The invention of AI imagery has done a serious disservice to gaming, as it allows unbridled laziness to take over. Case in point: Pakotime and their games. Another case in point: Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium: The Visual Novel. It is a visual novel made up largely of AI generated cities and buildings. The character cutouts are probably also AI generated as well, if the lack of hands in the generic cutouts are anything to go by. I can also tell by the lack of specific imagery within the game. For example, take this:

In a normal visual novel, you would see an image of them escaping through the secret exit. But not in Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium. But everything is told, not shown. Oh they’ll tell you what happens, amazing things, but never show in any images of the action, because its all generic AI generated garbage. But the rot goes far deeper than just the AI generated imagery. It extends to the story itself.

The writing in Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium is bad, really, really bad. The visual novel tells the story of a protagonist and her allies taking on a giant corporation that is kidnapping people, for reasons. It’ll tell you the corporation does bad things, but never spell it out:

After awhile, Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium turns into some thinly veiled leftist anti-corporate manifesto about resistance or something and I checked out. I didn’t care about any of the characters, it gave me no reason to. And because I didn’t care about any of the characters, I didn’t care about what they were doing. Since I didn’t care what they were doing, I didn’t care about people rising up against the evil corporation. And because I did not care, I just quit and never went back. When a porn game handles this stuff better, you know you’ve done messed up.

Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium is a visual novel that fails at all levels. Its fails in the visual part, as its all generic AI images. It fails as novel, with piss-poor writing. There is no reason to play this. The story is nothing you haven’t read before, and done much better. The visuals are all generic and frankly could have been left out, and little would have changed. This gets a garbage with a two back-end score.

Overall: Cyberpunk Paradise Elysium is a visual novel that fails at the visuals, and as a novel.

Verdict: Garbage

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