The review contains spoilers for the movie and all other mediums of DEEMO Grief is like the ocean it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim. Vicki Harrison https://i.ur.com/2pFlnGb.png Menu artwork after completing the game the first time with a golden tree illuminating the rest of the darkness alongside the window in the ceiling Introduction The mobile game DEEMO is frustrating for its obscure but unique storytelling. You have to play a certain way and expect certain things to not miss important details that help to understand the core aspects of the story. To list some examples: There are no save slots Youre never prompted that new dialogue now exists Dialogue can silently become unavailable to read after a certain amount of progress Dialogue is shown randomly meaning to see new dialogue you may have to tap a character or location multiple times. You risk accidentally skipping new dialogue by accident and you have to tap that location multiple times again and get lucky. Rayark developer failed to communicate that 3.0s Forgotten Hourglass which Ill now call Chapter 3 is the actual conclusion to the story not 2.0 Chapter 2. Rather Chapter 3s story was communicated as an alternative perspective in the trailers. Then it was communicated as the conclusion to the story in the games changelog and the confusing messaging was never cleared up. Chapter 3 is paygated. Yes the true ending is paywalled behind DLC. Worst of all Chapter 3 has no cutscenes that give players a rough idea that a new story is even being communicated to the player. Most players dont even know there is new and meaningful dialogue to explore as if Rayark is saying the story is not important to know about... I said a few examples but this doesnt even account for the segmentation of the story across many untranslated and even rare media: DEEMO Last Dream no English translation DEEMO Prelude and Sakura Note No official English translation DEEMO After Story Exists only on a discontinued version of the game DEEMO Last Recital for a discontinued console the PlayStation Vita. Other than After Story the other two also include information that conflicts with the game canon as if it wasnt convoluted enough. For example Last Dream explicitly notes that Alice completely forgot about the castle when she woke up when in the game she not only remembers the castle because it is her mind palace but she revisits it multiple times in Chapter 3. It makes Kingdom Hearts before the bundles look simple to digest... And no DEEMO Reborn is the original game but somehow with less story and less music. The only good part about it is the puzzlesolving gameplay and a cool 3D reimagining of the castle. https://i.ur.com/k8G62nl.png Timelines of the whole DEEMO franchise representing three different conflicting canons plus recommendations I was willing to be a completionist and deal with the utter bullcrap Rayark pulls towards me. After experiencing the actual art the story and the soundtrack DEEMO became my favourite story in fiction. I mean this sincerely. Considering the above if you werent like me and were just a new player interested in a mobile rhythm game with a story it is understandable why DEEMOs story is inaccessible to most. It is truly frustrating. It makes the actual art that I love so dearly almost impossible to share with anyone else. Understandably no amount of praise I can give is enough to motivate a new casually interested player into such an incomprehensible mess of poor gameplay design and business decisions. So when an anime movie was announced I had a little glimmer of hope in my soul. My hope for the DEEMO anime was that it would not have the games problems. The story the artwork the soundtrack can be experienced passively and without worrying if you missed anything critical. You wouldnt need to do stupid things like tapping a screen endlessly. You wouldnt need to pay extra for the full story. The movie would and should have been the complete package of Alices tragic story and how she comes to terms with the death of her brother Hans. Much like the game I expected the anime to communicate Alices recovery in three core ways at the least: slow painful and introspective. Small Recap of the Details The most important characters to know their roles for are Alice herself The Girl and The Masked Lady. Alice has gone through grief her whole life since losing her brother as he was the only other person in her life she could rely on and care for. Their parents died before Alice was 8 her mother committing suicide after her husbands heart attack and abandoning her children for good. Being in the hospital bed since the truck accident Alice has an internal battle within herself that determines if she wakes up or dies in her sleep whether she wants to face reality or eternally dream. The Little Girl is the part of her that wants to wake up. The Masked Lady is the one who wants to sleep. The Little Girl is the Masked Ladys doppelganger who unwittingly threatens to end the dream and destroy everything the Masked Lady sacrificed to keep her brother as Deemo. But the Masked Lady is also Alices maladaptive personality construct and is why Alice continues to grieve. She has her own fears and wants and she will always be a part of Alice no matter how much she is suppressed or tried to get rid of. Even when Alice wakes up the pain remains in her and she cant just get rid of it no matter how she suppresses or attacks it. When Chapter 3 begins it makes a very creative use of the multipleplaythrough system found usually in NewGame+ where the more the full game is replayed the closer we get to understanding the Masked Ladys own side of the story collecting memories and progressing slowly but surely with just talking. This process continues from childhood even to Alices adulthood. At the end of the story the Masked Lady and the girl apologise to each other understanding each other and promising that if any negative feelings are boiling up they will fix it together and not be left in the dark. The grief never truly goes away for her brother but Alice can confront and use it to empower herself while she is still alive and at the end of the story she uses it to fulfil her dream and her brothers dream of becoming the best pianist in the world. That is DEEMOs story: a girl who slowly but eventually liberates herself from her grief and the harmful way she processes the memories of her brother. They turn from being hurtful to empowering. But most importantly and this is the part that separates DEEMO from every other story of trauma and grief I have seen: Empowerment is a lifelong process Alice goes through. Negative feelings can come back at any point and it can feel we get stuck in the past and cannot move on. But if Alice and the Masked Lady within herself can learn to navigate their trauma the first time the second time the third time they happen from childhood to adulthood and beyond they know they can navigate those feelings together again. Chapter 2 has players reasonably assume that Alice quickly recovers after waking up because theres no to be continued and the game doesnt receive another story update until 2 years later. Chapter 3 shows that this recovery is not as simple and quick as it was made out to be. It is one of the most inspiring and grounded stories I have encountered in fiction told so simply and so beautifully. https://i.ur.com/IxaNa1M.jpeg Fanarthttps://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/62273930 from https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/4162755 on Pixiv showing the Little Girl and the Masked Lady sleeping with each other beside the tree as Deemo plays music As beautiful as the story is the poor gameplay decisions made while fantastic symbolically are far more obtuse and obstructive than the storytelling benefits can account for. Sure the multiple playthrough system is fantastic in symbolising the repetitive and slow process of empowerment over Alices life. However its still a grindy and frustrating experience that not only offers no new cutscenes to indicate a new story is even happening but Its designed to have unsuspecting players miss crucial dialogue entirely resolvable only by deleting the app and restarting the 15hour journey back to the spot they were just at among the other issues I mentioned at the beginning. DEEMO Movie Review So how did the movie do with adapting the games story and contributing to the overall canon of DEEMO? Unfortunately... the movie is almost satisfactory and only for the most part considering only the story up to Chapter 2 and only slightly considering Chapter 3. This focus presents various problems that make the anime significantly incomplete and so much less impactful than it could have been. Recovery as Slow and Effortful Not Met The anime considers but doesnt adapt Chapter 3 by introducing an original story of Alice in high school the outcome being her two new friends Sania and Rosalia. This would have been an excellent hole in the timeline to tackle but the animes original story can be summarised sadly quickly. Alice is a transfer student who excels at the piano getting Sania and Rosalias interest. Learning that Alice is trying to remember a certain melody Sania and Rosalia try to suggest their own melodies and clues. When Sania suggests the sakura blossoms Alice begins to fully remember the truck accident and her brothers death alongside the melody. Valensky their music professor then explains that the trauma was so great that Alice repressed the memory of the incident and her brother. Fortunately Alice made two new friends so she can move on from the trauma without being alone. https://i.ur.com/5x2s4gS.png Alice and her friends having ice cream seen after Playthrough 2 of Chapter 3 This summary is just one aspect of Chapter 3s story in the game which is depicted through this image. One aspect. You get this image playing through the game three out of five extra times total sometime after the accident was revealed and Alice woke up from her coma. In other words Alice isnt seen making friends until two extra playthroughs through the game which communicates to the player that it was a slow tedious process getting to the point where Alice has the capacity to maintain friendships a sign of her slow but effortful recovery. The movie unfortunately does not communicate the slow effortful part of the games message on maladaptive trauma. It has the same problem as Chapter 2s ending where the reveal and assumed recovery is sudden and seemingly resolved very quickly. Both leave no opportunity to explore the aftermath of Alice waking up from the coma and fully realising her brothers death. Consequently the games primary theme how we see our precious memories in a hurtful rather than empowering way and liberate ourselves from this negative way of thinking was not met in this anime adaptation. Rather the anime chooses to forgo this conclusion as much as possible which this will be discussed in its own section... Introspection: Celia as The Maladaptiveness of Trauma Incomplete https://i.ur.com/HWf7jYJ.png The Masked Lady staring at the tree that stopped growing starting Chapter 2 of the story The animes handling of the Masked Lady is only satisfactory if Chapter 3s existence is completely ignored. To be clear the anime officially subtitles the Masked Lady as Seria when she is meant to be Celia an anagram to Alice. I gave a recount of the story above but the details are important to note here. Celia the Masked Lady does not want the Little Girl to leave because if she leaves the world crumbles bringing Deemo along with it. Deemo is a construct of Alices brother and the only figment of her brother left that she can continue being with. This means a disturbing implication: Alice would not have woken up from her coma if Celia had won. The part of Alice that did not want to wake up to face a reality without her brother would mean her death in a hospital bed how the game communicates suicidal ideation. Unfortunately just like Chapter 2 of the game the anime does not explore the motivations or aftermath of these aspects and the consequences of Celias character that make her especially compelling. The anime only somewhat replicates the Chapter 2 ending creating more questions than answers about Celia. Chapter 3 reveals that Celia has been in darkness for so long that she believes there is no hope she will be happy. This is because Celia is the part of Alice that suffers. Similarly to how depression is personified in stories Celia would be something Alice wants to eliminate completely as it means being happy and getting over her grief. However Celia is also the part of Alice who remembers her brother fondly. Therefore if Celia is to be removed to solve Alices grief that also means Alice has to forget her brother as well. The anime somewhat communicates this very somewhat because they exclude so much of Chapter 3. By excluding Chapter 3 of the story we do not see Celia and what she is going through after Alice wakes up from the coma and returns to the castle during another introspection/dream so the majority of Celias motivations and role is unknown to the animeonly watcher. https://i.ur.com/jIe6orA.png Celia gazing into the overcast darkness from what was meant to be her brothers bedroom now turned into a balcony as seen in DEEMO After Story The reason Celia has such a grip on the castle and wants to stay asleep is also further elaborated in After Story a prequel to the main story involving Celia as the first Little Girl making her the first to be in the castle. Its not entirely necessary to play but it is super helpful. She chooses to stay in the castle reluctantly after retrieving her memories knowing that while she wants to return home she refuses to face a possible reality where her brother isnt with her. This is a conclusion Celia draws as she explores a dream of the mansion she did live in. As the mansion distorts to vocalise more and more how Celia made the wrong decision to leave Deemo and the castle and by extension her brother so does her initial motivation to wake up. Celia then puts on the robe and mask and falls into a deep dark cold sleep. The consequence is that Alices coma is prolonged making her more likely to die. Celia wouldnt know the coma aspect just that her motivation was to go home but regardless if it means not leaving the last part of her brother behind she is willing to dream eternally. Through multiple introspections throughout Alices lifespan the Little Girl would eventually and properly understand Celias struggles and gain her trust. Rather than try to fight each other they would work together to solve their anxieties and fears. They would work together by comforting each other whenever they felt bad usually with a big hug every now and then. https://i.ur.com/kDCZ6sW.jpeg The Little Girl and the Masked Lady effectively Alice and Celia being there for each other on the fourth and final playthrough of Chapter 3 Unfortunately the anime does not include any of this. Consequently animeonly viewers would get confused as to why Celia for example suddenly started to help Alice reach the window: Celias conviction to stay asleep wasnt that strong to begin with as indicated by After Story. Animeonly viewers would also feel the ending is rushed because like Chapter 2 it actually is rushed. That is why they included one more story chapter Chapter 3. In an effort to be conclusive while sticking to just the story up to Chapter 2 the anime feels just as rushed and incomplete. Baffling. Repressing Suppressing Ruins the Adaptation Quoting Professor Valensky at the end of the movie Alice was so full of grief that she erased the memory of the incident. Not only of Hans death but of her involvement in the accident too. Though the animes thematic and character issues stem from Chapter 2 before Chapter 3 comes to solve those issues the anime introduces on its own an aspect of the trauma that completely misrepresents Alices journey and frankly ruins the entire adaptation for me. The anime chooses to say that the trauma has been repressed instead of suppressed. Sorry for using my psychology degree thats cringe to do but this is an important thing to distinguish. Memory repression is a Freudian concept suggesting that memories of severe trauma cannot be remembered consciously but they remain perfectly preserved in the brain. Therefore the victim can recover a perfectly preserved memory of the event through certain incidental circumstances such as the sakura blossoms for Alice. The victim may also experience certain symptoms without knowing their cause such as hallucinations or menstrual cramps but the victim otherwise functions normally until their traumatic memories return to them. Like most of Sigmund Freuds concepts memory repression is unfalsifiable and most research evidence suggests that memories are incredibly manipulable through mere suggestion Lost in the Mall Experiment demonstrates that a person can remember a traumatic event that never even happened. The mobile game does not fall down this hole luckily enough. The mobile game suggests that Alice tried to suppress memories instead. Suppressing is an active onpurpose process of trying to forget something usually by ignoring the problem with activities like heavy drinking. Most importantly suppression actively avoids making peace with the traumatic memory which lets the memory keep a stranglehold on ones mental wellbeing resulting in anxiety and depression that can be draining on ones life potentially leading to worse outcomes later. That is why in Chapter 3 the best way Alice could move on empowered by her memories is to help the part of herself that sees and suffers from these memories. Without making peace with her past Alice would continue to grieve because Celia will always be a part of Alice. For the anime to make out that Alice repressed her memories in the Freudian sense suggests that for all this time nothing about the incident affected how she lived. She grieved intensely but briefly before she could somewhat return to normal and just go about her day. The trauma couldnt explain her aloof personality as the trauma had no active role in her behaviour when it should have. Celia as a maladaptive part of Alices psyche meant nothing. Everyone in the castle meant nothing. In the anime Alices journey to recovery is made out to be I now have friends. I can at least hang out with them. https://i.ur.com/JTPU2M5.png The final scene of DEEMO: Memorial Keys where Alice believes having supporting friends can resolve her childhood grief This is not what DEEMO is about and was never about At the very least in the new DEEMO Movie manga Sakura Notehttps://anilist.co/manga/148494/DEEMOSakuraNote/ the trauma affects her because she frequents the doctors for occasionally passing out usually by trying to remember her past. Valensky and others also try to hide the truth from Alice for fear that she cannot handle the truth even when Alice becomes aggressive about not being told the truth. In contrast the anime suggests nothing about Alices trauma actually affecting her throughout most of her life. They can certainly be inferred upon rewatches but that is asking a lot when the story is meant to be simple and clear. Symbolism should encourage rather than require deeper meanings to be unearthed. The anime could be considered almost satisfactory in most of its executions even though they dont necessarily expand on the games canon or clarify questions and answers. However this moment in the anime misconstrues the entire core message of the original story and to me this is the damning point where I lost faith in the adaptation and the creative team behind it. They worked to adapt DEEMO into a movie and completely missed the point. Possible Conflict of Interest? Keep in mind that the following is an interpretation of machine translations of two Japanese interview articles. There was a conflict between the directors vision and what Pony Canyon wanted to sell. The director intended the movie to be a TV anime series with a heavy focus on an animeoriginal plotline with Alice in high school linkhttps://www.cinra.net/article/202202deemoiwmkr. However that wasnt the actual DEEMO story that Pony Canyon wanted to sell so the script had to be rewritten. Fujisaku tried to give a compromise that satisfied all parties with a mix of the original content and the game content linkhttps://futabanet.jp/seiyuumen/articles//84985?page=1. This is the solution they went with. However this compromise removed all possible potential the film would have had if it had committed to one direction over another. The animeoriginal story doesnt add anything substantial to the canon of DEEMO but because so much screen time is given to the new story the actual game story cannot be given the focus it deserves like including the Chapter 3 content. It is a genuine shame because now theres the potential excuse that a conflict of interest prevented the movie from being a great adaptation or derivative of the game. They not only misunderstood the point of the story they have a damn excuse to get away with it Other Positives and Negatives The Soundtrack Talking about some positives I and almost everyone else within my circles agree that the movies soundtrack is excellent. The most wellliked track is understandably Walking By The Seahttps://www..com/watch?v=7Wwy9j4MIeQ which goes from the games groovy soft tunehttps://www..com/watch?v=CnET7ZNNV00 to an explicitly funky tune. Sairaihttps://www..com/watch?v=8tgxcbJXkI would also get an outstanding orchestral cover that gives a wonderfully unique alternative take to the originalhttps://www..com/watch?v=GEX8Cv2U3Ww. The movies version of Leviathanhttps://www..com/watch?v=6rLHesuSZeA is somehow even edgier and more intense than the originalhttps://www..com/watch?v=yjXuLualzk which surprised me. Though the movie doesnt integrate the soundtracks in the best way e.g. Veil of Memoryhttps://youtu.be/G4IWv3W0fbc?t=53 being cut off too early characters talking over songshttps://www..com/watch?v=yHa7hxTLsBM and some covers are inferior to the originals ANiMA for dampening the piano volumehttps://youtu.be/kBRyRgsKqw0?t=43 compared to the originalhttps://youtu.be/a7ffh5sucw?t=44 ironic in a pianofocused movie and Milis songs Nine Point Eighthttps://www..com/watch?v=Le5nXTvNYJc and Yubikiri Genmanhttps://www..com/watch?v=AN72SVbETA lacking lyrics the soundtrack is a genuine delight and one of two truly good highlights of the movie. Story Structure and Original Elements In the original game the Little Girl and the Masked Lady were the only characters who would speak and scenarios like the high school the Metronome room and so forth did not exist in the original. Despite a large amount of original content however I have not noticed anything new that the DEEMO franchise has not done before e.g. the toys interacting with Alice are just a better version of the fairies from DEEMO Reborn nor did I notice any extra questions being asked or answers to questions being presented e.g. What is the note in the study? What exactly is Deemo? What was Alices childhood life like after her brother died? What is arguably new is that Deemo the Little Girl and the Masked Lady are the only ones who can see notes on a sheet. But this is only new because of the newly introduced toy characters who didnt exist in the game. A supposed reason for including this much filler the original content itself even turning out to be filler was to give the movie more stuff going on. The creative staff might have felt the movie would be boring if it were just Alice exploring and vocalising her observations. A translation of this interview articlehttps://tvbros.jp/movie/2022/02/11/27877/ gives credit to the theory as Ayana Taketatsu VA for Alice mentions how much more expressive and ageappropriate Alice became when the director decided to add the toy characters. Alice being more obviously expressive thanks to extra character chemistry would have allowed the creative team to do more things to maintain audience interest. In my opinion this decision from the director more or less suggests that DEEMO should not have been a movie but a short featurelength OVA like Totsukuni no Shoujo 2022https://anilist.co/anime/130550/TheGirlfromtheOtherSide/ or even better a short OVA series that encompasses all the games story and the original story the director wanted. If the player reads The Little Girl and the Masked Ladys dialogue they can reasonably see how the story could be roughly 40 minutes just for Chapter 3 content though I am currently gauging this with my developing narrative recaps. The movie could have also included more Chapter 3 content as it should have where entirely new environments colour palettes etc. would have been discovered for cool musical montages. To suggest that what the movie added was better than what existed in the game enough to ignore Chapter 3 content is bad faith towards the ability of the original work to captivate its audience. They truly thought they were better than what got them the anime adaptation greenlight to begin with. The Visuals https://i.ur.com/ykowVaM.png Tadaaa.... The most obviously bad aspect of the movie is the visuals which look like cheap motioncapture CGI you would find in 2000s TV shows. Everything is incredibly barren compared to the game artwork like the piano room not even having water with lotus surrounding the stump. I guess water wouldve been too difficult to animate. The top room is also just a flat expanse of sky with some surrounding trees while the game had a large expanse of trees that made the room dark and claustrophobic and then in Chapter 3 the daylight sky dominates the view. Its not only poorlooking CGI but its also creatively bankrupt. I personally think that besides some rigging issues where a characters arms snap into place while playing the piano alongside the mostly unexpressive eyes the character acting is very good. My favourite example is Alice waving her arms in excitement as she talks to Mirai. The actual problem with the animation stems from being entirely motioncapture which means there are no examples of the CGI being animated to do less humanely possible and exciting movements. The visual language of the characters in the film is heavily restricted as a result and lots of scenes that try to be exciting mostly have the characters being still for minutes like the storm and rollercoaster ride. The movie has a lot of decent backgrounds and even some good colour use but a lot of this effort is ruined by an excessive amount of bloom and blur effects. I suppose the bloom and blur would further obscure the dolllike CGI models for the characters but this impacts how easy everything is to see such as the details of leaves furniture etc. The blooming and blur also outright erase facial features like the nose making some characters look more uncannily chibi than they should. Some scenes look genuinely impressive but only when the movie is not trying to hide its already obvious faults. Also again if they just included the Chapter 3 content we could have gotten this area. https://i.ur.com/jAypdNL.png The Cherry Blossom Forest in Chapter 3 with lush pink flora some crystals growing from the ground and a bright illuminating source of light at the end of the viewable pathway creating a sense of mystery for what lies deeper into the forest Anime staff why do you make the decisions that you do...? The Prelude Manga is a Lie? According to Comic Zerosumhttps://twitter.com/comiczerosum/status/1487017624781213701 the final episode of the Preludehttps://anilist.co/manga/126117/DEEMOPrelude/ manga should be read before watching the movie to enjoy the movie more. I argue instead that people will be more confused. Near the movies end with Hans and Alice on the Cherry Blossom road he comforts Alice as he prepares to leave her for his important recital. After this moment the truck crashes into him. In Prelude however Hans has already performed his recital in Episode 5 and he gets an offer to go on a world tour. That world tour not an upcoming recital is something he tries to comfort Alice about. Two chapters later in the manga after Hans takes Alice to an aquarium that is when he gets killed in the accident. In other words the manga and the movies timeline of events dont match up. They are different timelines. Comic Zerosum has lied. I prefer Prelude and its sequence of events more than the movie so it was easy for me to choose which should be the accepted canonical version of the differing timelines. That being said these people couldnt even get events in a timeline to match up. The DEEMO story isnt even big or complicated The more I try to understand and give sympathy the more I cant believe what fundamental incompetency Im seeing How can they recommend reading something that contradicts another thing and not only fail to realise this but get into that problem in the first place? The Coma Scene Lots of fictional works misrepresent what it is like to be in and recovering from a coma. DEEMO is no different. Warning for psychology brain again but it genuinely fascinates me. A study titled the portrayal of coma in contemporary motion pictureshttps://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?cluster=17912160580031152444 finds examples of incorrect portrayals such as patients getting out of bed immediately absent delirium and a beautified appearance with correct portrayals including a long road of physical and mental recovery. This road to recovery is especially true if the patient shows no signs of recovery within a 48hour period THE PROGNOSIS OF MEDICAL COMAhttps://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?cluster=13955385061029426874 https://i.ur.com/zMMJ9v1.png Alice waking up from her coma at the end of Chapter 2 bandaged and connected to a ventilation system heart monitor and an intravenous bag In the mobile game Alice is shown to have messy hair and be connected to the ventilator as she opens her eyes which is a somewhat accurate portrayal of waking from comatose. However she immediately rushes out of bed to stare out the window as if completely recovered. Because Alice has been in a coma for more than a week thanks to the events of After Story source: light novels last dream chapter complete physical and mental recovery after waking up is unrealistic. Some versions of DEEMO do not include the ventilator Last Recital and Reborn but it is not unrealistic for a patient in comatose not to need a ventilator. The movie still presents the Coma Scene unrealistically but instead of showing Alice immediately rushing out of bed she slowly gets off and walks to the window. The movie is the only entry in the franchise to show Alices physical weakness when waking up. The movie also shows her in delirium and trying to observe her surroundings before a sudden river of tears appropriately conveys the flood of emotions that she cannot currently express with her face. This makes the movie the only entry to portray Alices delirium when waking up compared to every other entry where she is oddly very lucid. https://i.ur.com/2vwTYe7.png Alice quietly crying tears after waking up in DEEMO: Memorial Keys her overwhelming feelings of sadness catching up to her delirium from just waking up For all the negatives the movie has how it handled the Coma Scene was arguably the best and most realistic in the franchise. Its still not perfect but it is the only example I found where the movies execution was a genuine improvement compared to other versions. Good work creative team. Brownie points for that. Same with the soundtrack like highlighted before. I just wish that amount of effort and sincerity was applied to every part of the movie not just two. Conclusion The anime presents an almost satisfactory but deeply misconceived alternative to the mobile game and its core messages. By sticking to Chapter 2 while also taking a derivative inconsiderate of Chapter 3s core themes and messages the anime turns out to be the 2nd worst attempt at representing DEEMOs story as a slow painful but effortful recovery from trauma through selfintrospection over the lifespan. I personally think Reborn is worse for having much less subtlety with the mystery hiding Hans face during the reveal and changing the ending to make Alice not only oddly calm about her brothers death but had some people think she jumped out the hospital windowhttps://www..com/watch?v=9HvW31VK6a4lc=UgyMEr4aPbKOsJSgB4AaABAg scroll down for highlighted comment. The ending communicates either Alices sudden rationalisation and act of suicide an extremely dark alternative ending that had the potential to be good and unique like this Bilibili fan animationhttps://www.bilibili.com/video/BV16G4y1M75y/ or the ending showed that Alice could easily move on with her life with little emotional baggage damaging the games themes more than the movie ever did. That being said if I am comparing the anime movie to Reborns handling of the story something went truly wrong. The movie is also similar to DEEMO Reborn in that the visuals are something to be desired with both forgoing the 2D drawings and illustrations that made the mobile game light novels and manga genuinely beautiful with huge chunks of visual language that the movie fails to convey in the same way. The true highlight of the movie is its soundtrack with flaws in some tracks that only somewhat disappointed me only to be outshined by how good the rest of the soundtrack is. Perhaps if you are disappointed in how the movie handled its original story and its themes there is a manga version called DEEMO Preludehttps://anilist.co/manga/126117/DEEMOPrelude/ and Sakura Notehttps://anilist.co/manga/148494/DEEMOSakuraNote/ which appear to expand on the highschool story dramatically. We get more insight into Alices character and medical condition due to the trauma and more instances of Sania and Rosalia interacting with her. Prelude is also a prequel story before the main game and a prequel before After Story telling the life of Hans and some examples of why Alice loves him so much as a brother. Prelude is fully translated and gets my thumbs up but Sakura Note is yet to be fully translated and to receive my thumbsup. Hopefully it achieves what the movie cannot. Ultimately it is the games I want people to play but as this review introduced its not an easy thing to tackle. But I can give some recommendations here to guide people. 1. Try to get the Switch version of the game. It is around 20 USD and is objectively the best version of the game. Not only is all the DLC free but Chapter 3 is also free. Thats Chapter 3 FREE on the Switch version. The next best is an Android device and having access to Google Play Pass which gives a free trial to play DEEMO and its DLC free for 30 days. Beyond those options players must pay 10 USD for Chapter 3 which cuts out 99 of those who would be interested. Could also like sail the seas too but you didnt hear that from me. 2. Play and enjoy the game but make an effort to tap on areas and characters to bring up their dialogue. The dialogue is chosen at random each tap and characters can change poses and positions when coming in and out of rooms but it would be fun to see as much dialogue as available and think of the order in which they come in and what corresponds best with the actions onscreen. Be sure to do this after the tree changes artwork and grows as this is when characters get new dialogue alongside old dialogue and some old dialogue is deleted after some time. I wish the game indicated this but thats how it is. If you feel this is too tedious which it is there is also this resource documenting the dialogue in the gamehttps://sites.google.com/site/deemoproject/comprehensivedialoguelist though some are not included for some reason. 3. Most of the game is fine until Chapter 3 where it suddenly expects to be treated like Undertale in one instance. On the 2nd playthrough of 4 in Chapter 3 3 playthroughs out of 5 total when you get 100 on the stairs you now must go to the Basement and tap around the left side of the screen for an interaction that has the most critical dialogue to know in the entire game. Why is this so obscure? Dont ask me ask Rayark. 4. If you feel tired of replaying the game over and over and run out of new music to play one trick that worked for me was letting Flight of the Bumblebeehttps://www..com/watch?v=SVXJwA61eJY play in the background. It is the shortest track in the game and you can score 0 and still get the light orbs to spawn around the tree. So in roughly 4 minutes you can grow the tree 1.5m in the mobile version. The Switch version straightup gives a tonne of tree growth when playing the game so the trick is pointless in that version. Bless Fly High Works... I hope to make my own resource someday where it can include everything useful for the player like all the dialogue and perhaps even my own borderlinefanfic narrative recaps. Then people can just enjoy the series normally without worrying about missing out on anything. But until then the DEEMO Movie is the most accessible way to get into the story. It would be upsetting if the journey ends there because tough times are meant to be overcome so I highly encourage trying out the rest of the entries especially the games however you can. DEEMO is truly special to me and I hope everyone else who is interested enjoys the story art soundtrack and even gameplay as much as I did. Thank you for reading https://i.ur.com/uko5A5E.jpeg Alice sleeping on her bed with cherry blossoms growing on the blanket. Artworkhttps://twitter.com/niwauxx/status/1640677209076813825 by Haruki Niwa https://twitter.com/niwauxx on Twitter who is the artist for DEEMO Prelude and DEEMO Sakura Note