天下制覇

 

You jump on them. A lot.

I’m taking it easy this week after suffering through Quantum Girlfriend’s beginning. I’ve touched on Studio Ryokucha’s brief foray into doujin-like games before and this is pretty much the doujiniest. But why should I introduce it? They wrote a paragraph in English. Let’s let them do the honors.

A “MIKO” is traditional Japanese religious dress. The graceful line raises female neatness more, and has the effect shown beautifully. these clothes that express sacred to God, and the symbol of being Shinto priest by the color. The color with, female beauty is pulled out.

   

Well, that sure explains everything. You are the narrator, who gets into a lot of arguments with the characters. But the role of voiceless male character with penis goes to Nobutsune, technically boy head priest laze-about of some random shrine whose name I’ve forgotten. It’s in the third person anyway. He gets into trouble with one of those gem of four beasts and wishing for sex with a shrine maiden, you know the tune, and sexually frustrated copies of himself go running around trying to have seduce various things. At the same time, Ryouko, his fiancee, shrine maiden, and avid reader of BL comes to see him after a long absence and has to clean up his mess, one hand job at a time with the help of her shikigami/stuffed panda tanuki, Ponta.

The plot is not exactly what one would call complex, although like Magic a Ride, the writing is surprisingly decent and it does quite a capable job with the humor. It is a bit more into the whole genre saavy thing that I like, going out of its way to list out an entire harem’s worth of cliches a couple time’s over to make sure everybody’s in on the jokes, but like MAR, Ryouko herself is amusing enough to carry it a lot better than most Japanese attempts at humor. Where it’s let down is the rest of the cast. Ponta’s probably the best of the lot, serving Rock’s role as the magical girl’s stuffed animal du jour, but it’s not the same dynamic when he’s completely put upon. Nobutsune and his obnoxious friend are as boring and cliche as they come. Nobutsune’s horny doubles are… slightly better I guess but mainly because they give Ryouko a foil.

The presentation is also one of the things I really liked about MAR and this is pretty bare bones. They try with what they’ve got, and it’s certainly more animated than, say, Galaxy Angel, but it’s not a pretty or impressive looking game at all. Also, as I mentioned there’s also not much of a plot besides “throw tanuki, defeat Chinese elemental beast, rub clone’s junk to ‘satisfy’ it” repeated until they got tired of it and just put the rest of the stages into extra mode. Even including all the extra stuff (which has more to it than the actual game), you can easily breeze through the whole thing in a weekend. It does have some of the weirdest unlockables I’ve ever seen, like a tool for messing around with the sprites in various ways, because apparently they thought it’d be neat to let someone shrink a character sprite 50% vertically, stretch it 200% horizontally, turn it upside down, move it to the middle of the screen, and make it say “Donner sa langue au chat!”

The game’s a pretty standard platformer, with Ponta serving dual roles as ballistic missile and mobile spring. Chuck him to damage enemies, or step on him to bounce up extra high. They do a surprisingly good job with just that last element, setting up various ricochets for jumps that get progressively trickier as the game goes on. There are also a bunch of elemental charms you pick up along the way that do things from boring as sin bomb explosions to much more interesting wind gusts that you have to set the direction for to get into weird nooks for hidden bonuses.

 

Like MAR though, it’s very much a doujin level game and definitely lacks some polish. The big one is that the controls aren’t as tight as they should be, especially given how taking damage means enemies send you flying across half a screen and how tiny the platforms they like to make you jump across are. Falling into pits just sends you back to the start of the screen, so it’s clearly going for the minimal punishment approach, but you have to quickly get used to slightly overshooting jumps and then pushing backward just so you don’t go skidding over the edge. Dashing/double tapping also doesn’t seem to take quite as well as it should. The main game’s also pretty easy. There are challenge modes in addition to that which do have more teeth to them, but you’ll probably breeze through the main game without breaking a sweat other than a few trips into pitville.

I like the game, but it’s like popcorn. Amusing while it lasts but even less substantial than that game about raising armies of your children for government subsidies. Give it a look if you want to play a short little sex romp comedy with a decent platformer attached to it. It’s obviously not very ambitious, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome either. There’s a lot to be said for brevity, especially when it comes to Japanese media.