Time Hollow

"A fun little diversion for the DS."

I bought Time Hollow just on a whim, I seen it for fairly cheap at the game store, so I grabbed it. I wasn't expecting much out of the game, but when I sat down to play it, I was fairly surprised with the game, it was far more than I had expected from it. The back of the packaging was pretty misleading and didn't give much information into what this game was going to be like.

Graphics:

Pretty standard graphics for this kind of game, maybe a little better than other games in this genre for the DS, but still, nothing out of the ordinary. The graphics for the most part are all still-frames and text, but they're nicely detailed in the standard anime look, and in that aspect, this game will reach out to anime fans out there, but the one thing that caught me off guard was the videos in the game, they look great, even for being on the DS, they animate well and really add to the overall experience of Time Hollow. The graphics don't come without their issues though, the movies have some grain to them, but that is to be expected from the DS hardware, which isn't all that powerful, additionally, some of the other screens in the game; such as the chapter screens seem to be lacking in quality as well. Even though there are some quality issues in some of the areas of this game, and most of the game is motionless, it was still a decent display of graphics, and nothing to shake your head at.

8/10

Music:

For the most part, the music was more annoying than anything. Most of the music that played in between events was pretty boring and repetitious, but during most of the major events and most notably the opening video and ending credits, the music was incredible, and really gave a lot of emotion to the scenes, namely some of the scenes within the last few chapters of the game. Quality wise, as I said, most of the music was pretty boring, and played on a ten second loop, and the composition wasn't that great either, but there were a small handful of tracks that sounded great, and since this was the first game that I played on my DSi, it really shows the sound quality of the DSi as well.

7/10

Story:

Somewhat similar to the 'Butterfly effect' movie, but much different in its own way. You play the game as high school student Ethan Kairos. One morning, (on his seventeenth birthday… SURPRISE!) Ethan wakes up and realizes that his world has changed, his parents are gone, his uncle has raised him, but he now has memories of both existences, he wanders off to school and the story just explodes from there, most of it is pretty intense too. Ethan is now in control of changing the past and future of all sorts of events that happened from many different times, from recently or many years back. The story gripped me right away, and I couldn't put this game down, it was like a good book, though a little cheesy at times, the story was refreshing, something new, something that didn't involve guns, aliens, monsters, swords or anything like that, it was just an all around solid story with a decent cast of characters. Even the characters were great, every main character had some kind of role to play in the story, some more than others, but a role never-the-less.

10/10

Game play:

The game play in Time Hollow could be easily compared to other games on the DS such as Trace Memory or Hotel Dusk, but this game is not comparable to either of those games, this game is more about finding out information and changing that information, while those other games I mentioned were more puzzle based and had more game play elements to them. The game play in Time Hollow wasn't anything exciting, and you had to rely on the story to keep yourself playing. You play through the game going from location to location, finding different events from the past, opening something called a 'hole' with your hollow pen and slightly altering things in the past to change present circumstances. The game uses the DS stylus pretty extensively, but other than that, the game play is lacking. There are no enemies to fight, and the only way to get a game over is if you overuse the hollow pen and run out of energy for it, but the game is pretty self explanatory, and running out of energy rarely happens.

5/10

Overall:

I really would've liked to give this title a higher score, but with mediocre game play, pretty mundane music and still graphics, it was hard to give this game a great score. The story, a handful of the music tracks and the video cut scenes were the only things that saved Time Hollow from being a pretty dull game.

Graphics: 8/10
Music: 7/10
Story: 10/10
Game Play: 5/10

OVERALL: 7/10

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/24/09

Game Release: Time Hollow (US, 09/23/08)