Baler sky is the best visual novel experience I've ever played I would put it up there as one of the best visual novels out there with the likes of steinsgate Fates day night and wonderful every day I've enjoyed almost every single part of this visual novel and it's well worth the 100 plus hours I've invested into this game balers sky is a great Deep dive into this cyberpunk world filled with ideas of self-grown autonomous AI immersive cyber spaces genetic manipulation and futuristic political Strife where with each route that you play it slowly builds into each
other creating an in-depth World setting and World plot and if that wasn't enough to turn your head it's also a fun fast action beat him up RPG as well you play as Co katakura a mercenary who gets memory loss from this most recent mission in the present time Co and his subordinate rain kishima are after a group of scientists who caused the tragedy known as great Christmas who triggered a hasus nano machine that annihilated the city where he grew up and splitting up his friends in the past we follow CO as he searches for the
truth behind the devastation of that fiful day and tries to prevent another great Christmas from happening every again the game story is split up between the present time and the past as Co begins to regain memories through flashbacks which includes key events that led up to the day of great Christmas as I said before balder sky is half anime visual novel and half an action RPG Mech beat him up game over the course of the story you'll encounter sections where you have to fight a number of enemies in order to progress with the story you
have three different Buttons used for attacks and depending on your position in regards to the enemy your attacks change if you're close to the enemy you'll do a close range attack while if you're far away from the the enemy you'll do a longrange attack these attacks can be remapped to fit whatever play style you want to execute whether it's getting up close and personal and doing physical combos or using a variety of different weapons these attacks can also be chained together to pull off ground and air combos as long as your heat gauge remains low
which can be considered your action bar melee combos are fun to execute and as you unlock more attacks in the development section you can chain these attacks together to create combos that flow into each other well there's a multitude of different combos you can do with a large list of attacks you can unlock it's fun fluid and responsive which is a big Plus in my book for these type of games along with unlocking new weapons and attacks in the development section you can unlock plugins which can change your overall gaming experience whether it's adding upgrades
to your Mech unit disabling UI game elements customizing parts of the menu and even adding Secret Story plugins however over time when the difficulty ramps up I began to notice that the weapons in the game aren't that effective against enemies who larger health bars so using melee attacks ended up becoming the main way to do damage finding an effective combo is going be important in the later fights and endgame bosses because trying to find an opening can be damn hard when the enemies start raining missiles and lasers upon you or my personal favorite comboing you
to death there's some particular enemy compositions that make me want to pull my hair out and Eisen wolves are actually the worst type of enemies even on normal difficulty the game still kicked my butt at times the shotgun and the SMG became my most used weapons in the whole game because of how useful they were to execute and Whittle down Health by the time I reached the fourth route I had a consistent combo that used all of the buttons and could take down a two Health enemy bar with a full combo in regards to the
actual visual novel experience there are six routes in the game rain nanoha chinatsu Aki Makoto and then the final true route what's great about Baler sky is that it uses the visual novel format to its Advantage as you play through each route each story builds off of each other filling in details so while major plot concept is minor in one particular route turns out to be the main focus of another route for example in one route we get to know the events of great Christmas while in another route we know about the actual Nano machine
that destroyed the city and as we progress through the story it adds up into the larger plot of Baler Sky which works really well because it feels as we the player are actually gaining these story memories along with Co and by the time we reach the very end the story leaves very little plot threads open if any and wrapping everything up in a nice little bow there are usually three different endings for each route a bad end a normal end and a true end there are some choic decision that affect which ending you get and
it's pretty easy to get the true ending if you caner basic anime plot beats example being if given a choice whether you should give up or keep going you should probably keep going other factors that go into play are the actions you take in a key fight usually if you lose the fight or run out of time but these events are very few in the story that said while the way to unlock the bad end is actually pretty easy it's the normal ending that takes a bit of effort to get to what I noticed pretty
early on is that in order to full fully clear all of the character's endings and have it registered in your save progress you need to replay that same route but choose the alternate ending all of your inventory such as plugins obtained carry over which each save this means you can't go complete one ending and then go back to a previous save file and view the alternate ending you won't get those plugins you got from completing that first ending the first time and at the very end of the game you finally unlock the ability to use
the scenario jump plug which allows you to jump between parts of the stories with all your your plugins and points so you can use this to see those endings I didn't know that so I ended up playing through the routes over and over again to unlock all of the endings this is also connected to a personal complaint with B this Sky cuz sometimes I just wanted to read the story and not do any Mech fights or have the option to skip Mech fights in general as it cuts the story pacing rain kishima is the first
heroin you meet in the game and a as our guide as we deteriorate from an experienced and skilled mercenary into a bubbling awkward high school student Cor serves as a beginning introduction into the dystopian world of Baler sky but is still a sufficient self-contained story and characterization for rain herself by the end of rain's route there's a core intrinsic moment that links both the past and the present together but having to balance both in addition to trying to understand the setting diminishes rain's own character story with all the backstory and new found technology that the
plot establishes the beginning starts off very slow and it's hard to get accustomed to everything that the story dumps on you and having Co constantly cut the flashbacks was my least favorite part of the game and yet yet ironically enough by The Game's thirdd route I was actually missing those peaceful Happy Days in the game's second route the game focuses on nanoha Dependable childhood friend and it's at this point that the Story begins to pick up it's probably one of my most favorite routes totally going all in on the childhood friend trob and childhood promises
what makes this even better is that while you have an idea of what's going on there's still details missing from the big picture which creates this great conflict of trying to figure out who to trust and wondering who's right and who's wrong especially with the antagonist of this route adding more gray motives to further complicate the situation as you can probably tell from the previous routes everyone has been affected seriously by the events of great Christmas but the person who's been affected the most was chinatsu being chinatsu is the glorified version of Everything's changed it's
been X years since this event happened and things are serious business now and Baler Sky shows us immediately when you first see her something clearly happened and after hinting it in the previous route we dive deep into it while generally you can get a large feel of the technological world that they live in chinatsu route is an instance in which the Sci-Fi elements of Baler sky has a profound effect on the character's personality her route takes his fact and goes all in tackling Chin's psychological State and her resulting actions as a whole Bal Sky addresses
the political and social aspects of these futuristic Concepts that the visual novel establishes and as we explore deeper the novel Still Remains to continuously keep the environment that the castle lives in deeply fascinating and engrossing I felt really pitiful for Tatu by everything that's happened to her and by the end I was actually really glad for her by her route's ending because being chinazi was actually suffering in this game originally when the game was first released Baler scy was actually two games dive one and dive two one of the features of the localized release of
Baler sky is that dive one and dive two are actually combined together after you finish chin out's route you get introduced the second half of the game indicated by the change in the home screen menu and the opening sequence the last three rounds are part of dive two it is an ai's route that we can start the field the story pull itself together to create the larger big picture as every route so far has been built building up CO's memories and present day information Aki is CO's second cousin who he considers as his caretaking sister
an individual who lays around all day but is actually a very capable technological programming wizard Aki is one of my favorite supporting characters from the other routes mainly because Aki Ries that sense of reassurance providing a safe haven and safe Refuge from the real world events compared to the other routes where the events of great Christmas ended up being a major plot point we focus on Co and Aki's relationship and Aki's social difficulties as an individual largely integrated with the cyberspace in order to unlock the last two routes you need to read the reminiscent section
of the game which is a full collection of Coast school life you don't really need to read this as it's the same content if you remember the flashbacks so I spend a majority of the time skipping through this section the problem here is that they threw in some new scenes that weren't initially covered by the flashbacks and so I had to keep my eye on the story from time to time to check for new stuff which I didn't appreciate Makoto is the second to last route and you probably already figured out where Makoto is in
the present day Makoto's route deals with her unique cyber illness and her relationship with her sister what Makoto says will make you think twice about what you know so far and hint at a very deeper Revelation as she has one of the biggest connections to the larger truth serving as a really good precursor to the final true route as for the true final route if you thought that the rest of the routes were pretty good the true route just takes to a whole another level accumulating everything that you know so far and spinning it in
a whole different perspective Baler Sky occasionally hints at this throughout the other rounds but not in the way that you expect the true route is the biggest departure from the natural course of events because what happens in this route is nothing like the previous one so far because at this point you are collecting all the information that you've gained up until this point all of your struggles all of your Blood Sweat and Tears just to get to this point right here at the finale of balder Sky I wrote and made this video because I truly
believe that you should play this game Baler sky is a god tier visual novel that stands out amongst all visual novels this is a visual novel that took 6 years of dedicated work to bring over and it shows I've complained about parts of the game but in retrospect it's all minor issues that don't take away from the main experience and at the end of the day it's well worth the investment to spend the 75 plus hours on this piece of work there's a lot of care put into this game from the lovingly crafted characters the
unique cyberpunk visual flare the deeply moving soundtrack The meticulously thorough vision of the world and the fun fast action gameplay it's a visual novel that I'll stand by as one of my favorite visual novels I've ever experienced