天下制覇

Or rather, Seinarukana eats it all up.

I meant to play more of this. I really did. I’d hoped to get at least up to the end of the trial which I had skipped through the text for and paid zero attention to the story whatsoever, but Seinarukana is a harsh mistress that always finds its way to add more to do. On the up side, I did finish the scripts last week. Every text string that requires translating has at least been translated into its initial rough draft form. And if you think that’s an oddly specific way of stating things, then you’re very right, because my personal bullet point list of things left to do still stands at a little under 25 items, and that’s with "All Editing/QC for a probably 60-70+ hour game doing all the routes" as a single bullet point. Included in that as a different single bullet point is importing all 40,000+ lines of the scripts (plus speaker tags!) into the original full script files, something that couldn’t be done before since the compiler for those files didn’t approve of inferior English letters. Now it does, but since it believes this process to be a compromise, it stopped playing voices. And for some reason has now become case specific. I… just don’t like asking questions anymore. Oh yeah, and the literally thousands of text-as-image parts of the interface, because text as text is too easy to edit and nothing is ever allowed to be easy.

So here’s my thoughts on the first 15 minutes of Corona, the more than just spiritual sequel to the soon-to-be-released-by-my-corporate-masters Yumina, and story of when Eternal’s writers read a bunch of light novels, watched some anime, and thought to themselves "Wow. We need to get in on that," resorting in what I can already say with 75% certainty resulted in the kind of action ‘parody’ Japan loves where they do the exact same thing as what they’re parodying, but then says "This isn’t an anime/manga/light novel/eroge!" Mainly because they bring it up I think every other minute in the part I played.

It begins in a somewhat similar way to Seinarukana actually, although whereas Nozomu dreams of standing on a mountain of corpses, killing friends, and then being killed by one, Touka dreams about having friends (Checkbox #1). Then, since his spider sense was tingling, he dresses up in his fanciest popped collar and other clothing stolen from a Shinsengumi cosplay convention, heads out into the technicolor night taken straight from Persona, bonks a monster on the head with a stick, calls himself a hero, and then goes back to bed. 

The next day, after a lively conversation with obnoxious and expository male friend about how used to be all about pretending to have superpowers (Checkbox #2) and compares things to anime and manga at least three or four times (Checkbox #3), as well as running into a couple standoffish girls (Checkbox #4), he goes back to bed, only to dream of having friends again, but be woken up by more tingling spider sense. This time though, the monster proves impervious to small blunt wooden objects and he’s saved by one of the girls from earlier wearing more scarf than clothing (Checkbox #5), which he of course has to point out… at length… to her embarrassment (Checkbox #6),  until she tells him to go home because he’ll get himself killed. But shortly after, it turns out that she’s actually part of an organization protecting the world from monsters (Checkbox #7) and actually wants to recruit him because his spider sense is extra spidery compared to hers.

That’s about as far as I got before Seinarukana started kicking the back of my seat to deal with its issues again. Not even to the first tutorial battle, let alone the titular Corona herself, descending from on high, naked, glowing, and calling Touka her father and entering a not-as-complicated-as-it-should-be ‘father/daughter’ sexual relationship with him (Checkbox #lots). A mashup of Persona/11 Eyes’s magical disco nights and LN generica thus far. Not exactly the Deliverance-esque beginning to some other games I’ve prodded somewhat recently.

I don’t actually dislike Touka as much as the above probably gets at. He’s at least enthusiastic and proactive about hitting things and goes almost straight to the "I’m supposed to be a hero, not die" mindset, and his reaction to Tokino telling him to screw off is to want to get stronger instead of wallowing. Not to mention beginning right off with the meat of the setting instead of pissing around with his gigantic foreheaded friend. Perhaps reaching the game itself again will be my ambition for next week, assuming my harsh master lets me. The bizarrely simultaneously overstreamlined-in-some-ways-and-massively-clunky-in-others game. Like Eushully lately, Xuse/Eternal need to stop trying to reinvent the wheel with every game, but at least this (and Nega0) are a lot toned down from Yumina’s wall of numbers. And they have some big SMT designer working on their next game too, so it’ll probably be even more Persona-ish.

Or maybe I’ll try to get past where the trial was for Demonion instead, although there’s not a whole ton to be said about Yet Another Demon Rape Game^tm. Damn my love of Dungeon Keeper and not-so-secret dreams of running a disco torture lair slash gambling den for bile demons while simultaneously raising chickens.