天下制覇

Sorry Natsume/Akebi. Arrange yourselves more horizontally if you don’t want your faces cut off.

And now we go from SHChara’s style of game to almost the exact opposite, a serious, sweeping, brutal epic that I really like yet can’t ever manage to get more than a couple hours into it, but we’ll get there. Amatsukaze is from *Tail, known mostly these days for the strategy/monster rape-based Venus Blood series, but back in the day, made other stuff too. The big two of note being Dea Ex Machina and Amatsukaze. The former is especially of amusing historical note because it’s handcuffed (more like shackled, straitjacketed, and gagged) to a hideous numbers juggling R&D sim… thing, where you’re running a high tech sex toy company as a way of funding your rebellion against the Umbrella Skynet Corporation, using the first true artificial human as your main sex toy prototype testing partner. And by high tech sex toys, I mean things like electric whips, swarms of nipple-pinching robot scorpions, and multi-penised robot tigers (that may also have dildos for tails, I can’t remember).

Amatsukaze, on the other hand, is just about a bunch of ninjas doing ninja things. And by ninja things, I of course mean the occasional uterus full of demon centipedes. I’ll be honest, I’ve never felt like I had a great grasp on the plot since it’s built as a grand medieval epic and Japanese proper nouns of that time frame are typically at least five syllable-long tongue twisters. The gist though, is that protagonist Jinma gets pulled into royal intrigue with a princess who is probably part god/dragon, a mission goes horribly awry resulting in his sidekick being captured, while he’s simply given amateur non-elective surgery before an evil witch finds him and decides to stick the seed of evil into him via her vagina. Also, his captured sidekick is tortured, gangraped, and brainwashed. This is all in the bloody prologue. He’s not even put in charge of the remnants until the start of chapter 1.

What really stands out is the presentation, especially since the entire thing is built on the KiriKiri engine (same as Tsukihime/FSN, among lots of others). The action scenes, of which there are many, are animated and have actual visual direction. Characters leap around on screen, race across the field, clash, so on and so forth. I put a couple clips from the prologue (above) just as an example of how well they actually sell the action instead of relying on overly verbose paragraphs describing in lurid detail events taking half a second. This is also complimented by a true rarity in visual novels, evocative writing. It does veer a little bit on the wordy and overblown at times, but it gets a little more leeway than most VNs because it’s blessedly not in the first person, so you don’t have the problem of some dimwit thinking for 30 seconds and 100 lines about how some girl’s breasts bounce.

And speaking of dimwits, they’re blessedly absent too. They’re all competent and confident in their capabilities as well as acknowledging of each other’s, so events can drive things instead of insecurity. Even the obligatory tsundere, Natsume, goes all mother wolf at the start when Jinma’s unceremoniously dumped back home, mostly dead and unconscious. It probably does help that being a *Tail game, it’s packed to the gills with sex of all kinds, from things Going Badâ„¢ on various missions to Jinma’s training of his three sidekicks on various bedroom antics for when things do Go Badâ„¢, so like SHChara, that opens up room for their relationships to actually grow beyond highschool level blushing and stammering to pad things out for 30 hours.

 

 So why can I never get that far into the game if I like it so much? Part of it is that I just don’t like the gameplay that much either. Aside from the functional yet uninteresting “select which events you want to see before we proceed” schtick, the main thing is a card game that’s… well, basically rock, paper, scissors. I’ve seen enough to know that it opens up a lot more when you have a lot more available cards, party members to shuffle between, and options to manipulate things, but at the start, it’s… well… mostly just rock, paper, scissors. The limiting options on both sides do add some strategy to it, but the frustration when you’re in a bad situation far outweighs any paltry fun of the occasional curbstomp.

The lion’s share though is as I intimated before, I just really don’t like grand epic stories all that much. I’m a fish and chips kind of guy, and this is in a lot of ways like trying to consume your own body weight in lobsters. I’ve never been one to marathon shows and when I hear about people doing things like watching the entire LotR trilogy back to back, my mind recoils. Hell, I get antsy just sitting through the obligatory eight loading and credit screens all console games seem to have these days. I really enjoy the scenes where it’s more narrowly focused down on the characters or the action scenes, but then it pulls up a map and/or Sayo (princess) starts explaining some political situation with X, the daimyo of Y, plotting against Z, the shogun of P, using the ninja of Q who used to be part of R until they were attacked by S who is secretly plotting with Y, my eyes completely glaze over, and I lose all track of what’s going on in my attempt to keep all the confusing names and places straight, or even remember which are people and which are places. I feel like I should be taking notes, and for someone like me who likes to either play while exercising or put games down and wander off for minutes to weeks at a time, that’s just too much mental gymnastics to keep everything straight.

There are some other smaller niggles I have too. The “select events” thing is often just there to make you click a few extra times with no actual options or choice for one. All the rapery, centipedes in vaginas, torture, etc, isn’t exactly my cup of tea for a big ‘nother. Even the regular sex scenes somehow manage to veer a bit more obnoxious than usual… without even using that janky animation VN developers keep trying to pass off too. If you remember the way Kamidori liked to have what sounded like someone churning KY jelly with a pestle and mortar as a background ‘sex’ noise, this doubles down on that and then goes all-in on a pair of threes. Besides numerous butter churning tracks, it also has various moan loops that play whenever a voice isn’t. It all comes together into an unrelenting looped cacophony that makes me question if perhaps the centipedes haven’t crawled into my ears.

   

Regardless, even though I lack the attention span (for a rape-torture-centipede affair no less) for it, I think there’s really a lot here that’s fantastic and well worth a look if you’re more into sweeping epics than I am. I hear that you’re ‘supposed’ to start with Dea Ex first since they’re connected by your standard after-the-apocalypse-everything-becomes-fantasy-again schtick, but I could never get past the awful economics sim part of that while this goes balls out with the action from the start and greatly expanded on the actual battle part instead of shunting it off to the side.