天下制覇

I feel betrayed.

Oh, Debonosu. You and Softhouse Chara’s non-RPGs will always be a weakness with engines I generally like and never ever taking themselves or their settings seriously. Like fascinating little doujin circles (and they kind of are) that you follow just because they almost always try something at least interesting, even if it typically falls flat on its face due to poor balance and worse testing, but there’s usually the glimmer of a good game in there somewhere. Now if only you could find a better writer. And perhaps a better artist too. Or at least one that hasn’t been recycling the same designs since 2005. Anyway. I finally got around to playing about the first hour or so of Senjin Otome, Debonosu’s latest game and lacking having done anything else of note Japan-related for the past few days that wasn’t tweaking lots and lots and lots of pixels in Photoshop for hours on end, here we go with some initial thoughts. 

  

You know, when the very first thing that you’re shown after hitting “Start Game” is naked tits in a box, you kind of have to have a little begrudging respect for just skipping the usual horrendous introductory nonsense and getting right to what everyone knows you’re there for. Of course, it then spends probably a good 50 lines pondering what this strange naked thing in a box is, what it could mean, how bad it’d be if anybody saw him with it, etc. And then of course, the childhood friend walks in, calls him a pervert, and declares that she’ll rehabilitate him even if it takes her own body. At this point, he hits her. Yada yada. Robot Nanomachine girl sent by his parents to “solve the mystery,” he’s her master, in short order, meet a punk on the street who tries to attack them and then when it shifts to combat, we’re instead fighting giant spiders (and nobody seems to notice this), also, mysterious headaches and ringing in the ears, yada yada yada.

In case the above didn’t make it clear, after hitting Akane to shut her up, the writing went right back to unspectacularly boring for a very long period of time. It’s at least trying to be funny constantly, but in that awful Japanese style of just having the straight man (Takato in this case) shout out “What you have said is unlike reality!” over and over and over and over and over again. “I will use my radar to protect the house.” “That much!?” “I’m the one who’ll wake Takato up!” “Why are you arguing about that!?” And a robot bird calls him a tsundere. And I die a little more inside each time. Every now and then, it does approach a passable joke, usually either going off of Akane vibrating wildly or Miyabi passing from deadpan into snarky, but not often enough for me to make it feel like it was on purpose, and even when the jokes do hit, they’re usually made obnoxious by Takato shouting out that the joke has been made after I had already chuckled to it. There’s no shortage of them at least.

  

Oh, and after the first non-tutorial battle, Miyabi declares that she’ll heal Takato’s injuries, so she ties him up, throws him down on his bed, and tells him that she needs to ‘extract genetic information to process inside her.’ Granted, Debonosu’s other two games in their action line were “become this dragon girl’s adoptive father and then have lots of nasty sex with her” and “insert yourself as the third wheel between two dragon girls already having an incestual lesbian relationship“, so it lacks the underaged, dragon girl, and incestuous aspects of things, but it still gets an A for Awful. The point where he was admiring how lifelike her genitalia was is the point where I decided that I’d played enough to close things up and write.

Moving onto the gameplay then. It’s descended directly from their last (two?) dragon girl raising Tales clones things but with a number of pretty major usability tweaks that do help quite a bit, but if you played those and are expecting any major change, don’t. The core problem of a lack of feedback on hits, both for and against you still hurts. An attack either sends you/the enemy bouncing away or just makes a little number pop up for damage. Combine that with a stubby attack range, speedy movement, and enemies that aren’t going to hold still, especially not while they’re attacking, combining getting to whiff your attacks constantly and taking damage. It’s not the kind of combination you should be shooting for. At least it doesn’t rip control away from me at random times based on AI though. Grumble grumble. Encounter rate is pretty damn high too.

   

So no, it doesn’t exactly grab me. Combat’s still missing key elements of either Duel Savior or the Tales series, whichever you want to pick, and Takato’s shouting is just tiring. Akane and Miyabi aren’t too bad, but more than doing anything right, they just fail to be annoying, Akane in particular. Smacking her about 60 seconds after she appeared and went into awful cliche misunderstanding routine was probably too ‘good’ a first impression though which would no doubt be worn down by time.

And now, back to work.