As featured in the March Issue of Mage Magazine, Paige reviews Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, the latest title from in the Paranormasight franchise from Square Enix.

If you told me that Paranormasight was getting a sequel I wouldn’t believe you. If you told me it was releasing two weeks after the announcement, I would’ve struck you for your foolishness. That said, it’s here and I’ve played it.

If you’re not familiar with Paranormasight, it is a series of visual novel adventure style games with a lot of reading and a bit of scanning your panoramic environments and puzzle solving featuring sinister curses. The Mermaid’s Curse is set mostly on a small island, you start as Yuza Minakuchi, a man who five years prior survived an accident at sea. You’ve come back to your home island to look after your grandmother but many of the locals aren’t too happy, especially when you’ve decided to become a diving fisherman. However, you are extremely pressed to find a mermaid and it seems like you’re not the only one.

Being such a fan of the first entry, I didn’t need any reviews to make my purchase but I had heard that there was less of a focus on horror. I wasn’t especially surprised since The Seven Mysteries of Honjo did turn more into a thriller halfway through. When I did get to the very small amount of horror, I was disappointed there wasn’t more. Another change is there are not many segments where you’re actually in any timed danger and have to worry about getting instantly eliminated. It’s a bit more about rifling through your many many files. Supposedly, this is also because people complained about the jump scares in the first game and that is really sad. Hopefully, a third entry can swing the other way and we can achieve full balance. The Mermaid’s Curse definitely lost some of its tension because of that and perhaps because the story was a little more put together from the get go. I felt like it took me a bit longer to warm up to some of the cast, especially the two foreigners, but that’s mostly because their story was a whole lot of exposition dumping. The sense of humor is definitely still there although I think they might bring out the “kissy” pouts a little bit too much.

One change in gameplay is the fully 3D underwater diving segment where you are trying to collect sea creatures to rack up a high score without running out of breath. Once you upgrade your levels, it becomes a bit easier, although I found the faster swimming could make it hard to aim for gathering. I honestly thought there was going to be more to this part of the gameplay and assumed it was part of the reason for the higher price, but once you max out your levels there isn’t much of a reason to return. The game features a good soundtrack but re-using the same sound effects felt a bit weird as the shock and horror noises were constantly accompanying perfectly normal things. I had to play on my Switch 1 and it ran perfectly fine.

Some of the changes seem a bit more of a miss, and other times it seems they’re trying too hard to redo some of the popular things from the first entry. Regardless, the story is enjoyable and interesting besides the large extra historical reading (or skimming) inserted. The story does piece together as you play it but the impact of things hits a bit harder once you get the entire picture. There still is just the right amount of meta gameplay that slides into the paranormal themes.

Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse is a must play for fans, but for other people maybe try the original first. That said, these are good traditional style japanese adventure mystery games and I’ll recommend them 1000x over any Famicom Detective Club game.

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