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D

Dの食卓

01 April 1995
D [Dの食卓] - cover art
Glitchwave rating
2.91 / 5.0
0.5
5.0
 
 
80 Ratings / 2 Reviews
#3,260 All-time
#85 for 1995
The story follows Laura Harris as she goes to investigate a hospital after learning her father went on a mass murdering spree and barricaded himself inside. The hospital morphs into a castle upon her arrival, which she must explore to find her father.
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D
1995 Acclaim  
US
1995 Acclaim  
JP
1995 WARP Acclaim  
CD-ROM
JP
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Dの食卓 Complete Graphics
1995 WARP Acclaim  
3xCD-ROM
JP 4 992713 021136 SLPS-00133 / SLPS-00134 / SLPS-00135
D
1996 WARP Acclaim  
CD-ROM
XNA 0 21481 82048 2
D
1996 WARP Acclaim  
3xCD-ROM
XNA 0 21481 21048 1 SLUS-00128 / SLUS-00173 / SLUS-00174
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Title
D is a 1995 spooky-style FMV adventure game by Kenji Eno, sort of an enfant terrible of the gaming industry for his time (he passed in 2013 due to heart failure - peace be upon him). D places you in the shoes of Laura Harris, a high school(? maybe it was college) student who investigates a hospital after learning that her father went on a murder spree and locked himself inside. Once inside the hospital she finds it's somehow turned into a mansion, and the game starts from there. The pacing of D's story is a bit strange, and not entirely satisfying. Over the course of the game you get flashbacks to a moment in Laura's childhood, with each new flashback revealing more of the scene. Additionally you'll occasionally see a phantom-like illusion of your father's face, cryptically pleading for you to go back before "it's too late". There are two different endings to get - good and bad - and the ending you get depends on whether or not you use a certain item at the climactic encounter. I got the bad ending. Oops!

D came out at a time when CD-ROMs were still sexy (Myst having legitimized its viability as a gaming format), and FMVs weren't met with weary sighs. However D goes a step beyond Myst's relatively static world and includes a wealth of pre-rendered CG cutscenes (courtesy of Amiga 4000 work stations), and even actions like walking down a hallway, for example, are animated as if from a first-person perspective. As a result D was released on a whopping three discs while lasting roughly 90 minutes, all the more fascinating when you consider Final Fantasy VII had the same number of discs with 40 hours of gameplay. D received positive reception for its animation, story, and atmosphere, and Nintendo fanboys were thoroughly stumped as they were stuck playing cringe 2D crap like Yoshi's Island and Chrono Trigger.

Sadly time hasn't been kind to D, and the problems it had in 1995 are only exacerbated today. That said, the graphics still have a sort of uncanny timelessness to them, adding to the game's surreal atmosphere rather than detracting from it. No, the faults lie with the gameplay. First off, Laura's moving speed is slow. Incredibly slow. As a result there's going to be a lot of time spent just waiting for her to get from point A to point B. Luckily the environment isn't too sprawling, meaning it's not as bad as it could be, but still, it's almost comical how slow it can be - like moving underwater, but also the water is molasses. It may be a pretty large obstacle to overcome for gamers in 2022, but after a while I think my brain adjusted to the pacing and, while it never felt normal per se, it wasn't like my brain was eating itself while waiting.

As you may have figured by now, D's gameplay consists primarily of puzzles - "use clue X to solve puzzle Y to open door Z", that kind of structure. There's a magic pocket mirror that will show you which screen you should currently be at, but it breaks after three uses. The puzzles are pretty simple, though there were two that temporarily stumped me as I was overthinking it way too hard. Nothing made me stop and think "wow, that was clever!" but it's never cryptic in the way older adventure games could be, and I think I would rather take "too easy" over completely baffling developer logic. The most action D has is a quick-time event that occurs late game.

As mentioned before, you can complete D in around 90 minutes. There are no save points and the game has to be beaten under 2 hours lest you get a game over. Sadly I was unaware of this, and I lost my first playthrough about 2/3 in since I tabbed out of the game to chat, check forums, get something to eat, etc. As far as I know the pause screen doesn't even stop the timer. Luckily the answers to puzzles aren't arbitrarily gated, so as long as you remember the solutions and get the keys you need, you can speed up the beginning quite a bit. I beat the game on my second playthrough.

D isn't particularly good "as a game", but I still found it enjoyable. It felt like a game as developed by someone whose sole knowledge of video games came from watching his college dormmate play Myst for fifteen minutes. This, of course, is hyperbole, as Eno had prior experience developing (and composing for) games, but there's still something kind of special to the whole experience. D was Warp's first major project (their previous games being small-time 3DO/PS1 releases), and it went on to push a million units in Japan. As the story goes, Eno was pissed off at Sony printing a mere fraction of the copies Acclaim (the publisher) ordered, so much so that he stated publicly at a Sony event that he would publish exclusively with Sega from that point forward. Additionally, Eno was afraid that certain scenes in D would be cut out due to censorship, so he developed the scenes in question without anyone's knowledge and sent a "clean" copy of the game for review, later swapping out the uncensored version when submitting it to Acclaim. The man had balls.

So yeah, if you've read this far and feel intrigued, give D a try. It's absolutely Not For Everyone™ but if you like weird Japanese crap then you might get a kick out of it.
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twogunmoomin 2022-01-05T22:52:27Z
2022-01-05T22:52:27Z
3.0
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Title
D is a 1995 horror/graphic adventure game developed by WARP and published by the then famous Acclaim Entertainment initially for the 3DO and subsequently for the Sega Saturn, Playstation 1 (the one I'll be reviewing) and DOS, later being re-released for Windows, Mac and Linux in 2016.

Now, D is quite an original game for it's time since it's an interactive movie made entirely in CGI, no real actors on screen, just 3-D modeled characters with lots of polygons in they're bodies. It must be noted that this was not only weird for the time but also quite ambitious, who would have thought that a whole game could be made out of the "impressive" looking stuff that you only saw in a couple of game intros and cinematics? I mean, in '95 many games used full-motion video with real-life actors and practical sets and it was considered normal back in the day, but a guy named Kenji Eno had the idea of making a full interactive movie with only CGI cutscenes which presented a more "mature" kind of horror; unlike it's contemporaries like Night Trap or Phantasmagoria; and so we had D.

The story puts us in the shoes of Laura Harris, the daughter of a famous american doctor who one night goes insane and murders the entire staff of his own hospital. Laura is called by the police to talk with her father so that they could aprehend him but, as soon as Laura makes her way inside the hospital, a portal sucks her in and takes her far away into an old medieval castle, where the disembodied head of her father tells her to just leave him behind and get out of there as soon as possible. Laura's job is to find out what drove her father crazy while also remembering chuncks of her past and dark lineage.

The game plays (mostly) in first-person, we move through the environment with the d-pad, interact with objects with the button O and R1/L1 serve us to scroll through our inventory. That's it. D is a very simple and very slow-paced game, there's no combat and we also can't die through any conventional way. We just need to explore the castle and solve various puzzles in order to get to the next area until the we reach the end. Does it sound boring? Well, truth is, that depends on you and your taste. Personally, I found D to be a very engaging and almost relaxing game to play, it's slowness added to the eerie atmosphere helped by the minimalistic soundtrack and sound effects which made the castle felt empty but dangerous at the same time, like a place you know you shouldn't be diving further and further into but you just can't help it, you have to get to the bottom of it all.

Storywise it's quite interesting since it has a very surrealist tone and also the way in which the writers built the mystery kept me invested all the way through. Videogame-wise, for 1995 this is a quite well told story where nothing is being outright explained to you but kept hidden until the very end. I do have to admit that the twist is kinda corny (it is unexpected, that's for sure!) but it serves for a satisfaying conclusion and it even gives sense to the title of the game.

Although the game is slow, what really maintains it from loosing steam is it's very short lenght. It took me about 90 minutes to complete with next to no complications on my way through. I wouldn't qualify none of the puzzles as mind-bogling or nonesensical but some of them can become tiresome and maybe even annoying (specifically one on the second 2 disc). Luckily most are quite cool and not that hard to figure out. The castle is separated in three areas and each of them is divided within 3 CD-Roms, I guess because since the whole game is made out of CGI cutscenes it makes sense that it would have been too heavy to cram into just 1 or even 2 discs. Every time you finish an area, you have to change to the next disc. Which is kind of funny since by today standards those graphics look very basic and would fit in nicely into just 1 DVD or Blu-Ray. Actually, to the eyes of a 21th century gamer they could be considered laughable and even "horrible" but back then they did caught the attention of players and reviewers alike.

The things I didn't like are the fact that you have to beat the game in just one sitting, since there's no saving and no pausing. Yeah, it's a very short game (actually it could be beaten in less than 1 hour if you know what you're doing) but c'mon, why would you do that, what if I REALLY need a bathroom break? Also, if you don't complete the game in less than 2 hours you get a definitive game over and you have to start again; not much of a problem but it is a weird choice to say the least. My main gripe is that there isn't a lot of replay value here since the game is completely linear and the are no multiple paths to take. There are 2 different endings but those can just be decided at the very last minute depending on the buttons you press. There's also a secondary objective of sorts which consists on collecting 4 glowing beatles scattered through out the castle which give a little insight on Laura's past, but there's really no actual reward for doing so, you just get to know more about one aspect of the story.

D was a commercial succes and was well received by critics. It gave the opportunity for WARP to make a deal with Sega and create two sequels: a spiritual sequel called Enemy Zero [エネミー・ゼロ] for the Saturn and an official sequel called D2 [Dの食卓2] for the Sega Dreamcast, although there's 0 narrative connection between the 3 games and they're all completely different monsters compared to each other.

Ultimatley, I think that this is a game worth checking out despise of the score given here on Glitchwave which, if you ask me, is pretty much a sign of it's uniqueness. This means that D is not a game for everybody. It's slow, weird and visually it hasn't aged well, which means that it's most definetly not a perfect game, but for anyone who can appreciate its virtues, it's a must have. I consider D to be an underated cult classic and a game that I'm proud of having in my collection. If you're interested the game plays well in all of the available versions so, just buy which ever you want.


7/10
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Catalog

bebe12345 Dの食卓 2024-03-20T13:06:05Z
2024-03-20T13:06:05Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
IceKiller159 Dの食卓 2024-03-19T11:17:31Z
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MateusAuri Dの食卓 2024-03-18T20:34:38Z
2024-03-18T20:34:38Z
2.5
1
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Ullur Dの食卓 2024-03-16T18:24:41Z
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diegoiv4an464 Dの食卓 2024-03-16T00:19:18Z
2024-03-16T00:19:18Z
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longestseason D: The Game 2024-03-15T17:16:57Z
Windows / Mac / Linux/Unix
2024-03-15T17:16:57Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
QuodDixi3161 Dの食卓 2024-03-10T16:41:33Z
2024-03-10T16:41:33Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Acolytus Dの食卓 2024-03-10T03:13:15Z
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In collection Want to buy Used to own  
willoverdoseonmusic Dの食卓 2024-03-06T22:53:45Z
2024-03-06T22:53:45Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
PrayforSake Dの食卓 2024-01-26T02:12:54Z
2024-01-26T02:12:54Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
hevykofe Dの食卓 2024-01-04T14:19:29Z
Saturn • JP
2024-01-04T14:19:29Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
buddysnatcher Dの食卓 2023-12-24T23:48:03Z
2023-12-24T23:48:03Z
In collection Want to buy Used to own  
Player modes
Single-player
Franchises
D
Also known as
  • D no Shokutaku
  • D
  • D: The Game
  • View all [3] Hide

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  • Previous comments (2) Loading...
  • slib 2022-01-11 01:14:06.320366+00
    Excited to finally dig into this
    reply
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  • vespergraf 2022-12-05 15:58:36.076447+00
    should be at least a 3
    reply
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  • DomMazzetti 2023-03-03 00:23:02.988438+00
    The
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  • Algorhythm2 2023-12-29 05:44:32.92659+00
    dick
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  • MateusAuri 2024-03-18 20:36:46.408875+00
    wish they remade this like Real Myst
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