Bad End Theater is Cute, Clever, Funny, and Amazing!

Welcome back my weebs and otakus, it's Otakunofuji with another game video. Today I want to talk about Bad End Theater, a (very) short story visual novel style game where your choices lead to more than 40 bad endings for the four characters involved. The art style is great, the writing is entertaining, and the puzzle-like way you manipulate the characters' behaviors to get different endings is pretty brilliant. For just $10 it is truly incredible. 

Bad End Theater is a fantasy tale featuring a hero, a maiden, a demon underling, and the demon overlord herself. The basic gist of the story is that the maiden goes missing and the hero goes to the demon castle to find her. Depending on who you choose to play as you get different perspectives on the same events. And depending on the choices you make at key points in the story, the events can change. All roads lead to bad endings, though, no matter what you do. 

What makes it all the more interesting is that by making different decisions and acquiring new bad endings, you unlock personality traits for the characters that change how they interact with each other. For example, the demon underling is hungry and immediately gobbles up the maiden when they first meet. But if you turn off his "hungry" trait, he won't eat the maiden on the next playthrough and she'll actually get to the demon castle. Or another example is the demon overlord won't give the demon underling a day off, which sets off one series of events, but if you turn off her "tyrant" trait the next time, she'll give the underling time off which sets off a whole new scenario. 

Each character has 4 personality traits to turn on and off, and using different combinations of them in addition to making different choices at various points of the story results in more than 40 different potential bad endings. Some of the endings are fairly obvious on how to get to, but some of them take some critical thinking to figure out what combination of choices you need. It's like a puzzle game. A puzzle game where everyone always dies at the end. 

The key to all of this is that the story is really, really, really short. Like, five minutes max for the longest and most convoluted routes and all of that time is just spent reading text. If you skip through it you can pound out routes in closer to thirty seconds each. But the writing is pretty clever so you really should be reading it, at least when you get to new stuff. 

Being able to die and retry so quickly makes the whole experience really addictive and fun because you're only ever a couple clicks away from getting back to the same branching path so you can make different choices. The different routes can take some surprising twists, too, so you just keep coming back for more and more. 

I have to say, I really loved Bad End Theater. It took me a little over 3 hours to see all of the endings and get all of the achievements on Xbox, and I had a great time with it. The gameplay is clever, the story is fun, the characters are cute, the music is catchy - for just $10 it's pretty much perfect. I highly, highly recommend it.