The story of both the Punch Line anime and game can be roughly described as existing in two distinct parts, beginning with the initial “spirit” half and ending with main character Yuta Iridatsu finally getting their body back and using it to right some wrongs. Now, I’m a bit of an archivist; I have screenshots covering the entirety of pretty much every game I’ve played since ~2013, to the point where I had to get an external hard drive just to have a place to put them all. That’s what makes it so frustrating that the Playstation 4 version of the Punch Line game uses that rarely-seen feature that allows developers to disable your ability to make screenshots and videos. That would be pretty weak even if the game and story were both brand new, but the anime wrapped up over three years ago and many of its big revelations have been out in the wild since then. The Punch Line game supposedly has a different ending, of course, but disabling the screenshot/video functionality for the entirety of the second half—including many sequences and screens that the player has already seen—is heavy-handed and incredibly grating for archivist-types like me.

Even in the frequent scenes where characters are messing around and nothing significant is happening on the plot front, screenshots and videos are locked off.

I can take screenshots through my HDMI recorder, of course, but it messes up the naming and order, and not everyone has an HDMI recorder sitting around. It’s just ridiculous that the intro and outro videos disallow screenshots and video considering that you can make all the screenshots you’d like of both of them provided you do it in the first half. The intro and outro are identical in both halves (so expect to go a little crazy having to sit through them before you piece together that holding X—not tapping it, but holding it—skips them despite nothing ever telling you this).

You also can’t use the share button to make screenshots of television news reports that you’ve already seen much earlier in the game. It’s probably worth pointing out that the Punch Line game was originally released in Japan in April of 2016, so even the parts new to the game have been out there on the internet for awhile now.

Those weird title screen things (possibly loading screens) that switch between speaking and moaning “Punch Line“? No screenshots or video for you! It’s kind of a shame, too, because some of the art here is really well done, only shows up in the second half of the game, and would make for some decent desktop backgrounds.

This is the one that really gets under my skin, though—chapter titles are locked off with everything else, so all of the unique chapter title screens can’t be screenshotted by PS4 players lacking some kind of HDMI recording ability. I’m not sure why this is the one that bothers me the most, but it really does. Punch Line has no reason to use such ridiculous, anti-player limitations (especially if it’s going to release on PC as promised, since there’s no built-in ability to lock off screenshots and videos), and I wouldn’t be lying if I said that this worsened my overall experience; I relied exclusively on the built-in screenshot and video functionality on the PS4 for several years, and I would have been entirely unable to include screenshots of half of the game if that was still the case. The limitation doesn’t even make sense; screenshots made in the first half automatically affix a small watermark to the bottom-right of the image, whereas those made over HDMI don’t, so the inability to record pushes players to circumvent the whole thing, leading to images that aren’t watermarked.

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