Baldr Sky Review: Just Play Virtue’s Last Reward Instead

Visual novels have evolved quite a bit over the last fifteen or so years. A lot of classic visual novels, such as CLANNAD, Steins;Gate, and Higurashi When They Cry typically consist of dozens of hours of reading, with varying amounts of choices being available to be made. It’s a bit of a contrast to many modern visual novels, which tend to be more interactive and shorter, especially those developed in the West.

Confession time: although I develop my own visual novels, I haven’t actually played a lot of the classics. It’s not that I don’t want to - I’ve heard nothing but good things about Higurashi, and I enjoyed the anime adaptation of Steins;Gate - but I’d be lying if I said that the lengthy playtimes of them weren’t more than a little intimidating. I’m an adult with a full-time job, and I only have so much time to spend on video games.

I discovered Baldr Sky through the magic of VNDB, while looking up cyberpunk stories, a genre I’m particularly fond of. Although I was wary of its length, I nevertheless was hoping that I would get an engaging and thought-provoking story to keep me entertained throughout, and if it gave me an opportunity to dip my toes into an old-school visual novel, all the better! Unfortunately, I came away regretting having spent my money and time on the game, and I’d be lying if I said that I’ll be in a hurry to play another visual novel of its era. Here are the reasons why.

Bugs

Let’s start out with some things that I think we can all agree are objectively bad: bugs. Assuming that you’re playing this in the modern day and aren’t some sort of weird time traveller, you’ll probably encounter your first issue when you launch the game and it immediately crashes. (For the record, I was playing this through Steam). Thankfully some kind souls have worked out a fix for the issue, and it does appear to be happening moreso due to Windows 11 than an issue with the game, per se, but it’s not exactly a great way to start the game. 

Once I was able to get the game launching, I was greeted with a black screen during the opening movie. Hmm. It’s easy to press a button to skip the opening movie, and as far as I’m aware there’s nothing essential in said movie, but that doesn’t mean that I like this issue, you know?

The next bug that I encountered was far, far more frustrating than the two mentioned above: at multiple points in the game, particularly towards the end of the second route, the game would crash without warning and exit to the desktop. Occasionally I would get a message about Microsoft Visual C++ Runtimes, but it wasn’t illuminating, and it didn’t seem as though the crash was due to anything that I was doing wrong.

As a result of this bug, after a certain point I was forced to resort to saving across multiple files every few minutes out of fear of losing progress. One time while doing so, the crash happened again, corrupting my save and forcing me to load one from further back than I would have liked. Naturally, this constant crashing was never anything but frustrating, and it’s probably safe to say that it won’t be patched judging by the time between the game’s initial release on Steam (2019) and the present.

Story

The primary appeal of visual novels are, of course, their stories, so let’s talk about the story of Baldr Sky. You are playing as Kou Kadokura, a soldier living in a world in which people frequently spend their time in cyberspace, complete with its own virtual reality. The countries of the world have united into a single entity, and are assisted by artificial intelligences. Kou is investigating an event called Grey Christmas, in which his then-girlfriend lost his life.

At least, he eventually remembers that he’s investigating Grey Christmas - you see, at the start of the game an attack (in cyberspace, where all of the game’s combat takes place) leaves Kou with amnesia. Thankfully, with his partner (in the “coworker” sense, although she’ll eventually become one in the romantic sense) Rain’s assistance, he’s able to get nanomachine treatment which slowly restores his memories. This is presented as the story flashing back between the past and present.

This is a good way to tell the story - flashing back to the past gives the opportunity to introduce characters and concepts organically (even if there is some fairly juvenile writing at play in these scenes), but keeping things in the present allows for the main story to progress at a steady pace and create a sense of anticipation. So, with that setup, how does the story’s pacing and execution play out?

Quite badly, to be honest. The game initially locks us into a single route - wherein we eventually end up in a relationship with Rain - and it has very few choices within that route. It’s only after we finish that route (which took me around 10 hours, although I’ve seen some people say that it took them as many as 15) that we get access to the second route. The third route isn’t opened up until the second route has been completed, and so on, until players have completed all six routes.

As a result of this storytelling structure, the game is very repetitive. We’re constantly seeing the same scenes again and again, with little benefit to it. Quite often I would find that I wasn’t able to fast-forward through a scene which I had previously viewed, as it was on a new route and thus the game treated the entire scene as though I hadn’t seen it, even though there were only a few different lines. There is the option to allow for the fast-forward option to skip unread text, but doing so can result in missing what new information is there, making neither option ideal.

While I know that this won’t be an issue for everybody, another qualm I have with this system is that the new branches open up quite arbitrarily. On the first route, Kou decides to go to the company which his aunt and cousin work at, and the story continues from there. To reach the second route, we need to replay the first route, and prior to visiting the company take the newly presented option to message ahead and let them know that we’ll be visiting. There’s no reason as to why this option is only now available, and as such the restriction of which branches we can unlock feels very arbitrary. I understand that the writers want to present information to us in the right order, but a well-written plot would be a bit more flexible about this sort of thing.

As we continually play through the different routes of the game, we gradually learn more about Kou’s past and all of the assorted groups and characters that were involved in Grey Christmas. This all culminates in the final route, where it turns out that the different branches were different experiments being observed by a collection of brains who are quantum observers and…look, I’m going to be honest: by the time I was on the final route I was pretty checked out of the story and wasn’t paying as much attention to it as I should have been. 

Call me a bad player who’s too stupid for this advanced story which can only be appreciated by intellectuals, but if the story had been more engaging and better told, I would have been much more willing to engage with it and appreciate it. As it is, throughout a good chunk of the final route a single, prevailing thought was in my mind: “Wow, Virtue’s Last Reward did the quantum branching stuff way better than this mess of sci-fi buzzwords.” I’d be lying if I said that there were no good moments throughout the previous five routes, but I simply didn’t feel that enough of it was worth it to get to the conclusion, which didn’t do a lot for me.

Romance and Sex

What little I’ve said about the actual details of the game’s story has more focused on the plot and world of the game. However, there’s another aspect of the game which I’m assuming is intended to be a selling point: romance! As is traditionally the case for visual novels, each route leads to the protagonist ending up with a different love interest, gradually learning to know about them and falling in love with them. So, how does this compare to the main story of the game?

Yeah, it’s also pretty terrible. As we play further through the routes and see more flashbacks, we eventually learn that Kou had no less than six different women crushing on him in school, one of whom is his cousin (who is also partially a clone of his mother, because it’s that sort of story). Several routes have Kou suddenly declaring that he’s in love with the girl of that route fairly abruptly, and the story treats this as sincerely as it does any other girl on any other route, which ironically makes it feel more insincere than anything.

This is already a fairly silly power fantasy (not a single one of these six women had a crush on Kou's best friend who lives with them, or each other?) but it starts to get eye-rolling inducing when we get to the sex scenes. For all of my complaints about this game, I will say that the six female love interests have up to now had unique personalities and have felt moderately well-fleshed out. All of that goes out of the window once the sex scenes start - each of them spouts out lines like “Kya! I’m so embarrassed!”, or “Don’t touch my special spot!” I understand that these scenes are intended to be erotic and not realistic, but they ultimately come across as some of the least realistic scenes in the entire story, and this is a story where people enter cyberspace to engage in mech battles. The scenes are only available through a decensoring patch, which I installed out of a mix of curiosity and wanting to see the entire story, and which I ultimately regret using.

Of the six love interests, there are also some dubious design choices - two of the six look noticeably younger than the others, and while starting up the game every time has a notice assuring us that all characters are older than 18, it nevertheless feels a little suspect, you know? A different character’s ending - the ending labelled as that character’s good ending, no less - also has them get cloned into a new body, and it’s explicitly stated that Kou and that character had intercourse before the body had finished artificially aging to the character’s chronological age. While nothing is shown of this scenario, I don’t really need to explain why it made me feel icky, do I?

Speaking of sex scenes, did you know that this story has rape scenes? I didn’t going in, and they’re quite frankly disgusting. While they can be avoided, which I was able to do, a player can’t avoid the setup of them, such as in Rain’s route when she falls into a sticky substance which holds her in place and gradually dissolves her clothes. Although the game presents the instigators as villains and the scenes as wrong, there’s nevertheless an undertone of, “But how sexy would it be to see this?”, and I honestly can’t say that I feel they actually add anything to the story beyond so-called erotic scenes.

Gameplay

Many visual novels include some type of non-reading gameplay in them to break things up a bit, and Baldr Sky’s choice of gameplay is one that I don’t believe I’ve seen in a visual novel before: fast-paced combat in the style of Devil May Cry (or perhaps a better comparison would be God Hand, as you can build your own combos here, but as I haven’t played God Hand I can’t compare the two very well). How does it play out?

Not very well, unfortunately. There are many small decisions made which gradually wear down what could have been a fun and exciting system and turn it into one in which I constantly feel as though I’m fighting with the game. For starters, there’s no way to manually change the target that you’re locked onto. What this meant for me was that I was frequently in a situation wherein I’d be attacking an enemy, get them down to a low amount of health, and then have the game lock onto a completely different enemy, leaving the first enemy alive when all that I wanted to do was finish them off. I also had plenty of times when I was hoping that the game would lock onto the enemy who was right in my face, only for it to prioritise an enemy to their side and back a bit.

Another frustrating element is the pacing of combat. The game has a meter for the heat gauge, which is essentially the opposite of Dark Souls’ stamina bar: it starts out empty, making different attacks fills it up, and once it’s full Kou can’t make another attack until it’s emptied out. The thing about Dark Souls, though, is that the combat is slower and more thoughtful than something like Devil May Cry - it’s about looking for openings and taking your time. As Baldr Sky plays more like the latter, this means that combat is a constant cycle of attacking and pausing ad nauseum, all the while receiving a barrage of attacks from a large number of enemies.

Speaking of attacking, the specific attack that you will make with a button is determined by your distance from the enemy plus the way that you’re moving. While this does make sense for long-range and short-range attacks, it means that it’s easy to press a button and expect a certain attack, only for a different one to execute instead, since you had to dash or move out of the way of an attack at the same time. I frequently felt as though I was more pressing a button and hoping that a certain move would be executed than knowing one would. The game also only lets you use each individual attack once per heat gauge build-up, so if you use the wrong move or miss, you have to wait for the heat gauge to drain before you can do it again, which is an unnecessarily restrictive choice in my opinion.

On top of those flaws, the combat is frequently a slog. The attacks that Kou makes never felt very damaging, and enemies often have much more health than he does. After a while many of the fights began to feel like padding. Multiple story beats have the player fighting enemies for several minutes, which are then followed up by a quick line such as “Damn, there’s even more of them to fight!”, before combat resumes once again for several minutes. It’s hard to feel that these moments add that much to the overall story, and I wish that there had been a way to skip combat. As it is, after a while I ended up turning the difficulty down to the easiest level simply to get through things in a reasonable manner.

The combat is probably at its best when the player is placed in a one-on-one fight against a boss, reducing the overall chaos of the combat and allowing players to focus on a single enemy, but even these have their flaws. Bosses very transparently charge their force crash meters faster than the player, allowing them to execute super moves more frequently than the player. One boss in particular was also particularly difficult, as they floated slightly above the floor, which makes most attacks miss against them. Add in the fact that bosses naturally have as much as two or three times the health of Kou, and the result is that I found the best way to defeat these bosses was to keep my distance and snipe them when in the few opportunities available to me.

Conclusion

At the start of this review, I said that I wasn’t exactly sold on this style of visual novel. The story was unnecessarily drawn out and repetitive, the sex scenes were laughable, and the gameplay needs multiple things fixed about it. Thankfully, many visual novels today avoid these pitfalls - they tend to have more tightly-written stories, provide stronger gameplay, and…well, I don’t actually know whether sex scenes in modern visual novels are any better, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are.

So, who exactly is Baldr Sky for? If you’ve played it, loved it, and disagree with all of my comments above, then the answer is obviously you, and that’s cool - I’m not going to tell anybody what they should or shouldn’t feel about something. But if you haven’t played it, then I’d only recommend it to you if you’re a teenager who can put up with a lot of reading. The sex scenes will probably be more erotic to you, the story will probably seem pretty deep, and you might be more forgiving of the gameplay. 

Looking at the general reviews for this, it seems that there are a lot of people who love this game, and while I can’t understand what they find so appealing about it, I’ve got no qualms with them liking it. For myself though? I think that I’ll stick to something a bit more modern in the future.