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Okay, I've had words about this for a while so now I'm gonna post 'em.

Let's Talk About 774 Deaths



This game is shit. This game is fucking garbage. I hate this game.

First things first though -



This cute little dog runs along before the title screen. I don't know what he's from or what he's supposed to mean, but I like dogs. So this is okay.

Back to the main menu though, pressing start game takes you to the first room:



The two weird shapes are shortcut wells. Once you hit the halfway point and, I'm assuming the last room, you can unlock these shortcut wells to get back to where you were. Going out the door at the bottom returns you to the main menu, the door at the top takes you to the next room.

To move in the overworld you need to swipe to take a step in the direction that you swiped. It is a really clumsy way to move around.



The NPC statues you can find in each room can be interacted with in so far that they change the appearance of your character. As far as I can tell this is purely aesthetic and has zero effect on the game.



Here's the first room of the game. Each grave is a small game to play. They're usually gray to start with, to indicate the game hasn't been cleared, but I've played a little bit so I've got a few white headstones to mark that I've beaten that game.



Each sign just has the number of the game. Walking up to the headstone and tapping it starts the actual gameplay.



110 deaths is about as far as I'd gotten by actually trying to clear this piece of shit game before I realized it was bullshit and gave up, but I'll get to that in a second. Let's talk about the types of games there are first.



The first one is the same basic platformer we see in Nanashi no Game: Me, except as you can see the buttons are drawn onto the screen. They are small, and once your fingers are on them you cannot see them anymore. You can very, very easily lose track of where they are and miss the button entirely. They also do not handle rapid input well, like if you need to jump multiple times quickly.



Like in the very first fucking game for example.



The next game type requires you to turn your phone vertical.



This game type is a fucking appalling mess. Basically your character falls at a set speed, and you need to rotate your phone side to side to navigate around a death obstacle course. The further to the side you rotate the phone, the faster the character moves to the side. It's an incredibly imprecise way to control anything on this fucking earth and of course the mazes are based entirely around precision and memorizing where the bullshit kills come from.



Here's the next room of games and the next random character model we can be. Each room opens up after you've cleared... I think it's half of the games in the previous room? I've managed to clear a few rooms through sheer self loathing.



The third game type is an endless runner, where your character is constantly running to the right and you need to tap to make them jump over obstacles. This game type, in particular, is fifty kinds of stupid bullshit, and why is a little hard to explain.

Primarily, every game type has fucked up garbage physics that are wildly inconsistent between runs. You can do the exact same series of inputs five times in a row and get incredibly different outcomes every time. Rather than just needing to jump over obstacles in the endless runner stages, they require you to manipulate the physics to make jumps that are otherwise impossible. The game will put a single block you leave the character against, pushing them back toward the left side of the screen (you die if the left side actually reaches your character). Jumping over this block will then cause your character to increase in speed very very slightly, in a weird effort to gradually rubberband them back to the center where the character is meant to be. This is not an obvious feature or even meant to be something the player is supposed to notice, I think, but nearly every endless runner stage in the game uses this fucked up physics manipulation as the crux of its design.



The final game type is literally the dumbest shit possible. Remember those little metal ball mazes you could get for like a dollar as a kid? You rotate the plastic maze around and navigate the ball through it and it's not fun at all? It's that, except with your shit character and an impossibly tight time limit.



Some of them, like this one, are rather linear. You just need to tilt the phone to slide the character away from the blades through a linear maze. Some of them, however, are very complex mazes that you have to memorize and slam through as fast as possible to beat the time limit.



I could go on and on about how awful the gameplay is in this. The controls are inconsistent, the physics are non-existent. The precision it demands for such miserable control is just stupid.

You will die from being near a blade, thinking about a blade, saying the word blade out loud. The hitboxes on these things are stupid and murder you with no warning, even when you are not anywhere near them:







Playing this game is a living misery. BUT.

Zamujasa" post="441875410 posted:

As far as I know the only thing the counter does is give you an achievement at 774 deaths in, well, 774 DEATHS. You'll also note the subtle humor in the fact it isn't counting lives, it's counting, well. You'll see when he dies.


THIS POST. This post intrigued me. What the hell happens when I actually die 774 times? Also, while we're on this subject, where did the 774 number come from? "Nanashi" can sort of be 7 and 4 near each other, but it is more likely to be read as the "seven deaths" pun rather than the two numbers. Even still, where did that extra 7 come from? What the hell am I missing here.



Anyway. I picked a level where you die pretty much the instant you spawn, set the phone on my desk, and drummed my fingers on it while I watched a movie. Touching the game when you die resets it, so I just didn't bother looking at it for an hour or two.



Oh man what's gonna happen, what clever joke did Zamujasa reference, I just gotta know !!



!!!



....

Nothing happened. I'm actually up to about 1000 deaths now, nothing at all has happened.



Maybe it unlocked an achievement, you're thinking. It has an achievements button right there. (As an aside, if you click "view the latest information" it takes you to a weird Square Enix site which has literally no information about the Nanashi IP, so. Whatever.)



The achievements for this game are pretty bare bones. Achievements for unlocking each room and clearing each room, but nothing seems to have unlocked for getting the titular number of deaths. Well, let's go back to the game then.



.....



Yeah looking at the achievements actually breaks the entire game and you have to force close it to reset the aspect ratio.



Also just one last aside that for some reason this is the only app I've ever seen that doesn't show a frozen state on the app management screen. Usually there's supposed to be like a small thumbnail of whatever application there, but instead it's just a transparent gray box?

So, just to really depress the hell out of you if you're a fan of the Nanashi IP, Japan actually had a proper Nameless App released back a few years ago. It cost a whopping $10, but it looks like it was AMAZING. You can read about it here and on a few other scattered sites as well. The app actually had an imitation of the android homescreen that you would run the actual "cursed" game within. As you played, it would propagate a twitter application with fake tweets from other people playing the game and dying. It had an email application where you could receive haunted emails, and it looks like you'd even get fucked up ghost phone calls??? There is a haunted camera you needed to take spooky pictures with too. The RPG section even looks like it did have some sort of interesting narrative.

As you can guess a $10 game didn't fare so well on the mobile market, so Square Enix pulled the entire thing down and replaced it with 774 Deaths. It's a really sad end for a super great IP. I hope they end up doing something more with it cause damn this sucks.