In space, no one can hear you sigh in a mixture of boredom and frustration.

It’s been a very long time since Lylat Wars on the N64, but in many ways I feel that this is still the definitive shoot-em-up game…or at least, I’ve not played anything better. But then, this is not a genre I pay very much attention to generally, as most of the titles I come across are brutally difficult side-scrolling entities, and one Touhou game was quite sufficient to tell me that this wasn’t really my sort of thing. But I decided to give Chorus a chance after watching a few gameplay videos, as the mixture of space exploration, combat powers, and chaotic space battles looked appealing.

God almighty, what a mistake THAT turned out to be.

All of those things are mostly appealing, in all fairness. Despite how content lacking they all are and the lengthy travel times I was actually quite motivated to explore each of Chorus’ areas to see what was around, and I enjoyed the combat for the first few hours until it became unbearably repetitive and something to be avoided where possible. I never really did get the hang of controlling Forsa as well as I would have liked – my fault entirely for trying to use both sticks to control movement, which I’m used to from other games, but the left stick only controls your forward momentum and a barrel roll movement – but I didn’t absolutely hate playing it…mostly.

Drifting was poorly implemented and awkward. The game also has some very weird, stringent requirements for mission acceptance and saving – is being unable to save in the middle of a mission really THAT big of a deal? Checkpoints during missions were often spaced annoyingly far apart as well, meaning that death or failure meant re-doing segments or watching pre-battle cutscenes again. It was very easy to fail during missions as well, as the game seemed to delight in throwing arbitrary timed segments at me when I least expected it. Destroy the hidden power cells within 30 seconds or you fail! Blow up that ship within a minute or you fail! Defend this character on the other side of the map! Chase after this person you can barely see! Things like this shake up the gameplay, which is nice, but having to sit through the setup for it each time is not.

Boss battles in this were mercifully few and far between, but they were without exception extremely obnoxious – the two giant Faceless constructs were insufferably long-winded and boring, with sudden death mechanics that made them extremely cheap and repetitive (why did I have to do the same two sequences twice each for the final boss?!) and the Sentinel enemies were such a ridiculous difficulty spike that I nearly quit the game both times. There was a lot of that, and I don’t think that’s entirely on me as a player: some enemies were just obscenely overpowered damage sponges, and upgrading your ship in this seemed to have very little effect in the long run.

But the biggest problem with Chorus lies in its narrative – it’s absolutely bloody dreadful. Nara has the emotional range and depth of an adolescent in their “emo” phase, spending most of her time in nihilistic brooding that is only made all the more irritating by her tendency to deliver it all in a whispered inner monologue. Her ship, Forsaken – nicknamed “Forsa” because we can only deal with so much cliche drama – has even less personality than that, and doesn’t seem all that bothered that it was left deactivated and alone for seven years after an initial tantrum which never seems to really resolve itself beyond a “fine I forgive you for now” moment. Despite the initial setup being interesting the plot is delivered with all the enthusiasm and creativity of a J.J. Abrams movie, regularly interrupts the gameplay flow, and just isn’t particularly fun to sit through.

This would have been much better as a game that encouraged exploration for its own sake, or at the very least dialled back on the story and Nara in general for the sake of worldbuilding, because some of the concepts were actually rather interesting…although this was no doubt because the game only touched upon them briefly, preferring instead to focus on Nara feeling sorry for herself and trying to find her place in the universe.

Chorus is not a game I will replay – I’ve already sold it on, in fact – and not one I will look back fondly on. You win some, you lose some, I suppose. Stepping outside of my comfort zone in this instance had the effect one would expect if you stepped out of an airlock.