Divi-Dead

A Review

by Mighty Doom

What’s funnier than Joe Don Baker fat jokes and more disturbing than a threesome between Dave Thomas, Jon Voight and Farscape’s Scorpius? You got it – hentai games, easily found for download by entering “juegos hentai” in Google.  You’ll note there’s a strict formula to which every last one of these games adhere.  It involves, among other things, repeatedly visiting various locations until something finally happens, shooting the breeze with various psychotic anime women, and engaging in conversations that take about ten minutes to click through because the characters, being Japanese, take at least that long to get to the subject at hand.  The Japanese have talking about absolutely nothing for extended periods of time down to an art form.  It’s like Sex and the City, only with less porn and fewer failed attempts to be edgy and hilarious.

            One H-game in particular, however, stands head and shoulders (and tentacles) above the rest.  This game is Divi-Dead.  I first encountered this gem within the hallowed pages of Zany Video Game Quotes (zanyvg.overclocked.org) and, several weeks later, discovered a chopped-up rip of the CD on a dubious Spanish website.  This took a while to download – the game is about twenty or thirty times larger than any other rip on the site, upwards of 120MB.  But my perseverance paid off, and now I can say with pride that I have played a game in which one man calls another a “fart-blasting scrotum.”

            Divi-Dead does have some things going for it.  The artwork is of surprisingly high quality, the character design is quite good and the scenery is suitably foreboding.  There is a plot here as well, and a fairly complex one at that – but you’ll be hard pressed to dig through the broken English to find it.  The main character, Ranmaru, is a generally prickish teen who, following his recovery from a sickness with which he’s been afflicted for most of his life, is enrolled at a bizarre high school isolated in a mountainous region of the Japanese countryside and run by his uncle, who wants him to snort out…uh, sniff out rumors of drug abuse on campus.

            Ranmaru meets a variety of unlikable, neurotic students, including the constantly vomiting and ill-tempered Nishizaki, the prerequisite weird little androgynous kid Yuta, and Azusa, a girl with whom Ranmaru may (GASP!) have some unremembered connection from his pre-catatonic childhood.  Ranmaru, being a jackass, shuns his new acquaintances, including that fart-blasting scrotum extraordinaire, THE GYM TEACHER.  By “shuns,” I mean, of course, “says a lot of things that are supposed to be insulting but make no fucking sense.” When Nishizaki emerges from behind the campus restrooms, for example, Ranmaru cracks, “From behind the public restroom comes a guy that might as well be a financial advisor.” Oh, man! BURN! Eventually Ranmaru gets around to providing the school nurse and librarian with the deep dicking they so obviously require.

            The plot subsequently becomes fairly incomprehensible, involving an incense club that’s spreading around a hallucinogenic scent, the descendants of a local family of magi, a demon girl who lives in a mansion in the woods and, best of all, EXPLODING HEADS the likes of which mere mortals have not seen since Scanners.  We all know violence is fun, and here we’ve got it in spades – head-crushing, schoolgirl-shredding, mass disembowelment and Grandpa’s favorite, the BLOODY CHANDELIER MESS.

            If you’re not immediately knocked out of your socks by the constant repetitive Xtreme wandering from one campus facility to another just so you can see a fucking cat that will open up another random location for no apparent reason, there’s always hot, erotic dialogue like “Aaaah! Shove your eggplant in me, Ranmaru! Shove it up to my ribcage!” and “I’m blasting!” How the hell can you beat the raw entertainment power of a game in which the main character foils a demonic attacker by squirting mustard from the school cafeteria all over him? Tell you what, buddy, it’s pretty damn hard to do.

DOOM’S FINAL JUDGMENT: B-

The Good: Nice high-res artwork, character design, scenery, etc.

The Bad: You don’t so much play this game as throw darts at the school map you’re given and hope one of them will hit something interesting.

The Ugly: Metal pole to the head.  Motherfucking OUCH.