However, during the actual fight you find the team responsible for cultivating this non-existent idol contributing in different ways to the battle. The virtual avatar itself is a pastel pink mermaid with hearts for pupils and adorable catchphrases, so already her boss fight is able to pull from an undersea visual direction, but it layers in suitable color choices on top of the battle clearly taking place inside a digital space. Sayu is meant to represent cutesy digital idols, but the idea is explored in a rather intriguing space. Most of the EDM artists who serve as major antagonists have solid voice work and are diverse not only in the subgenres they embrace but each have a pronounced theme and concept to make seeing the next one in line more captivating. Sadly, not everyone has an absolutely fitting voice performance, although most of the time it is the less important characters you only briefly chat with in Vinyl City who can have stilted or unusual deliveries. NSR’s leader Tatiana, voiced by Priscilla Patrick, features a much colder and clinical performance that contrasts the rebellious energy of Bunk Bed Junction well, and since many of the EDM artists under her are more eccentric and sometimes even a bit sympathetic, having her at the top of the ladder with unreasonable demands keeps the quest important enough to continue pursuing while still avoiding any cartoonish evil since her desire is more to maintain order over Vinyl City rather than directly harm anyone. Zuke has the truly deep connections with characters the two encounter, history with other musicians both in and out of NSR providing some more layered interactions rather than the constant quest to beat EDM artists to prove rock’s benefits in bringing power back to the people. Mayday being the emotionally open idealist who has energy enough for the both of them gives the game a strong source of vivacious forward movement on top of many delightful and fun interactions between her and other characters, but Zuke is not a mere counterweight. Zuke on the other hand is far more reserved and down to earth, Steven Bones bringing a relaxed demeanor to his normal speech but able to crank up the emotion when something truly is personal or important for the drummer. Mayday, voiced wonderfully by Su Ling Chan, is an effervescent in-your-face optimist with her head in the clouds but an unflinching devotion to her belief in the righteousness of her rock and roll mission. Right off the bat, Mayday and Zuke are excellent complementary protagonists. A power outage does undermine this claim some, and the revelation that the backup generators for the city only feed energy to the districts run by the NSR artists inspire Mayday and Zuke to switch from wanting to join them to trying to start a revolution against them. However, when they play, they are soundly rejected by NSR despite being a strong and viable power source, NSR aiming to keep their stranglehold on the city through the idea that only EDM is reliable enough to keep Vinyl City running. Mayday and Zuke are two young artists who rediscover the genre of rock and roll after most of the city had shifted to playing electronic dance music to power the Qwasa, but the two believe the different genre might help with the city’s power issues and thus form their own band Bunk Bed Junction. In Vinyl City, music is converted into energy through a special device known as a Qwasa, and in order to search for promising artists who can power the Grand Qwasa to a considerable degree, the record label No Straight Roads hosts televised auditions. However, it was an improvement, and besides the crashes gameplay was almost never negatively impacted, meaning No Straight Roads still had room to win me over with its incredible imagination. Now in 2023, some of the issues have been addressed… but there are still moments of dialogue not syncing with mouth movements pretty egregiously to the point characters spend longer miming than talking, the game crashed twice, and the slowdown near the game’s start still wasn’t addressed. However, after seeing audio sync issues in cutscenes, slowdown during seemingly mundane gameplay segments, and even having scenes entirely skipped as they didn’t load properly, I decided to wait to try again later down the road. Usually I would wait for a newer game to potentially get any patches or updates, but I had thought this indie game would have been safe to play. Back when No Straight Roads released in 2020, its electric rock and roll personality, colorful characters, and stylish music-inspired environments and battles made me jump in and play it shortly after its release.
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