天下制覇

I don’t even know what that means, but that C has a fly hat.

Since last week I talked about a game that I played (a tiny portion of) but didn’t actually read, I thought this week I’d talk about a game that I’ve read (a tiny portion of) but haven’t actually played.

However, I think it’s best done more poetically, so I’d like to now perform a one-man play better known as the prologue to Softhouse Chara’s Dancing Crazies.

My name’s Minase Akira. I’m just a regular guy working a regular job in business. There’s the PR girl that brings me tea every day. Just a normal everyday life. Ah, finally time to go home. Back to my little daughter, Himeko, my reason for living and enduring the tedium of this everyday life. I bought a cake for her on my way home as a present. She’s ecstatic to see me when I get home. I make sure that she’s been good and behaved herself while I was gone.

Then the phone rings. It’s my other job. I hate doing this to her, but I can’t take my daughter with me for this. I head to the job and find the target with his bloodstained knife as obvious proof of his guilt. I’m a little disappointed that I had to be called out for this and put two bullets through his leg. You see, I’m an illegal bounty hunter, taking on jobs that the regular police can’t deal with. If I’m caught or die, nobody will care, but I go where officials can’t, because I’m a former assassin. I tried to move to Japan to get a fresh start, but I’m too infamous for my own good. I wanted to stay out of it for Himeko, but once my identity was known, I had to start bounty hunting just to keep my life with Himeko safe. 

The thrill of the job is still with me though. I don’t like killing anymore, but the excitement’s there. Sometimes I accidentally kill somebody in my work, but without the intent, it’s not the same. I wish I had killed that punk. Thinking that, I make it back home. My daughter’s already gone to bed like a good girl and locked her room for her safety just like I taught her. As I go into my bedroom, I call to Linteil, who appears out of the air. I’m the only one that can see or interact with her, but she’s been by my side for the last five years. She calls herself a reaper. I don’t know what she really is, but since she doesn’t mean to harm Himeko or me, I don’t worry about the details.

The important thing is that she’s a woman and I’m a man. I can still taste the disappointment of not killing that punk. The only thing that can calm me is sex. It doesn’t matter who. Whores, drunken sluts, whoever. I screw them mercilessly, caring about nothing but satisfying my own urges.I push her down with a singleminded purpose and she surrenders to my urges, telling me that I’m always gentler after the first time each night. We go at it for hours before drifting to sleep.

At this point, the prologue ends. When you start the game, none of this is relevant. You get about 5 minutes of Akira going "I should try to amass a fortune through bounty hunting so I can retire comfortably, but also keep up the facade of my daily life." Then you’ll be given your usual menu of what to do each turn where if you’re as lucky as me, you’ll just go after the first E ranked bounty on your list, whereupon you’ll discover that your organization of bounty hunters includes a school girl and a cat… then a ninja randomly joined my side once the battle started against a man who counted a spider and a wasp as members of his own gang.

Okay, so the starting members are randomly generated, including, but not limited to, chinese waitresses, bees, and armadillos. Yes, giant bees are not the strangest thing. There’s clearly a line where the editors should have stepped in and said enough is enough. I think it’s somewhere between ex-assassin office drone and invisible death god sex toy babysitter. Sadly, this is generally about as far as I’ve ever gotten because my initial experience was so mindboggling bizarre that I can’t even think about the game without feeling like there are bees in my brain. The actual gameplay is more stat management than anything else since battles are completely automated besides the vague control you have over ‘tactics,’ which usually don’t even matter because there’s no real way to tell if your bounty (the only kill you need) is going to charge headlong into your forces or hang out in the corner.

I do generally like Softhouse Chara as a game maker though, I just often wonder about them. They make a lot of light hearted games that veer clear of the maudlin heavy drama that seems requisite and pervasive for even ‘silly’ VNs, but almost everything they make feels like they thought up some neat gimmick for a game, then completely forgot to develop it to a point where it’d actually be fun. Here, for example… just crib X-Com or Fallout’s engine and it could’ve been great. Or Suzukuri Dragon could’ve been an amazing Dungeon Keeper clone, but alas, that’s probably a post for another day, complete with a paragraph of how hilarious the sex in it is. The main mystery remaining is wondering just how many drugs you need to ingest before you can call yourself a writer in Japan. My guess… a lot.