I hate this game’s name with a fiery passion. Both the space and dashes in the title will cause the title to get broken up into multiple lines, and all for a stupid pun. That encapsulates my opinion of VA-11 Hall-A as a whole, though—interesting and unusual, but ultimately lots of effort for very little payoff. I went into this game knowing nothing about it other than the fact that it’s received nearly universal praise, and yet about 75% of my time with it was utter misery. The premise is solid for a visual novel with a tiny amount of gameplay because working as a bartender means interacting with many different characters, watching as they open up over time. Add main character Jill’s problems into the mix and it sounds like a winner.

But the brilliant story many reviews praised? It never materialized, with much of the interesting-sounding worldbuilding leading nowhere in particular. And while I came to like many of the regular characters despite the awkward tone lurches of their random tangents, I missed out on an ending for two characters because I evidently screwed up the Drink order of a third character who orders in riddles. That’s stupid. Anyone on earth could tell you that this was a stupid idea. And these little problems combine with a dearth of likability early on to make for a game that’s 75% nails on a chalkboard. Having now finished VA-11 Hall-A, I can finally understand why it’s praised so highly despite how rarely I ever hear it mentioned—it panders in a big way to the niche that owns anime body pillows, a cartoonish amount of pent-up sexual frustration, and an obsession over things like catgirls.

Is that offensive? If you’re offended, show me who’s boss by buying a physical version of VA-11 Hall-A here (PS4) or here (Switch). That’ll teach me.

“Hi, nice to meet you! HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT IT’S LIKE WHEN YOU DIE?”

I’m glad that I’m playing VA-11 Hall-A now instead of when it first came out in 2016. Back then, I hadn’t played very many visual novels, so I wouldn’t have been able to describe what bothers me so much about the writing style. Now, however, I can compare VA-11 Hall-A to Aokana – Four Rhythms Across the Blue, which is similar to VA-11 Hall-A in that it’s also a deceptively long visual novel balanced somewhere between grounded seriousness and zany, frequently racy humor. Aokana succeeds and VA-11 Hall-A fails (early on, at least) because of one basic thing: transitions. Aokana barrages you with details, but you get a good enough sense of everyone’s normal behavior that unusual behavior or an odd comment serves as a pivot point between seriousness and humor. VA-11 Hall-A‘s problem is that it leaps from its zany humor to more existential questions in a single breath.

Main character Jill can go from laughing at something stupid to having overly dramatic conversations at the drop of a hat, and it doesn’t help any that she’s already familiar with many regulars at the start of the game. VA-11 Hall-A drops you into a whole lot of dialog more suited to the end of the game long before you have any idea who anyone is.

VA-11 Hall-A takes place in a dystopian futuristic world filled with talking dogs and advanced AIs and has plenty of interesting subjects to cover because of that, but it dives in so haphazardly that topics come across as the writer pontificating about things (or as one of the Game Pass reviews I saw puts it, “as if written by a high school student who thinks they are smart because they browse 4chan”). It’s clumsy.

And this stuff really does come out of left field without any kind of segue. It’s not uncommon to give someone a drink and then get asked a very pointed question about your character’s sex life. There are ways of handling this type of stuff, but the writing style bludgeons you with it, causing many of the characters to come off as charmless and unlikable.

Again, these characters are strangers to you, the player. Most of us know better than to joke around like that with a stranger. And while overwhelming you with ugliness is occasionally an intentional decision to make certain patrons unlikable, it can get so unrelenting even among other more likable characters that at one point I sat back and out loud said, “this was definitely written by a very specific type of guy.” And what’s so frustrating is that many of the characters do eventually wear you down and become enjoyable regulars whose lives I enjoyed hearing about. A sequel written with more nuance and better transitions could be amazing, and there’s a sequel coming called N1RV Ann-A (ugh) that’s hopefully that game.

Side note: The cross-branding that resulted in the critically-reviled YIIK: A Postmodern RPG frequently being mentioned as an all-time cult classic has aged incredibly poorly. VA-11 Hall-A might as well be talking up Superman 64. Every single time YIIK came up, I was yanked out of the experience.

I suspect that VA-11 Hall-A plays better on consoles than on PC for drink-mixing reasons

The basic gameplay loop consists of listening to characters ramble, making them a drink, and then repeating that until you get back to Jill’s apartment. She has bills that you have to pay on certain dates (and failing to pay the last one results in you getting the bad ending), but some of her money can also be spent on optional room decorations. Several of these are required to keep her focused long enough to show you what customers order after you click past their dialog. So long as you don’t screw up too many drink orders, though, you’ll have enough money to buy everything she wants and still make your payments. I purchased several unnecessary items and still barely managed to save up to cover an unexpected $10,000 bill.

Like so much else about VA-11 Hall-A, mixing drinks can be interesting. If a character establishes that they drink something when they’re sad and order something different after coming in sad, you can make the other drink to cheer them up. At a couple of points, your decision to make a drink alcoholic or non-alcoholic seems to also influence the story in a (admittedly minor) way. I like that sort of thing.

But mixing drinks is a slow, tedious process on PC. You’re required to individually drag different combinations of five ingredients into a mixing icon, then mix it for either a short time or a long time depending on what the recipe says. And you’re always referencing the recipes because patrons often ask for drinks with specific qualities, and none of the drinks are memorable enough to remember how to make off-hand. It wasn’t until I checked the internet, filled with a combination of frustration and confusion that people weren’t up in arms about the terrible drink-mixing controls, that I discovered that there are keyboard shortcuts that speed up the process significantly by mapping the five ingredients to Q, W, E, R, and T. That’s better, though still not ideal.

Nothing bothered me quite as much as the tiny dialog window, though. This is a visual novel where the dialog box takes up 1/6th of the screen, forcing conversations to become a salvo of short lines that pepper you like a shotgun shell. I found myself clicking through so much dialog that I would occasionally double-click by accident, completely skipping a line. There’s no way to go back. VA-11 Hall-A has no log. That part of the conversation is gone unless you reload a save or replay the game. This is terrible visual novel design. Another annoyance is that you have to click in this undersized window to move things along; clicking anywhere else doesn’t push the dialog forward. This is unnecessarily unintuitive and annoying.

VA-11 Hall-A has music and visuals, obviously, both with their positives and negatives

You know that when a header is generic like the one above, it probably means that there’s something wrong with the art. That’s not entirely true, though; VA-11 Hall-A recaptures a look popular among Japanese PC games a long time ago that’s been largely lost since, and that’s good. This does result in some stylistic fadeouts that I grew to hate because of how slow they are, but other than that, my only real problem is the lack of variance. The bar is always the same, and while the new characters who appear make things slightly interesting, you’ll be staring at the same stuff for most of the game. And VA-11 Hall-A is quite a bit longer than I expected it to be. It took me 4-5 days of moderate play to finish, even as a fast reader.

The music is also pretty solid, but every time you start bartending, you start by being asked to make a playlist from a large list of tracks. Not only does that rob them of any connection to the game or its events, but they fade out instead of actually ending, which is the kind of audio design “screw it” that makes me crazy. VA-11 Hall-A was made with Gamemaker Studio. I know Gamemaker Studio. I know how its audio works. I took a few months away from this site to develop a short little game of my own. If I can make tracks that properly end while fumbling around and learning the first coding language I’ve ever made an effort to learn, anyone can. Even if that was addressed, though, there’s one more thing that bothers me about the music: every note sounds like it’s the same volume, which gives the whole soundtrack a very robotic and tiring feel. That may be a deliberate decision that pays homage to the repetitive, unnatural-sounding soundtracks of the games that inspired VA-11 Hall-A, but I don’t care for it.

Story: 2/3 (because I ended up liking many of the regulars for the most part) Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ – 5/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

A super late VA-11 Hall-A review first appeared on Killa Penguin