天下制覇

Yes, there are other things going on besides the start of the new season.

Shikigami is Akabei Soft’s upcoming SRPG about a naked monk crossdresser who fights mecha-using priestesses with his army of little girls, some are catgirls on segways, some are completely naked… including flesh. …Okay, so there’s also a large breasted oni with little more than a bib and the optimistic belief that it will somehow manage to cover her breasts, but that’s the exception, not the rule. That description may not be what’s written on the box, but that’s sure as hell what it is. Is this really what you want to be known for, Akabeisoft? Being the company that keeps making SRPGs about transvestites? Well, at least he only crossdresses some of the time. Also, weirdly enough, he becomes voiced once you put panties on him. I prefer not to think too hard about it.

Anyway, since I approve of more territory conquering SRPGs and RagnaROCK did show promise for AKBS’s first try in this genre (albeit almost completely unfulfilled), I thought I’d take the new wheels out for a spin. The good news is that even from just the trial, it’s easy to see that AKBS actually put a lot more thought into the engine this time and it has a bit more depth. It’s a ‘party’ based affair using groups of two units wandering around the landscape and smacking each other. There’s kind of a RPS system going between swords, spears, and bows, but since you have four times as many spearmen as anything else, and the first ‘archer’ you get is overpowered as all hell, that’s not exactly… how to say… well-implemented as of yet. There’s enough variety in skills and unit characteristics along with HP being very slow to heal for deployed units to require some actual thought and care in how you move, although I do hope that the challenge ramps up a bit in the full game.

Unfortunately, it is still full of small niggling issues that plagued RagnaROCK. For starters, overlapping windows and white text on a white background? Come on, here. That’s rare at least. It really needs a confirm for certain skills and actions though. You click and drag to move the map on the overworld, but if you try to do that with a unit selected, you move the unit instead. Similarly in battle. If you misclick on a skill that doesn’t require a target, it immediately goes off. Misclicking ‘capture’ instead of ‘attack’ should also have some kind of actual warning given that it’s a complete waste 99% of the time.

The way movement handled when two units trade positions is also a little weird. When a unit moves in front of another, they trade places, so if the unit in the back goes first and both are trying to move forward, then they’ll just endlessly swap positions. I’ve only seen the AI get stuck in an infinite loop like that once, but that’s still too many. It also creates the weird situation where the second unit in that scenario can be rubber-banded forward two spaces in one turn by the first character moving backwards (swapping position), then the second moving forward. That seems slllllightly problematic for archers. There’s also the really weird unit limitation that bugs me. After beating the first stage, your army explodes to about ten units… but you’re still only able to deploy 3 squads at a time, so nearly half your army (mostly generics, but still) is sitting at home, twiddling its thumbs.

It’s not bad though. The humor’s about the same level as RagnaROCK, which is to say that it’s not great, has far too much high pitched shrieking, but is still weird enough to have its moments. The setting is about as strange as RagnaROCK’s too, even without reducing Thor to a large breasted tomboy in a belly shirt. Most of it is just modern day stuff… but made out of wood. Wooden vacuums, wooden segways, wooden rice makers. One has to wonder if someone in AKBS just really really likes wood.

My main hopes after trying this out are that the full game will have A.) A lot more maps than the trial, B.) Be a bit more challenging, and C.) Have some actual branches with different battles, unlike RagnaROCK. You can pick up the trial here if you’d like to give it a whirl. The full game is due out July 29th.