天下制覇

At least it makes more sense than “Out Vegetables.”

Celestine is down on her luck. Her father’s been murdered by her uncle, everyone knows it, but nobody will do anything about it because of politics. The only way for her to get justice is to become a full-fledged mage and officially take over the family name. However, while she has the talent to be a mage, she completely lacks any ability to produce mana on her own, so has been drubbed out of Hogwarts. Enter Lazlocke, outcast mage who stumbles upon her as she’s getting drubbed some more for begging to be let back in. She begs him to teach her, but he tells her it’s impossible without her own mana. After seeing her be drubbed a few more times, he decides to take her in and makes a deal with her; he’ll teach her, if she obeys his every command, no matter what, no matter when. She agrees, and after a week of calisthenics, he brings her into his office and jumps her bones. She lets him, and afterward, manages to fireball the hell out of a training dummy. Despite being male, Lazlocke is a wizard’s bride, someone who produces excessive amounts of mana on their own, and needs to transfer it to others (via sex, obviously) to keep it from killing him. He’s also kept on a very short leash by Hogwarts because he can turn any sufficiently talented female mage into a roving WMD. However, all the drubbing took a lot of time, so Celes needs to win the big upcoming Quidditch tournament in order to qualify as a real mage and complete the half-assed Hamlet story that we spend the entire game and most endings completely ignoring.

Wizard’s Climber is another Softhouse Chara game, and after Suzukuri Dragon, one of their more highly regarded. It’s an unabashed Princess Maker clone, although in traditional SHChara fashion, has decided that’s not nearly complicated enough. Celes has an excruciating nearly two dozen stats to increase keep track of. Granted, a fair number can be safely ignored on any given playthrough since there’s no reason you need to be putting effort into Ranged Weapons if you’re training her to be a pugilist, and Fire Magic is basically totally worthless, but it’s still excessive and would have benefited greatly from simplification. As is the standard for the genre, you set a schedule for her to do various things, including get railed to replenish mana, improve her stats, send her on adventures or to do things like earn money, so on and so forth. The general flow shouldn’t be a shock to anybody who has even a passing familiarity with the raiser kind of games, even if just Monster Rancher.

Also like Suzukuri Dragon, it’s designed for replay. A lot of replay. There are six bloody modes in all, each unlocked in series, all influencing a number of things, but most importantly when other characters appear and begin interacting with you, making achieving the different endings easier. And there are over 20 endings, so… yeah. You’re expected to be playing through a lot, trying out different ways to raise Celes, so on and so forth. It’s hell for completionists. You can hold ctrl or just click to speed through most things, but the repetition can still get tedious.

   

Appropriately, Celes is really the strong point of the game. While they eventually introduce a pair of subheroines in the form of her rival and her rival’s master who Lazlocke has a past with, she is very much the primary in pretty much everything. As I’ve said about SHChara games in the past, one of the things they really excel at is developing a reciprical relationship between people, whether or not they start with a whole lot of surprise sexings, and lots of little moments showing it gradually growing and developing instead of simply vomiting up some overwrought melodrama, some sex that sounds like a pig being slaughtered, and calling that good. And yes, I realize the irony about a central conceit of the game being “magical sex disease” and it having one of the healthier attitudes towards sex in Japanese media; that it’s part of a relationship, not the be all end all. It extends to the subheroines too, particularly Viola who has a deceptively complicated relationship with Lazlocke due to her/the guild basically using him as a battery for her to win a war in the past when he was in love with her and got a hard talk about the realities of life, romance, and sex. I really wish they had given more focus and weight to that, especially comparing it to his current relationship with Soshiette. Still, the third subheroine, Yelle, Celes’s rival and Viola’s apprentice, is unfortunately kind of just there to fulfill the standard role of “rival teenager with small chest,” to check a box. She’s not obnoxious, and is generally refreshingly mature about matters, but she’s basically just Celes again, only slighty taller and without a balcony you could do Shakespeare off of.

The presentation does a lot to help as well. Every training option has a ton of animations, for succeeding and failing. Even while you’re just idling, she’ll wander around the cottage, studying, making tea, experimenting, whipping out a saxophone, etc. You could make a screensaver out of her idling around, or call it neopets and an entire game in and of itself. The combat is… okay, having some actual animated sprites and whatnot, which is something so basic that it’s shocking how many studios are content to just draw one and call that good enough. There’s also a boggling number of kinds of enemies in dungeons since SHChara loves to reuse sprites between games. Still, if you’re going to massively reuse sprites, might as well go whole-hog and just keep adding to your pile. A number of events leverage the same sprite work as well. You can’t interact much with it though, so it’s largely just yelling at the screen for her to stop randomly wandering around and cast a fireball on the damn orc already.

  

It does have a few fairly large other problems above and beyond the avalanche of stats and things to keep track of, many of which that feed into each other. The first is shared by most of these raising-type games; the story’s just mostly nonexistent. All the day to day scenes are usually fun or adorable, and short enough to not interrupt flow, but it really would have been improved if it had more meat to the main plot of Celeste’s family and/or Lazlocke’s indiscriminate-semen-depositing-disease to work through, at the very least for the first couple modes. You’re enforcing limits anyway, might as well put some real story in there before opening up the more expansion “do whatever the hell you want” modes. It’s frustrating because they show traces that they could’ve developed some things a lot better, especially between Lazlocke and Viola. Soshiette, the not-maid martial arts wizard that was sent by Hogwarts to keep an eye on him and periodically drain him of mana is also criminally underdeveloped considered how much she’s around at the start and her stable working/sexual relationship with Lazlocke.

Exacerbating that, and perhaps the biggest issue, is that there’s basically no challenge whatsoever. You can get an early game over if you do nothing but have sex with Celes and get her pregnant, but otherwise, that’s kind of it for just about anything. It really badly needs some kind of progression system, or some manner of goal or test to reach every X turns to aim for. The later modes focus more on the combat as a goal, but it’s still pretty squibby. Giving people freedom is fine, but too much and with little direction can also be paralyzing and rob of any sense of accomplishment. If you were going to ‘win’ just by sitting around anyway, then what’s the point? Tied into this, and like many an SHChara game, is just the obtuseness of some things. It’s like it’s designed to be played with a guide to figure out how the hell you’re supposed to advance from certain modes to the next, or get certain endings. Again, natural exploration is good, but provide some kind of direction. There are also some severe equipment balance problems, but that can be said of basically all SH Chara games.

  

It’s a game built on its main character, and luckily, they do a really good job with her. She’s pretty adorable, supplemented by SHChara doing their usual good job creating actual relationships between her and the other characters you interact with. A lot like Romanesque, it’s built on the little turn to turn events, although with less ambition to the plot (and LWR’s was thin enough as it was) and a bit more focus on the main character and his actual relationships with others. It is, however, kind of insubstantial and painfully lacking in difficulty, so you’ll probably sit down and lose 4-5 hours to it, probably multiple days for a week or two, but there’s not a whole lot there once the moment’s passed unless you really want to dive head first into some of its dungeon things for no real reason other than why not. It is on my list of things I’d like to do some day, but like Baldr Force, that’s someday quite far away at the moment.