天下制覇

Because who would ever code for an OS with greater than 16-bit colors?

Baldr Force was one of the first visual novels I ever played. Not that I played it as a visual novel back then. I played it on a friend's Dreamcast just for the robots shooting each other in between Cannon Spike or Power Stone. I miss the Dreamcast. Anywho, while I got a Cliff's Note summary of some things back then, I returned to it years later in that brief year to a year in a half where I was hungrily devouring VNs while getting started into translating, before translating started to erode my already blackened soul. That was nearly a decade ago, and a time when I even had a fairly positive opinion of Seinarukana. Oh, how times change. I only played it for an hour or two over the weekend to refresh my memory, so this is still focused through the haze of memories of very long ago, but eh, I've committed to entire projects on that. A little writeup is nothing.

Yada yada it's the future and cyberspace/internet is a place you can go. Tohru and buddies are thrillseeking hackers who on one of their escapades stumble upon what appears to be the ghost of a girl online, and soon after, accidentally hack into a military honeypot at the same time as a terrorist group. One of Tohru's friends is killed by a cybercop in the crossfire as they're also raiding their place in meatspace. They acknowledge his skills, so extend him an invitation to enlist into their special forces division. He does so in hopes of finding who killed his friend, and the truth behind the ghost they saw.

Force has all the things that are great about Team Baldrhead's games, yes, even Material Brave. Solid gameplay, and great presentation with in-game cutscenes frequently used to give extra emphasis to things and integrate with the gameplay. It's also mercifully on point. I can't help comparing it to Sky in this regard, simply because Sky is full of so much unneeded fluff about going to school, sitting through class, making lunch, eating lunch, waxing nostalgic about eating lunch, eating more lunch, eating more goddamned lunch, fondly remembering about that time you ate lunch, etc, to say nothing of all the bald-faced padding not even in flashbacks where every other chapter is mandated sit around and talk about how nostalgic everything is. Not that Force is completely innocent, but it is very much more focused start to finish instead of unnecessarily stretched out for hours to watch everyone mince about in no doubt some mistaken belief that people wouldn't be able to follow unless it has teenagers going to school squirming over how they have feelings about things. And eating lunch.

That said, Tohru's unfortunately not great. Not horrible, but well, the very first lines are him having some kind of existential crisis while he explains what cyberspace is to nobody in particular for about five minutes, and it's not going to get better once his BFF dies in the first chapter. Understandable, but no more pleasant for it, and I will always prefer the more enthusiastic, clever, and witty protagonists. At the very least, 90s Batman TAS Batman, and he's more of a Surly McGrumpasaurus. Also not helped by this, and spoilers, I guess, but plot-convenient laser-specific amnesia eventually ends up rearing its godawful head with him too, along with magic science powers. Unlike Kou in Sky, it's much further into the game, so he doesn't spent entire routes wringing his hands and missing the painfully obvious right in front of his face, but again, something it really could have done without, or at least worked in some kind of different, far less eye-rolling way.

As for the rest of the characters, it has the usual array of females, although one thing Baldrhead is usually good with is actually doling them out patiently as the story proceeds instead of ejaculating a mass of cliches all over the screen in the opening minutes in one gigantic harem and then embarressedly trying to sort out the mess they just made. Like DS, you're not going to even see, let alone get a proper introduction to, multiple main characters until many hours or even routes in, and heroines that aren't the focus of a route shift seamlessly into supporting roles. Still, none of the archetypes are going to surprise anybody. Spunky Perpetually Concerned quasi-Childhood Friend, Mysterious Super Waif, Obligatory Perverted Male Buddy, Bookish Glasses Girl, Bitchy Combative Combat Girl, Ditzy Chinese Terrorist, Mysterious Super Waif #2, etc. They're mostly fine, and it's easy to tell what every route/heroine's purpose is supposed to be in the overall story, although certainly stronger the further you get for the most part, particularly with the Qipao Avenger and Waif #1, who play off well against Grumpadillo Maximus, although could have stood to have their stuff differentiated a bit more. Another common Baldrhead issue.

A special prize does go to Genha, one of the primary antagonists, who is a delight to hate. He was in Xross Scramble for a couple scenes too and I enjoyed every line. He's simply a sadistic monster of a villain overall and does a great job staying as such through the game, although I'm sure he probably does get neutered quite a bit in the console versions, including the 'Standard Edition', the backported 'enhanced' PS2 version and only PC version (I believe) that has Tohru with a badly needed voice. It was painful to see his obvious pastiche in Sky, Gilbert, reduced to an insecure prat. Genha is a hedonistic, sadistic rapist who takes delight in torturing Tohru and the heroines at every turn in a myriad of disturbing ways. Gilbert… kills one or two guys… maybe, prefers to toss women in magic goo and then leer for fifteen straight minutes, and ends up slinking off with his tail between his legs every time he shows up, sometimes after little more than being glared at. It's all very depressing.

Speaking of which, that may also be a large part of why I have a hard time getting into Baldr Sky, above and beyond all the pointless chaff, padding, and flashbacks to the world's most obnoxiously generic harem setting imaginable that they keep jerking you into. There are a ton of things that it wholesale pulls straight from Force. I expect things like terminology and slang, and a lot of the minor stuff, like turning the big brain chip manipulation focus that was a driving element in Force to "pretty much everyone can do it" in Sky, or them never shutting up about how corpses and wreckage don't remain in cyberspace in Force, to never shutting up about how corpses and wreckage remain forever in Sky. That doesn't bother me much. It's when it's egregiously copying things like major reveals or events, right down to the CG, that gets my dander fluffed. Who knows, though? Maybe Force copied them out of its predecessor, Baldr Bullet, and playing that would knock my opinion of Force down a notch.

Force does suffer from a similar thing to Duel Savior before Justice came along and added a much more satisfying ending, and minor spoilers ahead, I suppose, at least if you're one of the lame jerks who haven't played it or Xross Scramble. Jackasses. Anyway, Team Baldrhead dove head first into the broken girl trend of that time; what the hep kids call yanderes, but didn't ever figure out how to actually execute on it. Like DS's Mia, Renn, the final heroine in the mandated-order story, is a broken girl caught in a bad situation yada yada mountain of bodies in her wake. And also like DS, you're supposed to buy into the sympathy for her, love conquers all, "what says you care more than having sex with your abused, mentally unstable sister?", etc, but the execution is… lacking, shall we say. Unlike Mia, the jealous, possessive insecure controlling bitch, Renn's more of the mysterious waifish pixie girl archetype, so she's not as omnipresent or as obnoxious in her default state. Still, it doesn't mesh well with or springboard off the content of the later routes focusing on experimental magical sciencical brain experimentation like it really should have. 

As for the gameplay, there's not a ton to say that I didn't mention in the Sky version. It's pretty much the same, only greatly pared down what with coming almost a decade prior, and quite a bit more focused on shooty shooty mcranged combat instead of longer, flashier melee combos, as well as beginning with mass-battles and a larger arsenal while Sky tends to focus on smaller battles fought on your own and handing out the toys very slowly. Not that you can't do some impressive stuff with the toybox you have, but you're going to spend a hell of a lot more time circle strafing in Force than in Sky. Sky's certainly much better realized on this front, even if the combos and damage from them get a little ridiculous if you actually know what you're doing, but that's because it had a solid foundation to work off of.

And in case anybody was curious, yes, it is something I have contemplated working on since decent tools exist and I wouldn't need a hacker. Moreso recently than in the past because the only actual progress made on any actual hacking I've needed done since, uh… mid 2014… was "I showed up." The problem, however, is that like DS, it doesn't run well on modern systems, to put it very mildly. Even gets upset when you try to window it with things like dxwnd, so it'd… be as much of a mess, and people already didn't care at all about DS to begin with. Not right now though. Not next. Not the one after that. Most likely not the one after that either (although at least two of those are very short). But maybe some day, if for no other reason than to undercut Sky. Spite can be a decent motivator and without all the chaff, the game's not tremendously long, although a real project would get the same treatment as Duel Savior with pulling in the best content from all dozen releases…

Finally, I'm obligated to mention that, even over a decade later, Bachelor still has the best choice in underwear of any visual novel character. Crazy little waif girl.