天下制覇

  

Wherein I learn I should’ve looked ahead and seen that the rest of the chapter wasn’t that long.

For the interested, SHChara announced their next game, another fantasy castle defense type thing… I think. There’s not much about the game itself besides having a quartet of heroines, a castle, and the ol’ sex for mana thing, but by the style of the dwarfish sprites, an SRPG seems likely. Then again, they’re self-describing it as a “base defense and mega-range artillery SLG,” so… okay?

Impressions:

Despite the rather obtrusive (ironically) lack of CGs, it’s not as visually uninteresting as I’m sure the screenshots are making it appear, although I think that’s something that goes for most VNs. It especially loves to do that same thing with text that Prism Ark likes to do, but splash text doesn’t make for very interesting screenshots. Nor does it excuse it, but then again, it is over a decade old at this point, and they can’t all be Giga games and full of little quasi-in-engine cutscenes to really do a good portrayal of the action instead of generic slash or explosion effects and lazily bumping the characters around on screen. You don’t need a full action game to really show that off either. Amatsukaze was fantastic with its visual portrayals of action, using nothing more than basic Kirikiri scripting, a few extra sprites (which it got ridiculous use out of), and random shots of trees/the sky/the ground.

Speaking of which, there is something that I’m sure people who have poked around with the Japanese version of Seinarukana will notice in the English release, if it ever comes out. As I was looking through the scripts… the actual scripts, not the crappy, incomplete, broken scripts that I used to actually translate 99% of the game that hid all furigana from me… I noticed that there were a bunch of those kinds of cutscenes. In the Japanese release, there are just fades to black and then it goes “Wow, that sure was a fight we had,” which is simply godawful, so I went through and undummied as many as I reasonably could. The vast majority were in the first couple chapters, and without spoiling anything, provided at least one opportunity to reinforce some foreshadowing. I also changed the first sample actual battle to a cutscene in order to add a pseudo miniboss battle (which is similarly nigh impossible to lose) instead of another one of those awful fade-outs into “Boy, that was a tough fight!”

Unfortunately, there were a few demo scenes like that and dummied out mini-boss battles later in the game, but due to how things were internally structured, the later in the game things got, the more complicated it would have been to re-enable them. There’s one in particular at an important part in the game that I really wish I could’ve turned on, but it’d have involved some pretty complicated party functions and messing with status screens because the character/skills in question aren’t technically active at that point and aren’t meant to have their information viewed then. Alas. I did go through and add save prompts to every surprise in-script fight though. That’s something at least.  

The Story Thus Far:

After Ringo ran off from catching us at the tail end of our hump session, we call Wet Towel to deal with the unconscious Kururu, and we find out they’re roomates. How convenient. Blondie barges in to wake us up the next morning and immediately starts talking about our dick. We convince her to keep it a secret, but she still wants another bath and to do more sex stuff. In class, Wet Towel is suspiciously exhausted, possibly due to Blondie’s post-orgasm snoring. 

Ringo’s sleeping in again cause she’s been up late practicing for the big meet!, so Blondie and I go to fetch her. When Blondie tries to unlock her door with a spell, Ringo surprise slams it open and crushes her. As we argue about girlfriends being heroines, Ringo lets it slip that she saw us, and then races off immediately afterward. After school, “It’s show time”, ie time to hunt for people to pressgang into the Magic Girl Club. Blondie sets her mind on recruiting Ringo and does so with a lasso. We take a knee and swear that she’s still our heroine. We try to use the “couldn’t help ourselves around a naked girl” argument, but she’s not buying it, although she does admit that she had a more open relationship with us and asks us to apologize to Blondie for her.

 

When night comes, Blondie picks us up for patrol. We get another stiffy from watching her transform. After a little wandering around, we hear a scream. It’s Ringo, and she’s being attacked by a magimon. We protect her, but then it’s more interested in chasing Blondie around, and shakes off a sword whack to the head. It easily blocks Blondie’s magic too. It keeps attacking us, but not using magic, so we can’t reflect jack. Ringo saves Blondie from one of its attacks and says that it’s after her, she’ll fight it. We keep protecting her and get smacked into a wall for our trouble.

 

Angry Red declares that she’ll be an idiot and a heroine too, and that if it’s not a ghost, she’s not afraid of it. She uses her widget, which transforms into a big ball, to transform too, complete with naked shot. Blondie reminds us this isn’t the time to get boners. Thanks, Blondie. Ringo casts a water spell, and though it blocks the initial hit, water is an AoE attack apparently and launches the thingy. It’s been storing flame magic in its arm, which it used to cancel Blondie’s magic before.

We get a tutorial about Stunning. Basically, reducing stars to 0 stuns, hitting with an uninterrupted Big Magic stuns, and reflecting an uninterrupted Big Magic stuns. Ringo’s like Kururu, except water element only. Using our newfound knowledge, we very handily murder the hell out of the hand-rabbit thing.

 

Afterward, Blondie explains that the magic girl costume expresses the magic girl’s heart, so being dressed like a maid means that Ringo’s a simple, proper girl. Whatever, Blondie. Problem is that Ringo got hurt in the fight, and now she can’t participate in the big swim meet tomorrow! Oh no! Except not because Blondie has healing magic too. But what’s important is that we got to see her underwear. Blondie gets all woozy and the cat explains that healing magic’s the hardest and takes the biggest toll on the caster. This surely won’t ever come up again.

   

Ringo makes up her mind to join the club after the big meet, to repay Kururu, and totally not for us. We call it a night, because obviously there could only ever be one monster out. Also, someone’s watching us from a roof who knows all about Blondie, talking to a stuffed animal, which admittedly does talk back. A couple days later, Ringo was blown out of the swim meet. Except it was never a swim meet at all. It was water polo and everyone just assumed wrong. This is a joke for some reason? Also, there’s another transfer student, so we automatically assume it’s a girl from another dimension who’s here to join us, so we’re going to tell her we love her. Angry Red wonders if the magical girl club is really the harem club. The new girl shows up, and her hand puppet says hello.

Next Episode:

New girl and lots of oral sex.