The game’s storyline is set in the first season of the critically acclaimed anime and borrows all the best elements from the series.
The central concept behind Psycho-Pass is that a person’s tendency to commit crime is readable, like a mental bar code. In a future Japan, society has developed scanners that can instantly detect whether someone is a low key citizen or a menace to society – and they’ve deployed a police force that can arrest or outright kill latent criminals: The Public Safety Bureau, with its Inspectors and Enforcers armed with scan-capable Dominators which either stun or vaporize depending on the individual’s Psycho-Pass.
The game Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness is a visual novel which centers around two characters from the Public Safety Bureau. The villain is a young genius hacker named Alpha who genuinely wants to make everyone happy – no matter the cost.
The game draws deeply from the themes of the show – the disturbing nature of such a system, the human attempts to subvert it, and the ability to gain or suppress psychological damage. One of the core themes of the show is that while some people are born criminals, others can become latent criminals by exposing themselves to criminal thoughts and acts. One of the major choices in the game, therefore, is how close do you want to ride that line in order to achieve your character’s objectives?
As a visual novel, the animation is sparse but the game fully voices all of the key characters – many of which reprise their role from the series.
Mandatory Happiness is releasing in the West in September.
