[Switch] Diabolik Lovers Chaos Lineage Mini-Review

Title: DIABOLIK LOVERS CHAOS LINEAGE
Developers:  Otomate & Rejet
Release Date: 28th March 2019
Length: ~20 Hours
Links: Official Site, VNDB

After countless failed attempts, Karlheinz finally thinks that his “Eden Project” has been sucessful and begins to make plans to bequeath his powers to his sucessor & fade from existence. However, his longtime friend & chess partner Socrates isn’t quite convinced that Karlheinz’s chosen Adam & Eve are up to the task. To test the pair’s love is true, he decides to trap all of the guys & Yui in a world that he has created, as well as wiping all of their memories.

Inside the fake world, the guys are seperated into three families – Orange, Scarlet & Violet. The families have been locked in a battle to the death in order to decide who will become the “Supreme Ruler”. The key to this is the legendary “Sleeping Princess” called Eve whom will, the legend foretells, appear in the church one day. With all the players set, this deadly game of survival begins, will Yui & the guys ever get their memories back so they can return to their own world?

My Thoughts

I should probably admit here that I was totally wrong about this game – I thought it was going to be a fandisc but in actual fact it’s a fully-fledged main game in the series. While “Chaos Lineage” could easily be a phrase used to describe that actual timeline of the series, this game actually takes place during the latter part of Dark Fate.

I’m going to talk about the positives of this game first, starting with the character routes themselves. Although the trope of “characters lose their memories” seems pretty generic, it was actually kind of fun and was definitely interesting to see how far the guys have come. I also read some reviews where people have mentioned that they felt the routes were very short. All of the routes took me between 1.5-2 hours to read each, leading to a total play-time of just under 20 hours. I think that this is okay for a full-priced game given just how many characters there are but if you don’t then it would be worth waiting to see if the game drops in price a little over time.

Having grouped the characters into 3 different families, this leads to a lot of fun & often the characters make comments about each other that are very funny when you consider their “true” relationships. I liked the violet family best but all three of them were actualy pretty good. Scarlet was especially fun because Reiji is definitely a great leader.

All of the character routes were generally of (at least) good standard so I won’t be speaking about all of them individually but will talk about a couple that I felt were particularly enjoyable and/or notable. Overall, this game offered almost “alternate” endings to those in Dark Fate, with many left pretty open-ended.

As a Kanato fan, I have been pretty disappointed by many of his routes in recent games. However, Chaos Lineage actually bucks the trend and I firmly believe that this was Kanato’s best route outside of the original game. I enjoyed watching the triplets try to get along & really liked his ending also.

I was highly disappointed with Carla’s route in Lost Eden but thankfully his route in this game was far better. His ending in particular was more in-line with his personality.

I may be bias but Azusa’s route was hands-down my favourite from the game – it was very different to most of the other routes & actually had me in tears (which is lowkey embarassing to admit). Since he’s not a do-S character, I’m convinced that the creators like to make us SUFFER in other ways. I also appreciated that only Azusa (and perhaps Subaru) are the only nice characters when they have none of their former memories.

Interestingly, since this game is set before Lost Eden, none of the characters have previously met Kino so the game essentially “resets” everything that happened in his route & starts again. While this meant him being an asshole at the beginning of his route, I feel like I understand him better from his route in this game than in Lost Eden. It never made sense for me for the guy to only appear after Karlheinz had disappeared when all he’s ever really wanted was his approval. Kino also had my favourite bad ending, it was just the kind of despair I like, haha.

On another positive note, I also thought that the artwork was a little better than in Lost Eden but there really is a disproportionately high number of “blood sucking” CGs.

I’ve never been a fan of the way the routes of the “main” Dialovers games have been set out & have complained about the use of “situation” chapters which totally break up the flow of the story. This game actually changed it to each character having 15 story chapters + 2 endings which makes SO much more sense.

Since what used to be the situation chapters are now integrated into the main story, this means that we still get those nice dummyhead mic scenes. The only downside to this is that it means the game is far better played in the Switch’s handheld mode so you can wear headphones & appreciate the voice acting. I did play a couple of routes (Laito & Yuma) using TV mode and it just wasn’t quite the same.

As you can see above, there are only two endings – Euphoria (happy) & Labyrinth (bad). This makes so much more sense & the game no longer wastes CGs on the bad endings.

Note: This section contains mild spoilers for some of the previous Dialovers games, skip to the Final Thoughts section if you want to avoid these!

Okay, onto the bad part of the game – the overly complicated set-up & lore. I always thought that the writers just threw Socrates in there to show that they were clever & knew about philosophy or something. I guess it makes sense for him to finally do something but I just can’t understand why he would toss the Tsukinami brothers into his imaginary world in routes outside of their own. Wouldn’t it be a lot of effort to capture them for no reason? Like I can understand the Sakamaki & Mukami families being there since they have the potential to be “Adam” but why the Tsukinami guys? In their routes they typically try and ignore what Karlheinz is up to as much as possible so in Lost Eden Karlheinz just gives his power to one of his sons. In my mind this means that he has essentially given up on his Eden plan so why would Socrates be trying to prove Adam & Eve’s love in that circumstance?

This problem also arises in Kino’s route since he admits that he basically just broke into the world since it looked fun & thought he could mess with the Sakamaki family. Which means that Socrates must be trying to prove the love between Yui & some other guy to bother locking them away in this world? This doesn’t make much sense since Yui never mentions or thinks about any of the guys in that way during the route. Was Socrates trying to get Yui to fall for one of the guys? But that would interfere with his plan to stop Karlheinz surely?

I might be overthinking things but I believe a simpler set-up would’ve avoided all of this. Some writers definitely need to learn that they don’t need to try and overcomplicate things, although I do feel bad for the Dialovers writers since I doubt all of them have been with the series since the beginning.

Final Thoughts

My Score: 7/10

Despite the stupid set-up, I actually enjoyed the content of this game quite a bit and feel like between this & Dark Fate, all of the characters have some sort of satisfactory route ending. This game has a good balance of comedy & plot so if you’re a fan of the series then I would highly recommend picking this up, even if you felt a little let down with Lost Eden.

This series has had quite an impact on me since I’ve just spent so long on it but to be 100% honest, if this was the final game release I would be okay with that – at least the series went out on a relative high. I do believe & hope that if they want to continue the series it would be from this game though since the endings are open enough to allow it.

Since this is the current final game, I thought it would be fun to rank the characters & games themselves. This is 100% just my opinion so please don’t be offended (I know I have trash taste).

Character Ranking

1. Azusa
2. Shu
3. Subaru
4. Carla
5. Kanato
6. Kou
7. Shin
8. Kino
9. Reiji
10. Yuma
11. Ayato
12. Ruki
13. Laito

I’d consider the top 6 to be characters that I actively “like” and the bottom 3 to be characters that I’m not keen on. I no longer hate any of the characters though – I think we’ve been through too much by now 😛
Azusa is definitely one of my all-time favourite characters & my top 3 have been the same for a while but it’s been pretty interesting to see how my opinions on everyone else have changed throughout the series.

Game Ranking

1. Dark Fate
2. Lunatic Parade
3. Chaos Linage
4. Original
5. Vandead Carnival
6. Lost Eden
7. More, Blood

I just referred to the first game as the “original” but my list is probably different to a lot of players – I definitely value the humour and “fun factor” of games like LP & CL highly. I’d say that the top 4 are definitely worth a play, VC is fun if you find it for a cheap price & unfortunately More,Blood is incredibly important story-wise to the rest of the series so you’re forced to play it even though it sucks (which probably makes me hate it even more!). I’d say that Lost Eden is the least important of the “main” games since  DF has better endings & CL overwrites the need for it plot-wise.

We’re finally at the end! Thank you so much for sticking with me through the ups and downs of this series. I actually find it pretty sad that I’m finished but at least now I can go & enjoy the drama CDs!

Thanks for reading!