Laughing Warawau MZ Remake First Impressions

Laughing Warawau MZ remake was released on September 28th, 2024. I only got to play it properly on October 5th, 2024. I'm gonna be honest I was sort of eager to see what this remake had to offer so I tried playing it before a machine translation was available, basically playing it raw. From there I did form some opinions based on the changes I noticed even without being able to read the text buuuuuut, still counts as a first impression. And most of my thoughts didn't change anyway, if anything they were amplified after having a translation.

I'll get straight to the point. This game is not good. It fails as a remake to the original Laughing Warawau (2011) and as a standalone game. And I know it's very easy to look at a remake of a beloved game and call it terrible because it's slightly different from the original, but I find it hard to believe that anyone would look at the majority of the decisions this remake makes and think it's a genuine improvement.

Probably the most egregious change is the lack of Talking Points. For whatever reason, the author decided that what this game needed was less character interactions actually and went ahead to remove almost every single Talking Point that was present in the original game. For what reason, I genuinely have no idea. Laughing Warawau had such a strong and memorable cast and yet by the end of this game each character just felt like a hollow shell of their former selves.

And to be clear, it's not purely the presence of Talking Points that make or break this cast. A lot of their personality traits were just, sort of toned down or completely altered? Chihedo Musubi being the worst offender.

There's actually a new character that's been added to the main cast and she sort of sucks. I was initially curious how she would fit into the dynamic but I quickly realized that she didn’t actually have a character. Instead of her having her own personality she's just a weird split of Chihedo Musubi? As in most of her dialogue are just stolen lines from Chihedo in the original game. Her existence serves nothing more than to make Chihedo Musubi look more incompetent and insignificant by comparison since they now share the exact same role for some reason. I can only assume the Talking Points were removed because of her presence and it might have been too much of a hassle to include her in every single interaction but if that’s the case, why even add her to the main cast?

But don't worry, it gets worse. In the original game, you were pretty much encouraged to get a better understanding of the story by exploring around, interacting with NPCs, and finding bits of lore within their dialogue in the environment. And while most of these NPCs still exist, it's now a weird mix of optional combat NPCs and actual enemies that will attack you when you interact with them. Why is this an issue? Because it's nearly impossible to tell which enemies have optional encounters and which ones don’t. Mix that with the fact that the maps in this game are huuuge. Probably much bigger than in the original. Why is this a problem? Because it completely discourages any type of exploration in this game. I have no reason to visit every single room like I did in the original. I don’t want to talk to every single NPC and gamble whether I'll get another boring combat encounter or some vague bits of lore that may or may not contribute to the bigger picture. Playing through this remake is just a huge slog.

I guess this remake’s idea of improving the original game’s simple barebones combat was to just give your party members more skills and throw in more mandatory encounters in the game. By having actual skills, you might almost be tricked into thinking you’re going to get perhaps a more interesting combat system, but no. All you have to do is spam your strongest attack. Bosses are incredibly easy or annoying depending on how many times they spam their AoE attack in a row. I could forgive the original for having very simple combat since that clearly wasn’t the focus of the game. But considering this remake goes out of its way to remove any incentive to explore and adds more bosses, all of the combat in this game just feels like padding. In fact there is a certain boss that outright admits it exists to waste your time. Not in a particularly humorous way, but more in a the creator genuinely could not think of an explanation for these specific characters to be here so they just didn’t bother.

Beyond that, not only were parts of the story removed but some of its lore has been altered. Not in a way that makes the narrative more interesting, no that's ridiculous. Now here's where things get really weird. Because at the start there are clearly some very intentional changes to the game's story so I almost assumed we might be heading in a slightly different direction this time around. But no? After a certain point it’s almost as if everything has been copy and pasted from the original game's script without considering the changes that were made to it beforehand. So there is straight up contradicting information present in this game because whatever the creator had in mind for this remake at the start was never elaborated upon, ever. Certain pay-offs that were built up beautifully in the original story suddenly come out of nowhere in this remake because the foreshadowing and build up present in the original were either removed or altered to say something completely different. I can't help but wonder what someone would think of this game had they never experienced the original, but I'm also genuinely horrified at the idea of the remake being someone's first impression of this story.

The only thing this game has going for it are the visuals, I guess. Almost all the assets were remade from scratch or heavily edited to give them a more updated look and it's pretty cool. It looks nice enough, but some of the atmosphere has been lost. Not as a result of the new art style really, but I dunno, a lot of maps just didn't bother replicating the surrealism of their original counterparts. In fact, it feels like a lot of the more "uncomfortable" aspects of the visual and audio design were seemingly removed for no reason. There was one area I did like quite a bit though and that was Nyanyamo's mansion. It just looks a lot cooler in the remake.

This ended up going on a lot longer than I had wanted it to but the Laughing Warawau remake was just such a disappointment. Of all the games I would have liked to see remakes of, this was probably the last one that needed it. I wish the time spent developing this could have gone to something more interesting. Just play the original, it's amazing. There's no reason to check out the remake.