VN - Others - Completed - Dead Days [Final] [CLOCKUP]

A great redemption from the horrible writing catastrophe that was Maggot Baits, DEAD DAYS shows that Clockup can still write good stories even after Euphoria.

I've read most of Clockup games and this one is my 2nd favorite. It's a solid story focused on characters. It has a great life-affirming message even if most of the characters are technically undead. It doesn't explore any peculiar topics but it is sufficiently dark and has a ton of sex scenes.

All the characters are great and it's really hard to choose who the best girl is but the best written character is probably Kiruru who takes the spotlight even if she's just a supporting character.

Hard recommend if you want to read a darker, story-driven eroge.

Maybe I had high expectations after Euphoria and Maggot Baits, but it felt a bit bland. Almost too vanilla if you ignore the fact that MC is dead and pretty much anything that's happening is technically an act of necrophilia. Sure, there were some gory scenes here and there but overall the game was pretty tame and boring, and that's not something that you expect from ClockUp.

an absolute banger. Love clockups previous works and im happy that another finally got translated.
cant recommend it enough if you like interesting modern plotlines
Mao best girl, Gypsy-Q is such a bitch.

Banger! If anything, writing on a really good level. Didn't really liked gory elements, but those scenes are easy to skip. Surprised anyone giving it less than 4 stars. Why the heck I should write more than 200 symbols to live a review, feels like a school esse

Dead Days fails in three ways that so many Japanese VNs do.

1. It's incredibly verbose.
I don't know if it's the culture or translation, but there are times where I feel like the word count could be cut by up to 50% in some Japanese VNs, and this one is no different.


2. It has no patience.
The sex scenes are completely backward. You get the immediate big, climatic sex scene at the very beginning, and you end with the smaller gestures like blowjobs, handjobs, and paizuri at the very end. It's like the developers didn't trust its readers attention span if it wasn't throwing you sex scenes at very regular intervals. Which is a shame because the premise and setting lend themselves very well to slow burn.


3. A bad story broken up by pointless choices.
Dead Days falls into the same pit falls that many Japanese VNs do, and you'll be very familiar with these issues if you've read a handful yourself.

Dead Days starts strong in medias res. You wake up with three strangers in a shipping container. You don't know who they are; you don't know how they got there. What a brilliant way to build suspense, characters, and mystery. Oh, nevermind, we're now going to read a twenty-minute-long flashback about the protagonist. Japanese VNs, why are you like this? You dangle something interesting in front of me, and then you cut to the most dry flashback sequence I could imagine.

This might be the record for how fast it's taken for a serious story to lose me. Needless to say, after the flashback, you go back to the shipping container and realize that this story is almost identical to Gantz, which performs almost everything this story wants to do better, because Dead Days has a habit of overcomplicating things for very little payoff.

Since its Gantz, the crew has to hunt anamolies in the world in exchange for their survival after death. And once they finish the hunt, they gain an additional week of life. This causes the girls to get inexplicably extremely horny... because... it's a Clockup game, of course they do. Rather than write nuanced romance and sexual development, they'll just insert a horny switch that turns all characters into drooling sex fiends. I'm not exactly against this idea if it's done well; it's just the execution doesn't work. This results in the first sex scene being an orgy of the four main characters. The game blew its load in the introduction. The issue here is that I'm not attached to these characters yet. We've spent a grand total of ten minutes with them, and in that time all we did was beat a random dude to death. This feels like the most flimsy excuse for sex scenes that I've ever seen in a VN. It gets to the point where the game itself is so bored of it that it stops giving you sex scenes and just says "you sorted them out" within a single textbox.

Other than that, there's really not much to say about the story. It's bland. Like eating toast without butter. There's no central idea or theme. Character development seems to begin and end with building romantic relationships. The protagonist himself sees the most development, but only because he starts the game as a completely unlikable douchebag. Don't expect him to be particularly relatable.

I should also warn players that the main girls in this game will sleep with others. You'll have to watch those scenes in their entirety. Admittedly, it's never netorare, the girl you choose in the story will be loyal. But I know some people won't like it.

Disjointed in general feels like a great way to describe all the random plot threads and characters that get introduced as 'important' but get very little development. It falls into the pitfall of continuously introducing new and unnecessary complications and mechanics to the story and over-explaining it all but failing to ever be interesting. And having the mysterious operator giving you instructions be a gothic lolita obsessed with the protagonist is just so ass; that character should have been a mystery the whole way through. This game would have 100% benefited by just cutting the fat and focusing on its core premise. I don't understand why some JP VN writers feel the need to overcomplicate everything.

My final criticism is the 'choices' and 'routes' mechanic that this game employs. Each girl has their own route; you've probably heard of this idea before, but Dead Days does it really poorly. It can work if it's done like in Maggot Baits, but in Dead Days you'll be reloading the start and skipping through 75% of the game just to get another ending. Only for you to not have chosen one of the ambiguous choices the game offers perfectly, resulting in a different ending than you planned. Repeat this several times until you get all routes. Then repeat once more for the true ending.

By the time you've gotten to the true ending, you've done so much skipping around, so much reloading, that it's extremely hard to still be immersed in the story. Games need to stop doing this. It's bad.

This is still a 3/5. It's polished. It has great music. The art is fantastic as always. While the sex scenes have more misses than hits, some of them are great. But this is still a visual novel, and the story really let this one down. Even after getting the true ending, I don't particularly care for the characters, and I'll forget about the plot in about... one day.

I liked this one from Clock up, what I don't like about MC is him being a tsun. aside from that it is great. H scene was good like that art. (Skipped some but definitely skipped Every Julia, she wasn't my cup of tea.) Firstly played the normal way how I liked it and ended up with Manami. (No bad end.) Then played how the story really turned out, and boy I wasn't disapointed. It was been a while for me to finish a VN in a few sittings and thats saying how it hooked me up.

PS: The song was a banger!

Honestly, this VN surprised me. I went in with pretty low expectations seeing as I've read through euphoria and Maggot baits before dropping them being unimpressed, along with just not being a fan of guro. Compounded with this having a lot lower ratings and more criticism, I expected to reach a point where I would drop it as well.

Despite the overused premise, the mystery behind the story did leave me intrigued enough, and the story didn't feel as though it dragged enough for me to drop it. While the MC Teru is very insufferable in the beginning, his growth and the payoff in the true route of the game left me satisfied.

For the cons, it really comes down the how completely unnecessary the h-scenes were. The reasoning for needing them was as sound as they could make it but at the end of the day it was still just an excuse to have them. The story and choices were pretty tight, though there were some moments where I felt as though events should have happened regardless of our choices. There's also kind of an entire overarching plotline that isn't really addressed and we're simply told that some parts were resolved off screen.

A last point to note is the unavoidable scenes that the other characters experience. While this may be a turn off for some, it is worth to note that the main female lead is completely faithful to the MC.

Overall I'd say it was a solid 9/10 experience, it definitely won't compare to the juggernauts of masterpiece VNs but if you see it through the true end, I'd say it's a good time.

A cool-looking VN, but that's all it is. Cool-looking. The artstyle, while unoriginal, is very polished. The background stock images all have this nice filter that fits the global aesthetic very well. All characters look really nice both in dialogues and sex scenes, especially Aira, who even has different outfits throughout the game, which is pretty rare for a VN. Unfortunately, she's the only one with different outfits. Kinda lame.

And... That's pretty much it for the positives. Everything else ranges from mediocre to just dissapointing and bad. The story is nothing you haven't seen somewhere else; its just Gantz with porn. If you have played the best VNs out there, you've seen everything Dead Days has to offer, but better. There is a plot, with things happening, but none of them mattering whatsoever.

The story conveys no real message or theme, just some brief and vague takes on the people's relation with social media and interactions between each other, but nothing tangible that would serve as a guiding line to the story. I don't know what people praised regarding the developers' previous games, but I certainly don't see it here.

The adult scenes are on par with the game; visually polished, unengaging in every other way. The gore and piss scenes that were advertised are very few and far between, and the scenes left are incredibly tame and uninspired, that wouldn't even get a boner from anyone beyond the "baby's first VN" phase.

The worst part is the excessively verbose dialogues that transpire in both the main story and the sex scenes, that kill any appeal these might have. It's on par for your typical Japanese VN in that regard, a lot of "tell, don't show" and rehearsing the same lines over and over again. Thankfully it's not as egregious as something like Fate for instance, but after the second sex scene I started skipping them due to how unengaging they were.

Next is the bad and the really bad. The MC, Teru, is boring and irritating to follow. His conflict with Mao is artificial and forced, and what little character development he gets feels hollow and unearned. I understand kids do some stupid things they eventually regret and can turn their backs in their friends over pointless things, but to keep a grudge for this long against his childhood friend for something so inconsequential is just idiotic, and given how long it takes for the story to reveal that plot point, it feels like a giant waste of time.

Realistically, Teru shouldn't have any romantic feelings for Mao after keeping her away for so long, and Mao would have stopped pursuing him many years ago. As it stands, she just comes off as wierdly obsessive and deeply stupid for not getting the memo. But hey, we needed to fill the quota of archetypal, souless characters to fill our game, so here's you dumbass, holier than thou childhood friend for you to bang! And you bang here, with no valid story justification. It just happens halfway through the game for an extremely stupid reason.

The other annoying thing about this artificial conflict is that the game dangles in front of our noses some sort of character arc for Teru, where he stops being a douchy asshole and goes back to being a good guy again; but the choices presented to us during the story that tend in that direction all lead to a bad ending.

For instance, there is a branch in the first half of the story where Tengan is pursued by a token foreign bimbo on a bike, and you can choose to either listen to Mao's advice and save him, or ignore him and go do the job you've been assigned to. If you go for the logical choice that might give you some sort of character development - helping him - you get a bad ending, so you must choose the one where Tery stays a giant ass to keep progressing. Why? I don't know.

It's not the only choice like that, I think 1 or 2 others are similar, with the rest being inconsequential beyond what sex scene you unlock. But what this implies is that Teru never learns from his mistakes, he doesn't grow throughout the story, until the very end where his development is rushed and forced. The game tries to make us sympathize with him, even though I felt more of a connection with Aira and Tengan, who are actually more likable and interesting despite the game constantly trying to make us think otherwise.

The last issue is... I don't know if I'm just dumb or if the story is really like that, but after Mao's death, the story abruptly ends, without any explanation. No plot point reaches any conclusion, no character besides Teru gets a satisfying arc, only the conflict between Teru and Mao is sort of resolved. As far as I know, I don't know what choices I have to make to reach the actual ending if there is one, so I gave up. The story is not interesting enough to make me sit through from the beginning again.

So that's it. It's kinda bad. Not horrendous, but not worth your time imo. I don't get the hype surrounding this one, given all of Clockup's other games look like that at first glance on their website.