Three years after 2019’s AI: The Somnium Files, Spike Chunsoft released a sequel titled AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative (sometimes stylized as nirvanA Initiative and often shortened to AiNi). Set six years after the events of the first Somnium Files, the Advanced Brain Investigation Squad (ABIS) must again solve a strange new murder plot spanning another six years of mystery.
“Hey, No Spoilers!”
While AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative is a sequel, it opts to be mostly its own beast with its narrative. While a handful of peripheral spoilers are effectively inevitable just based on who is around or not in discussing a sequel to a murder mystery game like the first Somnium Files, this review will contain as few narrative spoilers for the events of the first game as I can work around without being completely reticent.
AiNi actually recognizes this concern for people hopping in without having played the first game. At the beginning of AiNi you’re given something of a quiz relating to the events of the first game. If you know the answers and choose to answer them correctly, the game will be a little bit looser with outright spoiling certain plot points and events, but will be vaguer if not outright mum if you haven’t. There are some questions you will likely immediately have if you’ve played the first game, and the answers for at least a couple of those will only appear as prompts if you respond to the intro quiz correctly. That’s not to say it doesn’t address anything from the first game, but without additional context, it’s unlikely to really spoil anything for you.
Torn Asunder
Not long after the events of the previous game, several members of ABIS and their acquaintances are participating in a fun little game show-type activity when suddenly a corpse appears out of nowhere with a sign attached to it saying “Fray to Free!” Or rather, half a corpse appears, as the body was cut completely down the middle and the other half is nowhere to be found. This case goes unsolved for six more years until the other half shows up mysteriously at a sports arena. Strangely, however, the estimated time of death was that day, which immediately raises a great deal of questions of the how and why variety. Furthermore, when new ABIS agent Mizuki finds the other half, she is immediately met with long-range gunfire from an unknown assailant. This sets the team at ABIS on another wild case fraught with mystery, absurdity, drama, and silliness.
AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative splits its story into two parts. The back half is Mizuki’s, now 18 years old and working at the same place Date did in the first game, alongside his old AI eyeball buddy Aiba. The front half is handled by a new cast member, Kuruto Ryuki, and his own AI eyeball buddy Tama. As members of ABIS, both have the ability to perform Psyncs—investigations into the dreams and psyches of others—on those deemed relevant to the case. The story deals with events both past and present on the timeline as you try to uncover what the heck went down.
In Your Dreams
The gameplay loop of AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative is functionally the same as that of its predecessor. You travel to various different areas and investigate crime scenes and relevant parties to gather information about the case. I once again recommend checking all of the things in each area you come across, because the conversations between our protagonists, their eyeball partners, and many of the characters they cross paths with—even about mundane objects—are just as amusing and comedic as before.
There are a couple of new additions to exploration. For example, you occasionally will be tasked with reconstructing a crime scene based on the evidence gathered in order to reach a conclusion. These are their own little fun summation scenes to help piece together what you know, and they’re quite funny in their own right even if they can at times feature more macabre humor.
Still, the main gameplay element once again comes in the form of Somniums, the big dream world puzzle rooms you must explore to figure out the secrets of suspects. As in the first game, you get six minutes to figure out a given puzzle, with certain actions taking up a specific quantity of time allotted which you can use your TIMIE lifelines to reduce. Functionally the Somniums play very similarly to those of the first game, with some minor quality-of-life improvements to readability as well as adding some interactions that cannot be influenced by the use of your TIMIEs. They still can feel like trial and error at times, especially given there are ways to get instant game overs as the general difficulty feels somewhat increased on the Somniums in this game. Thankfully AiNi added a feature allowing you to revisit cleared Somniums without a time limit if you just want to check out all of the options (e.g. the funny choices) or find the little easter eggs hidden within, plus general difficulty options to make them a bit less punishing overall.
I liked the Somniums in the first game for how conceptually creative they could be, even if they might not always be the most well-put-together gameplay segments. AiNi steps it up even further in this department, upping the surrealness and emotional nature of several of them. Many are absolutely filled to the brim with tension and excitement. Whether a Somnium leans into the surreal, plays out like a horror film, or even does an outright parody of Pokemon, there’s no shortage of variety. Perhaps my favorite in the entire game is maybe the simplest one, titled “Nearly Interesting”. This one takes the idea of a game show, turns it into something quite unconventional by asking a series of odd questions, and it pays off in a meaningful way. There’s also a really cool bonus Somnium after the end of the game, its own big easter egg.
Heads and Tails
After the game’s introductory/tutorial sections, the first half of AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative’s story is from the perspective of detective Kuruto Ryuki, a young man recently hired at ABIS. Like Date from the previous game, his eyeball is replaced with a cybernetic implant housing an AI assistant, this one named Tama. In an inversion of Date and Aiba’s relationship from the previous game, Tama is the one constantly cracking jokes of a sexual nature to the straight-laced Ryuki’s chagrin, although these are often of a more teasing nature. Ryuki is still something of a goof himself, and their dynamic is amusing all the same. There’s more to this rookie cop however, and something very clearly off about him.
The second half of the game follows an older Mizuki, the same roommate and goddaughter of Date from the previous game. Aiba, Date’s AI eyeball assistant, also now takes the place of Mizuki’s partner. Given they’ve both had to put up with the dirty old man, their dynamic involves a lot fewer jokes of a sexual nature and are more standard banter playing off one another’s quips, but I still enjoyed it all the same given they were already two of the most fun personalities in the series. Although a bit more mature, Mizuki has some haughtiness and a lot of the moxie that defined her character before, and her inexperience and hastiness in her new profession are noticeable throughout her part of the game.
It’s ironic given this is a game about bodies bisected in half, but I think AiNi is better in its front half than its back half, and there are several reasons for that which I will get into later. But one of the bigger ones is that Ryuki presents a more novel protagonist for what he is. By the time you’ve started to really get into Ryuki’s story, you shift over to another pair’s perspective for basically the remainder of the game. Mizuki is fun, but a lot of her character arc and conflicts were already handled by the previous game.
She still has some spots of meaningful development in this game, but a lot of that ties into newly added supplemental backstory. A lot of the new stuff is not only not great on its own, but it also feels incompatible with aspects of her from the first game and does more harm than good to the character and her story on the whole.
While there are a few alternate endings, AiNi is noticeably a more linear experience as well, and while I thought there were issues with the flowchart from the first game, I still preferred it to the approach attempted with this game.
Second Verse, Kind of Worse
As with the previous game, AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative puts quite a bit of effort into its characters. A lot of them are handled with a fair degree of nuance and a share of personal problems that tend to tie into why they end up involved in the overall story in a very humanized way.
A couple of the new characters are done quite well. I quite liked Gen, a chef friend of Date’s who is a heaping mass of a man yet is nonetheless a nice guy with an unusual appearance due to his mask obscuring his external deformities. He fits very nicely into the cast and gets some genuinely excellent scenes. There’s also a share of scenes involving a particular family of characters that weaves interestingly enough into the drama of the story, with all of them having their share of flaws that underpin the course of the narrative in several spots in dramatic yet empathizable ways, even if I don’t especially like any of them on their own.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the new cast holds up quite as well as the cast of the first Somnium Files. Given the shift in protagonists, the emotional core of the story is shifted more to newer side characters, and they don’t really pull off anything near as captivating as Date and Mizuki had in the first game. There’s a subplot involving a friend of Mizuki’s named Kizuna and a borderline stalker-type admirer of hers named Lien, and while I think Lien has shades of a compelling arc as he tries to develop as a character, the plot involving the two felt fairly clumsy in its execution. There’s also a character named Tokiko who operates as the face of a weird cult-like organization that weaves its way into the plot. She’s handled awkwardly in a way that felt overly indulgent and not much to the benefit of the story.
While I quite liked how the antagonists were handled in AI: The Somnium Files, I cannot quite say the same for AiNi. While the killer from the first game is much more anomalous, AiNi takes the approach of just having a masked stranger named Tearer be the killer. While the character has shades of intrigue and is a bit more nuanced in backstory, they end up being considerably less interesting in terms of how they fit into the story and the plot twists surrounding them. The supporting antagonists do little else but frustrate me personally.
Like a House of Cards
Where AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative falters hardest for me is in its later acts. For as much as I like much of its cast and found the journey itself to have enough thrilling and laugh-worthy moments along the way, this sort of mystery narrative is driven heavily by the way in which it keeps you invested through weaving together plotlines, twists, and answers to audience questions to pull off a satisfactory resolution. If it fails to bring it all home, the whole experience can suffer greatly. AiNi builds up a lot, but stumbles hard at its finish line and struggles to hold up for me under scrutiny.
While there are a lot of twists in games written by Kotaro Uchikoshi (who was mainly the writer this time rather than the director), the biggest hinge point is often one big twist that shakes everything up. Unfortunately, the biggest twist of AiNi does little to actually elevate the narrative of the game, only serving to be a big “whoa!” moment for the player seemingly for the purpose of having one. It’s incredibly contrived and relies on a ton of stretches of logic to even work, all while not really feeling like a consequence of the narrative itself but rather the way the game was directed.
The back half is further unaided by one of the later endings being driven by an inexplicable out-of-character moment and more internal inconsistency that’s hard to overlook even with some of the stuff the game otherwise gets away with. There are some aspects the plot of AiNi also recontextualizes for the first game, and these are mostly for the worse. Normally I’m not one to let a poor main plot hurt a game too much for me if I enjoy characters and gameplay, but AiNi’s final act has so many issues that severely dampen the experience and lessened my opinion of the game considerably the more I thought about it.
The climax of the game is also terribly underwhelming. Even removing the highly unsatisfying narrative developments that lead into it, the actual scenes that take place are quite weak. Part of it involves an attempt at a high-intensity action scene, and while AiNi does play them a lot more straight than its predecessor, this sadly serves to highlight how meager the actual animation choreography is when trying for nail-biting combat scenes.
For as much fun as I had on the journey, the end destination missed the landing and led to a very unfulfilling payoff.
That all said, there is one additional, peculiar story option you get very late in the game, which is of course very spoilery. I can see it being fairly polarizing, yet it’s also neat due to how a lot about it is left up to interpretation and the extent to which you want to take it literally. It is indulgent in some ways, but I respect it enough for trying something a bit outside the box.
Presentation
Apart from the aforementioned action scene choreography, AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative is a marginally nicer-looking game than its predecessor. The UI and animations are quite a bit sleeker, and the AI eyeball buddies have more range of expressions in their textbox portrait animations when they talk. Things have been touched up in a way befitting of a sequel that otherwise maintains the same style and ethos as its predecessor.
Once again, character designs are handled by Yusuke Kozaki, and the new character designs are by and large excellent in the same way they were in the first game. Several of the touch-ups and redesigns befitting of the time skip work well. The one exception for me is that of the new character Komeji, who is inexplicably given a head the shape of a cube in a way that looks bizarre and outlandish even for this series.
The sound is as good as ever. The score was handled by returning composer Keisuke Ito, who again knocked it out of the park. I thought the casting for the new characters was excellent, as was the voice direction for both the new and returning cast. Like its predecessor, AiNi has a lot of funny scenes, and they wouldn’t be nearly as funny without the delivery of the voice actors. It is noticeable that the English voice track was recorded during the early COVID pandemic years when there were more challenges to voiceover, so there are some apparent microphone discrepancies (e.g. different volume levels and audio compression) between voice actors, though this is far from the worst instance of this issue from that era.
Verdict
At its best moments, AI: The Somnium Files – Nirvana Initiative was some of the most fun I’ve had playing an adventure game ever, even topping its predecessor on occasion. The characters are still fun, the game made me laugh plenty, the Somniums are similarly creative, and there’s still plenty of enticing mystery to go around.
Unfortunately, while the first AI: The Somnium Files manages to pull its story together to a thrilling conclusion, I cannot say the same for its sequel. Outside of one particular part, its final act is immensely unsatisfying and does not hold up well under scrutiny, with a big twist that felt more to the detriment of the story than to its benefit. Some of its new characters are welcome additions, others are not, and the antagonists of the story don’t contribute much value. It also adds some unnecessary retconning that feels worse coming off the first game. The story is fun in the moment and has a strong first half, but doesn’t carry its own weight all the way through and feels lacking the same substance that made the first game so memorable for me long after I finished it.
AiNi still has a lot going for it, but for a game where so much of the enjoyment is centered around its story, I really wish it could have brought it all home. It’s still a really engaging experience, it’s just substantially more uneven.
AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – NIRVANA INITIATIVE IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another visual novel, you may enjoy Mojika: Truth Rears Its Ugly Head. We have also covered a wide variety of visual novels both original to English and localized from Japanese, which you can check out here.
AI: The Somnium Files was reviewed on PC.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
