天下制覇

  

Thankfully (or not?) that was all that got stroked.

Impressions:

Something that often sands my gullet, especially in these kinds of light novel(esque) things, are the bitchy characters who have the maturity of a three year old and spend the entire time angrily stomping their feet. So I appreciate characters, even in trash like Dragonar and Mechanical Doll, or Horizon if you want something not abjectly terrible, that show a little bit of maturity in their situation and keeping their eyes a little further beyond the petty nonsense. For all the other faults in this game, it is something that it has done decently enough… up until now.

Erika takes this so far in that direction that it’s just ridiculous. Practically every word out of her mouth is about how great Ayumu is, how they’re always thinking the same thing, and just his general perfection in every single way. Even Ena isn’t this obnoxious about it, although she’s clearly meant to be a joke and this is apparently Erika’s entire character; jerking us off and rambling about elegance. Yeah, yeah, the writing here is what the French would call “péter du fromage”, but I don’t even know what the conflict this chapter was even supposed to be. Maybe if they had actually shown Erika humiliating our team or members of it instead of that being all lip service, they could’ve at least gotten by on build up. But the conflict we needed to team up for was machinated and resolved within about 20 seconds, and that was just kind of it. Not even the pretend growth and POWER OF TEAMWORK that we got from Blondie and Hikaru. She was there for the start, and then spent the entire thing fawning over us to get to… continuing to fawn over us. I don’t even think I really understood the rules for the test either. This one was just a particularly bad mess, even for this game.

Our Story Thus Far:

 

We’re hanging out, getting ready to meet the press since we’ve been so boss lately. Hikaru and Tsubomi abandoned us already. Blondie tries to ditch us too, but she’s officially in charge of Unison, so is stuck. At lunch, the girls are all hitting on us. Blondie gets possessive again. Erika wanders over and chastises us for not being as elegant as her in the morning. Blondie makes fun of her hair. Sidekick says that she should use it as a drill. After pulling herself together, she explains how world famous and amazing she is, so we hit her to make her stop. Yeah. That seems like a logical thing to do. She says she’ll take care of all the interview stuff because we’re not elegant enough or something. We’re happy to let her. We talk about how great she and her team are until we miss the monorail to class like idiots.

  

We meet up with her again right before the interview and she starts annoying Kanae again, so Kanae decides to teach her the power of teamwork since Erika’s team is small and relies mostly on her. Erika calls her out on just trying to avoid the interview. Once it finally starts, Kanae’s nervous and stammers. We hold our own. The interviewer asks Erika how it feels for her team, Schwarz, to have dropped a rank so they’re even with Unison. She goes into shock and then declares both us her rivals and that we’re going to be competing at some upcoming comprehensive practical examination thingie so she can get her number one rank back. Ena meets us after the interview. We want Ena to take us to see the student council so we can formally tell them we’re not joining. She says she’ll take us to them and we proceed to wander all over the school finding nobody. She remembers they’re all off training due to recent events, but her MYSTERY POWER is useless so she’s stuck doing the paperwork.

SIDEQUEST TIME. Nothing interesting on day 1. Just tracked down Sidekick for his note thingy and built up Tsubomi’s libido meter a little since the other two need their Likeabilities leveled up to unlock more sexy time. We run into Erika afterward, who’s shopping on a tight budget because responsibility is elegant apparently. The foodstall guy tells us both to not lose in our match, and she says we better take it seriously since she recognized us as her rival. Day 2, we help out on a random op against Evol, which gets Tsubomi horny, so we put her in a clown hat and stupid fake mustache. After deciding to spend time with her because she’s horny, the first thing we do is try to run away. Writing is hard, guys. She drags us into an empty classroom to check out a new invention. It’s a vibrator. She makes us shove it down her underwear and promptly wets herself. Fantastic.

The next day, Hikaru tells us that everyone’s talking about the upcoming competition. We try to get her to stop hugging us from behind because her breasts are icky. When we can’t explain why, Tsubomi pops up to explain that they’re fleshy female power generators, so Hikaru hugs us tighter. In class, we’ve got some upcoming thing. Also, a new area will be opened in prep for it… in plot world. Not sidequest land. At lunch, Kanae says we have no chance of beating Schwarz head on if Erika’s serious, so we’ll have to be tricksy in some way. Tsubomi’s all powered out from our recent antics though, so her spy stuff’s out. The forest that was just opened up is something Erika’s conquered, but nobody else in our little harem, so we decide that’s the best way to go.

 

More sidequesting. More random hunting of Evol people. Yawn. Nobody’s libido’s unlocked, so we switch to control Kanae for a little bit. Afterward, it’s snowing in the dorm. We run into Mashiro again. She gives us a drink in thanks for the vending machine stuff long long ago and tells us to be careful on our plot mission thingy because lots of people get hurt. We can’t sleep, so wander out and run into Erika who’s also out for a stroll. We offer her a drink and to talk to her as we walk and she can’t get over how in sync we apparently are. Erika admits as we walk that individually, her team’s all better, but we might have the edge as a team, and that we’re an excellent Unleashed worthy of joining her team. Day the next, a new area’s opened, but for Reputation level 30 only. At 22, we’re a ways off. We hang out with Tsubomi to level up her Likeability. We get flustered because she hugs us. This chapter is just full of fantastic scenes.

We go home with Hikaru to half-raise her Likeability. Next day, after getting kicked out of class for passing notes, Kanae reminds us for like the fifth time that Erika’s team is strong and we need to get our crap together to win. We hang with Hikaru again to level her Likeability up to 3 (same as Kanae’s). We talk to her about her master, some renaissance woman apparently in their remote mountain village. We meet up later to go check out the forest area thing and make plans. We know Erika will beat us to the finish line, but we can score extra points in other ways, like killing tons of NPs. We’re going to take a look around to find a good place to score points right now.

Someone’s supposed to meet us, but they don’t show up. Also, there are NPs everywhere even though there should be upper classmen hanging around and/or fighting them. We decide to go in and take care of business and immediately stumble across the little lesbian cornered by flame pigs. She yells at us that she don’t need no man’s help before running off, so Charlie’s Angels and I kill the pigs. Afterwards, we decide to split up just to scout.

The lesbian thanks us, but is still hurt. We bandage her despite her complaints. Because of the NP swarm though, our little contest might be delayed. She eventually chases us off. We reconvene in the dorm with no further incident, and not able to really check the forest at all. In the shadows, Law and Chaos complain about the plan being out of whack. Law says she’s sitting this one out because she has a debt to repay. Third to last day of sidequests, we hang out with Tsubomi for 50% to Like lv3. Second to last day, remember that random sidequest a while back about looking for some mysterious person near a volcano? We’re looking again. Fun. We find Evol this time, beat them up, and take their memory stick. It’s for some Spherical Point thing with POWER, but that’s for later apparently. For the last day of sidequests, we hang out with Kanae and give her a teddy bear we picked up somewhere for an extra Like bonus, boosting her to the next level and unlocking a new sexy time once her Libido’s maxed again. She asks us if that was really our first, so we assume she was talking about some ice cream we had the other day, not kissing. Because we’re an imbecile. Somehow, even after she says it was about a kiss, we still have no idea what she was talking about. Because we’re an incredibly dense imbecile.

   

Come day of the exam thing, Erika’s saying it’s likely Evol’s involved with the recent hubub, and we should be bait to lure them out. She’s figured out our plan to beat them in points by killing lots of NPs too, so drawing them is perfect for us. The president shows up and tells us he’ll be personally watching out for us, along with all the other upper classmen. After fighting a little bit, we come across Wolfram beating people up. He says that he’s “thinning the list” and not here for us. We try to attack him, but get punched and then knocked out. When we come to, we’re alone and lost in the middle of the forest. After exploring a little, we come across Erika who’s lost too. We team up to get out of here.

  

It starts raining and we seek shelter. She’s worried about everyone else in a similar situation. Us, not so much, because supposedly we’re the weakest of our team. She doesn’t buy it either. Once the rain stops, we try our phones again and pick up a garbled mayday from Schwarz. We get ready to go save them, but are assaulted by a random evil deer.

  

After dealing with it, we find one of Erika’s teammates being attacked by a giant turtle being manipulated by Chaos, who’s looking for Erika. Apparently this whole thing was to get her for her position and authority. She rants a little more about destroying the broken world, establishing a new kingdom, and BODY CONTROL POISONS. She sends a cloud of poison at us, but Erika wraps us in her wind to keep it at bay. Chaos wanders off, leaving the poison cloud and a giant turtle to deal with. The turtle ignores us and goes after Erika’s teammate. She’s not strong enough to blow away the poison, which means it’s kissing time. So she gives us some ridiculous archaic nonsense about her future being promised to the first person who kisses her.

Not a ton to say about gameplay with Erika. Like Hikaru, she doesn’t really have charge attacks for major damage, and her little rapier doesn’t hit smaller downed enemies, so she can be a pain to use. She does counter and combo a little easier thanks to her speed and the multiple hits from her wind power at least. I think that her Down-B ‘attack’ is supposed to be a command counter, but the hit detection on it seems a little wonky. Sometimes it works just like I expect it to. Sometimes it does nothing and she takes massive counter damage and gets stunned. Everything you’d ever want in a command counter.

 

After killing it, Kanae re-establishes contact with us and we rendezvous with her. Later, all the teams that participated in the operation were given free passes so… whatever scoring there was going to be, apparently we weren’t part of it. Erika’s entire team is hospitalized with no ETA on return (despite one of them seemingly escaping easily from the turtle), so she’s self-recruited herself into our team and is fighting with Blondie over leadership while Hikaru continues to rub her chest against our back. One haremette left.