天下制覇

Miko paradise, my ass.

The latest game out from Alicesoft is Shaman’s Sanctuary, a touching priestess raising game. Apparently modern Japan got sick of having different religions all over the place, so decided to unify them all under one for greater stability and more glory for the collectivist mind. Religion in this case being a little bit of a misleading term. These are more like school clubs. There’s the athlete ‘religion,’ the merchant ‘religion,’ the musician ‘religion,’ and my favorite, the religion where everybody is the same guy. You are Itsuki, the reluctant god human semen battery of the magical girl religion, which apparently has only three priestesses Mizuno, Momiji, and Natsu Guardy, Rangey, and Meleey.

The two core mechanics are the stat raising, which is just choosing which stats to train and adding on Itsuki for a one point training bonus, and the combat. Unfortunately, all the little training animations may be about as amusing as the whole combat engine. The point of battle is to defeat the enemy leader(s). That would be the strongest units on the enemy side, and Itsuki, the weakest unit on your side. If you already see where this is going, congrats. The combat is piss easy, except that enemy targets are completely chosen by the RNG. Just because the enemy is in the front row, that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to up and use a ranged attack to snipe at Itsuki in the back row. Just because Itsuki’s in the front row, that doesn’t mean they’ll choose to ignore him and plink at Guardy for 0 damage. Of course, even in the best defensive formation, the enemy can (and will!) sometimes lead off with a lucky critical on Itsuki that kills him outright before you can even move. That’s only slightly less annoying than when the enemy has 6 weak generics in battle which can all do 0 damage to your magical girls, but will hit Itsuki for a third his life.

That reduces the formations to being a little silly. There’s almost no reason to not always use the glass cannon formation that puts Itsuki in the front row. He has only a one in four chance of being attacked anyway. Unfortunately, he’s also made of paper and semen so gameovers will probably be frequent. There are other things you could do, like use Guardy to protect Itsuki the whole battle, or charge up their special abilities for two turns in order to do an attack that does… about as much as a critical, but when the berserker approach will get your through 99% of the game, why bother with anything else? Well, finishing battles with special attacks does give higher stat gains, but the game’s already easy enough as it is.

Unfortunately, the story and characters don’t fare too much better. After the introduction, it’s just a generic "go to each place, learn about them, beat them, add them to the harem, never see them in the plot again." There’s no choices to be made outside of who to dump Itsuki’s fluids into between battles. In the end, and wait for this surprise, there’s an evil cult with demons that was hiding in the shadows the whole time. Wow. That’s a shock. I think Alicesoft went out of their way to find irritating VAs for this game. All the characters are various levels of irritating though. The Ctrl button is your friend, especially since it stops you from having to hear Guardy’s shrill piercing screams.

I toyed around with doing a ‘speedrun’ of it (mostly blind) after being bored with the tedium about an hour in, and lo and behold, it actually only took about 75 minutes to run the game from start to finish with the Ctrl button held down (and thank god for that). I did, however, get a bad ending because I apparently lavished too much attention on the non-main characters, and only had the will to make it through about 20 minutes of playing again before the soul crushing nature of the game overcame me. I’m weak like that.

The point is, this game is terrible. Avoid it like the plague. This is the kind of thing I’d expect Circus to crap out in their recent "we can make games with gameplay!" craze. Even Toushin Toushi III managed to put together some solid characters and a decent plot despite the lack of playable mechanics. I’m not sure any thought went into this one at all.