Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus Review
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, 02-20-2015 at 04:00 PM (58343 Views)
The "Hate" series, consisting of Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus, was written by Christine Love. Both games are very similar in format and plot and have a quite unique way of telling its story.
Analogue: A Hate Story
Analogue: A Hate Story is set in a distant future where Earth is far from being the only place where humans live. The protagonist seems to be a bit of a Space Cowboy, doing investigation missions for random sponsors for a living. One such mission is described in Analogue.
The setup is as follows:
Honestly I found the beginning to be rather rocky. It was difficult to get into at first because the screenshot above is all the introduction you get and then you're left on your own to investigate with the ship's AIs, going through log files of people you've never even heard of.
Soon enough that problem solved itself though and once you're past the initial stage of not knowing what's going on it's smooth sailing from there.
Meet your first AI partner, *Hyun-ae. She helps you wade through the ship's log files one at a time and unlocks new related ones as you read them. You can also change her outfit which can be quite funny.
As it turns out the Mugunghwa had quite a... traditional patriarchal culture, wherein women are expected to fulfill a typical "wife's role", being married by arrangement at a young age and only supposed to support their husband and have children thereafter.
At some point, a certain someone turned off the ship's life support system, causing all its inhabitants to die.
Finding out what caused this also requires the help of a second AI called *Mute, who - contrary to *Hyun-ae, who has a mindset similar to ours - approves of the ship's culture. With her help, the "who" is quickly discovered, although if you want to figure out the "why" you will need *Hyun-ae's help once more.
I quite enjoyed how you can go through all the log files with both *Hyun-ae and *Mute and gain different perspectives through talking to them. While *Mute hardly convinced me of the upsides of such a gender-role-enforcing culture, I appreciated the insight. Both AIs are quite likeable in their own way, which is great.
There are a lot of intense and shocking messages.
Eventually you can download all the log files you have, and possibly your AI partner as well, ending the game. There is also a 'Harem' ending where you leave with both AIs in tow. This is by far the most satisfying of the endings, and not because it has a harem. Finding it without help can be potentially quite difficult, but I won't spoil it for those that do enjoy looking for it.
So much for Analogue: A Hate Story.
Hate Plus
Hate Plus is a direct sequel to Analogue, taking place just after the prior mission, on the three-day return trip back to Earth. You can load a cleared save file from Analogue, importing your own gender, accompanying AI partner and relationship towards them, or start out fresh with whatever you want.
It's cleverly implemented as an interview from your sponsors, too.
So what happens during these three days? Well your AI partner discovers old hidden log files within themselves from before the Mugunghwa's system wipe which happened around 300 years before the disaster that killed everyone. That system wipe was when the Mugunghwa returned to the patriarchal culture we know from Analogue, and it also caused the year count to start over from 0. And so you start extracting those to solve the mystery of just what happened back then.
It seems that back then while the society was not misogynistic, or at least not nearly as much as in Analogue, it was run by a council of nobles forming a bit of a monarchy. Democracy is frowned upon by the council, including *Mute, who was a very different person before the system wipe and worked as Councillor of Security with over 1600 years of experience.
Old *Mute is badass.
I very much enjoyed the story of Hate Plus. Seeing the established principles fall in favor of the reprehensible misogyny that we know to inevitably follow was both interesting and thrilling. The writing is as such that very few characters end up being painted black or white, and *Mute, who I didn't care much for in Analogue, ended up being one of my favorite characters of the Hate series.
Unfortunately Hate Plus has this awful habit of being annoying as hell to read. Starting with this:
You get about a third of the log files per day, but once you complete Day 1 or 2, you are forced to take a 12-hour-break as the game will not let you continue.
My kneejerk reaction to this you can see here. In all honesty it didn't affect my enjoyment of Hate Plus all that much overall, but it's still bulltrout and should not have been in this game. I am a fast reader, or so I've been told, and I would have enjoyed this novel far more if I had been left to my own pace. Forcing a particular pace onto the reader can (and for me, did) backfire hard.
As far as I've heard, hovering over a save file and pressing "S" skips the waiting time, although you miss out on the achievement for diligently waiting through all the 12-hour waiting times over three playthroughs doing so. Sure would've liked to have known this beforehand.
Hate Plus also tries to make you bake a cake. In *Hyun-ae's route, she gives you an honest-to-god real cake recipe and wants you to make it. There's even an achievement for taking a picture of the cake and sending it to the developer.
This was immersion-breaking for me because the only way out of this is to tell *Hyun-ae that she doesn't deserve to be happy. I would not have said this to her otherwise, but for god's sake game, you're not getting me to make that cake. Hell, I probably would have done it for completion's sake, but if you're a completionist I've got some bad news for you.
One of the achievements in this game is literally impossible to get. Not even kidding. It can't be done. At least for all intents and purposes. There's no conclusive statement that the achievement in question is, in fact, a red herring, but no one has found it thus far and believe me, people have tried. It's impossible to get.
With all that out of the way however, I really enjoyed Hate Plus. It was very well-written and the game plays out quite differently depending on which AI you pick, which I liked a lot. It was more engaging that Analogue and its almost complete non-linearity worked astoundingly well.
Overall
The Hate series is a great pair of short visual novels that I'd very much recommend to anyone who likes Christine Love's other novels. It has an interesting setting and while the format can be annoying at times, it does do well to help immersion. I also quite like the series' sense of humor. That Steins;Gate and Ema Skye reference
The soundtrack is pretty good, in both games. While there aren't many standout tracks, they sure worked great in context of the story.
I personally give Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus a combined score of
7.5 / 10
I liked Hate Plus more than Analogue, but they are both well worth reading, and with their availability on Steam they're easy to pick up.