天下制覇

Friendship with a whole lot of benefits.

Impressions:

And so the harem is complete. Well, barring Ena who's more of a wannabe and/or usurper in the eleventh hour than actually getting any piece of that sweet sweet Ayumu ass. I'm pretty sure that this also means that every single female besides Ena becomes basically irrelevant at this point, as is the tradition in LN (and LN-like) stuff. Make sure you've got something that can check the boxes for everyone, that way, everybody's happy! Which is to say, an extraordinarily superficial way to go about things, likely rooted in trying to get their fingers in as many pies as possible instead of making one great one. This metaphor doesn't really work. It's a problem that kind of comes with the turf for the visual novel "pick a girl" genre, and often also manifests itself as the Goofus/Gallant protagonist who has to fit every role and be interested in every possible character archetype, and thus ends up having no character of his own.

Our Story Thus Far:

Some unknown (to me) time later (a morning apparently), we're lamenting that Mashiro hasn't responded to our e-mail. Tsubomi butts in to reveal she's been spying on us and that we should've told her we were waiting for Icy. She explains that Icy's in the hospital because of her unstable power. She goes on to explain that Mashiro's also known as the Ice Reaper and she can't control her power. She's tried to be teamed up, but always ends up freezing people when she loses control. She suggests that we could use Engage on her to help her control her power, but admits it's just a guess. We notice that she's got rings under her eyes because she was up all night checking this stuff out. We kiss her on the forehead and she gets all blushy. Later, we talk to Teacher Pinky about Mashiro. We tell her about the NP we fought. She explains how there's a kind that divides infinitely and that we may have fought one of its bits. Mashiro was okay because it's a fire type and therefore weak against ice. She tells us the student government will take care of it from here.

Sidekicks are napping during self-study time. Erika tries to brag about how ardent Unison is, but Tsubomi's sleeping too. The rest of the harem wants to take out the mother NP that's spawning the rest for GLORY or whatever. Erika berates them for their poor habits. Hikaru apparently attacks rubix cubes out of frustration, so she retreats to hugging us for protection. Later, we get word from Pinky that the student council has decided that the top ranking freshman team has to help take out the mother beastie, ie us. We'll supposedly be okay because most will be small. We'll also be working with Mashiro because of her ice powers on this. Our job is to support her in taking the head one out.

Sidequest time. Day 6 and I can't remember what I was doing, so I'll just clear out the patrol battle quest nearby. We beat a bunch of Evol, including a new spear user, and a really obnoxious lightning bird miniboss. Kanae just ALMOST gets horny enough for the next sexy time. We go to visit Mashiro afterward. Her room is basically an ice box. We insist we want to be friends. She says she wants to be too, but she's dangerous and hurts everyone. We tell her we're helping her out on the mission and we'll hang out again afterward. Next day, we hang out with Hikaru. Like level up to 4 (unlocks next H scene). Because we're a eunuch, we ask her to stop hugging us. She needs convincing, and isn't convinced.

We run into sketchy student president later who tells us that for greatness, one must confront great challenges. This confuses us because we're too stupid to follow along. Day the next, we hang out with Erika. Like level to 3. We ask her what noblesse oblige means because we're incapable of using Google. She explains to us in about 4 paragraphs. Second to last day, nobody wants to hang out and no battle quests, so we just wander into the port area to murder some wildlife and max out Kanae's libido. Final day, Kanae's horny, so we indulge her cocklust. She drags us to our room as we wonder what she could possibly want. She demands our porn so she can use it as reference for treating her cocklust. Apparently the internet doesn't exist. We refuse, but she finds it immediately by tricking us by saying she found it. High level mind games. She's especially interested in the boob jobs in it and wants to try that, so strips off her top and makes us straddle her balloonish chest. I'm not in the mood for this so I skip over basically all of it. I think she's grumpy because she doesn't like just masturbating by herself. That's how magical horniness works, apparently. Anyway, one faceful of semen later and she's feeling better. Problem solved.

Day of the mother killing, and student council's discussing us. Chaos, I mean, whoever her name is, wonders if we'll be okay, even with the Ice Reaper. The harem's raring to go, aside from Hikaru who's grumpy because we're teaming up with Mashiro instead of her. We convince her to protect the rest of the team instead of us. They all warn us to keep things in line with Mashiro before heading out. We'll control her again since she still can't Engage/fill her libido-o-meter. As soon as we go in, we find a bunch of unconscious Evol people.

Nothing too interesting here that wasn't covered with using Mashiro in the previous bit. It's easy to see how her narrow crappy little extendo-spear is. At least her ice pellet is still good. You'll notice me seeming to pause or run into walls a lot in the dungeon here. Secret passages. I knew the dungeon was full of them. They're in the other areas too, but not quite at this amount. It also speaks to the game's terrible balance that it's happy to let you fight Kaiser with Mashiro with no chance to level her or change her stats in any meaningful way. You're supposed to win that battle (reduce him to 33% HP), which takes at least 3-4 combos with her, and yet he's happy to one-shot you even if you're guarding. This isn't even on the hardest difficulty either. Nor does it make sense when it just dumps you into a "his power level is too high!" scenario anyway. So… you have to win, to get a cutscene about how you lose. Fantastic work subverting that bad RPG cliche in the entirely wrong direction, Giga. The phoenix boss does let you switch to Ayumu if you want, but it'll also just about one-shot you. I got lucky it sort of glitched out and got stuck in the corner, although all flying enemies balance how much of a pain in the ass they are to hit initially with how easily they tend to get stunlocked trying to return to their normal height after being downed.

Eventually, we find someone taking out members of Evol. He introduces himself as Kaiser Evolution, leader of Evol. His power level is EVEN HIGHER than Wolfram's. Bizarrely, despite him doing 50% of our HP in one hit and the battle cutting off when he reaches half HP, we lose and game over a couple times, but thanks to our hidden save scum power, we beat him, only to get to the cutscene where he's too strong to beat. We demand to know what he's doing, but he just says it's for their GREAT PURPOSE and Evol will lead the new world order before vanishing. Something roars off screen, so Mashiro shoots ice at it and says she'll protect us.

It turns out to be a phoenix. We declare friendship power, will work together to beat it, yada yada. We get it stuck in the corner and then ice/stab it to death after it nearly kills us in one hit. Controlling Mashiro wasn't a great plan. Except that it's not actually dead yet and starts roaring and causing the mine to collapse… somehow. Msahiro uses her SUPER ICE powers to freeze it to oblivion… somehow, but then collapses and her powers start going crazy again. She tells us to run away, but we refuse and rant some more about friendship power.

We finally grab her and tell her how warm she is. Then we tell her to close her eyes and do our spit infusion thing. She says she feels our warmth. No, honey. That's spit. Post script, Kanae explains everything else went perfectly. Back in our room, everyone is fawning over us because we have the sniffles and/or almost had frostbite, but Mashiro's ability is stabilized now. They fight over who gets to hug us. Mashiro comes in and everyone's all friendly-like now. As proof that we're friends, she gives us a peck on the cheek. The entire harem flips its crap.

Elsewhere, Evol's named members are having some kind of squabble over Kaiser attacking their own men, but they work it out somewhere offscreen. Apparently their GRAND PLAN, which was years in the making, is nearly at hand, whereupon they'll overthrow the rotting world order, remake it with Unleashed as the gods, create a new world order, etc etc.