I have to say that the Rose & Camellia Collection is probably one of the oddest games I’ve played in a long time. This collection of five different titles has you battling it out in epic slap fights with a variety of opponents. The game is almost completely motion controlled with a single Joy-Con, and has some of the most over the top stories I’ve seen in a long time. The real question is, was it any fun? Let’s dig in and find out.

There are five different stories here to slap your way through. The first follows Reiko as she tries to take over the Tsubakikoji family after the death of her husband. She will have to pummel the other ladies in the house to make this happen! The next story follows Saori as she seeks to get revenge on Reiko for taking over the family, but things do not go as planned. The third story sends a young maid in training, Rightie Mita, to complete a fierce competition, The Death Queen Circuit. This is like Street Fighter for slap fights. The next story has us taking control of Shizuka Tsubakikoji as she keeps getting some unwelcomed house guest. There is only one way to handle them of course, pummel them with slaps! Lastly, there is the La-Mulana bonus episode. This follows Mulbruk as she proves she is the true heroine of the game, by slapping down all the other girls that oppose her.

All of the stories here are well written and presented in a very nice visual novel style. Each story is more more over the top than the last. Some of the stories try to present themselves as serious, but you will be laughing too hard at just how ridiculous it all is. The voice actors really drive this home as well, they go full ham on these characters, and I loved it! Their performances with the era fitting music just really make all the storytelling here top notch and a pure joy.

Graphically, Rose & Camellia Collection is nicely done. All of the 24 characters found in the game are nicely detailed and vary in style. You have the La-Mulana characters, maids, boxers, a giant robot and much more. The battle effects here are all great as well, along with great sound effects that really seem to give your slaps a lot of weight, especially when you land a critical hit or get a nice counter attack.

Now let’s dig into the gameplay of this one, and this is where things fall apart some. There are two different controls schemes to choose from. Most players will opt for the motion controls because the touch screen controls are completely unusable. I tried them for a couple of battles and had nothing but problems. The motion controls do work for the most part, players will hold down A and swing the Joy-Con in order to smack their opponents. There is a timing mechanic here in order to get critical hits, and after completing all 24 fights here, I never did quite figure it out. I kinda got the timing on the double slap you unlock late in the game, but there is another strike called a Palm Strike which I wasn’t able to pull off even once. When you’re not on the attack, you can hold down the R button and swing the controller at the right time to dodge enemy attacks. These characters have some tells that let you know when they are about to strike at you. This is sorta like those you would find in a Punch-Out!! title. If you successfully dodge an attack and time it just right, you can even counter attack your foe, but be warned, they can do this to you the same way if your attack is poor.

Overall, the Rose & Camellia Collection isn’t a terrible experience, it’s just not a great one. While the controls sound good on paper, they are inconsistent in execution. Throw in some crazy difficulty spikes on top of this and things can get frustrating very quickly. I had a blast with over the top stories and the campy but fitting voice acting, but I think this package might be a bit overpriced at $20 for around 3 hours of gameplay. That said, if you catch this one on sale, and want a fun story with some unique controls, this might just fit the bill.

Review Score
Overall

Game was provided by the publisher for review.

The post REVIEW: Rose & Camellia Collection appeared first on oprainfall.

Typically, I don’t take on otome reviews. They tend to be games I have a hard time stepping away from once I’ve gotten into one. Plus, doing all those paths back to back to back can be a lot. I tend to play otome very sparingly and these days I’m pretty particular about which ones I’m interested enough in to pick-up. However, Sympathy Kiss is one I was at least somewhat curious about and we ended up with a copy for review. Thus, when I was asked to do this review I figured why not, I was looking forward to distracting some men at the office.

Sympathy Kiss is a modern slice-of-life otome, rather than a fantasy or historic one. The main character, Akari Amasawa, has been working as a designer at Estario, a mobile app company, for the past year. Recently, Estario’s first app, Estarci, hasn’t been doing so great. Estario decides to transfer some employees to a new team to try to revive the app. Estarci is somewhat of a social news app.

Throughout Sympathy Kiss, you’ll go through day-to-day life getting to know your colleagues on the new Estarci team and coming up with ways to improve and save the app. The game splits into numerous routes pretty early on. You can either take home some guy, Nori Tainaka, who regularly lives with random people; or, you can leave him and choose one of a few different colleagues at work to help out and get to know. As you play through the various routes, a few other paths can be unlocked. At the start of the game, you have about five guys to choose from.

There are a lot of different guys to get to know. Nori Tainaka, who I mentioned earlier, is described in the game as a nice very puppy-like guy. He’s sweet and helps out around the house for anyone who takes him in. There’s also Yoji Kobase, who takes on the director role of the Estarci team and keeps everyone on task and everything running smoothly. He seems stern and intimidating in the beginning, but deep down he’s a caring guy. Honestly, I think Kobase was my favorite among all the choices. Not only is he supportive and good to you in his route specifically, but he’s always reliable and helps out the others on the team in their routes as well. Another option is Rokuro Yoshioka, who works at Tempesty, a tech company Estario will collaborate with on Estarci. Rokuro is described as seeming like a prince in that he’s very attractive and acts princely. Yoshioka is the son of Tempesty’s president and is supposed to eventually take over the company. These are just a few of the men you can choose to hang out with and attempt to seduce. Another member of the Estarci team, a woman named Nanami Oe, takes on the role of your loyal work friend who gives you advice and gossips with you about the guys you choose to hang out with.

As far as interactive features are concerned, Sympathy Kiss is pretty basic. Periodically you get choices to make, some of which will raise either your work or love stat in each guy’s route. You’ll get one of numerous endings depending on which routes you take and where your work and love stats are at by the end. You can also sometimes choose between two different emotions, such as when someone asks if you like something or not, or based on how you want to react to something they do. And there’s this RiNG app which characters will periodically call or text you through at different occasions during the story. The game allows you to go back in a story log and change choices whenever you like, you can save in one of numerous save slots and you can also skip parts of the game in replays to jump over story parts you’ve already read, or to skip ahead quickly to each choice. One feature of Sympathy Kiss I really appreciated was how at the end of each chapter you’ll switch to the perspective of whichever character’s route you’re on and find out what they were thinking when something happened earlier on in that chapter.

I do believe I’ve played through every single possible route in Sympathy Kiss. I dated each guy and saw a variety of endings, I also went back and speedily skipped through some previously played routes to see alternate endings. I am mysteriously missing one prologue gallery image though, so I may have missed something. But I played as many routes as I could possibly find and dated every guy. Overall, I had a lot of fun with the story of this otome. However, I felt like there weren’t a ton of extras to enjoy. You have a gallery, a music player, there are interesting profile info pages you can unlock for each guy and you can revisit any specific chapter you want to adjust the work and love stats and see different endings. But other than that, there wasn’t anything else. I know some otome have little additional postgame chapters to unlock and similar features like that, which Sympathy Kiss unfortunately doesn’t.

Oh one other thing I would like to discuss real quick are the amount of grammar mistakes and errors. I’ve realized these last few years that very often these localized otome are loaded with a ton of grammar errors throughout. When I first went through Kobase’s route, the first guy I chose, I can only recall a single mistake. However, as I went through more routes, there were significantly more errors. Nonetheless, it isn’t the worst otome ever in this aspect. I’ve seen grammar mistakes far more often in some other otome. So it’s not as bad as it could be and I did appreciate that there was at least some effort put in there.

In the end, I quite enjoyed my time with Sympathy Kiss. I found that despite being a T-rated otome, it wasn’t overly cheesy and I had fun dating…well almost everyone. Not only that, but the music and overall atmopshere was very enjoyable as well. If you’re otome obsessed, you have no reason not to pick this one up. If you’re new to otome and have wanted to try them out, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t start with Sympathy Kiss. I do hope in the future though, that this game gets a sequel or fandisc of some kind. There wasn’t really any postgame story content to enjoy and there are a few guys I would like to see more of.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Sympathy Kiss appeared first on oprainfall.

I’ve had a chance to sit down with the Nintendo Switch release of Neptunia: Sisters vs. Sisters and it’s time to share my thoughts on this port. I’m pretty letdown this release didn’t include the swimsuits by default and they are locked to the Digital Deluxe release. This version does have Maho and Anri as playable characters, which is exclusive to this release. This is just a terrible way to do business as it forces players to buy more than one version if they want all the content. Even the folks who sprang for the limited editions of the previous releases still had to pony up for a Digital Deluxe if they wanted the swimsuits. You can get those on the disc if you want to get the upcoming physical Xbox release, which is just odd in and of itself. Let’s hope this is something they fix with the upcoming release of Gamer Maker.

Since I wanted to cover the performance of this port I will be very light on story and gameplay details in this review. If you want a more detailed look at the story and mechanics please check out my review of the PlayStation 4 release. The story begins as Neptune and the other Goddesses receive a distress call from the PC Continent. They depart to handle this emergency while the CPU Candidates are sent to a nearby abandoned lab to investigate its contents. There they discover a sleeping Goddess, the Ashen Goddess, and as she awakens she traps the sisters in capsules for two years! When they are awakened, they find the world is not how they left it. The latest smartphone, “rPhone,” dominates all of Gamindustri markets, and Planeptune was lost due to Trendi attacks while both Neptune and Nepgear have been away. Nepgear finds herself in a state of depression having lost both her sister and her home; however, new friends Maho and Anri help Nepgear get back on her feet, and they begin to try to get things back in order. Nepgear’s struggle will be great in the face of this new enemy. Can she overcome it and take back her home and save Gamindustri?

Gameplay here is a bit different than previous entries, since the combat is all action based. The world map hasn’t changed a bit however, this is the Gamindustri you know and love. Players will go from place to place, completing missions to progress the story forward. There are plenty of sidequests that come up as well through the ever-popular Chirper app. Here you can take on quests, claim rewards and give likes to the Chirps from the various residents of Gamindustri. These quests are what you would expect: hunt X monster, gather X item, or find lost residents. You will not only gain rewards from this, but also unlock new scouts to use in Disc Development. Making these discs will give you a ton of different buffs that are very useful in battle.

The girls will gain new special abilities and moves as they level up to make slaying your foes even easier with amazing combo attacks. The Switch release gives you access to Maho and Anri right off the bat. Shanghai Alice and Higurashi are also unlocked instantly, so you won’t have to complete the game to use them in combat. This does make the first areas of the game a bit easier since you have access to characters with powerful attacks early on. The photo mode is unlocked when you launch the game as well, which makes a lot more sense than having it do so after you complete one run of the main story.

Graphically I have to say this is one of the best ports Idea Factory has done for the Switch. The character models still look good, even if a bit scaled back, and the environments still look great as well. The shadows on the characters look a bit strange at times, and there are greater loading times than the PlayStation 4 release. This occurs when going in and out of battle, so it can make things janky at times. Overall the framerate is pretty solid, docked or playing in handheld mode, but you will notice some hitches in combat every once in a while. These aren’t too frequent, but it does throw off your combo when it occurs.

Overall the Nintendo Switch release of Neptunia: Sisters vs. Sisters is pretty solid. It may not be as pretty as the other releases, but it still looks good and runs at a solid framerate. The addition of Maho and Anri as playable characters gives this version something the others don’t have, and this is a pretty solid game overall on any platform. The base release will set you back $49.99, and if you want a decent portable version or just want to play around with new characters it’s probably worth your coin. If you have another version of the game already, there isn’t much extra here for you to dig into.

Review Score
Overall

Game was provided by the publisher for review.

The post REVIEW: Neptunia: Sisters VS. Sisters (Switch) appeared first on oprainfall.

Years ago when I watched Love Live! Sunshine!! I was very taken with Yoshiko Tsushima, AKA Yohane. I thought she was by far the cutest member of Aqours and her chunni antics just made me love her even more. So I was very excited when I found she was getting her own spin off anime project, Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror, and even more so when Inti Creates announced they were making a Metroidvania title based off the anime, called Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEP BLUE. After I enjoyed the anime series, I was very excited to dig into the game to see where this story continuation was going. Let’s see how everything turned out!

The story here begins as a strange undersea dungeon suddenly surfaces near the town of Numazu. It quickly becomes all folks in town can talk about, so Yohane’s friends each begin to explore the dungeon one by one, but they never return. Yohane decides to venture into the dungeon to rescue her lost friends with the help her faithful dog Lailaps. What mysteries lie ahead of her in the dungeon, and will she be able to rescue her friends?

The story here is pretty basic, but for those who enjoyed the anime this is a great side adventure. I love seeing the girls interact with each other, and the Easter Eggs they threw in here for fans of the anime and Aqours in general. This one isn’t going to blow you away with amazing storytelling, but if you’re a fan of Yohane or Love Live! Sunshine!! you will have a good time here seeing all the girls in action once again.

Graphically the game is done in that fantastic pixel art style Inti Creates is known for. The character sprite works still comes out quite detailed this way, and all of the girls’ sprites were very cute, down to the last details! Enemy models look great as well, with a pretty good assortment of them. There are still re-colors, but I felt like there were less here than in some of their other games. The boss monsters really shine with their huge size and impressive looks. You can tell the team put some love into each one. The environments themselves are great as well. Each one is very detailed and you really get immersed into the type of area, from lava filled volcano to fluffy candy style areas. The game ran great on the Switch from start to finish with no frame drops.

In the music department, Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEP BLUE really shines. Each area has amazing theme music that fits the feel of it. This includes a mysterious sounding theme for the temple and more upbeat theme as you begin to explore this underwater dungeon. The theme song, “Deep Blue”, is an amazing tune that got stuck in my head for a long time after I stopped playing this one. I wish Inti Creates would’ve included an in-game music library, or something for completing the game, so you could enjoy these tunes on the fly, but there was nothing unlocked post game. Which is one of my complaints here: it’s pretty bare bones overall outside of the main game.

The gameplay here is very much that of your standard Metroidvania title. You will explore each area of the dungeon, battling enemies and bosses as you save your friends and gain new abilities. Each girl has two unique skills, one you gain as soon as you free them, and the other when you find a hidden item in the dungeon. All of these skills can be used to slay enemies in the dungeons, such as Dia’s electric slash and Hanamaru’s adorable rolling attack. These skills can also be used to solve puzzles in the dungeon to gain access to new areas as well, but players should also look out for special items in treasure chests too. These will give Yohane some new skills and allow her to equip more accessories as well.

Yohane can purchase a number of healing items and items that will buff your stats from her fortune telling shop with in-game currency. These help you out in a pinch if you need to restore your health or Darkness points. The latter is what you use to call out your friends to help you in combat or use the variety of weapons you can cast. That’s right: you can cast a variety of weapons and accessories from the materials dropped from defeated monsters.

Weapon casts include several different types of bows and swords, each with different properties, so you can choose whichever fits your play style the best. Cloaks and accessories can be cast as well. These give you various buffs that will keep you alive during the harshest areas of the dungeon. Some will give immunity to status aliments while others may cut down different types of damage. Each one will give Yohane a boost in HP and Darkness points, so you will have to balance her out as you see fit. I went with a big HP build and tanked a lot of the bosses, but this is totally up to you.

Overall I had a great time with Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEP BLUE. I loved exploring the dungeon and seeing all of my favorite Aqours members once again. Each girl’s skills were very unique and suited them very well. Hanamaru having a laptop fall from the heavens to make it explode with a single touch made me laugh out loud since I got the reference from the original anime, and this is what games like this should do. I feel like the package is a bit light on extras since there is nothing to do after completing the game. No new game plus with more difficulty, unlockable galleries or even a way to listen to the music post game. It will take you around eight hours to see everything the game has to offer and I feel like it is worth the $29.99 price tag for fans of the anime or Yohane, but everyone else might want to wait for a sale to snatch this one up. While I loved everything here personally, I was a big fan of the series going into this, so I know I got a bit more out of this than those just looking for another Metroidvania to pick up. That said, I have no issue telling fans to snatch this up ASAP, it’s a lot of fun with girls you know and love.

Review Score
Overall

Game was purchased by the reviewer.

The post REVIEW: Yohane the Parhelion: BLAZE in the DEEP BLUE appeared first on oprainfall.

I have never played a fashion game like this before. I know syn Sophia is the developer behind the Style Savvy games that were on the Nintendo DS and 3DS, but I’ve never played them. What caused me to take on this review is the fact that, regardless of my lack of experience with games focused on fashion, I do love dressing up my character in various other types of games which allow it. I’m that player who will sacrifice a bit of stats to make sure my characters still look good. Thus, I was very intrigued by Fashion Dreamer and wanted to try it out. Not to mention this is yet another more chill casual game, which is what I’ve been tending to lean towards when taking on reviews lately.

Fashion Dreamer is a pretty basic fashion game. By that I mean, there aren’t a lot of concepts or things going on. At the start of the game, you get a Muse to dress up. A Muse is what your customizable character is called. You can pick your hairstyle, nose, eyes, height/body type, skin tone, hair color, lips, etc. There are quite a lot of options to choose from. I should mention, though, that the body type options are limited. You basically just pick a height from the selection they have available and certain proportions change a little bit depending on the height you choose. There aren’t any sliders to decide how slender or curvy your character is or anything else such as that. You can choose from a few different face shapes, however. Anyway, once you’ve created your first Muse, it’s time to jump into the virtual world of Eve.

The game takes place in this virtual world, Eve, where there are four different Cocoon areas to hang out in. Well, there is only one Cocoon to start and you have to unlock the other three. The goal of the game is to become a fashion influencer and spread your brand. You’re able to like other characters’ outfits to collect usable clothing pieces. There is also a pop-up area where the most popular clothes and clothes other people have shared show up, so you can also hit like on those to collect them as well. In the game’s offline mode, there are pre-made CPU characters who will be around town and ask you to create Lookits for them. A Lookit is essentially a new overall outfit. Sometimes they may also like what you’re wearing and copy your outfit. Either of these will give you random rewards, such as gacha and bingo tickets and color palettes. The color palettes you can use to create your own items. You’ll need E-Points to unlock and create different clothing pieces. Creating your own clothing essentially just requires you to change the colors of pre-existing styles of clothes, and the more color palettes you unlock, the more choices you have.

E-Points you’ll get for anyone liking your outfit, liking your shared clothing pieces that pop-up in their game, stuff shown in your showroom, and so on. Your showroom is a small space you can decorate and display clothing in however you like, in addition to other items you’ve collected. The game contains both an online and offline mode. While you can collect E-Points offline, the process is extremely slow. This game is a lot more fun and active if you play online. Online you’ll see other players’ Muses in your game and be able to create Lookits for them as well, plus you’ll be able to visit their showrooms and see clothing items they’ve shared which you can then collect. The CPU characters are also present in the online mode in addition to the real player Muses. Each Cocoon area has its own gacha machine and two bingo machines. The bingo machines simply give you E-Points as a reward. The gacha machines are different in each Cocoon. They all have their own unique styles of items you can unlock randomly from using your gacha tickets. This will unlock certain styles in the clothing creation menu, so you can recolor them how you like.

There honestly isn’t a lot going on in Fashion Dreamer. The more likes you get, the more popular of an influencer you become, and as you get to higher ranks, you unlock more Cocoons. You also have a brand rank to raise from creating items. You can customize your brand symbol that goes on clothes you create and the more you create, the higher that rank will raise, which will then unlock additional clothing styles you can customize. Oh, and you can take photos, both at a photo booth spot and wherever you’re at in the Cocoon. For the photos at the photo booth, or Photo Egg as the game calls it, you’ll be able to add little decorations to and save.

Like I was saying before, there isn’t a lot going on in Fashion Dreamer. You make a ton of outfits, you travel between the three different areas of each Cocoon, dressing up other people’s characters to fit their preferences, hit like on whatever you like or want to collect for yourself, and you create clothing items over and over again. Also, after collecting a ton of stuff and creating so many outfits, I found some of the options weren’t very vast or unique. Hats for example, there are a lot of beret looking hats. The variety isn’t super vast. Not to mention, there also weren’t any bags, nor any gloves or necklaces that are separate rather than stuck as a part of certain tops. The game is really fun as a short bursts type of game where you get on only for a little bit, as a break from other games with a lot more going on. I thought the music, sounds and overall atmosphere were pleasant too. But, I don’t see it as a good game for sitting down and playing for hours on end. I was really into it the first two days I played, but after a few days, it became something I only checked in on for a little bit at a time. I played for over 15 hours, reached the platinum influencer rank and saw the credits. I believe there may be a diamond rank seeing as I still saw other players at a rank higher than me, but I imagine that would take a very long time to reach in comparison to the lower ranks prior to the game credits.

Ultimately, in the game’s current state, Fashion Dreamer wasn’t bad. I had a ton of fun dressing up my character and collecting different clothing. But, it also didn’t have much of a long gameplay life, I simply wasn’t extremely into it for more than a week. Although, you should know that this isn’t the game’s final complete release. By that I mean, various upcoming free updates have been announced. These are simply my thoughts on the game as is, before any updates have come out. I had fun with Fashion Dreamer for what it is, but it could’ve been a lot better. I don’t think I would pay the full $49.99 price for this. As it is now, I definitely would recommend waiting for a sale if it sounds like something you would enjoy. I might possibly write a follow-up in the future, should the game be substantially different or receive a lot more substance after all of the updates are out.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Fashion Dreamer appeared first on oprainfall.

I heard a few things about the series a while back when it was just a light novel series. I didn’t really get into My Next Life as a Villainess until the anime began. For those who aren’t familiar, it features a character who is reincarnated into an otome game called Fortune Lover. She recovers her memories and realizes she is now the character Catarina Claes, who in game is the main antagonist and for most endings is killed or at the very least exiled. From there Catarina does her best with her limited skills to change her fate.

This game is a new story that is set after Catarina believes she’s avoided her death flags. Catarina and her friends end up on a voyage on a luxury ship called the Vinculum. What seems to be an enjoyable trip ends up going awry with pirates boarding them, but also other plots are in the works. The new development reminds Catarina of an old fan book and a fan disc she never had a chance to play. While similar to the scenario, things are still quite different. It doesn’t take long for Catarina to realize she might have more death flags to avoid, and she doesn’t have the advantage of knowing as much as she did about the base game here.

As the main protagonist, Catarina is just as simple minded, gluttonous, and oblivious as she ever is. These traits do reflect in some of the choices that come up, which are are funny at times and may differ from some choices that might typically be seen in these games. If you are not familiar with the light novel or anime, it might be worth noting that Catarina is a pretty dense character who can compete with the best for not noticing romantic signals. While the current Catarina is different than the original, I do like the moments where she embraces the villainess attitude. If you are not a fan of the series, this could be an area you might not appreciate as much from your own tastes though.

It’s probably not that big of a surprise that this is definitely for the fans. It is a new story that does feel like it would belong in the series. All the the characters are voiced with the voice actors from the anime returning for their roles. That being said, I will say even if you are not familiar with the source, you won’t be too lost. The game does a good job recapping the main points worth knowing. At a few points there will be a flashback to the past, usually once from Catarina’s memory and the perspective of another character. If you are new you might have trouble figuring out which choice to make for some characters to build affection. Then again, that is also why they have auto-save.

Routes in these games usually have several chapters, though some routes can conclude within three. The first two chapters for any route will play out more or less the same as Catarina and the others board and enjoy themselves. At the start there are four suitors: the princes Geordo and Alan, Catarina’s adoptive brother Keith, and Nicol, the brother of Catarina’s friend Sophia. Once you finish one of these routes, two more open up for the new characters. These two are original characters named Rozy and Silva. Rozy is an engineer on the ship who quickly befriends her through food and Silva is the head of the Weiss Pirates that take the Vinculum. The two are interesting, though unsurprisingly Silva gets quite a lot of time due to his role. Rozy has fewer parts overall unless you go for his route, which is a bit of a shame. While the scenarios they go through have some similar motions, there are some differences. They can range from what actions are taken, what characters appear, and what details are revealed, among other things.

While there are about six main routes to choose from, My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! -Pirates of the Disturbance- boasts a total of 25 different endings. These endings include different ones for each route, another ends, and doom endings. The game features a number of galleries and libraries like most games in the genre. Unlocked endings, music tracks, CG scenes, and cutscenes can be viewed from the special menu. The CG scenes look pretty good and the music is also pretty fitting. If there is anything that I would say as a negative about the music is while the tracks are nice, none really blew me away personally. Another thing to collect along the way are memory scenarios. These are unlocked as you play through, and may also depend on what choices you make. These scenarios are not available as you play through a route, but are accessed through the special menu. While they don’t really do much for the main scenarios, they explain some past events and memories of the characters. They are not really important to the overall plot, but they are nice to have.

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! -Pirates of the Disturbance- is a game that is very true to the series. The story, setting, and new characters are not something that would be out of place in the original story line. With the series taking place in a world of an otome, it’s only fitting that the game is a solid example of one also. The characters are unique and each route differs enough from each other to keep things interesting. If you are a fan of the series I can definitely recommend this, and if you are not but are looking for a more light hearted otome, then I would say this isn’t a bad choice for you either.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! -Pirates of the Disturbance- appeared first on oprainfall.

A while back I remember saying I would cover it, should EastAsiaSoft ever put out a “real mahjong game,” as I put it. I had already reviewed one of their mahjong solitaire games before and wasn’t interested in covering numerous other nearly identical mahjong solitaire titles. And thus, being that I’m a huge fan of Riichi mahjong these days and the fact that EastAsiaSoft was finally localizing a Riichi mahjong game, I decided to take on this review.

Now, I am by no means an expert at Riichi mahjong. However, I have been playing it a lot these past few years, mainly against other people via apps on my phone and at this point I’d say I’m a proficiently skilled amateur. I can’t look at a hand and know immediately how many points it’s worth in total, I don’t have every single unique hand memorized and I never do too well in tournaments. Nonetheless, I know what I’m doing when playing digitally and can at least hold my own against much better players. Now with that being said, let’s get into discussing Another World Mahjong Girl and what I thought of the game.

Another World Mahjong Girl is not your typical Riichi mahjong game. It’s been formatted as a two-player affair. The player, you, are there to teach various girls of assorted humanoid species how to play mahjong. You’ll take control of one of a few different girls and play others across a magical world. There isn’t more to the story than that. You simply go from place to place, chapter to chapter, taking on girls in mahjong. You can read a bit about each girl before you battle them and then you’ll face them in numerous rounds until you whittle their points down to 0. If your own points hit 0, you fail and simply have to start over against whichever girl you were facing. You’ll have to face almost every single character two times, for multiple rounds each time. I didn’t find this to be the most exciting Riichi mahjong game, seeing as they made it a two-player thing. Typically, Riichi mahjong is played in either three or four-player matches. This could’ve been better had you played multiple girls in at least three-player matches.

In between facing these characters in mahjong matches, you can “discipline” the girls available for you to play as by buying and using items to raise their stats. This is where some of the game’s ecchi aspects come into play. The girls make sounds as you discipline them. Other ecchi aspects of the game come into play when you take away their points at the match results screen and in the gallery where you can touch the girls and they’ll make some sounds and cycle through one of three different lines. I don’t normally tend to play ecchi games, I took on this review for the mahjong, but I know there are much better ecchi games out there than this. The ecchi content seemed to be bare minimum.

That wasn’t the only issue I had with Another World Mahjong Girl. I felt like there were numerous issues throughout playing. First of all, from what I know about Riichi mahjong, this game doesn’t seem to have the standard romanization for the different Yaku. Yaku are essentially hand patterns and/or win conditions. If you break apart your hand and don’t go for Riichi, then you have to have a Yaku to win. A lot of Yaku require you to go for Riichi though. Anyway, the romanization choices were less common and I just found it to be strange. I also thought it was odd they seemed to use a white dragon tile which looked more like the one used in Chinese mahjong. But I suppose this is a fantasy game, I mean neither of these aspects are necessarily wrong, they’re just unique choices.

I did run into various legitimate mistakes and glitches as well though. In some of the character bios there were huge spaces after any quotation marks or apostrophes. Another mistake was whenever I was on the results screen at the end of a round, if a Yaku/point description took up two lines, then the next one would overlap it rather than being on its own line further down. Not only that, but when I started the game for the very first time and was sitting inactive on the difficulty choice screen, trying to decide if I should go with Normal or Hard, the game completely froze my Switch in a way I’ve never had happen before. My controller was still on but it was totally unresponsive. I had to put my Switch to sleep using the power button on the main system and hold it for a few seconds to get my Switch to light back up and be able to shut down the game. One final issue I had was the incorrect use of Ron. Any time I got a winning tile from the wall, which is a Tsumo not Ron, the prompt to call my win was displayed as Ron. Whichever girl I was using, her voice actor would correctly voice Tsumo. Tsumo would also be displayed in the match results afterwards. But the option to call my win during the match was incorrectly displayed as Ron.

In the end, I personally would not recommend Another World Mahjong Girl, not to fans of Riichi mahjong, nor lovers of ecchi games. The mahjong aspect wasn’t super terrible. I mean, as you went through each opponent they gradually got better and the chance aspect was never unfair, it wasn’t hard to get good hands. But the two-player part of it wasn’t as fun as playing regular three- or four-player mahjong and there are much better sources for enjoying Riichi mahjong, some of them free-to-play and against real people. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the ecchi features in this game were very bare minimum. You can find much better ecchi in other games. I simply found this title to be priced too high for what it was. I got through the whole game in only about five hours on Normal and in my opinion, it’s not worth the full $10.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Another World Mahjong Girl appeared first on oprainfall.

After I reviewed EastAsiaSoft’s release of Mugen Souls a few months ago, I was really hoping they would pick up the sequel, Mugen Souls Z, and I got my wish. I was very much looking forward to checking out this game again, and having all of the CG’s and bath minigame intact would just be icing on the cake. That time has finally arrived, and I’ve spent about 40 hours playing the game. Now, let’s see how this port turned out, was it as good as the last one? Let’s find out.

The story here begins as Chou Chou is exploring space for a world to conquer. She soon spots twelve shiny worlds that seem to fit the part. Upon exploring these worlds, she soon runs into the newly-awakened Ultimate God Syrma, who has a strange coffin with her. Chou Chou, as we know, has to check out everything she find interesting, so she begins to examine it. She is suddenly sucked into the coffin and her Undisputed God powers are absorbed, making her tiny. The only way to restore Chou Chou to her normal form is to absorb the powers from the other Ultimate Gods, spread throughout the twelve worlds.

I think the story of the first game is a bit better than Mugen Souls Z, but I really love the new characters introduced in this game. The well-mannered Bertram having a huge crush on Alys with her idol status is just funny, and Reu is just a wild child that gets super close to Shirogane, making Tsukika a bit jealous. All of the other great interactions the old cast has with the new cast really make the story a lot of fun. If you were a fan of the original, you’ll find more to love here as well.

Graphically, Mugen Souls Z looks about on par with the previous game’s Switch release, but I do think this release looks a bit better. It’s not the drastic upgrade it was on the PS3 between the two games, but you will notice. The character models look great, and each of the Twelve Worlds has a different look and feel. The CG artwork is certainly a highlight here as well, be they for the bath minigame or the story based ones. The performance is pretty good on the Switch as well. The game runs at a solid frame rate docked or handheld, but you will notice some dips when playing in handheld. It’s very playable, but not quite as smooth as it is docked.

I think, over the years, I have gotten a soft spot for these classic Idea Factory tunes, since I found myself really enjoying the soundtrack here. I know there is nothing special about it, but I found myself humming along as I slayed 100’s of foes and having a great time doing it. The game is voiced in both English and Japanese, but just like last time, the bath minigame is voiced in Japanese only. I think I like the Japanese cast a bit more, but the English crew does a good job giving these characters life as well.

The gameplay here hasn’t changed a lot from the previous game, so rather than retread old ground this review, I’ll focus on the new things. The combat is mostly unchanged from the last time. The captivate system returns, and again, each enemy will have a personality with some sort of fetish they like, and you have to pick a personality and pose to change into in order to capture the peon. This system is somewhat improved this time, since it shows you what the successful outcome of each of your actions will be before you do them. This really helps you gather peons faster, since it’s much easier to get the outcomes you want.

The other major change to combat is the Coffin Skills. When an enemy is turned into a peon, it will trigger a Coffin Skill from Syrma’s coffin. These range in effects from stat boosts to HP recovery, and you can set this to whatever skill you wish. The Peon Ball back, but is now known as the Ultimate Soul. This is a joint attack between Syrma and Chou Chou. It powers up in exactly the same way, based on the number of Shampurus you have collected throughout the game, though you will have a limited number of these to use on each world before returning to base. This limit will increase with the number of Shampurus you have as well. The damage for Ultimate Soul will get a nice buff if you have a ton of Peon Points banked from doing actions during a battle, but this will deplete all your PP when you use it. The overload rate increases when anyone is KO’d in battle, and if the overload level goes too high, just like with the Peon Ball, it will blow up in your face usually resulting in death. The last new feature is Damage Carnival. If you do enough damage during a battle, you’ll get bonus points at the end of combat. You can upgrade this to make it require more damage to activate, but provide a bigger bonus.

As you complete worlds, you will gain Ultimate Fusions. These are field skills ranging from the ability to snag floating chests to the ability to swim. When you capture certain Peon Points, you will gain power ups to these skills. These include Ultimate Vault, which allows you to jump higher; Ultimate Snag, which allows you snag locked floating chests; Ultimate Hunt, which allows you open locked chests; Ultimate Warp which allows you to use certain warp points. These are all boosted versions of the Ultimate Fusion skills. Years ago I said this was the most annoying part of this game, and I still stand by this. They spread these skills all around the maps in a way that makes for endless backtracking. You may have one skill needed at the top of the map, but the Peon Point with the skill may be on the bottom. This made for a lot of needless running around, seeing as you will be visiting all these worlds multiple times as these skills unlock to start with, this just seems very tacked on.

While Mugen Souls Z does have some issues, it’s still a really fun game. The combat is still very unique, the story is great with a lot of fun interactions between the characters, and the bath minigame finally being uncensored is a great addition to the game as well. I spent about 40 hours with the game and got the true ending. I have also done some of the absurd post-game battles thanks to the crazy amount of included DLC that will make you very OP starting out, but these post-game battles are still a big challenge. I feel like this one is well worth the asking price of $39.99. It’s not perfect, but fans will find a lot to love here.

Review Score
Overall

Game was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Mugen Souls Z (Switch) appeared first on oprainfall.

When I first saw Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, I was drawn in by how unique it looks. When I found out some members of the Danganronpa team was behind the development of this, I knew I had to check it out. Even though I wasn’t the biggest fan of that series, it had been a while since I played a good mystery game, and I figured this would fit the bill. Let’s see if it lived up to my expectations.

The story here follows a young man named Yuma Kokohead. He wakes in a storage room after being knocked out and can’t remember anything but his name, and barely catches his train. However, Yuma doesn’t wake up alone, as he soon notices a Shinigami in the form a tiny ghost that only he can hear hanging around him. She tells him the reason for his amnesia is that he has made a deal with her. The train he boarded is heading to the Kanai Ward. This area is cut off from the outside world and controlled by a huge corporation called Amaterasu. They rule this area with the might of a militarized Peacekeeper force. He has been sent by the World Detective Organization in order to figure what is actually going on in the rainy neon lit hell. This will not be easy, though, and even the train ride there will prove to be a lot more than our young friend bargained for.

I really enjoyed the overall story here. Each case was pretty well thought out and let all the various characters you meet throughout the game shine, even if just for a little bit. I feel like they could’ve done a better job fleshing out these side characters, but maybe the DLC cases will do this. Each case across the six chapters was pretty interesting, but I feel like some of them were drug out in the labyrinth section. The game has a decent runtime of 35 hours overall, but you could shorten this down if you just stuck to the main story.

Graphically, Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is one the best looking games on the Switch. All of the character models are nicely detailed and gloomy environments in the city are just outstanding. The design of that downtrodden city always covered in rain with an amazing neon glow is just great. Shinigami has the standout design here; no matter if it’s her cute ghost form or full on sexy female one, she is just great in style and character. This is also one of the best performing games on the Switch. It runs at a consistent frame rate docked or handheld, which is not always a given for a title that looks this nice on the platform.

I have to say this soundtrack is one of the most fitting ones I’ve ever heard. Lots of sorta upbeat tracks, but they all have that sense of mystery to them that really adds to the atmosphere. The sound effects during the mini games are great as well; I usually don’t have much to say about sound effect but these really did add to overall experience here. The voice acting is top notch in both Japanese and English. All of the actors do a great job giving these characters life, and really it just comes down to preference on which one you think is better.

The gameplay here is divided up into a few sections. The first is where you control Yuma as you explore the surroundings looking for clues. The ones you find will earn you Detective Points you can spend to upgrade your various skills. The last is the Mystery Labyrinth, and these sections are by far the biggest during each case. Here you will traverse a maze playing different mini games and quick time events. I put the difficulty here on Easy since I’m never good at these sorts of things, so when I failed I lost a little health, but my guess is on higher settings the penalty will be more brutal. You do this until you reach the end boss and uncover the truth of the case! The interactions here between Yuma and Shinigami are great and were one of my favorite things here.

All in all I had a good time with Master Detective Archives: Rain Code. The game really has a focus on death, which is pretty much what you should expect from this team, but it went a little hard for my personal tastes. Those who loved Danganronpa and the other works of this team will be right at home here, and there is nothing wrong with that since they are the target audience. If you love mystery games that have a wild twist to them, you would probably want to check this one out as well. I feel like it is well worth the $59.99 for those into this, and the DLC cases will likely add icing to this already wonderful cake.

Review Score
Overall

Game was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Master Detective Archives: Rain Code  appeared first on oprainfall.

Ever since I finished the original Atelier Ryza game I’ve really been getting into the overall Atelier franchise. I’ve never played anything older than the first Mana Khemia though. So I was looking forward to trying out Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg. I knew it’d be a dated entry, but I adored the new art/graphical style and Koei Tecmo mentioned in their promotional info that it had a new Unlimited Mode, so I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about the time limit. Originally, I didn’t think I’d be the one doing this review but fortunately, it landed in my lap and I was lucky enough to check it out.

Atelier Marie Remake revolves around Marie, of course, who is the worst student at the Royal Academy of Magic in Salburg. She’s given an atelier and five years to create a high enough quality item to pass a special graduation exam. And that’s it, that’s the basic plot of the game. You’ll find that Atelier Marie, being the very first Atelier game, is super simple and basic. You have five years in game to raise your alchemy skill and make something decent. This game’s calendar pretty much resembles a real calendar, each year has January through December and each month is a full month, they’re not some sort of fictional shortened versions. To gather stuff, you’ll leave Salburg and go to one of a select handful of areas to gather materials. Each time you gather something, a day passes by. These gathering areas have monsters to battle as well. To form your party, you’ll hire a couple of characters out of a number of people in town. These characters require payment, so you’ll have to pay them every time you get back to town. But as you become friends, the cost slowly goes down. Also, battles are a super basic turn-based affair as well. There’s nothing fancy or any advanced mechanics here. In between alchemy and adventuring, you’ll also be able to fulfill requests in town to make money and you’ll occasionally happen across rumors in town or at the local bar, which will raise your knowledge and possibly unlock stuff, such as new places to gather. And as you finish quests, your reputation will go up. Your reputation goes down if you miss a deadline for a request or cancel one.

Now, I did play the game in the new Unlimited Mode. Nonetheless, you’ll find the game isn’t necessarily completely chill on Unlimited. Various events still happen on certain dates and when you take on a request, you will still have to finish it in a specific number of days. Thus, despite having extra time after the five year deadline to complete what you need to, you’ll still be relying on the calendar and trying not to waste any time. It’s just not as relaxing and carefree as a later title, like Atelier Ryza, which lacks a calendar system altogether. Still, it’s nice they give you that extra time to complete the important stuff, it’s not as strict as Atelier Ayesha for example. Also, the game is really short; I finished my first playthrough in a little over 10 hours. However, there is a bit of replay value. There are a handful of endings to unlock, there was one character I never even met who required something I clearly didn’t do correctly or at all, and you might find yourself with not enough time before the graduation exam to befriend every single party member and see all of their events. Plus, when I checked the event requirements list, which shows you some vague requirements for unlocking different events, I saw some characters had one scene you don’t get to unlock in Unlimited Mode. Based on the requirements, I thought these might be some sort of bad ends/relationship results or something of that sort. Therefore, even though this is a really short Atelier title, you might just find yourself playing it quite a few times, especially if you’re a completionist.

Overall, I thought Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg was a super cute and charming little entry. It’s super basic, being the very first Atelier, but the brand new modern chibi character designs and all the various art screens throughout the game were all extremely charming. The soundtrack was just okay. Having played this before launch, I missed out on the ability to play with Atelier Sophie’s bar theme as the relaxing tune I set in my atelier. I always like to have a chill tune set for the hours I spend on alchemy. Oh and something I forgot to mention earlier, the alchemy system is also super basic. You merely need to have the required ingredients, there’s no little minigame or advanced mechanics behind crafting. There are some occasional minigames though. When I crafted or collected specific items, a minigame would pop-up where I’d have to go around a maze on a time limit, collecting something while avoiding these enemies of a sort, to keep that item or even get extra. Also, eventually you’ll be able to unlock different designs for your atelier, which have specific bonuses for different gameplay aspects.

In the end, I’m very happy to have had the chance to play Atelier Marie. I was really looking forward to it as I said before and it turned out to be quite the fun and cute little adventure like I hoped it would be. Well, maybe it was a bit shorter than I realized, I’m not sure I would pay full price for this one, much less the Digital Deluxe price. Regardless, the fact that the Digital Deluxe Edition lets you play the Plus version of the game, which as far as I know is much more like the original with just a few extras – not a modern remake – is a nice little bonus. I may have to get myself the Digital Deluxe someday in the future. Anyway, if you like Atelier games, or you’re a fan of really basic and short little slice-of-life type RPGs, then I would highly recommend Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg. But if you prefer a much longer game, or specifically a more in-depth Atelier title, then this one might not be for you. Or, perhaps it’s something you’ll wanna snag on sale.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher. A copy of your own will cost $49.99 for the Standard Edition and $69.99 for the Digital Deluxe Edition.

The post REVIEW: Atelier Marie Remake: The Alchemist of Salburg appeared first on oprainfall.

If you could have any wish granted – any wish at all – but it meant taking part in a life-or-death illegal broadcast where failure means being erased from existence, would you do it? And if you found yourself on this broadcast against your will, would you be willing to hurt your costars in order to achieve that wish, or would you give in to apathy and let yourself be erased? Not that such a broadcast exists, of course; those are just rumors. The Other World Stream is just the gossip mill working its rounds… isn’t it?

Charade Maniacs, the newest release from Idea Factory, honestly has a really interesting premise. Set a good century into the future, technology has advanced to the point where humans were able to create a second artificial moon named Morpheus, though for mysterious reasons it one day disappeared. Wearable smart watches with projected displays, called Bangles, support daily tasks, provide entertainment, are used in education, and can even regulate bodily functions. Artificial intelligence is commonplace enough that protagonist Hiyori Sena’s family has their own pet robot dog they treat like the real thing. Hiyori has heard the rumors of the Other World Stream from her classmates, of course, and after the family’s robot dog finally stops working, she idly wonders if she could wish him back to life if she were to go on the stream. Her childhood best friend, Tomose Banjo, reminds her that the stream is just a rumor, but as he prepares to confess his feelings to her on their way to school one day just before summer vacation, the two unexpectedly find themselves whisked away to a place called Arcadia, where two moons hang in the sky and their every activity is monitored. Here, they and eight other unfortunate souls will have to participate in the Other World Stream – or be erased from existence.

Did I say eight? Yes I did. Charade Maniacs boasts nine love interests for Hiyori, but manages to keep the cast from being too unwieldy by breaking them down into smaller groups throughout the story. Here’s a quick rundown of all your romantic options:

• Kyoya Akase (CV. Soma Saito) – An energetic, positive presence who always tries to see the best in others and refuses to distrust the rest of the cast. He joins the Information Team.
• Tomose Banjo (CV. Kenichi Suzumura) – Childhood best friend who is fiercely protective of Hiyori and distrusts everyone else on the Other World Stream. He joins the Cleaning Team.
• Mamoru Chigasaki (CV. Daisuke Namikawa) – A quiet, reserved man who hates confrontation and who takes being on the Other World Stream harder than most. He joins the Information  Team.
• Mei Dazai (CV. Makoto Furukawa) – A stoic bookworm who cautiously accepts others but doesn’t exactly trust them. He joins the Information Team.
• Keito Ebana (CV. Tomoaki Maeno) – An antagonistic, distrustful man who wants nothing to do with anyone else in the cast when they aren’t being forced to perform. He joins the Cooking Team.
• Ryoichi Futami (CV. Tomokazu Seki) – A cool-headed and kind man who takes on a big brother style role to most of the other cast. He joins the Cleaning Team.
• Souta Gyobu (CV. Yoshitsugu Matsuoka) – An impish boy who shows callous disregard to the whole situation and just wants to figure out the mystery behind the Other World Stream. He joins the Cleaning Team.
• Takumi Haiji (CV. Nobuhiko Okamoto) – A childish, softpoken boy who doesn’t quite grasp the situation everyone is in. He joins the Cooking Team.
• Mizuki Iochi (CV. Megumi Ogata) – A bold, mature older sibling type who the rest of the cast constantly wonder if they’re a man or a woman and about which Iochi could care less. They join the Cooking Team.

Whew! That’s a lot of characters! Like I said earlier, the game does a good job of giving the player plenty of chances to interact with each of the LIs, rotating them between scenes and breaking them into smaller groups Hiyori interacts with throughout the story. This game has a very long common route, but it uses that time to establish each character and let them interact with Hiyori and each other before the game branches into the working routes: Cleaning, Cooking, Information. Everyone is going to have to live together for the foreseeable future, and that means doling out the chores, so the cast all draw straws to see who is assigned to what. As the odd one out, Hiyori gets to choose which team she’ll join. These routes give you the chance to interact with the smaller group in a more focused manner as each team tackles a different aspect of life on the Other World Stream. From there, you can finally narrow in on a specific LI. It took me around 10-12 hours to finish my first route (Cleaning Team and Tomose) and another 5-6 to finish my second (Information Team and Akase), and I’ve put another two or so hours into my third route (Cooking Team, I haven’t made it to the LI choice yet). To say you will spend a lot of time with this cast is an understatement.

It’s just too bad one of them isn’t who they say they are. Wait, what? That’s right. On top of having to act against their will in an assortment of dramas, there’s a traitor in the cast’s midst.

Here’s how the Other World Stream works. The cast are all forced to participate in a series of dramas that range wildly in subject and tone – you can have a romance drama one day and be in a thriller the next. The Director chooses the dramas and who will act in them. Acting in each drama earns the cast member points: the better they act, the more points they get. If they can collect 3,000 points, they can go home. If a cast member refuses to act out a scene, they are inflicted with a Punishment Game, where they not only lose points, but also lose a bodily function. If their points go below zero, they reach a Dead End and are erased from existence, as if they were never born in the first place. While the Director chooses who acts in each drama, the Producer picks who takes part in the Other World Stream itself. And the Producer just so happens to also be a cast member. If the cast can figure out who the Producer is, they can all go home. But if they choose wrong, they all die. Who can you trust, when someone isn’t who they say they are, and they’re the reason you’ve been kidnapped and taken to this strange world to entertain otherworldly beings for who knows what reason?

I really like this premise, and I like the way the cast all react to the reality that they have a traitor amongst them. Some, like Akase and Iochi, refuse to give in to animosity and choose to trust everyone; others, like Tomose and Ebana, keep their guard up and remain standoffish to the majority of the group. The rest find something of a middle ground, or just straight up embrace being seen as untrustworthy from the get-go. Unfortunately, Hiyori refuses to distrust anyone, which I felt ultimately made her feel a bit too much like a wet blanket. I don’t mind the optimistic heroine, but in this case, I think it would have been nice to have her push back at least a little against the premise rather than immediately jump to blind trust of everyone. The game gives reasons she would trust certain people over others because of how the routes split, and it would have been a fun change of pace if the routes you choose influence how much trust you have in those characters over the others.

Presentation-wise, Charade Maniacs is gorgeous. The character designs by Teita are stunning, and the way the game frames the Other World Streams are stylish and fun. The music is honestly one of the best soundtracks this year, with incredibly upbeat and engaging music, and an opening and ending theme that are certified bangers. The acting isn’t shabby, either, with a veritable who’s who of voice actors lending their talents to this charming cast. You have your staple gallery and music player in the menu, as well as a glossary of terms, people, places and other important bits of information. There’s also a ton of replayability here, with so many LIs and three distinct story routes. That being said, the long common route can be a turn off since it takes so long to get the chance to romance any of the cast, and romance definitely takes a backseat to plot here. (For me that’s not a problem, but if you’re looking for a romance-heavy otome, this one isn’t it.) I did not have any major issues with the localization this time around, though I did catch a few typos, doubled words, and other grammatical mistakes. The game has a lot of text, and as noted above, I only fully completed two routes, so it’s possible I just didn’t encounter anything egregious the way I have in other titles.

Overall, I have had a blast reading through Charade Maniacs. The cast is large and varied, but not overwhelming, and the overarching mystery of what the Other World Stream is and why it exists keeps me going back for more. What’s up with the Arcadians? Why specifically wipe out the memory of people who died rather than just kill them? Why was this cast chosen to have such a drastic imbalance between male and female members? If you like mysteries, you can’t really go wrong here.

Charade Maniacs is available on the Nintendo Switch for $49.99 and well worth the price.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Charade Maniacs appeared first on oprainfall.

A Wonderful Life is not a Bokujō Monogatari game I have any history playing before. I haven’t played the original GameCube version, nor Another Wonderful Life or the Special Edition version. I feel like I’ve heard in the past though that this was a good entry and have always been curious. Also, when this remake specifically first released in Japan, I had seen some stuff online and got the impression it would be a really charming entry. Seeing as I have no nostalgic history with STORY OF SEASONS: A Wonderful Life, this review will mostly be about how it holds up in comparison to similar modern entries and in general if it seems like a quality remake or not.

A Wonderful Life has a pretty basic premise typical of the Bokujō series. You find yourself moving to Forgotten Valley, where your father once lived, to run a farm. At the start of this remake you get to customize your character in a limited fashion, picking your hairstyle, default outfit, eye color, etc. After doing this and picking your name, you meet Takakura, an old friend of your father’s, and move to town. You’ll get a house with a kitchen and TV to use, a couple dirt areas for crops, a barn, a chicken coop, plus a cow to take care of and a dog. You’ll also be given some tools to help get you started.

What I found different about STORY OF SEASONS: A Wonderful Life, compared to other Bokujō Monogatari games I have played previously, is that it didn’t seem to completely focus on farming. Sure the farm is there, you can grow crops and raise animals and whatnot, but it doesn’t take very long to get done with your daily farming duties. It’s really more about your life in Forgotten Valley as a whole: the farm, making friends with the locals and seducing someone in town to get yourself a spouse and start a family, of course. Also, there isn’t a ton to do in the early game unless you save up and buy a ton of animals and plant a ton of crops right at the start. I find I don’t get too many animals because I can get burnt out having to do all the tasks it requires to take care of them, every single game day. However, it seems as if this entry wants you to focus more on animals than crops. Most other Bokujō games don’t actually force an animal on you from the start aside from a dog or horse. One other thing that was different is that each season is only 10 days instead of the 30 I was expecting.

Despite not having much to do at the start, I found myself wanting to be present for the whole day each game day and not sending my character to bed early. I played like this because in AWL you can actually milk your cow twice a day and the dirt your crops are planted in will dry out at some point during the day, which leaves them being able to be watered again. Not wanting to neglect anything at the farm, I wouldn’t go to bed until at least after 7. While waiting for the latter half of the day, I’d befriend some of the characters around town and work on seducing Matthew. The spouse options in this title are also a bit more limited than later games.

For a good amount of the time I spent on this review, I really enjoyed having a new relaxing farming game to play. But as I got into it, I found that overall, it wasn’t as good of a remake as I had hoped. Keep in mind though, I have no past history with A Wonderful Life, so this is merely how it seemed to someone who’s never played before but has an appreciation for the farming sim genre. I know it’s a GameCube game originally, but unlike STORY OF SEASONS: Friends of Mineral Town, which I found felt like a quality remake with real effort put into throwing a fresh coat of paint over it, AWL’s remake felt like they kept some of that retro jankiness. Despite using the button to move straight and not turn when trying to target certain dirt plots, I found my character would constantly skip out of line and water a plot in the next row diagonally across, or some other near-ish plot that wasn’t at all where I was aiming. Also, when I was out in the ocean fishing, at certain angles, the water layer glitches out and it looks like you’re standing next to a ditch, not the ocean. I also can’t forget how sometimes when I got off my horse just for a minute to go talk to someone, when I came back he’d be asleep and refuse to move for a good amount of seconds. It just didn’t feel fully remade. Again though, I’m not a returning player to this game specifically. For all I know this could be an intentional development choice to not ruin what fans loved about the original.

Ultimately, STORY OF SEASONS: A Wonderful Life wasn’t as charming as I had hoped and imagined it would be. It did get some more charm added in when I got to the second chapter and started my family. Still, I don’t think this Bokujō Monogatari game aged as well as some others, it ended up being super average. It’s not at all a bad game, I enjoyed my time with it. Nonetheless, I think this is mainly one for fans who have that nostalgia for it and will be going back to an old fave. If you’re new to it like me and really want to try it out, I’d suggest waiting for at least a small sale.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: STORY OF SEASONS: A Wonderful Life appeared first on oprainfall.

Over time, first person shooters have so many influences that it can be hard to keep track. We got Doom and Quake for emphasizing fast paced action and mobility. There’s the Build engine games like Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior that focused on interactivity and exploring the potential of weapons and what roles they provide. Then there is System Shock that provides a rich atmosphere and tactical gameplay sense. All of these had an impact on how developers designed games coming forth since the 2000s, even if Quake was the one to play a very large part of that.

Many of these titles, as such, influence the gameplay of Nightmare Reaper, an FPS that aims to have rogue-lite and looter shooter elements. There are a whole slew of other influences as said on the developer’s website for the game such as Blood and Rise of the Triad. Aesthetically, I can definitely see some of the influences from Blood in terms of having more gothic enemy and environment design. You traverse through mines, forests, and small villages and towns, all stage elements that were featured in Blood. However, I don’t exactly see how Rise of the Triad influences the game. Mechanically, it does have rocket jumping, bunny hopping, and even a couple more modern additions such as a dash and multiple jumps as upgrades. With all of these influences, it would be a challenge to make them mesh well together. Overall, the game shows why, which I will get into.

First, the plot is much in the background where it’s very easy to not really delve into it. A lot of it is hinted at in the doctor’s notes you can read, gaining an additional page after every stage. Much of it hints at the player character’s psyche and why they are even in a hospital ward to begin with, along with the doctor’s comments on treatment. The hospital itself is surprisingly atmospheric, hearing the screams of other patients and the strange drawings the player character presumably makes in their room. There is even a shadowy figure one can rarely see. You gain access to more areas of the hospital over the course of playing, even unlocking another bed that leads to the wave-based arenas.

Of course, this is a game about killing things, so hop into bed to go into the nightmare realm and start shooting zombies and demons to your heart’s content. Levels are organized within major areas in the game that house their own set of rooms able to be generated. As such, while the actual room generation is relatively simple, you at least see new rooms over the course of the game. It also introduces more and more enemies into the pool, which can lead to a chaotic arrangement of enemies in a single room. Makes me wonder if it would’ve been a good idea to remove early enemies or have a single selection of opponents for each area in the game. This is especially apparent when the enemy variety is surprisingly high.

However, in order to kill things you want a weapon, and there are over 80 to choose from. You have your traditional pistols and shotguns, but there are also magical tomes, staffs, a cryo cannon, a strange worm-like being, power boots, literally too many to name. In order to get the weapon availability this high, however, there are a few concessions made. Predominately, many weapons are direct upgrades from one weapon to another. Easiest example is the single-shot grenade launcher compared to the multi-barrel grenade launcher, having multiple rounds to hold along with different firing modes. Now, weapons are divided into  different levels, three in my experience, so lower level weapons are intentionally not as strong as the higher level ones. Combined with a rarity system that dictates special effects to make two of the same weapons different at all, you are somewhat spoiled for choice here. Now, you can’t bring back every weapon from one level to another, so you have to choose what you like most, even going as far as forcing you to pick a lower level weapon until you get upgrades to keep the higher ones. Even then, I believe it probably would’ve been better to truncate the weapon selection down, that way there is focus on weapons with either the most interesting mechanics or “wow” factor. I like the M1 Garand after dumping the magazine but it is in the same game as grenade launchers, occult weapons, a katana that can cause sword waves, and spiked remote mines akin to classic Shadow Warrior. It’s a tough ask for me to keep using it barring liking the gun and it is what I have on hand.

But wait, there’s more. There are three trees—yes, three–to invest into in order to increase your killing prowess. These are the skill tree, the jade tree, and the topaz tree. What you get out of them are all of the game’s upgrades and they all have different currencies. The skill tree is the most universal of them, having ability upgrades and major stat increases dotted throughout. You use the gold found in the levels in order to play a minigame styled as a simple, retro-esque 2D platformer, where even the world map is akin to Super Mario Bros 3. The topaz tree uses topaz, which is gained after beating a level, where you capture and raise abstract monsters to battle other trainers to gain incremental stat increases. Yes, it’s literally just simple Pokémon. It is also how you gain access to pills that you select before heading to sleep, modifying certain aspects of the game such as health drops. The jade tree uses jade earned from the arenas and it focuses more on situational upgrades like immunity to lava and acid. Though it does have the ledge grab upgrade so that warrants a slot. The minigame for this is essentially Gradius. This is where the game can feel bloated with ideas, even if it is all done to have the player keep doing runs over and over. Again, it would’ve been best to reduce the amount to just the skill tree, but perhaps allow another way to get pills and the smaller upgrades.

This also leads to a small conflict with the game’s tone. This is a game all about blasting enemies with blood and guts flying around the room, reveling in the violence akin to Caleb. Why is my menu a Gameboy Advance SP, where I insert GBA cartridges to access trees whose minigames and UI calls back to video games that have no relation to that of Doom, Duke Nukem, or Blood? Maybe this dissonance is intentional, as the game’s real world is in a psyche ward where perhaps these were the games the player character played as a kid. At the same time, it feels extremely disconnected with the overarching game. This isn’t the same disconnect to that of the possibility of the game’s Wolfenstein-esque secrets, which might house something more akin to an easter egg instead of treasure. There is a difference between a moment of whimsy and wonder, versus something I experience across the entire game.

There are other minor oddities to the game’s design, as well. As mentioned before, secrets might not house treasure to gain from them. However, the game tracks the enemy kill count, the treasure found, and secrets uncovered. Killing all enemies, finding all treasure, and uncovering every secret rewards bonus gold each. Yet, the game only shows you the enemy and treasure count during the actual level, only showing secrets after you get to the results screen. For the sake of 100%, I never truly know if I’ve gotten every secret. This wouldn’t be an issue in most games, but this is a rogue-lite, so I am always in the dark in this regard until an upgrade apparently that can clue you in that a secret is nearby.

There is a random chance to meet this stranger, who most likely represents the doctor, where they will either buy the weapon you used the most in the given level or are willing to change the stats of a weapon in exchange for gold. However, because of how precious gold is for the skill tree, it feels wasteful to change stats at all. For another oddity, browsing through the menu feels awfully sluggish. It takes a surprising amount of time just to go from one option to the next. It isn’t even a confusing menu to navigate, it just takes forever to go through it at all. Bunny hopping also is intentionally limited by a speed cap which hurts the point of bunny hopping to begin with.

With all that said, these issues pale in comparison to a console-exclusive issue. For some reason, the acceleration for aiming is zero to max all the time. It’s not like other games that typically have a small amount of time required to have the camera’s acceleration hit the max turn speed to begin with. Here, merely tapping the stick results in a large minimal distance traveled. This makes precise aiming nigh impossible, necessitating moving the character in order to assist with the aiming process. It’s notable that even aiming assist fails to fully adjust for this. This is a game killer for me, especially if the end result is a movement intensive shooter with a bunch of enemies to slaughter. I can kind of adjust to this awkward style of play, albeit exasperated all the more on the Switch, but I would much rather be playing on a mouse at that point.

In terms of the game’s aesthetic, it’s okay. Nothing’s bad but I wouldn’t say anything particularly stands out, as I’ve seen many of these graphical styles and lighting on games that run on GZDoom. The pixel aesthetic has a decent amount of detail, though the enemy visual design is not too interesting. It does look off when an enemy dies however, as it somewhat feels like I shot at a cardboard cutout due to how the sprite turns and plops down onto the ground. The environment has a decent amount of clutter, enough to give a sense of atmosphere once the action is over with. Andrew Hulshult created an okay soundtrack for the game, though the tracks don’t have enough presence and substance to them that I can remember them. Overall, the game in merely okay in this regard.

So yeah, I think the game’s biggest issue was scope creep. It needed more focus as there are just too many gameplay and system elements fighting for attention to really spruce things up at an individual level. If we are talking about FPS games from smaller devs, this is competing for attention from titles such as Dusk, Prodeus, Metal: Hellsinger, and Cultic. That is some heavy competition to be going against in this day and age. It doesn’t help that Nightmare Reaper is $24.99 on Steam, and $26.99 on console. It’s far from bad in the end, even if I recommend the PC version exclusively, but the competition it has is particularly high. Look into this if you are interested in a game with random layouts, events, and a lot of bonus content to be had.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy provided by the publisher

The post REVIEW: Nightmare Reaper appeared first on oprainfall.

When I first saw Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook, my first impression was this was going to be one interesting game. There hasn’t been a game in a long time with grid based combat, survival and rogue-lite aspects rolled all into one. I’ve spent around 30 hours with this one and completed all one hundred levels, so it’s time to share my thoughts. Was this a fantastic new experience, or just an exercise in frustration? Let’s find out!

The game begins as a group of adventurers enter a dungeon for beginners. The group soon finds themselves lost beyond any means of escape. Out of food and water, the group fears they are done for, but they stumble across the corpse of a dead monster. They decide to eat some of its rotting leg just to survive when they pass out, and then wake up in a strange camp. They will now have to venture forth to find an exit, eating tasty food and some of the most disgusting things imaginable. The group may just uncover the mysteries of this huge dungeon along the way.

Graphically, Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook looks pretty good on the Switch. The maps have a decent amount of detail representing the terrain of each area nicely and the character models look nice, but I do wish there were more options for your custom characters. Monster models look great and there are a few different variations of each one, but the boss monsters are where this one really shines. These bad boys are huge and will strike fear into you the moment you see them. Performance on this really depends on the graphical setting you choose. You have a quality mode that will give you low FPS but look pretty, a medium setting that is a good balance, and performance mode that will give you all the FPS but will look quite rough. I stuck with medium for my playthrough and thought everything looked fine, and the game ran well in handheld mode as well with this setting.

In the audio department this one is pretty standard affair. The music is OK but there really is nothing here write home about. None of the tracks are offensive and they fit the game very well, I just don’t think any of them really stand out. There are some voice lines for your characters in both Japanese and English. You will get different ones depending on which voice you choose during character creations and they will repeat these lines pretty often as you progress through the game. I thought both voice casts were fine, so just pick the one you like best and roll with it.

Now let’s get into the meat and taters of this one, the gameplay. You will begin by choosing a class for each of your four party members. It is very important when you pick your character’s occupations that you make a balanced party, since you cannot change this later. There are several different ones to choose from that range from mages with powerful magic, archers that have many great bow skills, chefs that are not great in combat but help make nasty dishes less toxic, and more. I think having all these options gives this game some good replay value, since it will certainly change the way you play each time.

Next up, you will begin to explore the dungeon by walking around each floor, collecting materials and slaying all the monsters in your path. Combat will take place when you come in contact with a monster, and you should try to hit them in the back without them noticing for an advantage. Combat takes place on a grid based battle field, and is 100% turn based. Each character will have a set movement range and, of course, range with their weapons and skills. You can harvest materials from the monster corpses post battle or by attacking the dead body during combat, but if you find yourself in a bind, you can always just devour it on the spot for some stat boosts and healing.

As you move around each floor of the dungeon and use skills, characters will become both hungry and thirsty. This can be replenished between floors by cooking meals, or eating things on the fly in the dungeon. You will get much better stat bonuses and abilities from actually cooking the meals, so you probably don’t want to just eat something unless you have to. In between each stage, you will be back at your camp. Here you can cook meals, craft items from materials, and more. Cooking meals is pretty simple, you can either use preset recipes or come up with your own. I had no luck with the latter and usually got food poisoning. Dishes will not only fill up your party’s gauges, it will give them different abilities as well. These include things like more HP, Attack, Defense, calories and water depleting faster, and much more. Some dishes will make your party member ill and they will lose happiness. This usually comes in when you are trying to feed them bugs or some other nasty things. These dishes will give some great perks sometimes, so you will want to make them suffer through it.

If you’re playing on easy difficulty, you will get to keep these perks upon your death, even though you will start back at level one. On normal difficulty or higher, you will lose these perks, some of your usable items, and start back at level one as well. You will keep your equipment and some materials on any difficulty. The equipment is an important one since you can upgrade it with materials found in the dungeon as you progress, so this will give you a base to start with when starting over. This will be important if you want to start on a higher floor since you can start on the floor after the last boss you defeated, but if you have low stats, you will probably just die instantly.

This is really just a taste of all the different things you can work with in Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook. If I explain all of this thoroughly, this review would be way too big, and at first, I wasn’t sure this was going to be a game for me. By the end though, I really was enjoying myself. I don’t think I would’ve had as much fun on the higher difficulties since you would be at the mercy of the game’s RNG as it generates the floors and materials. There were times I didn’t have enough to make food for my party for a few floors, and things got dicey quickly. At the $49.99 price tag, I think there is a good amount of content here, and if you like rogue-lites with some inventory management and survival mechanics thrown in, this will be a pure joy for you. Playing on easy difficulty would be a good way for someone to get into games like this, or old folks like me that want a decent challenge without it being a total stressor. I’m not sure I would say this one is for everyone, but I’m happy that NIS tried something different here. In the end, I think there is certainly a lot of flavor here, even if it’s not to everyone’s tastes.

Review Score
Overall

Game was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Monster Menu: The Scavenger’s Cookbook appeared first on oprainfall.

I was truly looking forward to trying out Loop8. I thought this was going to be a fun and relaxing summer adventure for me to get lost in. Prior to this, I had been glued to another game for most of May and I thought this would be a nice little break from that, a summer in 1983 Japan sounded like just what I needed to start off my own almost summer. Was Loop8: Summer of Gods what I hoped it would be? Keep reading, you’ll find out.

First of all, let me briefly explain what this game is about. So Nini, who used to live on a space station, has moved to Ashihara Nakatsu after the Kegai attacked the space station and he had nowhere else to go. Nini ends up living with a family relative in Ashihara and starts going to school there. Throughout Loop8, you’ll traverse back and forth across town, getting to know the various residents, raising the stats of potential party members by hanging out with them and doing one of a number of activities. Eventually a Kegai will slip through the town’s barrier and pick someone to possess. Once someone is possessed, you go to talk to them to essentially activate a boss and travel to an underworld version of Ashihara, called Yomotsu Hirasaka, to fight them and live to see another day. Should you ever fail, the game will automatically loop you back to the start of August. You can also manually loop back by talking to a specific character should you find yourself needing to before you’ve even attempted to fight the latest victim of the Kegai.

Now, was Loop8 what I hoped it would be? No, not at all. This game was a tedious mess and after just under 16 hours of playing it, I couldn’t do it anymore. Okay first of all, whoever the Kegai possesses is seemingly random every time; I think it might always be someone you didn’t bond with enough. But you would have to go through far too many loops to bond with everyone and figure out which possessed character gives you an easily beatable boss and/or one you have enough time to raise a decent enough party to defeat. I constantly got pitted against what I’m going to call a second tier boss, seeing as they required two magatama to fight.

You may be wondering, what are magatama? Well, whenever you go to Yomotsu Hirasaka to take care of the latest Kegai possessed individual, you have to collect these magatama around this Underworld version of town. The boss will be behind a sealed area of town and require a certain number of these magatama to get your chance to fight them. There are also some enemies around town you can fight on your way to the boss, but as far as I could tell, they did very little for raising anyone’s stats and were a huge waste of time. Now to get a magatama, you’re required to interact with these things floating around different areas of Yomotsu Hirasaka. Sometimes you might need a high enough appeal stat, other times you might need divine power, perhaps you have to give up some of your energy. It can be any number of things. So long as you have high enough stats for some of the collectable magatama, you’ll unlock what you need to unseal the path to the boss and go into battle.

Like I said earlier, the person possessed can seem relatively random each time and you may find yourself constantly thrown against a second tier boss you haven’t had nearly enough time to raise a strong enough party to fight. I found this constantly kept happening to me. And once you fail and find yourself looped back, the main character, Nini, will lose all skills and stats you spent hours working to raise. I did find if I kept raising the same characters, they seemed to keep some of their stats, but they also lost all of their skills. Not only that, but each time you loop back, to even get the option to add someone to your party and start working on them again, you have to talk to them a ridiculous amount of times and go through the exact same dialogue you’ve been through loop after loop after loop, yet again. Plus, even locating them in town can sometimes take ages. Many times characters won’t be on the map and you’ll have to find them yourself, or wait until their face does show up somewhere. And I can’t forget the fact that Nini moves in somewhat of a stylish anime way and it is not efficient for running around town quickly. There is quick travel, but you still have to walk across areas looking for characters, you won’t pop-up right next to them.

Speaking of the stylish sort of anime way you move around town, yes the game does look nice visually. It has this obvious anime style and Ashihara looks aesthetically pleasing. Unfortunately, you’ll be too busy dealing with Loop8’s incessant repetitiveness to pay attention to how anything looks. Also, the soundtrack isn’t anything fantastic either. It’s not bad or horribly obnoxious or anything like that, it simply doesn’t sound special.

I tried everything I could think of to somehow get to the end of this game, wherever that end is. I’m honestly not sure if you have to get to a point where every single person in town has been possessed at least once and succeeded without a loop back, or if you just have to get to the end of August: which would also require not looping back. Regardless, with the almost certain chance you’ll end up against a possessed Kegai you don’t have enough time to prepare for, without additional and luckier loops back, it’s frustratingly difficult. The only other thing I can think of to get to the end of this game is spending far too many hours figuring out who the hardest to beat possessed characters are and befriending all of them first, so that you have a decent enough available party well prepared for once you get to them as more difficult bosses later on. I simply didn’t have that kind of time when I had to get this review out. And frankly, I was not enjoying this game enough to ever bother with that, even if I had more time. And no, there aren’t any alternate difficulty options, so I couldn’t switch to some easier difficulty and speed through the game either.

As can be expected, if you’re still with me reading this review, no I cannot and do not recommend Loop8: Summer of Gods. It’s a shame because I really thought this would be a fun summer adventure and was pretty disappointed that it wasn’t. Not only that, but I know XSEED Games does some really nice physical editions. Maybe you want to pick it up if you collect XSEED’s physical releases. Still, I would suggest you wait on a good enough sale for that, because this game is not worth it. Although, if this game were to ever be made into an anime instead, one where all the repetitive nonsense is skipped over, I could see myself potentially enjoying it.

Review Score
Overall

Review copy was provided by the publisher.

The post REVIEW: Loop8: Summer of Gods appeared first on oprainfall.

Back in 2012 when Mugen Souls was first launched here in the West, fans were pretty let down by the content cuts in our release. This trend would continue with the PC release that came out in 2015. But, EastAsiaSoft has finally released what they promise is a faithful version of this cult classic, 11 years after its initial release. I’ve spent about 30 hours with this new release on the Nintendo Switch, and it’s time to share my thoughts. Let’s get to it.

Our story begins as the adorable, (self-proclaimed) undisputed god of the universe, Chou-Chou, sets forth to conquer all seven planets in the universe. She is accompanied by her two companions, Ryuto, her first peon who is totally in lust with her, and Altis, the re-incarnated Angel. The three of them will begin an adventure, the scale of which they never expected, as they discover new friends, make new loyal peons and uncover Chou-Chou’s mysterious past.

The story here doesn’t take itself very seriously, but I’ve always thought it was a lot of fun. I decided to play the game this time with the Japanese dub and subtitles, since the newly re-added bath mini game is only voiced in Japanese, but I don’t think they changed much in the localization here. They kept the English dub in place, and subs seemed to just be following along with that from what I saw in the first chapter. I was pretty disappointed to see they kept NISA’s dumb terms for the personalities. Tsundere will never equal bipolar no matter how badly they want it to, and without looking it up, most folks will not even know what a terse personality is. This was stupid 11 years ago, and time didn’t make it any less stupid.

Graphically, this release of Mugen Souls looks pretty good. I remember the PlayStation 3 version had a ton of Depth of Field and Motion Blur, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. All of the character models looks great, and everything has a nice clean look. There are some frame rate issues on some fields, this is more noticeable when playing handheld, but I don’t really thinks this effects the overall flow of the game that much. Battles run very smoothly, and all of the CG’s present in the Japanese version of the game are included in our gallery this time around. If you want to see them straight away without unlocking them in-game, there is an option to do this in the tons of included DLC.

I’ve always really enjoyed this soundtrack, and having not heard it in a while, I realized that it borrowed a few tracks from the Neptunia franchise. That being said, the battle themes here were always my favorite, and I still caught myself humming along while slaying all the baddies. As I mentioned before, the English dub from previous releases is here for those that are fans of it, but having played the game in Japanese this time around, I personally think that is the better way to go. It’s not as jarring when you enter the bath mini game, and I feel like the Japanese cast just does a better job bringing these characters to life.

Gameplay here consists of mostly combat, as you fight off hordes of enemies while trying to make them your loyal peons. This is done by the “Moe Kill” system. Each enemy will have a mood and personality type, and you will have to use one of Chou-Chou’s personalities in order to bring them to your side. If you win over their heart, you will gain them with no combat, but you can also turn them into valuables, or enrage them which gives them a huge stat boost. However, you can gain peons if you decide to just dispatch your enemies with your various skills and attacks, as well. It will take a bit of trial and error to figure out which ones work best on each type of enemy, but it’s fairly easy to stockpile a huge amount of peons in no time. Gaining these will help boost G-Castle’s stats for the ship to ship combat you will face during the story and in the Mugen Field.

Skills and weapons can be upgraded to insane levels by spending the gold, Mugen Points, and Gs you find in battle. Weapons can be upgraded in your home base, but you will need to explore the Mugen Field to upgrade other aspects of your characters. These include adding more defense slots, unlocking new jobs for custom peons, leveling up skills, increasing your level cap, and much more. You will be able to access all of this as you complete a certain number of the 100 floors found in the field. You can also turn on some handicaps that will give you a boost in all gained points as you travel further up. There is a lot of fun to be had here, but I always felt like the ship battles in this one were unbalanced. Even if you have a ton of peons and great stats, the ships here can turn the tide on you in a second, ending your run. You will only lose the Mugen points you bet at the start of the run, but this is frustrating when you have a big multiplier going.

When you’re not in combat, you will be exploring each of the seven worlds, watching the game’s story progress. Chou-Chou’s not only wants to make people her loyal peons, but the worlds themselves as well! You will do this by finding Peon Points on the map and fulfilling their wishes. Some want to see a certain type of girl, others want to know how many battles you fought, and some just need some cold hard cash. Doing this will not only progress the story, but later in the game it will help you increase your peon count very quickly.

At the end of the day, this is probably the best release of Mugen Souls we’ve got here in the West. The content is complete, and while the game doesn’t run perfectly on the Switch, I don’t think it’s terrible either. The story here is still pretty solid, but I would’ve liked to see the localization get more of an update. The personality names really bother me, and this would’ve been a good time to fix this. The excuse of “folks wouldn’t know the anime terms” is weak. Anyone buying this game would know exactly what they were. At the end of the day, even with my gripes, I feel like this one is well worth the $39.99 asking price. I still had a lot of fun with it, and having all the content from the Japanese version is a big plus. I hope EastAsiaSoft decides to port Mugen Souls Z next, since I feel like it plays better than this release, but I always liked this story just a bit better.

Review Score
Overall

Game was provided by the publisher for review.

The post REVIEW: Mugen Souls (Switch) appeared first on oprainfall.

Title	Alice Gear Aegis CS Concerto of Simulatrix
Developer	Pyramid
Publisher	PQube Games
Release Date	March 16th, 2023
Genre	Action
Platform	Switch, PlayStation 5
Age Rating	Teen
Official Website

When I first saw Alice Gear Aegis CS Concerto of Simulatrix, I thought this game is right up my alley. Lots of cute girls with weapons having duels with each other. It made me think of Strike Witches a little bit, if I’m honest. I decided to look further into the series and found it began as a mobile game in Japan quite a while ago, but it was never localized for the West. Nevertheless, I was pretty stoked to get my hands on this fantastic looking title. Let’s see if these girls really shine, or if this whole thing just falls flat.

An alien threat named Vice has taken over your world. A group of actresses with an aptitude for wielding special gear are the only hope of taking on the alien menace. The girls train with a company named AEGIS, charged with the defense of your world. The girls will fight in simulated tournaments against each other. Each girl has their own reasons for wanting to win, and they will become better prepared to defend their world as well.

I have to say I really enjoyed all of the different actress stories here. Each of the girls have a very unique personality and the stories were pretty interesting as well. There were a few curve balls thrown in there I wasn’t expecting, but this was a great thing since most of them were pretty lighthearted overall. I do wish that since you end up playing each of the stories here a few times to unlock every tile in the grid-based story mode that there were some alternate story bits or hidden scenes to find. It would’ve made this a bit more engaging rather then just skipping all the story bits during other play-throughs.

The gameplay is simple enough to pick up and play in minutes, but there is enough customization here to keep you entertained for hours. Battles take place in a variety of 3D arenas, and while you are locked on to your foe you can move freely about the area. Each girl has four different weapons. These include a main gun, melee weapon, body and leg artillery. Each of these can be fully customized before each battle, but some equipment is made for use with certain actresses only. Aside from the unique pieces, you can paint each piece of equipment any color you wish as well. Gun types are pretty much what you would expect: there are pistol types, machine guns, bazookas, sniper rifles and more. These can be charged up for bigger attacks by simply holding the button down. Body weapons work in the same way and most of these deploy satellites that will attack your foe with many beams, but some of the others do have different actions to play around with.

Battle can take place solo or in three-on-three skirmishes. These battles will take place in story mode as well as online and offline modes. During the three-on-three battles you can switch girls at any time with the D-pad. If your special meter fills a bit, you can also call one of your friends out to tag team a disadvantaged foe. Your special meter will also give you a powerful melee attack when it has filled to a certain point and a bad ass special attack when it’s fully filled. The special attacks vary greatly depending on which character you’re using. Some have damaging effects, others may heal your party. Figuring out which one you wanna use will play into your strategy with this one.

Graphically, Alice Gear Aegis CS Concerto of Simulatrix looks pretty good. The character models are all nicely detailed, which is great considering the amount of customization here. I loved that each girl had a variety of costumes to choose from, so you can give each girl the exact look you want. Combat runs very smooth on the Switch even when bullets and explosions are flying everywhere in the fantastic arenas. There is a little lag in the menus but it wasn’t enough to bother me, and the game ran just fine in handheld mode as well. I think not having a diorama mode in this one is a huge missed opportunity, given a big draw of this series are the real life models you can buy and assemble.

There are not a lot of musical tracks found here, but they are quality. The battle themes get you ready for combat while the other themes add a bit of feeling to the visual novel sections. The voice acting here is top tier. The actors do a great job bringing these girls to life and a couple of them really stole my heart by the end of this. You can listen to the soundtrack in the bonus section of the game after completing the story mode.

Overall I really enjoyed my time with Alice Gear Aegis CS Concerto of Simulatrix. The combat is a lot of fun, the characters are great and the customization here will keep you busy for hours. I spent about 10 hours and competed each of the girl’s story modes at least once. I feel like at the $29.99 price tag for a digital copy, this one is a nobrainer for fans of anime with cute girls or action game fans. You won’t be disappointed.

Review Score
Overall

Game was provided by the publisher for review.

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Title	Gal Guardians: Demon Purge
Developer	INTI CREATES CO., LTD.
Publisher	INTI CREATES CO., LTD.
Release Date	February 23, 2023
Genre	Action
Platform	Switch, PlayStation 4 | 5, XBox Series, PC
Age Rating	Mature
Official Website

When Inti Creates first announced Gal Guardians: Demon Purge, I didn’t really know how to take it. A Castlevania style game starring the amazing Kamizono sisters from the Gal*Gun franchise is something I thought I would never see, and I wasn’t sure how this would work. This is mixing two very different game styles together. Now that I have spent some time with this it’s time to share my thoughts. Was this a good Castlevania style game? Did it do justice to the franchise is was spun off from? Let’s find out!

Our story begins as our favorite demon antagonist, Kurona, discovers a dusty old mirror. She somehow manages to merge her world with a much darker one, turning their school into a castle from hell. The Kamizono sisters arrive and immediately spring into action. They have a pretty good idea Kurona is involved here, and they begin to explore the castle to find their fellow students and a way to restore things back to their rightful order.

Overall, I really loved the story here by the end. There were a lot more Gal*Gun-like things thrown into the mix here as you progressed, which made me feel right at home. I don’t want to spoil exactly what some of these are, but when you see them you’ll get a pretty good chuckle out of them. If they decide to do another one of these, maybe having more interactions with some of the NPCs and some more CG work would go a long way into making things even better.

Graphically, Gal Guardians looks fantastic. The pixel art characters look great with decent amount of detail, the enemy models are well made, and the over-the-top bosses are just icing on the already delicious cake. I thought the castle itself was very nicely done as well. Each area has a unique feel to it and you can tell the team put a lot of work into making every area look amazing.

In the audio department things are wonderful as well. The soundtrack is a pure joy, and exactly what you would expect to find in a game like this. The catchy and upbeat tracks that play while you explore each area of the castle will get stuck in your head quickly, and the boss themes are great as well. The girls will say different things as they jump and attack. I feel like a toggle to turn down how often these play would’ve been welcomed, but I really didn’t think it was that annoying either. The game is fully voiced in Japanese and all your favorite voice actors from the Gal*Gun games return here, so long time fans will feel right at home. The game does have a partial English dub, but I didn’t check this out. Hearing these girls voiced in anything other that Japanese would be jarring for me personally, but the option is there for those who want it.

The basic gameplay here is what you would expect to find in a 2D Castlevania style game. You explore the castle with girls in many side scrolling stages that have a ton of secrets to discover. Each stage has multiple paths to the end with hidden rooms and more to find along the way. The sisters have two very different play styles due to their weapons. Shinobu uses a gun, so she can take enemies out at a range. This weapon lacks the power of Maya’s melee weapon, but you will have to be closer to use it and she has less health than Shinobu does. You can switch freely between the two girls at any time if one is running low on health. If either girl runs out of health, you will be sent back to the last checkpoint. If you can get back to where your sister fell, you can revive her, but if you fall along the way, it will cost you one of your precious stocked lives.

The girls’ main weapons are not the only attacks your disposal. Each girl has an awesome set of sub weapons they can use to dispatch all the baddies in your way as well. These include things such as knives, umbrellas, bombs, penguins that freeze your foes and much more. You will unlock these as you defeat the bosses on your first run of the castle. These weapons can also be used to reach areas that you couldn’t when you take your second trip through the castle for story reasons. I thought some of the ways you use these were very creative and I had a blast playing around them.

Overall I had a blast with Gal Guardians: Demon Purge. The gameplay was very solid and a ton of fun. The writing here is great, and there are plenty of things here to keep fans of both Castlevania style games and Gal*Gun happy. My only real complaint is there is no way to pull up the castle map while in the stage. This makes looking for some of the hidden rooms more a pain than it should be. The game will take you around 8 hours to complete an ending. There are a three of these in total and some extra things to collect once the credits have rolled. I feel like this one is well worth the $24.99. It’s rare to find a game that would please these two very different fanbases, but this one will certainly do just that!

Review Score
Overall

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

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As a longtime fan of the Fire Emblem series, I had a couple prominent reasons I wanted to review Fire Emblem Engage. Firstly, I had been excited to play it for a while now. For another, I was more than a little frustrated seeing the online consensus that it was utterly inferior to the last entry, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. While it’s true I had a lot of fun with Three Houses, I’m also of a mindset that there’s been very few total stinkers in the storied history of the Fire Emblem franchise. And while I wouldn’t say Engage is the very best of the series, it’s also a far step away from being close to the worst.

Story-wise, Engage reminded me a lot of Awakening right out of the gate. The whole amnesiac hero thing is more than a little overplayed in RPGs, but I could mostly tolerate it here. That said, Alear is somewhat of an interchangeable avatar, despite having his own hopes and fears. It’s clear he’s driven to do the right thing, even if he’s not entirely sure why. I mean, sure, his title is the Divine Dragon Alear, so you’d hope he’d want to accomplish noble endeavors. But that’s far from a guarantee, both in fiction as in real life. I enjoyed how they played with Alear’s amnesia in the first dozen or so chapters, and then gradually start to fill in the gaps. Honestly, my biggest complaint about Engage’s story was that I saw the biggest twists coming a mile away.

Like any good Fire Emblem, Engage has a vast roster of allies you can commit to your cause. You’ll acquire allies from all the countries of Elyos over the course of the game, even those that are clearly demarcated as villains early on. There’s a really satisfying and dramatic arc in the first portion of the game, though I’d be lying if I didn’t say the back half underwhelmed me somewhat. Not for lack of ambition, just for what I’d call somewhat clumsy plotting. By the final battle, I found myself wishing the big bad was less chatty so I could just rush into the battle.

Thankfully, you don’t necessarily play any Fire Emblem for masterful storytelling. The series is good at being twisty and occasionally unpredictable, but pretty much every game’s core plot falls apart under intense scrutiny. There’s always small details that remain unresolved and forgotten in the rush to the climax. There’s also plenty of engaging (see what I did there?) characters you’ll interact with as you strengthen your respective bonds. My favorites were the quirkier, darker ones (AKA Tharja 3.0), like a cheerful yet murderous thief named Yunaka, as well as a gorgeous magician that defies the odds and becomes a staunch ally midway through the adventure.

The game also keeps a weird tradition going and gives us yet another Anna, though this one is remarkably small, if no less ruthless. While I enjoyed the variety of characters that join your quest, I did feel many had pretty one-note personalities that didn’t get enough definition. That isn’t to say all of them by any means, but more than I was comfortable with. Engage also keeps the tradition of being able to marry any unit that you have a close enough bond with. Admittedly there was a bit of a censorship issue here, and some of the younger options were turned into close friends rather than partners for life. You can also marry either a man or a woman, depending on your preferences. For what it’s worth, I believe Engage has the most LGBTQ+ characters of any entry, and some really badass ones at that. But to the surprise of nobody, I married the most superficial woman in the entire game. In my defense, she’s gorgeous and also a total valkyrie, so I feel justified in my choice.

Now that we’ve covered some of the setting of Engage, it’s time to talk about the reason most fans get excited for Fire Emblem games – the combat. I admit, this was the part that got me the most hyped to play, and I wasn’t disappointed. Three Houses took a step into the Persona universe by introducing the school elements. Engage takes it further, and essentially has warrior spirits you can summon and fuse with during battle. Assuming you don’t touch the DLC, there’s 12 different Emblem spirits you’ll acquire over the course of the game, and which can be summoned with magical rings they reside in, not unlike genies and lamps. Each Emblem is an iconic Fire Emblem hero, including Roy, Corrin and of course Marth.

Any character can be equipped with any Emblem. By doing so, you’ll gain access to their passive abilities during battle. These can range from blocking allies from attack to moving again after combat, and much more besides. Each Emblem is totally unique, and their class determines the buffs and skills they provide to your units. You’ll also automatically Sync with the Emblems, having them join the attack. As a quick example, I bonded Framme and Sigurd early on, and turned a middling healer into a hard hitting fighter that can also use a lance when not helping her allies.

When your meter is full from attacking, you can Engage, fusing your unit with their Emblem. Not only does this further boost the stats of your character, but it allows you to unleash incredibly powerful Engage attacks. Though most of these deal damage, there’s a couple that are totally game changing, such as the Goddess Dance, which lets all adjacent allies act again. The only thing that keeps this from getting totally out of hand is that you can only be Engaged for a few turns, and can only use one Engage attack during that period. However, there’s nothing stopping you from powering up, so you can Engage again afterwards, opening up further uses.

Engage Further On Page 2 ->

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Welcome back, Madams and Masters, to part two of my Amnesia review series! Last time I covered Amnesia: Memories, but today we’re going to dive deep into the fandisk sequels, Later and Crowd, released for the first time outside Japan in the Later x Crowd compilation for the Nintendo Switch. How do these two games stack up to the original, and are they worth your time? Let’s find out!

Amnesia: Later

The first of the fandisk games, Later, begins with a firefly outing set in a parallel New World from Memories. Everyone from Meido no Hitsuji, as well as Rika and Ukyo, want to take the heroine firefly hunting. While on this outing, you’ll have the chance to select which character you’d like to spend time with, opening up three possible routes to explore: After Story, which continues each love interest’s story from Memories; Waka’s World, a series of vignettes exploring the various personalities of the cafe’s manager; and Girls Party, where the heroine and her friends chat about the boys. There’s also an unlockable fifth route if you complete all of the above, but it’s worth it to discover what that route is on your own. Know only that it is my favorite route across all three games, and I encourage you to try it out for yourselves!

As this is a sequel, there will be spoilers for Amnesia: Memories going forward.

After Story is exactly what it says on the tin: Explore your relationship with the chosen love interest following the events of that fateful August. Does Shin learn to be nicer to you? How does living together with Ikki turn out? Does Kent ever manage to make it to London? Exactly how does Toma recover from his actions? And how does Ukyo reconcile the multiple lives he’s lived with the one he’s got now? Unlike in Memories, there are no Bad Endings here and your choices don’t matter, as each route is basically glorified wish fulfillment with the lover of your choice. For the most part, I found them a bit underwhelming, except for Ikki and Kent. Shin’s route felt like a character reset, while Toma’s didn’t address the whole cage thing nearly enough and fell sort of flat for me. I loved Ikki and Kent’s routes, though I feel like the Teen rating held Ikki’s back a bit. This is one of those instances where a bit more spice would have made a lot of sense, though that’s a minor quibble. Ukyo’s route fell somewhere in between for me and ended up being a bit disappointing, seeing as his route in Memories was honestly one of the best. Like with Shin, it felt almost like Ukyo underwent a character reset, tossing out any growth from the previous game to give what seemed like a forced conflict. None of the routes were outright bad, but when looking at what they were supposed to follow up on, most of them didn’t leave much of an impact.

Waka’s World is made up of four short, but cute, stories starring our favorite manager’s various personalities from Memories: the okama, the general, the silent type, and the assassin. Each vignette takes about 20 minutes or so, and I honestly wish they’d been a little longer, but they were sweet. I did have a few issues with the way the localization handled the okama storyline, since it would often refer to Waka acting “that way.” It wasn’t necessarily wrong, but it also didn’t really capture the difference between being an okama and being gay, which it felt like the translation was leaning more into. It didn’t change the overall meaning of any scene, but if you’re familiar with the concept, it does feel like there’s missing context.

Girls Party is an elaborate excuse to get the boys’ basic stats, but it was fun, and I am always happy when games give girls alone time, even if it’s just to prattle on about the boys in their lives. Sawa, Mine, and Rika each get to espouse their knowledge regarding two of the love interests, divulging their birthdays, height, hobbies, favorite and least favorite foods, and favorite animal. It’s hard to call these routes in any real sense, and they’re shorter than Waka’s World. Still, I appreciate the acknowledgement that the heroine has friends outside her chosen love interest, so I’ll take it.

In terms of story, Later is very underwhelming compared to Memories. I love wish fulfillment, and the voice actors all give great performances across the board, but the complete lack of any real choice removes all replay value, and felt like a missed opportunity to have some variation in how each happy ending plays out. Shin and Ukyo specifically felt like their character growth was reset, with Ukyo’s second personality getting frustratingly undermined. Toma was an interesting character in Memories because of the wildly aberrant way in which he expressed his emotions, but those rough edges are basically polished off here, and the story pays lip service to his actions but doesn’t really explore them in a satisfactory way. Ikki and Kent are the shining stars here, with routes that felt like natural extensions of their Memories stories that came to satisfying conclusions.

What Later gets very correct is the art and music. As much as I love the fashion in Memories, seeing everyone in the same outfit gets boring, and Later changes things up frequently. Not only do we get the whole cast in adorable yukata, but we also get casual wear for each love interest, and some snazzy suits for the wish fulfillment endings. The art is just impeccable once again. The game also provides a BGM player to listen to the soundtrack whenever you want, and I will always award points for a game that lets me freely listen to the music.

Unfortunately, Later has some pretty glaring issues that compound the lackluster routes. The biggest one is the plethora of typos. During my multiple playthroughs of Memories, I only recall one or two typos, but I was running into grammatical errors left and right during Later. There were at least two occasions where I couldn’t quite figure out what was being said due to the mangled wording. I can forgive a typo here and there, but when your entire game revolves around reading, this many errors is egregious. The game also suffered from some poor lip syncing, where characters wouldn’t even be talking but the speaking animation would continue, as well as audio peaking, especially during Ukyo’s route. It got to the point where I wondered if they simply didn’t have another take to use (and it wasn’t anything on the actor’s part, either, the line delivery was fine.) Between the poor proofreading and audio issues, Later‘s presentation was, honestly, really sloppy. Had this been a single release, it would have been absolutely unacceptable.

Overall, I found Later underwhelming and lackluster. Only three routes were outright fulfilling, and the lack of replay value, plus the typos and audio issues, dragged this down considerably. Even considering this game has my favorite route of all the Amnesia titles, were it a standalone game, I would suggest giving it a pass. However, we still have Crowd to consider, so let’s see what that game has to offer first.

Check out my thoughts on Amnesia: Crowd on Page 2 ->

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