ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos is undoubtedly meant to be played by anime enthusiasts, especially those fascinated by the Mecha genre, themes about space, drama, and revenge. More than a VR game, ALTDEUS is a visual novel dipping its toes into a virtual reality space, a VR experience that keeps interactions to a minimum. Set in a future where humanity has been forced underground to survive, it's really easy to immerse yourself in the story and its potential, but making that story be an immersive VR experience is something that MyDearest Inc. will need to improve further.

Nonetheless, if you really enjoy anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion or Gurren Lagann without a doubt you should be giving ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos a try.

Expect a visual novel that is leaning more towards the old style point and click rather than an interactive adventure. No doubt that ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos is still an interactive story where your selections could end up changing the course of the story, but forcing a traditional visual novel style into a VR game without making big changes to the gameplay or how you can interact with a 3D space was not a wise decision, and the game does suffer for it.

If your idea of immersive storytelling is mostly sitting down and enjoying a good show in 3D, then ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos is ideal for you, but if you want to be able to walk around, explore for yourself a 3D anime world, examine NPCs up close, interact with your environment and find out what doors a VR world opened to the future of Japanese visual novels…. well, you might be very disappointed.

Creating a VR experience in a game without a doubt sounds more challenging than making a current generation console game, and everyone that has played VR for some time understands and accepts that VR games are not meant to look as nice, but there is still a certain level of expectations and unfortunately, ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos does not meet them.

ALTDEUS does have some interesting, unique, and visually pleasing characters, like the beautiful Noa or the eccentric professor Julie, and of course we can never get enough of the really cool design they went with for Anima… but the backgrounds really make them no justice and they always fall flat and empty, leaving a lot to desire. For a game meant to be played through several times to fully understand the story, you really feel enclosed in the 6 or 7 spaces all the story paths take place in. Some of the spaces indeed had the potential to be awe-worthy and memorable, but the pixelated textures, the low graphic quality, and the extremely minimalistic presence the backgrounds have in every scene really take you aback, especially if you have seen the real potential that VR world backgrounds can offer in other games.

Music in ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos is very soft, almost idle most of the time, however, when it comes to the intro or a crucial point in the story, we can hear the more passionate “ani-song” themes playing, which is what we’d expect for an anime-like game.

Knowing that Noa is an idol, we were a little disappointed not hearing her sing too much throughout the game, we’d only hear her during our missions aboard our fighting robot, the Alto Makhia, but even Noa promises her usual songs, the reason she is so popular with the people, are much better than what you hear during combat… but I guess we will never find out as Chloe doesn't seem to appreciate idol music, and much rather listen to the soft tunes her best friend Coco hummed.

Without the freedom of movement and the lack of flowing animation in the characters, the sound should have played a very important role in ALTDEUS, but it didn't. There was an attempt to make this Japanese visual novel more enjoyable for overseas players by making the story completely dubbed in English, but even the voice acting fell short, as most of the timelines will not match the emotions of the characters on-screen. The English voice acting of the main character Chloe was more or less suitable with her doll-like persona, but for a very important character, Coco Coconoe, they really did her dirty and she really does not sound like the warm ray of sunshine they meant for her to be, and that really messed up with the immersion of the story. Other characters that were often on screen sounded like your typical anime-dub, not great, not bad, just nothing special… except for the mad scientist Julie, which was on top of her great performance from beginning to end.

ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos gameplay leaves you desiring more right from the start, as it is very unusual that you can not walk or move around freely in a virtual space in a VR game. You are tied to a 360° view only moving your head and pointing at things with a laser to interact with them or investigate them. There are some times you are able to pick up key items with your hands, or “touch'' certain menus, but these interactions are very limited and the touch commands are a little hard to trigger quickly.

Something that could have been very exciting to do in the gameplay was being able to pilot a mecha robot in VR, but even this is done to the bare minimum, only being able to control the hand movements while piloting. Unless you plan to play ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos several times for the story, there are very few times you’ll be piloting your Alto Makhia. In general, the game performs poorly when it comes to movement and quick actions, often spending a lot of time on black screens just listening to the action instead of actually displaying it on screen.

The game’s most appealing point in regards to gameplay is the Libra system, a device that aids you by displaying your thoughts and desires into choices to better interact with the people around you. The Libra is what you really want to pay attention to during your adventure in this game, as selecting different choices using your Libra can potentially change the direction of the game’s story and how others perceive Chloe.

If you go into ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos with the expectations that you’re going to “play a VR game” you will be disappointed, but if you jump into it thinking that you’re going to experience a new way to be more involved in a Japanese visual novel, then you’ll have a blast. ALTDEUS is absolutely an interesting approach to the future of visual novels and we were very excited to be able to experience this new beginning.

Initially, the game is not straight forward about having more to the story than what you’re playing, and it's up to you to discover the extremely convenient use of Ariadne, a universe-like menu that lets you select and go back to a specific time in the story at any point, avoiding the need to re-play the entire game just to select a different story path. ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos gameplay can be as short as 3 hours, but taking advantage of the Ariadne can offer many more hours and several different experiences throughout the game.

ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos can only be what you make of it, but either way you want to think of it, it’s very clear that the company and the franchise still have a lot of space to grow in the VR genre and we can only expect them to surpass this title in their next VR creation. If you’ve played through the game a couple of times, or don’t mind reading the subtitles, we absolutely recommend you go for the Japanese voices, as they make the story even greater, especially if what you’re looking for is to experience in “reality” an anime world. Although it’s not necessary to understand the story of ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos, if you have time to spare, you can check out this game’s prequel, titled Tokyo Chronos, and see how far MyDearest Inc. has come in its journey of incorporating Japanese visual novels to the VR genre.