天下制覇

And, of course… sex. Lots of sex.

Toushin Toshi is the latest and greatest game from AliceSoft, one of the more prolific creator of the hybrid visual novel/RPG/porn games on the market. They tend to be a little artistically sparse compared to many other contemporary visual novels and a bit more focused on the sex over the story, but it’s hard to not enjoy their games. They have actual gameplay for one, and have a longstanding tradition of extremely confident and even misogynistic male leads, which is a welcome change of pace from the eternal parade of whiny losers that normally populate these type of things. You have to be a certain level of badass to attempt to conquer Japan, to say nothing of Rance’s eternal quest to have sex with every female in the world, whether she wants to or not.

Dungeons, Monsters, And Maids
   

Toushin Toshi 3 is… wait for it… the third in AliceSoft’s Toushin Toshi series. The games are all dungeon crawlers and haven’t really evolved too much from the ‘good old’ early 90s gameplay elements for such. There’s a dungeon. You wander around in it. You fight random monsters. Level up for new skills. Buy equipment. Wash, rinse, repeat. The basic premise is that there’s a tournament going on where men enter alongside their female partners. The winner gets… use… of the loser’s partner for an evening, which is where Alicesoft’s normal copious amounts of sex comes in. Of course, the town is also pretty much staffed by voluptuous female townspeople and there are bunnygirls in danger in the dungeon who are all too grateful to be rescued from whatever monster is harassing them. Both you and your partner had fathers in the past tournament when… something happened, and you’re in this one to figure out what. Getting laid along the way is also nice.

Animated Miniscenes
  

The story progresses between dungeons, but it’s always just a case of going into the dungeon, fetching something (usually a little stamp for your qualification sheet) or doing something, and then heading back to town. Every now and then there are little cartoonish sequences to break things up and provide quite a bit more animation than you usually find, so they’re a charming little add-in. There’s the usual store to buy healing and other items, as well as equipment (staffed by somebody with far too many ‘Kos’ in her name) and you gain new skills by levelling or accomplishing certain other tasks, such as casting any spell X times. Up to 9 skills can be equipped at once, ranging from abilities that can be activated in battle to disable charged enemy attacks to passive skills that increase certain stats. Your abilities can further be augmented after a certain point by fusing items onto your status board. Unfortuantely, I just sort of started tossing stuff up there all willy nilly before realizing that I couldn’t move them around or erase them (they’re enemy drops, so you’re practically swimming in this junk), so my board is a little bit… less than optimized.

Assorted Status Screens
   

Like most dungeon crawlers, the core of the game is dungeon crawling, and this is probably where the game has its biggest flaws. The combat is just boring. Really boring. Often very poorly thought out as well. Every skill has an initial warm up, a charge time, and a cool down. However, there are very few active skills to use, so most of the battle is spent just staring at the screen while it automatically goes through the normal attacks. Once you get the stronger attack, you can use that for a little bit extra damage in exchange for a chance at it being interrupted, or do the same to enemies, or cancel their debuffs, but three or four hours and about 6 dungeons into the game, and those are seriously the only options I have. At least the basic attack is automated so I don’t need to feel bad about opening a book while the 18th battle against a Honey/Hani plays out. Along those lines, the number of random battles seriously needs to be toned down. A lot.

Random Dungeon Cleaning and Red-Shoed Swearing Boss

Some of the choices for modelling/art in battles are relatively incomprehensible as well. Your first match in the tournament, Dogi, spends the first few hours of the game taunting you and beating you up, but when you actually fight him, he’s less animated than that random squidman you killed three dungeons ago and marginally weaker than the last boss you fought who was himself the same as enemies in the area… only with red shoes. Yeah, you can’t use items while fighting him, but that fight was just really lame, even if the end result was to win some time with the delectable Forte. I’m also a bit disappointed that this seems to be completely linear. I haven’t been offered a single choice to do anything at all yet, unless you count my extended attempt at maid genocide in the 3rd dungeon.

So, overall, it’s pretty much exactly what I’ve come to expect from AliceSoft. It’s definitely not as good as Sengoku Rance or Daibanchou, or even as curiously addictive as Beat Blades Haruka, but it’s still a pretty solid little game and much more enjoyable than AliceSoft’s last game, AliveZ. If you’re looking for a retro dungeon crawler with a story and a copious amount of bodily fluid exchange, it’s definitely worth picking up. It won’t floor you, but it’s still a pretty charming little package nonetheless. It’s not terribly friendly if you don’t have at least a decent grasp of Japanese, but if you just want to play it and look at the pretty pictures, the English AliceSoft wiki already has a good start on filling in all the relevant gameplay details.