天下制覇

Admittedly, I didn’t put up that much of a fight.

Next up on my plate was going to be Nega0, Eternal’s oft-forgotten magical girl cum Phoenix Wright cum Megaman X villains cum dream smashing simulator, but it began with the same philosophical BSing as Quantum Girlfriend before going into such humorous twangs like “This girl makes up acronyms that nobody understands,” “My not-really-girlfriend is soooooo stupid,” and “That floating thing’s a laptop!?” and I just couldn’t take it. Supposedly, it eventually becomes about crushing the dreams of all your friends through a combination of ‘debugging’ their past to find them accidentally abusing magic before they transform into sentai rejects and you have to beat them up. Supposedly it takes all those cliches and starts amusing itself by poking holes straight through them. Supposedly there’s all manners of twists and turns and learning valuable lessons about accepting reality. Supposedly one of them licks ice cream off your dick. 

But after an hour of insipid “boy am I surrounded by wacky-but-not-actually-wacky girls” garbage, followed by an info dump about the pseudomagicalsciencial nature of reality followed by what appeared to be another hour of “here’s the entire cast again, each doing their one joke fourteen times with it explained seventeen times” I couldn’t last. I already know most of the twists too. Many are even interesting ones. Hell, even the second OP promises so much more than the incredibly annoying initial one. They’re what led me to try to get through the godawful start about three times now, but it would seem to be beyond me. 

So instead, I’m just going to make some random observations about upcoming games, and boy howdy, is 2014 full of them. There was already the glut of releases (relatively speaking) with Rance 9, IMM, Baldr Sky Zero 2, Eiyuu Senki Gold, and Demonion 2, but there’s another tidal wave coming at the end of summer, or more likely fall when everything gets delayed. Again.

 

Out Vegetables has to be, bar none, the most inane name for a game I’ve ever seen. Except perhaps that when they originally announced it, it was “Out Vegetabls.” Good job hitting the dictionaries, guys! Managing a bunch of horny thieves could be a really neat concept, basically MØUSE: The Game, but with less sex. Still, it’s Softhouse Chara, so even if they do make it like the X-Com-like tactical espionage action thingy I’d hope for, I’m sure they’ll dick it up. Aaaand that’s all anybody knows about that.

 

I already briefly touched on Death March, and boy, did that trial take away any slight anticipation I might have had for it.

  

Eternal’s gone ahead and embraced the whole Fourteen Sick thing even more unabashedly now, with their upcoming game in the dimension hopping Yumina/Corona series having both a “Black Story” and a “White Story.” Also, the game’s name is Alpha Ride and the ‘white’ heroine’s name is Alpharia. Subtle. Sadly, the ‘black’ heroine’s name is not Ride, but Stigma. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. Aaaand that’s all anybody knows about that.

   

I’m really interested in seeing how Debonosu’s first attempt at a standard RPG since their days as Studio e.go a decade ago turns out. They certainly know how to animate sprites and have a gargantuan set of resources to pull from between their half dozen action RPGs and dozens of roguelikes. Their usual failings come on execution and a greatly simplified engine with a lot more polish could be just what they need. Of course, the writing will still no doubt be awful, so I’m not holding my breath either.

  

Escu:de has two games coming up, although they’re keeping one pretty close to the vest for now and have yet to put up anything that doesn’t involve one of the heroines having their orifaces plugged. There is a game system page though, so presumably there’s something going up eventually. The other appears to be about trying to detonate the clothing off females before plugging their orifaces. Now granted, their last game was about training high school girls to competitive combat jet-ski by plugging their orifaces, but this just reeks of seeing one of those Queen’s Blade or Compile Heart PSP/Vita games about nothing more than clothing exploding and them going “Hey, we can do that too!”

Märtopia’s a really neat-looking Dragon Force-like game, and not just for fulfilling my oft-neglected itch for large scale squad-based RPGs, but also for giving the guy from Summon Night work. They’ve also been impressing me by having a ton of information, battle screens, information about upgrading units etc, up long before release and regularly adding more actual substance every Friday instead of lazily tossing up one more sample CG or noting what magazines are going to be posting a couple of their sample CGs. If they’re this on the ball with development, they’re hopefully doing a good job polishing things up and making a solid game out of it. Of course, now that I’ve said that, no doubt the next month will be updating the voice samples.

Now back to wrangling Canadians.