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Such a sad, unlucky girl...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 06, 2008
Author: Amazon User

What an oddity 'Rule of Rose' is! Why would anyone choose to play a game in which the main character is a nervous, awkward teenage girl and the story the game tells could best be described as disturbing? And yet, there's lots of good answers to this question. How about, just for starters: beautiful graphics, unique gameplay, and a compelling and rich plotline?

The graphics of 'Rule of Rose' are one of the things that sold me on the game almost immediately. Just watch the game's opening trailer to get a taste of what you'll see -- visually lush and beautiful animations, expressive characters, and a style perfectly suited to the game's story. Like the 'Silent Hill' series, 'Rule of Rose' takes a simple real-world environment and wraps it in darkness and just a slight tinge of surrealism to keep you off-guard. As gorgeous as the backdrop is, the creatures and dark edges of the story are rendered just as lovingly, products of a twisted imagination. In some scenes, sun streams through huge windows and bathes the world in a golden glow, while later the same windows are darkened except for occasional flashes of lightning, illuminating shuffling figures and featureless masks for faces. The visual style of 'Rule of Rose' is breathtaking, both terrible and beautiful.

Playing through 'Rule of Rose' can be frustrating at times. Jennifer, the main character of the game, is awkward, kind of slow, and clumsy with weapons. She is no fighter and is easily overpowered. This makes sense for the way the game's story is told, but can still make the experience difficult sometimes. This is more than offset, though, by the added dynamic of Jennifer's faithful friend, Brown the dog. Once you find and befriend him (early on in the game), Brown becomes your indispensible companion. He will help you find everything from restorative items (scones and lollipops for Jennifer, bacon and bones for Brown) to the next item needed to progress the story (everything from keys to teddy bears) and more. Brown also helps Jennifer in combat by frightening some enemies and giving Jennifer a better chance to strike or run away. Jennifer by herself may have made for a somewhat weak and frustrating experience overall, but playing 'Rule of Rose' with Jennifer and Brown is considerably more interesting.

Which all leads to the story. Told mainly through a series of crudely-drawn storybooks Jennifer finds and assembles along the way, 'Rule of Rose' is like a modern-day Grimm's fairytale gone horribly wrong. Thematically, the nearest comparison I can think of is William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies,' as 'Rule of Rose' is another story is which children are left to discover a society all of their own making (the mysterious Aristocrats of the Red Crayon), and the result is seldom pretty to look at. The children in 'Rule of Rose' are cruel and malicious to one another, as conniving and manipulative as any adults, and as selfish. Even so, 'Rule of Rose' is hard to turn away from, once begun. The storybook motif and the way the stories translate to Jennifer's reality are compelling, and in their own twisted way, beautiful too. Discovering the fate of the Aristocrats and the identity of the mysterious Stray Dog kept me playing to the bitter end.

Add in a surprisingly touching music score by Yutaka Minobe, consisting mainly of string arrangements that are positively haunting, and chillingly effective voice acting for each character, and 'Rule of Rose' comes together as an occasionally frustrating but overall compelling game.

Mind you, 'Rule of Rose' is not for everyone. The story features cruel behavior among children, and hints at physical and sexual abuse and cruelty to animals. There is very little that is overtly shown, but the undercurrent of dread and the implications of the story will frighten some and downright offend others. On the other end of the spectrum, those who like action games packed with blood and mayhem are likely to be disappointed by the slow pace of the story and the limited combat moves of the the teenage heroine. For those, however, who can appreciate a dark fairy tale, who can see beauty even in terror, who believe that even the story of a sad, unlucky, lonely girl has merit, 'Rule of Rose' is a game well worth the playing.

Worth your time if...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Rule of Rose is a great game if you are into symbolism. The combat is very limited and is not the mail focus of the game (as made clear by the poor choice of weapons). You are given items such as a fork and small knife to fight initially, so really you are merely meant to explore and survive rather than track down monsters and be a slayer (except of course during boss battles).
What's great about this game is the mystery. Each level is separated into two parts basically: exploration time and escape/fight time. During exploration time, little to no monsters are present and your character is free to check all of the accessible rooms and read clues as to what is going on. It's very hard to get lost and its usually pretty obvious what you have to do, thanks to Brown -the dog.
If you play through it once, you probably will not understand everything that happened (especially if you achieve the game over ending).
What I liked most about this game was reading about the children and analyzing them and Jennifer. The complex characters and mystery of just what is going on makes this game great.
To put simply what I should have started out saying, if you're into a lot of action and killing, this may not be your type of game. If you prefer to run from monsters and focus on plot and characters (and you don't mind lesbians, cruelty and animal violence) then this game you may find suitable for your taste.
The game's theme of the cruelty of children from an adult's perspective is really rather thought provoking and just plain awesome.

There are many better survival horror/adventures out there...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

First of all, I don't see the controversy in this game that everyone was talking about. It's disgusting yes, it may make you cringe, but not in a way other survival horror games do since all the freaky moments in this game involve being poked in the face by rats tied to sticks. Oh boy! Sign me up!

Just kidding. While that's reason enough to move on to many of the better survival horror games out there (Silent Hill and Siren are great), the controls in this game are utterly useless, since there is no gameplay whatsoever. You spend half of each level encountering no monsters, just running around telling a dog to find stuff, and that's worse than you think. You'll find an item that has no use but so that the dog will smell it and find another item that has no use, and so on and so on, until you finally find a healing item that will heal about 3% of your health bar. Oh happy day when you find that reclusive item.

And you'll need it because the boss battles are out of hand. And any of the monsters basically. This is one where you fight only if necessary, because if you want to stand in a room and fight the main character just closes her eyes and blindly stabs while 10 monsters overtake her. The boss battles are incredibly one sided, as they require you to dole out 50+ hits while dodging. attacks that will take huge chunks out of your life bar, and are almost unavoidable.

I'm not going to say that Rule of Rose is one of the worst games I've ever played, but it is slow, boring, and has a difficulty that will drive even the most hardened adventure and survival horror players like myself away from it. If you can keep from breaking your controller in disgust of the game over screen, and keep from falling asleep during the cutscenes (I literally did so twice), then you might be able to withstand Rule of Rose. I just hope you don't pay $30 like I did.

Should Have Been a Movie...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: April 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I admit, I haven't played a lot of survival horror. I rented this game because I thought it would be a good intro to the genre without the need to worry about twitch shooting and ammo counts. Plus, the story sounded interesting.

Things didn't turn out that way. The game is SLOOOOWWWW. Action? What action? You spend your time running around through the same areas, looking for items. Sometimes you end up in combat. Mostly you run around.

I use the word "run" loosely, since Jennifer does not seem capable of fast movement. Imagine running with your legs tied together - that's her speed. (To add insult to injury, if you make her move too much, she bends over and pants once you stop her...)

On the other hand, graphics and audio are very well done.

Animal Abuse Hell

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 12
Date: March 01, 2008
Author: Amazon User

If you love animals stay away. Brilliant in many area horrendous in others the ending does not allow for anything but anger and misery IMO

A good horror game , but not for slasher fans.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 18, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is pretty addictive. If you can play horror games without throwing the remote and screaming, you'll really like this game. But while it's compared to Resident Evil, it's more like Silent Hill in the fact that the monsters come at certain times, and that there are a lot of mysteries to solve. The clues and mysteries take up the majority of the game. This game isn't for slasher fans. Her weapons are small, and the main character has bad aim, so be prepared to run. It's a good title if you like the clock tower series. It's really about the creepy-factor of the story, and not about the gore. It's supposed to be creepy, and not SCARY!! PS you get a dog as a companion and it makes the game a lot of fun.

Creepy fun

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 11, 2008
Author: Amazon User

The game is enjoyable in a fun/creepy way. The combination of masochistic children and a deeper chilling backstory makes for an engaging if sometimes puzzling time. Actually I found there were quite a few humorous moments as well.

The one major drawback, I felt, was that as the game progresses, so do combat sequences, in which the game does not excel. The controls are for combat are clunky and imprecise. This tended to get frustrating more than challenging.

Overall, I enjoyed the odd game for its idiocyncracies- I've never played another like it, but I admit it did drag on a bit and required lots of hunting each chapter/quest for items and clues over the same ground as previous ones.

Great Game for Horror Fantics

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 30, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game is a great game... Especially if you like twisty storylines and freaky horror.
The movies are awesome, i totally palyed this game for the storyline, which is confusing, but amazing if you look up every detail.
The fights are a little bit hard to control, but you don't have to fight all of the enemies, only boss fights.

Graphics are the only thing to look forward to.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: January 17, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game had little to no story line and a defective battle system. The main character was easily killed and the endings were poor and did not help explain the story at all. This should be a rental only. You should not buy this game. It is a waste of money.

Clunky to handle but still arouses interest

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: January 02, 2008
Author: Amazon User

"Rule of Rose" is an adventure game that I suppose falls into the survival horror genre, but on a very gentle scale. It plays a bit like a sanitized "Silent Hill" crossed with "Haunting Ground", with notable visual comparisons with the former, especially in the game's locations, enemies and general bewildering ambience. That's not to say it's as good as "Silent Hill", in fact in some respects it's quite a let down, but you could have some fun playing it if the story intrigues you. Hopefully it will, because the gameplay is a bit lacking

The plot involves a young girl named Jennifer who finds herself stranded at a spooky orphanage where a group of children who have named themselves The Aristocrats seem to be in charge. These children set Jennifer a series of trials and it's these that form the main stages of game play. Working almost entirely without explanation or motive, you must carry out the children's requests to find missing toys or dead birds to complete each level. Along the way you meet creepy enemies and occasionally the children play tricks on you just for the fun of it. That's about it for the plot, you'll have to play the game yourself to try and make sense of the situation and see if you can get Jennifer out of it. Playing "Rule of Rose" is not that difficult but you'll find out early on that there is little explanation about what is happening to you. As the game starts, Jennifer wanders around the orphanage being generally menaced for a while and then at an allotted moment she falls unconscious and wakes up on board a giant flying airship (!) with the same band of children once again in control of everything. She finds a dog called Brown cruelly tied up and hanging from the ceiling, which she frees, and then girl and dog form a team for the rest of the game, searching for various clues and objects (by getting Brown to find them with his sense of smell) and dodging or fighting with an assortment of bizarre enemies. All the time, the children of the Aristocrat club will tease, trick and punish you whenever they feel like it.

The game does a good job at creating an unsettling landscape for you to play in, with creepy children's scrawls covering many walls of the orphanage and airship, and lots of torn up toys, caged animals and general dereliction everywhere. Had the gameplay been more involving, "Rule of Rose" could have been a reasonable success, but sadly the experience is let down by several major factors. Firstly, the action is dull, dull, DULL! There are only two things you have to do for the majority of the game. By far the least involving is the "Find" feature in which Jennifer let's Brown have a sniff of an item in her inventory and then follows him as he picks up the scent of something and trots off to follow the trail to it's end. Now this feature is used A LOT, which is a real drawback as it's pretty boring to do, just following a dog around through room after room and picking up items that he discovers is the way to finish nearly all of the trials that Jennifer is set, and some of the Find quests become chains, as one found item leads to another, and then another, with nothing else going on in between. Brown is quite cute but he takes no effort to control and he always finds what you set him to find and never misbehaves, so he's a lot less interesting than Hewie the dog in "Haunting Ground" (which this game resembles a lot) was.

The other thing you spend time doing is dealing with the game's enemies. Now let me say that the monsters in "Rule of Rose" are pretty good. Starting off as short, impish mannikin type things (very "Silent Hill"), they progress into wearing animal masks (getting fatter when wearing pig heads), and even donning huge conical head-dresses as pecking birds. The game also gives you a fun collection of weapons such as cutlery and hardware tools, which get better and sharper as the game progresses. Now this would all be great if only you had a playable character who knew what to do with them. But in this game I'm afraid you don't, and this is the other major pitfall of the entire experience. The main character of Jennifer has to be one of the soppiest, weakest, most irritatingly feeble creations I have ever played. She spends the entirety of the game whimpering and crying at everything, whether in cut scenes or actual gameplay, and it gets old REALLY fast. Any normal person would tire pretty quickly of the ridiculous ordeals the Aristocrat Club dish out, yet Jennifer never once challenges any of the children who torment her (she looks older than all of them put together, for crying out loud, and she's certainly a lot taller and bigger than all of them, yet she meekly submits to every demand they make). The game goes to some lengths to impress on us that Jennifer is timid and weak by design, but where's the fun in that for the player? And when it comes to facing monsters you'll need to move all breakable objects out of harms way as the controls for combat are awful and you are liable to want to smash something in frustration. The response time for pressing the commands is way too slow to accurately plan your blows or dodge, and the recovery time when Jennifer is knocked to the floor (which she is nearly all the time) is horrendous, seemingly set so that the time it takes for her to stand up is the time it takes the enemy to have another swing at her, which often left me in an endless loop of being floored, sloo-oowly getting up, only to be straight down again before the command to be able to make her run out of the way of the next blow could kick in. The camera angles and general directional controls are also flawed. The camera is automatic and will revolve to suit itself as Jennifer runs, which means that you have to change the direction of the analogue stick even if Jennifer is running in a straight line, just because the camera angle has changed from facing one way to another. So imagine what that's like in a small room where the camera waves around wildly as Jennifer runs to dodge the various monsters ...you'll be running in circles or hitting walls - or dead - in no time.

Now I will relent slightly here and say that the hard combat in the game does at least give you some challenge to stick your teeth into, but it seems poorly balanced. A fight between a slick and agile character and a strong and lightning fast enemy is a much more exciting challenge than a weak and hard to control character fighting against a weak and not very threatening enemy, so I still think it's poorly designed. Which is a shame, as throwing Jennifer into a room with upwards of 6 or 7 enemies, plus some quite old school bosses (the mermaid princess was fun) could have been much more entertaining than it currently is.

Apart from the combat though, the game is pretty easy and therefore, it can get boring especially when all you are doing is running through rooms after Brown while he sniffs out key items. There are only two locations in the game, and the environments are pretty repetitive The orphanage looks pretty similar throughout and although it's small I still got lost all the time, but the airship is huge and has endless passageways and gantries, including several remotely situated engine rooms that you never need to go for anything so I wondered what the point of them was - and some infuriating cabin areas filled with multiple doors that are never unlocked. Oh yes and on that topic, the game arbitrarily locks and unlocks various doors as levels progress, which is very annoying, because you can never commit to memory which areas are accessible and which are off limits if they change all the time. What I also found annoying was the miserable maps which were very hard to decypher, and the game's annoying habit of glitching frequently between game-play and cutscenes, flashing up incorrect subtitles on several occasions and dropping music and audio in all the wrong places - this is something that should have been tested more thoroughly.

The game's strengths are its twisted take on childish pranks, with some quite sinister overtones in places ( a small number of scenes verge on being pretty sadistic), and an overall sense of the bizarre. Don't expect to understand the plot too clearly, even at the end of the game I was still a bit confused. And there are some great illustrations in the books that Jennifer in each stage, all done in childlike scrawl but showing highly violent scenes like goats being disembowelled or people getting buried alive, which adds to the atmosphere! And if you like chasing Brown, you can spend an awful lot of your time just searching for rare items that he can sniff out, with a few bonus treasures to be found for subsequent playthroughs. But as general gameplay goes, all this dog-following gets very tiresome, and adding that to the sappiest main character I have ever played makes "Rule of Rose" a game that you might go off playing after a few hours.

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