天下制覇

This stupid post has been sitting around for almost a week now.

Our story begins long ago. Long long long ago. At the end of the world in fact. Ragnarok: The mythical battle between Aesir and Vanir. Odin triumphed over the demon lord Njord and stripped him of his powers before casting him to Midgard. Thousands of years later, the Norse gods have been forced out of Europe by Christianity and taken residence in Japan, dragging the powerless Njord along with them. Their new source of belief is by acting as pop idols for the masses to worship. Njord, meanwhile, lives every day in poverty with the succubus Nerthus, both too lazy and arrogant to actually work. Then Njord discovers that people give money to Nerthus when she sings in the park and comes up with his grand plan for revenge; steal the Aesir’s power through popularity. With the help of Nerthus’ sister, Loki, the three embark on a cross country musical conquest, but they’re still short one idol for the needed trio, so it’s up to Njord to put on the frilly skirt and high heels, and conquer Japan with his very own RagnaROCK.

AkabeiSoft2 is better known for more… well… cerebral games, such as Sharin no Kuni or Devil on a G-String, but they’ve decided to take a foray into the world of strategy conquest games, something the world always needs more of. RagnaROCK is a relatively simple conqest game built around song and dance battles. It’s structurally very similar to Big Bang Age. You have your general regional exploration phase, conversation phase, deployment phase, and combat. The order is shuffled a little bit (you can only meet with characters that went into combat), and there’s really nothing important to do in the exploration phase for the tutorial segment of the game, but the basics are pretty much the same.

Combat in RagnaROCK is a sixty second idol battle between the team you have deployed in the region and the enemy’s. The goal is to completely fill the bar in your favor, thus giving you control of the region. If the sixty seconds runs out without filling the bar, then the owner retains control, although there are minor bonuses or penalties on future turns depending on whose favor the bar was in at the end. Combat is pretty simple. The bar moves in the direction of whoever has the highest score, speed depending on the difference. This is modified a little bit by the audience’s mood towards singing or dancing at the moment. Every character also has a skill that can be used in battle with various effects. Njord’s "Look at Me!" for example, gives him a +50% boost to his stats but doubles stamina consumption, which is basically an instant win through most of the game. 

The rest of the normal RPG stuff is around too. Characters gain experience as they battle, there’s an idol training center (run by Ymir, LORD OF ALL CREATION, and Njord’s biggest fan) where you can buy better microphones or send the girls to train, and instead of HP, your singing and dancing stats just drop as you battle and recover while at rest. I will give it points for at least making overtures of challenge. Enemy generics are always at least the equivilent of you in terms of stats, and you never have as many troops idols as you’d need to make things simple. Of course, that leads into the issues.

Unfortunately, the game absolutely reeks of being unfinished. First off, it is exceedingly short. After I messed around a little bit to get a feel for the mechanics, it took me approximately four and a half hours to beat the game from start to finish. There are only four routes in total too; Hel or Loki initially, and Nerthus or Odin on the alternate Aesir route on second games. The fact that Njord is a palette swap of Neri should also be a warning sign as to the game’s lack of content… and the worst part is that he’s not even the only palette swapped character in the game. There are literally only twelve total characters to recruit in the initial Vanir route and only around 5 more in the Aesir route (the bosses of Vanir). Aaand Ymir’s requirements are so steep that she’s obviously meant as a bonus character for New Game+. They could get by on it if every character was decently developed, but most only have about 4-5 events.

It gets worse though. The exploration phase I mentioned above? There are only maybe two dozen events total. Some regions have no events in them whatsoever. Get used to doing live mini concerts for chump change because there is literally nothing else to do during those. Combat’s not great either. It’s nice that enemy stats are almost always better than yours and you can’t just level out of them, but 95% of the fights are against the same skill-less generics who can be beaten by basically just using a few certain skills. It’s a shame too, because they did a really good job thinking up skills with some creative gimmicks, but you can beat the game by just using the same three or four skills for the whole thing. The early characters are the strongest too, so all the characters they dump on you from the midgame on just sit in the wings gathering nickels and dimes.

Other parts are very obviously unfinished or just poorly thought out as well. Take the turn limits for example. You’re given 10 turns to conquer Nibelheim, which is basically the tutorial area. Then you’re given twenty turns to conquer either Valhalla (begin Loki’s route) or Bilskirnir (begin Hel’s route), but after that, the timer just disappears for the rest of the game. There is nothing to stop you from simply pressing "next turn" for an hour and watching the money roll in. Since the enemy has a limited number of generics as well, this also makes fighting them a little bit silly once the turn limit is gone. For both Odin’s region and Valkyrie’s, they ran out of generics before I had taken all their territories, so I literally marched in uncontested. There’s… something extremely wrong with that.

In the end, it’s not a horrible game, and it’s frequently silly enough to be enjoyable. Not often enough that I’d recommend it though. As a first try for AkabeiSoft in this genre, it’s not horrible, but it’s still just the skeleton of a game that badly needs to be filled in. I suspect Loki’s route is probably more interesting than Hel’s too (I lost interest about 3 turns into my second playthrough). Or at least, I suspect that Loki’s obsession with Njord would be more amusing than watching Hel be a bitter drunk for the entire route before Neri accidentally made Njord’s demon side go berserk, blah blah blah, "It’s okay, you can rape me", blah blah blah, "now you’re my woman. Let’s protect everybody’s smile." And the Aesir route involves Neri turning into the demon lord of the dance song. So… yeah.

I will say this though. Fenrir’s cut-in/save screen CG is criminally good looking. Woof.