天下制覇

Duel Savior doesn't have a monopoly on those guns.

Softhouse Chara released the trial for their upcoming game on Wednesday (well, Wednesday, Japan time), and since it's very much a spiritual successor to a game I do have a fairly high degree of fondness for, I might as well check in on that. As per usual, I've completely fast forwarded through all the 'story', such as it is, to get to the gameplay. I don't feel like I've missed much because there are goddamned three sex scenes in the prologue alone, plus more approximately every 2-3 turns, although they very quickly reach the two-line generic filler text point. Also, because the writers here are different from SH Chara's normal ones. They're… terribler, to put it mildly. The same ones involved in that fiasco, Martopia.

Anyway, like Suzukuri Dragon, the point is to build a dungeon castle within which you will have a basically neverending orgy of debauchery. Instead of being a dragon and heading off to villages to dragon the hell out of them, you have a mana-powered gun. And of course, the way you get mana to shoot the gun is having sex. Well, you can also randomly capture monsters and feed them to the cannon, but they're a lot less efficient than just ploughing the nearby succubus. You shoot the gun at nearby monster dens, outposts, etc, the pissed off residents attempt to invade your castle. When they do so, they have to navigate through the various mazes, traps, and soldiers that you've set to try to take out the gun. In between firings and sexings, you can remodel the castle in various ways, redeploy people in it, and hire new people to be your meat shields. It's basically identical to Suzukuri Dragon.

Perhaps it's just because it's a trial, but I'm not feeling that much on board with this as SD even though the mechanics are fundamentally the same. The two big changes to SD's mechanics are that your units simply come back if they're defeated, and it severely limits what you can fire on so it's harder to get yourself into trouble. On paper, they both sound like fantastic improvements, but after playing about 15 turns, I'm not so sure. It feels like the training wheels are permanently on and no matter how I screw around, it's going to work out. Granted, most Softhouse Chara games badly need to have the early game made easier (and the end game harder), but I feel like I'm lacking agency. It's especially bad for the first 10 turns when your castle is all of 3 rooms, most of which have only 2-3 options. It opens up to a larger castle and  many more options for rooms, but it's still unclear exactly what the effect of your decisions will be. Okay, I moved the entire army to the anteroom and put traps everywhere else. What I learned from this is that traps continue to be completely useless, and yet I still somehow scraped by that attack.

I'll mention Alpha Ride here too, the latest in the Eternal team's saga and with the Aselia series reviving, probably the last in the Yumina/Corona line. It came out a few weeks back, and all the promos looked hideous enough to keep me away, then the reviews and early impressions solidified that. It's apparently ghastly bad. It's apparently designed to be heavily modeled after SRW, except fantasy light novel, and with apparently no quality assurance whatsoever. My favorite recurring comment was that the game has a tendency to seem to softlock for about 20-30 seconds at random, because the AI gets so confused trying to decide what action to take. There are also apparently severe experience deficiency problems, which makes balance utterly, butterly screwed. My favorite glitch that I saw mentioned though, is that for somebody, the game clock stopped. Apparently everything else still worked as normal (buggy and all), the game clock just somehow got permanently frozen. This is what you get for abandoning the colorful paper sprites to do ugly, slow, blocky CGI, Eternal.