Ridley Scott spent decades publicly disowning the 1982 theatrical cut of a film now considered a science fiction landmark, pointing to a studio-mandated happy ending and a clumsy narration track forced on him after nervous test screenings, and it took multiple re-edits across nearly three decades before a version matching his actual intent reached audiences. Which cut counts as the real film has been argued over ever since, and the answer usually comes down to a simple question: how much of what made the story work got quietly removed before anyone outside the studio ever saw it. That question is worth asking again with Tokyo Necro, a title whose Western Steam release comes with its own asterisk attached to how complete an experience it actually delivers.
Developed by Nitroplus and written by Makoto Fukami, known for his work on Psycho-Pass, alongside Shimokura Vio, the game is set in 2199, after ecological collapse and a Sino-American war have plunged the world into a new ice age, with Tokyo surviving only through massive geothermal engineering. So’un Nagaoka and Ethica Kibanohara work as Living Dead Stalkers for the Karasuzumi office, hired guns who track down necromancers and the reanimated corpses they control, and their latest job pulls in an amnesiac girl named Iria whose connection to the necromancer underworld runs far deeper than either of them expects.
The dual-protagonist structure carries a lot of the story’s weight, and it’s the smartest choice the writing makes early on. So’un reads flat and mechanical by design, someone who’s leaned so hard into his cybernetic Ex-Brain implant that he’s started treating himself as a tool rather than a person, and switching perspective over to Ethica breaks that coldness wide open. She’s loud, flirtatious, openly affectionate with women, and stubbornly refuses to rely on the same Ex-Brain tech So’un’s built his whole identity around, out of resentment toward her own father. Bouncing between these two headspaces gives scenes real texture that a single fixed narrator couldn’t manage, letting the same events land completely differently depending on whose skull the player happens to be sitting inside at the time.
Where the writing runs into real trouble is consistency once the cast expands past its two leads. So’un, Ethica, and Iria all get genuine development across the runtime, but nearly everyone orbiting them stays locked into whatever single trait introduced them in the first place, never growing past their starting sketch even as the plot keeps circling back to them. Multiple heroine routes branch out from the main story, and I kept waiting for those paths to diverge in tone or narration the way the setup promised they would, only to find the writing handling them in largely the same voice regardless of which characters were supposedly driving events. That’s a real missed opportunity given how much the game insists these characters see the world differently.
Combat sequences are where Tokyo Necro earns its reputation, and calling them merely animated undersells what’s actually happening on screen. Fights render in full 3D, choreographed with a first-person view through an Ex-Brain visor that puts the player directly behind So’un or Ethica’s eyes as blood, gunfire, and reanimated bodies fly across the frame. It’s genuinely thrilling the first several times it happens, closer to watching an action anime than reading a static visual novel, even if the environments surrounding those fights sometimes look noticeably barer and less detailed than the character work driving them. The 2D dialogue scenes fare better on the environmental side, backgrounds carrying real grime and detail that sell a city slowly losing its fight against the cold.
Voice work throughout carries real weight, with Aji Sanma bringing Ethica’s brash confidence to life, Muro Genki grounding So’un’s clipped, mechanical delivery, and Yuzuhara Miu handling Iria’s more guarded uncertainty well. The score, composed through Nitroplus’s regular partnership with ZIZZ Studio, deserves real credit on its own, shifting between somber, string-heavy pieces during quiet character moments and driving, percussive tracks that kick in right as a fight starts escalating, doing real work selling stakes that the somewhat thin secondary cast doesn’t always earn on the page.
One thing you should know is that the Steam release ships all-ages by default, but JAST provides a free 18+ upgrade patch that restores the mature content Nitroplus originally wrote. However, purchases through JAST’s own store already include it. That matters, because it means the base Steam version isn’t a permanently gutted alternate cut the way I’d initially assumed going in. Anyone wanting the complete, uncensored experience Nitroplus actually wrote has a legitimate, no-cost way to get it, which makes this a considerably less severe situation than a story missing entire chapters with no path back to them.
Verdict
Tokyo Necro delivers some of the most kinetic, genuinely thrilling combat sequences a visual novel has attempted, built around a dual-protagonist structure that gives its two very different leads real weight against each other, even as the wider cast around them stays thinner than the story’s ambitions deserve. Route-to-route writing rarely shifts its voice enough to match the divergent character perspectives it promises, and the secondary cast leans on first impressions rather than real growth. For anyone drawn to cyberpunk zombie-hunting spectacle with real philosophical reach, and willing to grab the free patch for the full uncensored experience, this is well worth the time.
