If however the person’s Shinin is extremely evil in someway you’ll have a chance to exorcise it in the Inner world. A Silent fight is simple, on the top screen there is a bug like creature with a health bar, on the bottom screen a blank canvas with another health bar, the bottom health bar is yours. The bug creature will make an attack gesture and a small hole will appear on your canvas, your job is to close the hole before it explodes causing you damage. There are three main types of attacks, the first is simple, when the hole turns white tap it then it’ll close. The other two involve tapping a protective cover until it cracks then cutting it repeatedly until it closes and dragging the corners open then cutting it like before. I found these mini games hectic at first as I didn’t have a clue what to do, you soon get used to it though and in fact it gets to the point where you go into the final battle confident you’ll win. I would have preferred more variety in the Silent fights especially when you’re fighting three or four an Episode.

The game itself is split up into 21 ‘Episodes’, 19 if you don’t follow the correct path in the previous few episodes. Episodes pretty much consist of; go to school, prowl the city then report back, rinse repeat. Strangely it never feels boring or routine, you never know what’s going to happen which is great as it keeps you constantly guessing what’s going to happen next and the episodic format of around an hour per episode really gives you the feeling this could be a TV show or an Anime.

Presented in a simple 2D anime style, the art is nice if a little bland and uninspired at times, the character portraits are nicely designed though they all have very jaggy edges which prevents them from looking like they’re in the environment, if anything they look like cut out pictures on a painting. The only 3D in the game is during the Silent fights the bug creature is 3D though it’s nothing to really write home about.

One major plus point to this game has to be the soundtrack, so many beautifully crafted tracks add suspense to a desperate situation or highlight the evil intentions of a character. I really can’t push how great the music in this game is, I’m just glad when you complete the game you gain access to all the tracks.

How surprised I was to find voiceovers in this game. That’s right, maybe 20% or so of the game is fully voiced over and my what a lovely job they did too, each character portrays themselves in a not too over the top manner and you can really feel the friendship between the characters in their banter, the audio shows no signs of compression though it can be a little low on the volume side. One complaint if I may, the voiceovers don’t quite match the onscreen text. It’s not too bad as the localisation makes the voiceovers a lot more understandable than the actual text written but I digress.

As said before the game is split into episodic chapters, each taking around an hour or so to complete. The game can be saved on any map screen though you can’t save during battles or while you’re having a conversation, portable? No. For the simple reason that the Silent fights require some finesse with the stylus, finesse you’re not going to get while sitting on a train.

So, you’ve spent 20 hours on the game and you’re done, what now? Well there are extra’s such as the games soundtrack as mentioned before but to me I’m going to put the game away for a while, like a good book I’ll come back to it at a later date and play through it again. It’s one of those types of games, the type you keep for a very long time. The game itself has little to no replay value though.

A very bold and interesting attempted to bring a very Japanese game to the West, though the localisation is patchy at best I think the meaning of the game still remains and it has a lot to teach us about ourselves and how we view the world around us. The soundtrack is definitely worth looking into even if the game doesn’t appeal to you. It would have gotten an 8.5 but I just cannot forgive how bad some of the English is in this game.