天下制覇

Alas, no tortoises here, although at least a 25% chance they cribbed from that too.

Continuing this season’s exploration of the first hour or two of random games you may or may not have heard of, we come to Escu;de. They’re not a big name in the subgenre of “visual novels that cannot be completed by a guinea pig crawling across the keyboard” mainly because the game portion of their titles veer heavily toward cribbing heavily from some other franchise and then dumbing and cheapening it down so far that half the time, it’s just two portraits bouncing against each other with numbers popping out. They’re making more of an effort lately though, and Quantum Girlfriend is probably their first real step in that direction.

QG is the game you get when you blend together everything that was popular from about 2006 to 2008, although bizarrely, didn’t come out until 2011. It cribs most heavily from SMT and Haruhi, which it could have possibly stood to be a little more subtle about. And if you missed that reference, don’t worry, the next line after that explicitly pointed it out. The main thing it seems to have taken from Haruhi though is having its head shoved up its ass. The thing begins with philosophical wondering to thin air about what it means to be strong, moves from there to a brief introduction to the world’s blandest childhood friend, and then to the spunky sidekick who spends a terrifyingly long time blathering on about urban legends, religion, and quantum theory. Along the way, they also run through everything from Romeo and Juliet to Tolstoy to the Truman Show. It certainly believes itself to be all that and a bag of chips.

  

Anyway, the actual story with the BS cut out is that you are Wakahiko, all around nice guy and apparently cyclops. After the tortuously long, rambling beginning, Wakahiko and cohort investigate a rumor about a statue coming to life. Shockingly, it does, leading him to run into a goddess who has her own gigantic lecture about good and bad gods. He ends up going back to the statue, getting mauled by evil dogs and then mostly killed by one of the evil gods. He prays to live and Amaterasu descends from high to shove Kusanagi into him and bring him back to life. Together with her two underlings, Takemikazuchi and Ame-no-Uzume, they fight crime.

One of the big reasons I skipped over this for a long time (and not to tip my hand, but have no desire to continue) is that the start is just so bloody excrutiating. Hell, at the very start when he gets to class, there are two or three conversations with random side characters who they couldn’t bother to draw sprites for, not even generic students or whatever. So it’s like 15 minutes of just ‘talking’ to a static shot of a completely empty classroom. It does certainly pick up a lot, or at least stop faffing about with the faux philosophy, along with the characters that ate up so much time before simply vanishing, once the goddesses show up, but getting there is painful.

  

There are a few amusing moments, but the writing is nowhere near as amusing or as intelligent as it thinks it is, especially when presented as just a couple teens sitting around being clever and smug about how smart and referential they are. Especially when it’s doing the traditional Japanese thing of narrating at astonishing length things going on right in front of him. If spending nearly five minutes ‘dying’ wasn’t bad enough, he takes about half a dozen lines to declare that Amaterasu is a god. Really, Brontes? What was you first clue? That she appeared in a blazing pillar of light in the middle of the night, her floating clothing, or that her head was on fire?

  

Unfortunately, that undermines the humor, which is a lot stronger than the… depth? Like with the explicit Haruhi reference, it has the tendency to be really obvious about it and then explain on top of it. Uzume, for example, starts stripping in apology for climbing into bed with the cyclops. After he says he’s not mad, she starts stripping in thanks. If you have understood the joke here, then you are ahead of where they expected the readers to be, because they try to turn that into not one, but two punchlines. “She strips no matter what” and quite literally “It’s funny because I repeated it.” She is the flirty um… sexhound I guess of the group, but that reveal doesn’t come until about three more lectures on the nature of gods and quantum faith particles.

And that’s when it’s not just doing it because they feel the need to crowbar in porn, like Takemikazuchi demanding to be shown Kusanagi and going on a search into the cyclops’s pants followed by Uzume teaching her what dicks and the sticky white stuff she’s covered in are. The place that the humor shined was in the battles. It’s probably because characters were limited to only a couple lines, which meant that they had to use the rarest of all things in Japanese writing, brevity.

Speaking of the actual gameplay, as I mentioned, it’s stolen practically wholeheartedly from the SMT series. Boringly so really, although I guess you have DP (Divine Points) that charge from attacking/being attacked for skills instead of a more traditional MP system. It does selecting events/battles/character focus just like Devil Survivor; picking from a list of stuff on a map, and battles themselves are a boring static first person affair with generic animations that I think I originally saw in 1992 playing Might and Magic 3 fizzing about on screen. It even does the thing where you need to slap an enemy with an element and then records if they’re weak against it. Shockingly, and bizarrely though, you can’t fast forward the battles. Well, probably. I didn’t really go exploring the options. Ctrl doesn’t work unlike every other game made in the last decade though.

The more interesting part of it comes from the skills. You’re given a pool of creatively named skill points and every skill you want to equip costs a certain amount of points. You earn more skills/improve stats through winning battles, but mainly through purification between battles. All the goddesses do a little purging of the latent evilness (with choosing the cyclops to be matched to one of them) and depending on what you focus on and how well they do, they improve both stats and learn skills. It’s not a challenging game though, or at least the start’s not, and I doubt getting more skills/options as you progress is going to make it more difficult.

 

So no, I wouldn’t really recommend it based on my brief prodding. As shallow and rudimentary as the gameplay is, that was easily the most fun thanks to the banter. I’d probably have a much better impression if you simply cut off the first two hours or so. Once the goddesses began running around sticking swords into things and/or exploring underwear/having their own underwear explored, it did pick up significantly, but it took me skipping through about three or four gruelingly boring lectures to get to the meat of the game… at least assuming that sexing goddesses and killing monsters is the meat and not talking about unrequited love with your childhood friend (subtlety!). He even bloody paraphrases it half the time afterward too.  I guess other people seem to have a better stomach, or even enjoy, that kind of pretentious twaddle a lot more than I, so if you’re into that kind of thing, it might be worth a look. Otherwise, I’d give it a wide berth.