Game: Rule of Rose Publisher: Atlus Developer: Punchline, Inc/ SHIROGUMI Inc (CGI) Systems: PS2 N.A. Release Date: September 12th, 2006 Score: 7.2 (Out of 10)

Rule of Rose Review

R ULE OF ROSE is a game that falls into the distinctly Japanese "scared girls running away from things" sub genre of Survival Horror, which automatically means it is only going to appeal to a minority of fans of an already niched genre. In addition it's storyline is intentionally surreal and ambiguous, using the horror elements as symbols and metaphors hinting at events that may or may not have actually taken place, further alienating the general gaming populous. That having been said, if you don't mind running away from scary things instead of shooting at them, and you don't mind untangling a few mysteries to fully understand what is going on, you will be rewarded with one of the finest and most poignant stories in the history of video games. It's just a shame that you have to play through some of the more frustrating aspects of the game in order to get to it.

RULE OF ROSE takes place in England in the 1930s, and tells the tale of Jennifer, who at the beginning of the game is riding a public bus on a rural road late at night. Another passenger on the bus, a young boy, comes over to Jennifer and starts to read her a story from a picture book he has with him; it is about a "unlucky girl" whose parents die, and so has to go live in a strange old house. Before he finishes the story, the bus stops and the boy jumps up and runs out the door. Trying to give the boy back his book, Jennifer calls out to him and steps off the bus, which quickly closes its doors and speeds off into the night. Having no other options, Jennifer sets off up the only path, which is marked with a sign proclaiming this to be "The Rose Garden Orphanage". Part way up the path, Jennifer hears a dog whimpering nearby and goes to investigate, but only finds a shed containing a dog collar with the name "Brown" on it, and a boarding pass with a picture of a fish scrawled on it in crayon. She catches sight of the boy from the bus and continues further up the path towards the orphanage, only to see a disturbing sight just inside the locked front gates: two children with paper bags over their head are clubbing a bloody burlap sack. Now this would be enough to send me running, but Jennifer, while scared, decides to continue on. She manages to get inside, but is soon accosted by more children wearing paper bags over their heads, and loses consciousness.

When she wakes up she is on tied to a post in a strange room, and the little boy from the bus is taunting her from the other side of the wall. He says his name is Joshua, and from now on she is to do his bidding, or else she will be killed. The children of the orphanage have created something called the Aristocracy of the Red Crayon; some of them are considered "Princes" or "Princesses", and the other children have to bring them monthly tributes in order to work their way up the social ladder. Jennifer has just been drafted into their little club, and as the newest member is the lowest ranking in their hierarchy, "Miserable" (for the record, the next step up is "Irritating"; I guess that's a little better). Her first task sounds innocuous enough; she has to bring the Aristocrat Club a beautiful butterfly. She is then set free to try to accomplish this task, only to find that it isn't as simple as it seems.

The first, and most bizarre thing that you discover is that Jennifer is no longer in the orphanage, but rather an equally ominous airship flying through the night sky, apparently having been transferred there while unconscious. However, you will soon find that this may not be entirely true, since the airship seems to have several similar rooms and features to the orphanage, and that sometimes one seems to be juxtaposed on top of the other. This is primarily apparent due to the fact that the children and staff of the orphanage all seem to be present on the airship.

This is another factor that makes the Aristocrat's requests more difficult than expected, as you are competing against some of the other orphans to be the first to bring the monthly tribute. The winner gets favored, and eventually promoted up a rank in the hierarchy. They also get the dubious honor of humiliating and torturing the losers as a sign of their superiority over them. The winners are expected to do such things as prod the losers with sticks with live rats tied to the end of them, covering them with insects, slugs and spiders, and taking them outside at night and ritualistically dousing them with water.

Besides other the other children madly scrambling to be the first to get the Aristocrats' favor, there are much more formidable and terrifying challenges that she must overcome, such as the creatures that the children call either "Horrible Imps" or "Spooky Things". These creatures began as an evil fairy tale to make sure that the children keep up with their chores; they were told that when lazy children don't pick up after themselves, the horrible imps crawl out of the darkness clutching brooms to clean up the filth... which includes the naughty children themselves. However, it soon becomes apparent that the imps are more than just a story, as throughout the game they come out of the shadows to attack Jennifer with brooms, knives, pipes, and other nasty implements in an attempt to slow her progress. At first they all look like corpse-white, child-sized apparitions with deeply sunken in black pits where their eyes should be a cavernous, distorted mouths, wearing tatters and rags. As you get further into the game, you will also run into more specialized and disturbing imps, seeming to wear masks made of severed, hollowed-out heads of animals such as pigs and goats, or mutilated and bound to look like large pale fish thrashing violently around on the ground. It is all appropriately disturbing, and each of their strange forms ties into a specific part chapter in the game, each in turn linked to a member of the Aristocrat Club.

Regardless, Jennifer isn't entirely alone in her struggles against the sadistic whims and caprices of the Aristocrats, as fairly early in the game she joins up with a helpful dog, a Golden Lab named Brown (hence the collar that she found with his name on it at the beginning of the game). Though Brown can somewhat help Jennifer to fight off the imps, his main method of helping is by using his keen sense of smell to track down the items that Jennifer needs to keep the disturbed children happy.

With Brown's help she is able to stay one step ahead of the pack and complete their strange requests. However, each monthly tribute gets more and more macabre and unsettling, skirting the edge of sadistic perversion. And with each chapter to also get to know each child's story a bit better, and begin to understand how Jennifer fits into these bizarre events. It all builds up to one of the most unsettling and unexpected denouements in just about any media, on par with some of Silent Hill's most twisted chapters.

To make it perfectly clear, RULE OF ROSE is a mature game, both in rating, in subject matter, and in the depth of the narrative it tells. In fact, some of the imagery and suggestive content was deemed graphic enough to have it banned in Europe. The mayor of Rome himself stepped up to the podium to make sure that this game never taints his city. However, while the game IS quite disturbing and somewhat sadistic in places, the content that got the everyone's panties in a bunch was actually rather mild, at least to my jaded mind. The game was banned because there was suggestive themes and imagery that suggested that certain of the underage female minors may have been in love with certain other underage female minors. Let's get this perfectly clear right here and now; RULE OF ROSE is not underage lolita porn. There are no love scenes, no kissing, and very little in the area of even anything that might suggest that such is the case. There is one chapter about midway through the game in which one of the girls writes a love letter to one of the other girls, who she is infatuated with. The object of her affection does play up to her, using the crush to manipulater her, but it is very mild, not sexual at all, and actually ties into a rather heart breaking subplot about how the manipulative girl may have become the cold, heartless vamp that she appears. But certain parties in Europe didn't want hints of underage lesbianism darkening there shores, even if it is merely the sort of facination that happens when a group of children with no other sense of attachment in life are thrust into a predominantly same-sex closed quarters environment; those with the most need of personal attachment will seek out and attach themselves to the strongest personallity in the group, and often become infatuated with them. In is in most psychology books. But I guess some people don't want any of that real-world psychology nonsense cluttering up the minds of European gamers.

But in the end it is really their loss. The story is beautifully crafted, and is easily one of the best in the history of video games. There are a few scenes, especially in the game's bittersweet last chapters that have been known to make even some of the more jaded horror fans feel a little bit weepy. The characters are incredibly well wrought, eventually making you see even some of the more diabolical-seeming characters for the damaged, very human children that they are at their cores. You will realize that even the most monstrous of them was brought this point in their lives in an attempt to survive in a world that has given them nothing but loss and hardship. While this doesn't excuse some of the insane things that come about due to their actions, at least it keeps them from being in any way cartoonish villains. Jennifer herself, though seemingly pathetic and weak, grows in emotional strength as the game progresses and she begins to understand and accept her role in things. Unfortunately, the way that the story is presented may be too much for those with short attention spans or little eye for detail, as much of what really happens (and has happened in the past, leading to the events portrayed in the game) is told in a purposefully disjointed manner chronologically, especially with one key scene that is placed in the middle of the game, but actually takes place before any of the other events. Other events are only alluded to or hinted at, suggested through visual symbolism, or hidden so well in the various letters, journals, and storybooks that you would have to play Sherlock Holmes to have any chance of understanding them. Like a good David Lynch movie, sometimes you have to really work to understand everything that is going on at every level. And even then it is open to some interpretation. However, by the last chapter, all of the most important pieces will finally fall into place, and you will realize that what seemed like a confusing mess was really an intricately crafted puzzle that didn't make sense until the last piece was placed. For those who are dedicated and patient enough to make it through to the very end, they will finally be rewarded with a masterpiece. Unfortunately, most casual gamers will probably play it for twenty minutes and then give up, confused and/or frustrated.

The actual game play won't help win any converts either. While the game doesn't go so far as to stick to the old-school Resident Evil style tank-like control schemes that many obscure horror games still resort to, Jennifer is not exactly athletic, spry, or quick. In fact, she "runs like a girl" in an appropriately 1930s lady-like fashion, and does so rather slowly, her arms clutched protectively close to her chest. Surprisingly, unlike similarly themed "scared-girls-running-away-from-things" games such as HAUNTING GROUND or CLOCK TOWER 3, Jennifer can actually fight back against her assailants, although incredibly poorly. While you can equip her with things like Meat Cleavers, Ice Picks, and Pipes, she can't move while attacking, making her vulnerable to swarming enemies, who besides slashing and clubbing her, will also cling to her legs and make her vulnerable to other nearby enemies. And what's worse, when she does attack, she usually keeps one hand clutched to her chest, and feebly swings from her elbow, hardly seeming to do any damage. As if in mockery of this, the first "weapon" you find for the poor girl is a bloody dessert fork! And don’t let the game’s intro movie get your hopes up; even though it shows Jennifer running around with a revolver, most people playing through the game casually won’t ever see a gun until the very last scene… and then it only has one bullet! There is a way to get a gun with limited ammunition for the last few chapters, but it requires deliberately seeking out several specific enemies in the foe-crowded corridors, killing them and any enemies between you and them, and collecting an item from each of them. After you’ve collected all of these items, you can trade them at the right time for the revolver… and the game doesn’t tell you any of this.

Even if it had, actually being able to seek out and kill multiple enemies in the game takes a lot of skill and frustration, as you will soon see. This is because the hit detection for anything not roughly the same size as Jennifer and standing directly in front of her is atrocious. She may even be able to knock something down if it stands directly in front of her more or less motionless for about thirty second and let her stab it six or eight times, which they actually do, from time to time. Unfortunately, once they are down, most enemies get up and have to be stabbed six or eight more times to knock them down again, which kills some enemies, while others come back for round three before being put down for the count. Like in Silent Hill, it seems as though the designers intended an answer to this dilemma by allowing Jennifer to stomp on downed enemies, finishing them off. In fact, if you stand directly over a fallen foe and use your regular attack, she will stop swinging her weapon and attempt to stomp on the enemy’s prone, motionless form. The crappy hit detection effectively dashes any hopes of doing so, because not once was I able to get her stomp attack to actually connect and do damage with a fallen foe, even if it looked like Jennifer was stomping right on their skulls. Instead, it simply meant that when caught in a group of enemies and trying to hack down two or three of them, instead she will stop attacking the standing foes when one falls and ineffectively stomp in the direction of the one that is down, allowing the others free hits on her.

Some of the later enemies, on the other hand, have cheap attacks that allow them to knock her down in one hit. After being knocked down, it literally takes at least five seconds to get up again. And once she does get up, sometimes the enemies can time their attacks to knock her down again as soon as she is on her feet. Some of these, like the strange bird-like imps with the long necks, can do this from several feet away, giving you no chance to get in close with your short range weapon, while also meaning that you have to staying much further away from them while running away. Luckily, you CAN run away from most foes. In fact, this should be your policy through most of the game. It seems obvious that the original intent was that your character should be entirely defenseless as in games like HAUNTING GROUND, and that running away should be the order of the day. Somewhere along the way, someone realized that people don’t like feeling helpless throughout a whole game, and half-assedly tacked on a rudimentary combat system at the last moment, giving people the option to fight if they absolutely have to, while still relying on fleeing to be the main tactic.

Which is all well and good, except that they won’t LET you run away some times. For most of the game you can simply weave around and avoid the slow moving, awkward enemies. And then, idiotically, the game throws boss battles at you. Unlike in CLOCK TOWER 3, where the normally helpless main character was endowed with special powers at the end of every level in order to take on a the level’s boss, in RULE OF ROSE you are still restricted to the same pathetic half-hearted swings that you have to suffer through the rest of the game with. These bosses, while very disturbing looking and stylistically cool, all have their own set of cheap attacks and take a metric assload of attacks to actually defeat. Besides the bosses there are also areas where they actually force you to kill a large group of enemies to proceed, meaning that you will have to be fighting four or five enemies and attempting to avoid all their attacks at the same time. In a still more ridiculously stupid design decision, there is one chapter where they flood the halls with all kinds of enemies, and then make you find and kill two of each kind of specialized enemy that are scattered all over the map, and they don’t tell you where they are. These enemies are often surrounded by hordes of regular enemies that you have to fight through to get to them, then fight through again to get out. And if you pick the wrong rooms while looking for them, you are locked in and forced to kill every enemy in the room in order to get out again. Sections such as these simply mean that you have to use a ridiculous amount of healing items for both Jennifer and Brown, while whittling away for minutes on end with your pathetically underpowered weapons. And how do you find enough of these healing items to be able to suffer through these parts of the game? By backtracking back and forth through enemy infested hallways, following Brown’s keen nose from item to item.

Luckily, while tedious, these item tracking sections are more or less painless in terms of execution. In fact, item tracking with Brown makes up the bulk of the game, between searching for healing and trade items and following Brown’s nose in search of the items necessary to satisfy the Aristocrat Club’s monthly tribute. The method of doing so is also pretty painless, as all you have to do is go to the menu and select an item for Brown to use for tracking. Once selected, all you have to do is hit a button and Brown will begin to trot off, following a scent associated with the “find” item; then all you have to do is follow him. For key story items, this is fairly straight forward, as at the beginning of each chapter you will find a key item that you can then use to have Brown track a scent to the next key item, usually along with a story-revealing cutscene. The second can be used to track a third key item and another cutscene, and another, on until you’ve found and learned everything, and finish the chapter. While you do have to dodge enemies while doing so, this is pretty easy so long as you are paying attention and quick with the controller. If you do run into trouble, another simple button press will call Brown back to harass and distract the enemy, allowing you time to escape. Then you can just hit the “find” button again and Brown will break off his attack and begin following the scent again.

If this were all you had to do, it would be all well and good. Unfortunately, while you can certainly do so, it means that you wouldn’t have any healing items for you or Brown when you run up against the inevitable boss battle or unavoidable enemy ambush, as we discussed earlier. So in addition to the storyline related key items, there are also ordinary items that can be used to track down other ordinary items, many of which are food items used for healing. Here’s how it works: Jennifer finds an ordinary Marble, like the kind used in children’s games. The Marble has three scents associated with it, none of which you know what they are when you start out. Telling Brown to follow the scents associated with the Marble, he leads you through a few hallways and past some enemies to another Marble, which is then recorded under “Marble” as one of the three scents that you then are associated to the Marble. Telling Brown to search again, he may lead you to a Clothespin, which is then recorded as the second of the three smells associated with the Marble. Subsequent searches then bring you eventually to a Scone, a healing food item and the third and final smell associated with the Marble. You then know that all Marbles that you find will lead you to one of those three things, every time. If none of those three types of items are within range of Brown’s sense of smell (usually within a few hallways), Brown will hang his head and whine, indicating that he can follow the smell. The Clothespin, on the other hand, has four new smells associated with it, meaning that Brown may be able to continue searching using that for the “find” item. Different foods restore more or less health; a Biscuit heals next to nothing, for example, while a White Chocolate will heal Jennifer completely. The more rare and difficult an item is to find, the more likely it is to lead you to a powerful healing item.

Usually, however, you will end up with a huge amount of garbage in your inventory, such as Marbles, Clothespins, Ribbons, and Socks. “Why would you need more than one of any of these things”, I hear you ask? Well, my little cherub, I’ll tell you, even though the frickin’ game never does: these items can be traded in at the Aristocrat Club’s tribute box in exchange for great items such as powerful healing foods. For example, 12 Marbles or 8 Clothespins will net you one Shortbread, which heals most of your damage even if you are almost dead, while 6 Socks gets you a White Chocolate, which heals you entirely, no matter how injured you are. I wish I knew that before I ended the game with 38 Marbles, 20-something Socks, and dozens of Clothespins, amongst other junk I could have actually traded in to make the boss battles less painful. Unfortunately, tracking down huge quantities of these items means backtracking repeatedly back and forth through the same halls, dodging all the same enemies (which always respawn, by the way, even if you do kill them). You may find a Marble in the kitchen, follow a scent from it all the way to the furthest end of the level to a Clothespin, then follow a scent on the Clothespin ALL the way back to the kitchen, where you find a piece of Chocolate… right next to where you found the Marble. That’s right kids; you absolutely cannot find, or even see an item until Brown leads you to it, with only a very few exceptions.

In addition, certain items will lead you to other, very rare items that can then be used in certain parts of the game to find more rare items. These items can unlock content for the game, such as special costumes and better weapons. Others allow you to use them late in the game to view any of the game’s music tracks and cutscenes, or at least as many as you have found the rare items associated with them. For example, you may find a Film Can, which allows you to view one of the game’s cutscenes, or a Record, which let’s you listen to one of the game’s music tracks in its entirety whenever you want. In addition, each Record will eventually lead you to another Record, and each Film Can to another Film Can, if you are diligent, and you care to. This means that there is an awful lot of content and replay value, should you want to take the time to find everything in the game and don’t mind trotting past enemies through the same hallways over and over again to do so. I should say that there ARE parts of each chapter where it is safe to do so before or after the enemies appear, but that you most likely will have to have played the game through at least once before you recognize when it is safe to do so. That’s if you care enough to do so.

And though I just spent hundreds of words talking about the crummy combat system and the tedious backtracking, this is where I why RULE OF ROSE, while sometimes frustrating, is a really worth your time. Besides the story, which I already told you is some of the very best in the medium, the visuals are also original and often breathtakingly beautiful. The award-nominated CGI cutscenes are done by SHIROGUMI, Inc, the folks behind the unbelievable CGI in Capcom’s ONIMUSHA series of video games (ONIMUSHA 3: DEMON SIEGE has the coolest opening movie of any game ever, just for the record). The actual visuals used for gameplay, while not nearly as pretty as the movie portions of the game, are still very nice for a PS2 game. The levels are claustrophobic and oppressive, the character models nicely detailed, and the monsters suitably disturbing looking, though the gameplay visuals never look as good as what you’d see in RESIDENT EVIL 4 for example, or even most of the SILENT HILL games. But what it lacks in overall graphical pizzazz, it makes up for in style and design. First of all, the character animation for Jennifer and the other human characters is almost always spot-on and quite believable. Jennifer radiates timidity in her every motion, from the way that she runs to the way that she clutches her weapons to her chest and looks around fearfully when you are standing idle. All of the other characters also manage to convey much of their personality through simple body language, which is no mean feat of graphic design in and of itself. But Brown really steals the show, as he really moves around and acts like a real dog. When he is tracking, for example, he trots bouncily along with his nose to the ground, his head moving back and forth naturally as he sniffs, with his ears perked and his tail wagging slightly. When he is on the attack, however, his ears flatten back and he hunkers down with his tail tucked between his legs. When he feels chastised, such as when you ask him to track an item and he can’t, his ears and eyes droop, and he lowers his head as if ashamed. In short, his body language is that of a real dog, making him one of the most impressively animated characters in the history of video games. So if you have to trot back and forth for hours down the same hallways looking at a dog’s backside, at least it is an impressively animated one.

The way that the game is visually presented and framed is also quite impressive. From the beginning the story takes on the format of a children’s storybook, following the themes of both lost childhood and dark fairy tales. Each chapter begins with a storybook title, such as “The Goat Sisters”, and is accompanied by a short animated scene done in what looks like crayon or chalk. This have a very Tim Burton-ish feel to them, as they are often quite disturbing or odd, as well as often darkly amusing. The rest of the game takes on this same storybook quality, as the in-game text bears out this conceit. For example, if you try to talk to a character and they ignore you, it doesn’t say, “Nicholas ignores you”. Instead, unsteady, chalk-looking writing appears saying, “The Gluttonous Prince says nothing, as if the girl had never spoken. What a sad, unlucky girl”. Things like the save points and the Rubbish Bin where you store your items also take on fairy tale roles that fit brilliantly into the story. To save, for example, you must find a Bucket Knight, which is a scarecrow-like inanimate object made of a coat rack with a bucket perched on top that looks like a helmet. When you go to save, it reads, “I am the Bucket Knight, keeper of memories. Tell me your story”. As the “keeper of memories”, the Bucket Knight can also be used to give hints as to what you should be doing next, saying such things as “If memory serves me, you must bring the Aristocrats a beautiful Butterfly for their amusement” or something to that effect. The Rubbish Bin is similarly “animated”, making itself into a storybook-like companion for the lonely Jennifer. Even Jennifer’s inventory and health status screen take on this design scheme. All of the text, and even the inventory box and the items in it look like they were drawn in chalk, in an almost cartoonish fashion. And most delightfully, Jennifer and Brown’s health are represented as adorable little dancing animations in the pause screen, with a red line drawn in crayon stretching out behind them. As they get injured, their animated characters droop and get less and less spry-looking, and the red line behind them shorter and shorter. While you can also gauge their strength by the in-game character animations, since they begin to limp and stumble as they near death, having the little touches of the animated health bars in the pause screens was greatly appreciated and highly amusing. Also following this fairy tale theme, as well as the heavy symbolism and metaphor being used in the story, some of the things you will see as you progress are beautifully surreal. In one scene, the skeletons of fish can be seen swimming through the dark air inside the zeppelin as you explore, winding in and out of the darkness. In another you will see recently defeated boss fall off frame, only to turn into a small, lifeless hand-sewn doll as it hits the ground. In almost every aspect, this game is beautifully presented.

The music is similarly amazing, using a great deal of stringed instruments like cellos and violins that range suddenly to gorgeous and melancholy to screeching and discordant, depending on what is happening. Other pieces use piano in a similar fashion, either wistfully or jarringly. And the game’s theme song, “Love Suicide”, is nothing if not brilliant, sounding like a Billy Holliday song being played on an old phonograph with gorgeous lyrics and vocals that perfectly fit both the time period and the subject matter. Never does the soundtrack use inappropriate instrumentation, like electric guitars, just to fit into the standard norms of the video game industry (I’m looking at you, PRINCE OF PERSIA: WARRIOR WITHIN. Nothing says ancient Persia like Godsmack and distorted electric guitars). The rest of the sound design is also very well done, if inconsistent. The voice work is minimal, though what there is of it usually is done quite well. In this day and age one expects to hear more of it, though this may have taken away some of the game’s storybook feel that the text was able to impart). The monster sounds are disturbing and fit the creatures very well, but are occasionally looped too much to the point of obnoxiousness, especially in the boss battles. The boss at the end of “The Mermaid Princess” chapter almost made me want to shut the game’s sound, even though I love the soundtrack so much. There was one other chapter late in the game that has a neat little jaunty piano piece being played over a phonograph into the intercom, which really fit the feeling of being in a British orphanage in the 1930s… but the piece was too short or the chapter too long, meaning that you had to hear the same 45 seconds of music played over and over and over… But things like these are rare, and the sound design is for the most part very impressive.

So in short, if I were to judge this game based purely on story and presentation, it would score a perfect 10. It is that good. Unfortunately, you have to play it, which knocks it’s score down significantly. While the gameplay isn’t entirely broken or a lost cause, it isn’t exactly fun either; it amounts to running back and forth through enemy choked hallways while engaging in combat that is not unlike trying to chop down a redwood with a soup spoon. Eventually you get used to the game’s control idiosyncrasies, and may even get adept enough at the combat that you might actually WANT to go through the game multiple times, looking for every item. Believe it or not, I did. For most people, however, they will give it up in frustration long before they realize that the story is not confusing mess that it appears in the beginning, but rather an intricately constructed masterpiece. And that is a damn shame, when bad gameplay gets in the way of an incredible and moving story, beautiful and innovative visual design, and a stellar soundtrack. If you have any sort of patience whatsoever, and love the horror genre, you owe it to yourself to give this game a try. By the end you very well may decide that the end result is worth a little suffering.