Or “Chäos;HEAd” if you prefer. Just started this game today, lets see what I’ve uncovered.

Nitroplus games are like bipolar people. For the most part they are dark eroge, but sometimes they are relatively light-hearted (though Saya no Uta was 100% dark). Chaos;Head (which is by both Nitro+ and 5pb) can almost be seen as a parody of that.

Characters

For those who remember the Chaos;Head anime. You may remember the pathetic otaku 2D obsessed protagonist that was Nichijou Takumi.

But know THIS! In the game Takumi is…….exactly the same. Only you get to see him from a more interesting angle that makes him seem alittle less pathetic.

Voice acting is solid. Yoshino Hiroyuki, who’s often known for his light voiced characters, allows us to get a very clear view of how pathetic Takumi is. I haven’t gotten very far, but that doesn’t really make a difference cause you needn’t but look past the prologue to see the protagonist you will be dealing with.

Takumi always comments on the various eroge/anime gimmicks that you would expect.

The female leads seem nearly identical so far to their anime counterparts. But ultimately I need to play more to get see how well everything plays out.

Graphics

This was the interesting part. Most visual novels now have alot of special effects, transition animations, etc. Chaos;Head makes full use of these.

The rain-effects are nicely animated, the distortion effects are quite well-done, and there is one scene early where it actually is able to demonstrate the effect of seeing someone go around a street corner fast (look just play it to understand).

Just for another example: the game begins with Takumi in his apartment (if you can call it that), from any basic visual novel I would expect that we could only get one or two backgrounds to get the sense of the location. Instead the game uses a soft-rendered 3D layout in which rotates smoothly to give the sense that you are in the character’s perspective. I haven’t seen this technique before, so it’s rather cool to me.\

Also the CG coloring is just plain beautiful.

System

The “trigger system”, noted by the red and green colored heart-monitor things in the top of the screen. In any case, they’ve netted some interesting results. Green = “yay” (moe), Red = “erm” (yandere).

This is what happens for a Green trigger.

This is what happens for a Red trigger.

Fun stuff

Will I keep playing?

Yes. I’ve gotten hooked. Big thanks to the TLwiki for translating this