天下制覇

 

At least its H scenes continue to be extremely short.

Continuing my quest for something to write about on Monday through Wednesday, I briefly toyed with the idea of writing about writing about sex, mostly because I finally hit the first heterosexual scene in Seinarukana and it was one of the more amusing ones I’ve done in a while. Therefore I decided to instead get up this morning, let the dogs out, feed them breakfast, and then go back to sleep for another four hours. So here’s the briefest of my brief thoughts on Bunny Black 3 trial instead.

The main new twist to the series is the city building aspect, which is extremely simple, but as Eushully showed us by doing the complete opposite, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Build town to unlock characters, events, H scenes, whatever. Town will only function as much as you’ve attracted people to it, so balance residental/attracting buildings/useful buildings appropriately. Being a trial, it’s hard to tell if that’s going to be a trivial joke or show some actual depth. The dungeon crawling is to collect money and supplies to build more things. Repeat this cycle until game is beaten or you’ve shot yourself in the head.

  

The dungeon crawling hasn’t received any particularly major upgrades, but it still looks nicer and flows better than Gears of Dragon’s did. As much as I want to like its mass party system, it lacks the speed or flow of games like Ogre Battle, Soul Nomad, or even Venus & Braves. Actually, I think I’d like this a lot more if it just ditched the SP system and used V&B’s system. That seems like what it’s half designed for with the integrated pseudo-AI system built in. It’d help the RNG issues too. Even leaning on the Ctrl key, it should still be moving at 2-3 times the speed and turning animations off is just lame. SHChara’s usual issue of the RNG simply hauling out a spiked dildo because the upper range on it is set too high for no reason still remains. In the very first dungeon, you can be encountering just groups of 2-3 monsters at a time (before you can hire more party members), cruising along easily, and then run headlong into things like this, which with the aforementioned flow problems, even at best makes battles painfully grindy affairs. Aaand with the AI system, means you could just wander off for two minutes, come back, and the battle will still be going on.

SHChara’s recent issue of the writing not being quite humorous or parody enough still remains too. There are glimmers of it, but too much is too understated for it to actually be a joke. “I’m a demon lord, but I’m stuck doing paperwork.” *ba-dum tss* It’s like Disgaea if it was choking on ritalin. The story (such as it is in the trial) is probably the weakest of the lot too, and I say that having played nothing more than the trial of the previous two games. I really don’t remember 2’s being that bad at all, but I still didn’t want to suffer through the combat to get to the good stuff. This, on the other hand, is a truly painful “Prove your worth by uhh uhh uhh building a city! Or we’ll hit you or something,” bit of fluff. Yeah, there are war angels or whatever they call them wandering around the background, but they were there in the second too, and far better realized with an actual invasion driving things instead of bureaucracy. I’m pretty sure you’ve already got at least a half dozen in the harem already. Some made of fire.

  

Anyway, it exists. I don’t like dungeon crawlers in general all that much. Something about the copy-paste block corridors and my lack of direction sense frustrates me and for as much as I like almost any RPG with parties of six or more, Bunny Black still hasn’t seemed to figure out how to make that actually flow well. The end.