天下制覇

 

Aa-chan! Aa-chan! Aa-chan! Aa-chan! Aa-chan! Aa-chan!

Random Thoughts:

I already see why people would be both annoyed and frustrated that (spoiler again, but I’ve already said this about 15 times, so whatever) Ena is both the mandatory enforced main heroine, and yet also un-doable. I’m leaning more on the “she’s clingy and obnoxious” side myself, although our protagonist, Captain Doormat isn’t helping matters. It’s also doing the same thing Corona did where it’s trying its damnedest to emulate the world’s most generic light novel, in this case specifically Infinite Stratos, by making a gigantic hullabaloo over how it has its own special terms for each awful little cliche, all delivered in the form of lectures. What’s wrong with just saying “It’s magic” and moving on from there? Did the midichlorian debacle teach us nothing? It’s not like we’re ever going to leave this school/island and do anything with the ‘real’ world anyway. I also question the wisdom of letting a bunch of teenagers run loose on an island full of vicious mutant animals. No, “they have powers” doesn’t cut it there. Even I could’ve destroyed a pack of wild dogs or a small building when I was a teenager with my special power of “driving my parents’ Toyota Camry.”

What does help and stand out from Princess Witches is the presentation, although it definitely needs more little scripted fighting bits and less “X leaps at Y and then fadeout.” After Princess Witches’s godawful dragon nonsense, some variation on style and attempts to incorporate the gameplay into things helps assuage the tedium. Nowhere near enough to salvage the terrible writing, and from what I hear, that’s only going to get worse as time goes on, which is honestly kind of weird to me since everything’s totally linear so there’s no need to make concessions towards routes or events that may never come to pass. A big problem a lot of VNs, and just about every western RPG with a moral choice system and a good number of open world games for that matter, run into is that they need to continue blithely onward with the main events whether your main character is Goofus MacMoron, Gallant FancyPants, or Snidely Whiplash, because evil to game developers still haven’t quite figured out how to make an evil protagonist that doesn’t take their cues from Looney Tunes. I get the feeling that this is why so many VN main characters end up having the personality and presence of a sack of onions. They want to both have a strong narrative while also allowing the freedom for the player to define the character, but compromising in the hopes of winning both almost always gets you neither. It’s not impossible to do decently, but this sure ain’t going to be a win in that column.

The Story So Far:

 

We start with an infodump of random vocab. Unobtainium Enigmatite = magic rock that bonds with stuff and gives it magic powers. Unleashed = people + magic rock. NeoPlasm (NP) = anything else + magic rock. Who was she teaching all this to? A pair of wolves. For some reason, she keeps telling them about her day and thoughts on existence until they finally jump her and the OP plays. So we get a different infodump from the mind of our protagonist, telling himself that Enigmatite comes from some random volcano that appeared and people built a lab to study it, except that was across about five paragraphs, while some girl is trying to get our attention. You know the drill. Magic teenagers who are demigods. Magic island. Throw them all together. So on and so forth. And in case you were taking this too seriously, we’ve decided to call this place the Unleashed of Nursery, which is pronounced “Unleashed Nursery” because English is really, really hard, guys. So the first thing we do then… is have a flashback to being tackled by Ena, obligatory childhood friend who we’ve completely forgotten. And still remains forgotten.

 

Eventually, a random magic cat attacks and we reveal our Unleashed power, the ability to make stuff explode, which somehow is shocking ineffective in combat. She reveals that she’s useless. We mash the attack button smack it a few times with our sword until it turns to stone and pops like a balloon. There’s a wolf somewhere else though, and it jumps us when we go to find it. Luckily, we’re saved by a convenient panty shot named Hikaru.

 

She gives us some random piece of rock for powering up, so we of course remark that it’s totally like an RPG *nudge nudge* *wink wink* and then she wanders off again, no doubt to murder more dogs. Ena drags us off to see the grand poobah around here, who immediately jumps her and tries to french her. After chasing her off, we get more infodumping on the school, Unleashed, etc, the important part of which is that male Unleashed sometimes have multiple abilities. Our second is Engage, the ability to amplify another Unleashed’s power, although unlike EXPLODING CRAP, we have no idea how to use it. He calls in a girl with a butterfly stapled to the side of her head, and our first thought is “I wanna rub her head.” We’re supposed to partner up to hunt NPs from now on. She’s Kanae, angry, and needs no partner, yo. She explains Engage to us. Body fluid contact means power up for your spit/semen buddy. No mention is made if sweat will also work. She’s mostly mad at Principal Sleezebag though, not us, so she shows us around and reveals her power, controlling gravity. We agree to meet up after putting our luggage away, so instead, we have a weird daydream about how it’s our dead mother’s dream to go to this school for the good of all mankind. I am not even exaggerating here. That little aside was Bizarre even for LN drek.

   

We rush out and run into an angry ‘German’ girl. She gives us directions. We give her our drink for some inexplicable reason. Must be a Japanese thing. Kanae’s waiting for us, annoyed, and wonders how we could stand to swap body fluids with random people. Apparently male teenagers are an alien species in this world, and yet, we agree with her that it’s crazy, ’cause… cooties? We go out hunting NPs and instead mostly find tutorials. We kill a few more wolves and cats before calling it a day.

 

Butterfly-Head warns us yet again about random women jumping us to steal our precious fluids, as if we all don’t already know she’ll be the first one sucking spit. She also gives us a crushed cake and is shocked and emotionally moved when we eat it despite its deficiencies. Japanese female standards are so low. The next day… we oversleep and Ena comes to wake us up and tells us love means never having to say you’re sorry thank you. She demands to know about our Engage status, but being incapable of social interaction, our manginity is firmly intact. We run off to school and meet our teacher, who’s very subtly named Moe as well as the obligatory sidekick.

 

After class, we’re jumped by a murder of nameless girls after our precious fluids. This is apparently something that happens to every male in hopes that they have the Engage power. Our sidekick’s nemesis/totally not girlfriend, Rin, comes up and starts hitting him, so he quotes one of the two lines from Gundam G that apparently exists in the entire script at her. We’re also pointed towards the rest of the harem yet to come, who all happen to be in our class, mostly either asleep or high off their asses on mothballs.

  

Ena eventually wanders over and threatens to tear apart anybody who stole our virginity. Man-hymen found to still be intact, she drags us away to explain “Missions”, eg extracurriculars aka mandatory sidequests. We do jack today though, so night falls and we shoot down Ena’s every attempt to sleep with us because we’re allergic to vaginas I guess. We run into a few more people, then protect our purity from Ena’s relentless attack a few more times while wondering why NPs have suddenly started attacking the city right as the security systems go down before kicking her out and going to sleep.

 

Elsewhere, blondie is continuing her genocide against homeless pets. The next day, President Sketchy gives us a book that marks widgets on the map we’re supposed to collect because just do it, okay? And we reach our first mandatory sidequest period and are given the reigns without a tutorial every 5 seconds, so I call that a good stopping point even though I’m not done with Ch.1 yet.