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Wow, they really will make a video game out of just about anything over in Japan. What is the game this time? It's "Last Alive", a "Visual Novel" related to the fairly obscure Japanese TV drama of the same name that aired on TV Tokyo back in Q1, 2000. While it featured popular idols and cast members like Yugo Ogura, Yuko Kawai, etc., it wasn't really well-received. However, the WonderSwan Color would get a game adaptation over a year later in 2001. It is similar to "Ring Infinity", "Terrors" and "Terrors 2". The game is played vertically.

Like many pure visual novels, the game has almost no interactivity or major gameplay in which to speak of. The whole point of the game is to read the dialogue while absorbing the sights, sounds, and plot. The game is broken up into different scenarios and gets progressively more perplexing as you advance.

The story is about the player character who gets an airline ticket and wedding invitation from a close friend, and based on the information, is heading to a deserted island in the South Pacific, "South Island", to rendevous at a luxury cruise liner heading to Japan from the island. Along the way, they meet various young women and high school girls gathered for various reasons (field trip, vacation, etc.) who happen to be children of Japan's leading business executives who are going to Japan on the same cruise ship as the hero. But, not immediately known to the main characters, there are various terrorists and stalkers targeting the girls.

You won't be able to really investigate the cruise ship in the first scenario (though this is the ultimate goal of the game), but you meet up with various shady characters who contribute to the story and makes the hero aware that something isn't right. When you board the luxury liner, it is soon hijacked and sails off-course from Japan, but, unbeknownst to the villains, the boat encounters turbulent weather conditions and capsizes, from which point the game becomes an aquatic horror story where you're fighting to survive and safely escape from the sinking ship while avoiding hazards and characters that would be deemed enemies.

At various points, you're presented with two or three choices that will alter your path in the game, make your path longer, or affect the overall scenes you'll view. It's kinda like the Eastern equivalent of a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, but usually with more sophisticated writing. Making a "bad decision" won't always result in the end of the story, but impact the dialogue and characters accordingly from that point forward which leads into multiple endings. To spice the "gameplay" up at certain points are "time sensitive" multiple choice segments, where brackets on the side of the screen start blue and change to an ominous red (usually very quickly), giving you little time to think or react to a situation, giving the illusion that you're actually a part of the story and have to think on your feet. A "wave" of sorts appears after certain choices which means you're heading in the right direction.

As far as the overall package... well... eh. I'm probably a little biased towards old, portable visual novels and adventure games. Up until recently, they just didn't have the storage capabilities or the hardware capabilities to be particularly sophisticated. They were either nice looking and short (as the images and/or sound took up the majority of cartridge memory) or a little longer and fugly and unless the game REALLY pushed the unit, they didn't seem to strike much of a balance. Last Alive sorta fits under the latter.

It's of a decent length for a game of its type (especially for a handheld) but is mixed in the audio/video department. The photorealism is ocassionally impressive (like the moving screens, road, some still shots, etc.) but the imagery isn't very interesting as a whole. The sound is quite muffled even by WS/WSC/SC standards but does come in and out of a scene as necessary and is inherently pleasing in and of itself. The most important part of a game like this is the writing. I don't have complete mastery of the Japanese language, but what I could discern was adequate. The game supports save-clear data and is decent, but it won't really pull you into the genre if you aren't already a fan of it.

This is a video of the South Island Prologue. Enjoy.