Review: Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness – PS Vita (9/10)

Visual novels are a great experience to get into for the gripping story. Hotel Dusk and Phoenix Wright along with Danganronpa can be classified as that even with gameplay elements added in. Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness doesn’t have gameplay in it, but its story is one of the strongest ones out there. While length may be an issue to some, you do have 2 arcs to play and endings to get.

As soon as you begin, the story starts strong and never lets you go but it does come at a small cost but lets get into that. Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness‘ overall story is about an agency that can tell if you will be a criminal just buy your overall mental status: white is clear but dark is well dark. Enforcers are past criminals who hunt the people that are their person of interest and inspectors are the ones who make sure enforcers do their job right.

Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness‘ story revolves around two new characters who are Nadeshiko Kugatachi, a rookie inspector and Takuma Tsurugi, a rookie enforcer. The weird thing about this game being based on the anime series is there is no intro at all and this isn’t new friendly because you get no backstory on the actual characters or at least not enough for people to understand. The game’s length is just a couple hours long but there is a lot to it if you want to experience the full story of the new characters and the game does a good job with them.

There is a currency titled PP which took me awhile to find because there wasn’t a part written anywhere about it. You earn it buy playing the minigame that resembles the hit mobile game Threes!  It starts off pretty easy but gets harder the deeper levels you get into and each first clear levels gain you a 2000 point each time on top of the regular score. You can spend PP on pictures and voices of the characters and there is a bit to buy.

The gameplay takes routes and choices depending on what the outcome or direction it goes into like choose your own adventure book series. The artwork is very close to the anime and very bright and HD clear look to it but I will say the title screen looked blurry on the PS Vita and had me worried for a bit.

Conclusion

Overall, if you like visual novels or Psycho Pass you should get Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness and it’s worth it for the story alone. If you expect something huge and just think of this as “just another visual novel” my best guess is you aren’t even reading this review. Everyone should take a shot with this game for that matter because it’s an excellent visual novel.

The review was written and provided by Chris.