of writing before, called it “forced edginess,” and even wrote a whole brainstorm piece about it. But now I look at it and PARA-SOL isn’t forced edginess so much as something written by a severe patient from the loony bin. I checked and after this game the scenario writer hasn’t written anything new…

Can I assume he’s already checked into a psychiatric hospital for treatment? No idea if the food is good in Japanese psych wards. Hope he recovers someday.