SINCLIENT Review

SINCLIENT is a visual novel by BOOST5 — ah, actually it’s not really a galgame, more like an 18+ visual novel, since there isn’t a single choice or branch in it. You just plow straight through from start to finish.

It’s not a long game, but it’s definitely not short either. It’s split into two parts: a prologue, and a main chapter called Babylon. After finishing it, I came away with one feeling…

And that’s that the prologue and the Babylon chapter don’t connect at all. Two different games… two different stories… and even two different levels of rigor.

The prologue starts with the protagonist losing his memory, and unfolds as he slowly pieces it back together. He digs through the limited information around him and starts investigating both his own background and the “Seven Deadly Sins murders” happening in the city. The pacing here is genuinely good — one mystery stacked on another, the deduction and reveals moving along in an orderly way, and the protagonist’s multiple identities are a real highlight. There’s the bit where he suddenly discovers he has two girlfriends, the intermittent sudden amnesia, and even a diagnosis from a hospital psychiatrist who says that when he blacks out he might have a split personality or do other unimaginable things.

So as the investigation proceeds, all sorts of signs point to the protagonist being the culprit behind the Seven Deadly Sins murders — colluding with the ADAM cult at school, writing a murder novel based on his own experiences, killing targets one by one according to his phone contacts. The police detective suspects and surveils him too. Just when he’s about to despair, someone finally tells him the truth: he was deceived and framed by the woman who claims to be his girlfriend, and his amnesia and blackouts were caused by drugs she and the psychiatrist conspired to feed him. The so-called “girlfriend” is the real Seven Deadly Sins killer.

At the end of the prologue, the protagonist confronts the woman, she gets caught by the police, and then he realizes someone else is pulling the strings — a man who looks a lot like him. The story isn’t over… and that’s where the prologue ends and the OP kicks in.

Honestly, if the game had ended right there, I’d probably give it a decent score. The mystery-building and the unraveling are well-organized, the pacing is great, and some parts even hit you with genuinely surprising twists that are a real treat…

But like I said, that’s just the prologue. The Babylon chapter is the main event.

Babylon opens by dropping a huge bombshell on you: behind the ADAM cult at the protagonist’s school is a much bigger organization, the organization has Seven Sages, the protagonist used to be a member, and then there’s some British secret agent, and a little sister…

Then comes the avalanche of setup, one thing after another. The protagonist’s real girlfriend is the daughter of the Japanese Prime Minister. Japan’s homeland security department is working with CIA agents. The Queen of England is going to visit Japan. The Prime Minister has two daughters, and the elder one died in some incident. The Seven Sages hire an assassin called “21 Grams” to kill the Prime Minister’s daughter. The guy with the braid who looks like the protagonist wants to smuggle a nuke into Japan and blow it up. The protagonist still has to go to school every day and keep up his relationship with his real girlfriend. The ADAM church at school is still recruiting members on the campus intranet forum… One of the new recruits, Hirano Mirai, is looking for her father, and her father is the head of some independent British resistance group…

Oh, god. Do you have any idea how much my head was spinning while I was reading this?

All these messy plot threads tangled together, each developing on its own. I’ve got to hand it to the scenario writer for not letting this chaotic mess of branching plotlines fall apart — that’s honestly impressive. But the flaws are obvious too: I had no idea what any of it was building toward. Where’s the main plot? And most of these developments have nothing to do with the protagonist, who’s still chatting and bathing and picking up girls every day, while the narrative spends more time on the 21 Grams assassin and the braid guy’s action scenes… And I couldn’t tell what any of them were trying to do. Suspense is all well and good, but this way of building it made me want to close the game and delete it.

Also… just because the plot didn’t fall apart doesn’t mean there’s nothing to poke fun at…

Why can the Japanese Prime Minister just casually pick up a phone in a roadside phone booth? Why does the Prime Minister’s daughter keep walking around the streets and cheerfully going to class every day when she’s received assassination threats? Why can Japan’s homeland security let nukes enter the country freely? Why is Japan’s homeland security so busy licking the CIA’s boots? Because America is daddy? Why can foreigners openly spray submachine gun fire on Japanese streets? Why are Japanese police such idiots that they need a high schooler to assist homeland security? Why, when his daughter is in danger, does the Prime Minister not send protection but instead dump her on a high schooler? Why is the protagonist so OP, and even after it’s proven his high school identity is fake, he still has to go to school from time to time? Why does the Queen of England speak fluent Japanese (big fog)

Didn’t someone tell me the other day that anything involving real-world international relations and politics basically gets written as a comedy? So if you take it even slightly seriously, this chuuni-as-hell plot becomes absolutely hilarious.

Well, if I take it seriously I lose. It’s a game, not reality.

So the plot keeps throwing out more smokescreens — characters inexplicably betraying you, and just as you’re shouting “what the fuck,” the traitor switches back and says they were a double agent. Soon your ally gets an assassination assignment on one of your own people, but the next second the assassination is called off… Then it’s one incomprehensible crisis after another: kidnappings, bioweapons, 21 Grams facing being silenced, a fake 21 Grams… Okay, my brain is already scrambled…

If you ask me, sure, the twists are twists, the ups and downs are ups and downs… But where’s the main plot? Where is it?

The braid guy is still running around stirring up trouble, and I can’t figure out his goal, until the very end… when the story suddenly makes everything click…

Like a blood clot patient suddenly going “pop” as the blood starts flowing again, it hit me so hard I couldn’t stand it…

So the mastermind behind everything is the Prime Minister’s daughter who died years ago. Back before he became Prime Minister, the old man was determined to change this rotten society, but then his daughter came under threat. He insisted that as long as he became Prime Minister he could change society and the country, so he gave up on saving his eldest daughter’s life — and he carries some guilt over it.

But the Prime Minister’s daughter didn’t die… She believed her own father had abandoned her, turned antisocial, and decided to take revenge on the country. So she built a cult, gathered the Seven Sages, researched black tech, picked out the person with the best physical constitution — the protagonist — and used him as a template, fusing in a bunch of superior genes to create a clone. That’s the apostate guy, the one with the braid, and they call this created being the closest thing to the “god” described in the cult, the god’s proxy.

So what’s this final boss manipulating the proxy to run around doing? Causing a huge incident in Japan, detonating a nuke, setting the world ablaze… revenge against her father.

And with the help of this proxy who can fight and scheme and do anything, the plan goes off without a hitch. Yokohama ends up in flames after all. The daughter meets her Prime Minister daddy, daddy feels guilty, and then the proxy casually cuts him down. That’s when the protagonist arrives with his girlfriend to confront the boss. The little sister gives her big sister a rousing round of trash talk, the sister wavers, the braid guy gets annoyed, and cuts her down too…

What’s left is the protagonist vs. the braid guy. At first the protagonist gets utterly wrecked, beaten to a pulp… Then his girlfriend shows up with a trash-talk buff, and the protagonist starts trash-talking the boss. The braid guy boss starts mocking him back:

“I’m gonna destroy this world and create a new world order, I tell ya!”

Welp, when a boss says that, it means they’re about to die…

The two of them go at it with swords, the protagonist pulls off a flash strike… boss instantly killed. In the end the protagonist wanders off with his girlfriend, whereabouts unknown, the world returns to order, the cult is gone…

END

That’s it?

So the Babylon chapter is basically the story of an abandoned daughter who creates an invincible clone to take revenge on her father, and then the daughter gets instantly killed by the clone she created, and the clone becomes the boss.

Such a simple story, but the writing before Babylon has no real foreshadowing, just smokescreen after smokescreen. I know that in reality, things really can be this much of a mess…

But reality is a pile of shit. It’s uncontrollable. The person writing the scenario at least has control over the story. You should at least reveal a clear main plotline instead of leaving me drowsy and completely lost…

Besides, reality is a tangled mess — so you have to write it as a tangled mess too? Real girls don’t have giant anime tits either… So why are there so many giant tits in games?

Have a little imagination and romanticism, okay… Of course I’m not talking about writing international espionage as a comedy.

Aside from the plot, the visuals are a real love-hate situation…

What I love: the battle CGs between the protagonist and the others are genuinely great, and cool as hell…

What I hate: what the hell is up with the female character sprites…

The BGM has no real highlights — it’s just listenable — but the OP and ED are great tracks. Ayane and Marie are as good as always. Give them a listen if you’re interested.

Actually, I originally played this game wanting over-the-top twists and confrontations, and it did give me plenty of over-the-top twists and confrontations — the kind that slap you right across the face. It made me realize what “too many twists” means, and what “too lopsided a confrontation” means.

I can forgive basically anything, but what I can’t understand is that the final boss fight ends with trash talk. Or rather, there isn’t even any trash talk — just one instant kill. Then what was the point of the braid guy beating the protagonist’s ass for so long before that? Was it… another cheat power?

Yeah yeah, I get it. In Japanese ACG works, this is already an established convention.

What kills the boss isn’t the power of justice. It’s a cheat. What saves the world isn’t a high schooler. It’s trash talk.