By Nate

In a collaboration between Aksys Games and Idea Factory, a truth seeking, Visual Novel has been brought from Japan over to North America and Europe.

Collar X Malice is a visual novel game with lots of choices and decisions that impact your story. It takes a while for the game to get interesting, but the game does deliver when it needs to. This visual novel takes place in the city of Shinjuku. A shadowy organization puts fear and despair into the hearts of the city’s citizens. In the brink of all of this chaos, you take over as a female officer.

As you wouldn’t think that things could get worse, they do. As you try to restore order in the city, you are attacked by a mysterious group. They put a poisonous collar around your neck. You need to watch what choices you make throughout the rest of the game because if you don’t, you could end up sleeping with the fish. However, all is not hopeless. With the help of five ominous strangers and fellow confused cop buddies aiding you, you must figure the truth behind all of the attacks and your collar. With Shinjuku on the verge of oblivion, you must solve these mysteries.

This plot is actually quite good, but it isn’t always presented in the most interesting way. I often found myself quite bored. The choices you make at crime scenes and what you say to people prove to be quite important as they can easily change your fate. I also enjoy that the game has many endings so not everyone’s experience will be the same as another’s.

The graphics for Collar X Malice are decent. During some of the special events, they will look quite awesome; however, during just normal scenes, the colors are very brown and boring.

One very nice highlight of the game is the voice acting and music. The voice actors sound good. Some of the mysterious people in the game will have a weird chipmunk voice which isn’t that scary, but it does leave one intrigued. The music sounds great, but only one piece of music from this stuck out to me because it sounded as if it came straight out of Persona 5.

Overall, the game is a decent Visual Novel with good music and voice acting. The story can be boring at times, but it does give you moments of satisfaction.

7/10 – A good visual novel game. Definitely worth picking up if you need a game for your Playstation Vita or find it on sale.