天下制覇

Yeah, sure. Why not occasionally Romanize it like that?

Well, this is what things would look like if I went through with this plan. Half random rambling of half-conceived ideas I’ve been half-thinking about, half semi-accurate summary. My original plan for this week was to try out the first chapters of both this and Material Brave to see which lent itself to this format better, but I meant to do this yesterday so am already a day behind and kind of feeling like I should be translating since I’m like… a month behind where I wanted to be on that since I’ve been bad lately. I got a little sidetracked on this because I assumed that Ignition, the ‘expansion’ to MB was actually incorporated into the original. It’s not. You begin just by picking which ‘route’ you want to be on and it recaps the main game for you. Very deftly handled, Giga. Spoiler: It’ll mostly be wondering about why LN cliches are the way they are, because it is made of them.

Random Slightly More Relevant Thoughts:

Unusually for me, I don’t actually know a ton about this game besides hating the battle system already, despite not even having reached it. I do know that it does that thing where it starts out all sparkles, fluffy, and whatever and eventually tries to pull the “Psyche! It was deep and serious all along!” card. I have no real major problems with that when done well (see: Duel Savior), but I am starting to get a bit fatigued by everything and its dog trying to do it in recent years, in both Eastern and Western media, lest we make the ridiculous claim that it’s a Madoka thing. Now that my generation’s grown up and starting to take over the all-important job of creating children’s cartoons, we keep injecting angst and apocalyptic, ponderous backstories into everything from Adventure Time to Doctor Who that spew out 15 volumes of appendices that true fans are supposed to memorize. There’s probably a societal reason for that. I’d guess having to do with the internet and collective identity causing the old things like the crazy Star Trek fandom-type things to infect everything. Or maybe it’s just Star Trek.

Anywho, so far, it’s not really gripping me, although it does talk about dicks a lot, which is notably unusual. Then again, maybe I just don’t play enough dick-based games. I’ve often wondered what it is about Japanese writing that feels the need to go on at length about how regular life is. I understand it from the whole monomyth angle. The quest is all the more special against the boredom, peace, oppression, etc of an ordinary life, but a couple scenes of Luke being pissy about moisture farming and stuck at home playing canasta with his aunt and uncle are more than enough. We, living in a mundane world, understand what schools are and the ennui of being a teenager. Then I remember that the standard is paying writers by the word and settle in for another 75 straight lines about how something totally feels fishy, or how kissy this kiss feels.

The Story So Far:

We start with a dream but-totally-not-a-dream where a magic girl twirls a stick in a hurricane of cherry petals, and master of censorship apparently because everything she does is surrounded by haze and light. Cue: OP. But it’s just a not-dream-but-was-a-dream and we’re actually waving our hands, pretending like we can control wind and commenting on how thick the thighs are of random girls as we gawk at their underwear and getting hit for it.

Over in class, someone’s late and we apparently are overly enthusiastic to go fetch them from the girl’s dorm because it’s the obligatory childhood friend. We’re also saddled with the wet towel from before, who keeps hitting us. On the way over, we review that we’re going to a school for some reason, shout a bit about wanting to bang chicks, and have to hide an inopportune boner due to the mere thought of the wet towel’s ass. Our target is naked and asleep, so we start poking her ass until he gets hit again, suffers a brain clot from it, and eventually passes out, dead. We wake up in the evening and are immediately called a pervert again and are upset about our lunch being eaten.

Apparently there are rumors about girls being attacked in the streets. I’m sure this will be nothing. After some blathering about how the class rep isn’t the REAL class rep, everyone scatters, us to go hit on girls. Ringo, our sleeping victim, tags along and we all learn that girls don’t have penises, but I’ve seen enough porn to know that’s a lie. We also get our first choice, so we tell her we’re worried about her instead of blowing her off, and good god, does this game throw you a goddamned parade for making a ‘right’ choice. Some things might be content to just play a little chime. This demands a heart tornado, fanfare, and exploding declaration.

The wet towel drags us into putting up notices and invites us back to her room for… cake, which somehow isn’t a euphemism, so we tell her we want to eat her. This confuses her. Good thing we didn’t go with “I’d rather jerk off.” …It’s a language thing. Eventually, we go to dinner, where Wet Towel says that whoever catches the molester would be the school’s hero, and we go into a fugue state and suffer from crippling text formatting issues. Anyway, we decide to catch the guy who only exists in rumors but definitely exists. So we go back to our room, dress up in our hero costume, and fantasize about 100% of the females we know, as well as other cliche archetypes who definitely won’t be other heroines, being fascinated by our dick, and settle down to have a wank. No, really.

Business taken care of, we go back out and ask the Wet Towel to take make a man out of us. She’s open to it for some inexplicable reason, but Red cockblocks us both. We head out on patrol and someone starts playing with the contrast dial, making our spider sense tingle. Apparently it’s a dragon, and we want to hit it with our silly little sword, but we’re dragonblocked by some girl calling herself the princess of light who magics it away, so we ask her to marry us.

Before she can answer, our spider sense tingles again and we tackle her to safety, ending up lip wrasslin’ somehow. After spending entirely too long repeating that it was a kiss, we get up to deal with the dragon’s twin brother, Dragon 2 Electric Boogaloo, except now her magic’s gone FOR SOME REASON. We take on the dragon anyway, while she yells at us to stop, and I guess just die or something.

 

Our sword goes all magicky for some reason and we do the Ganon thing where we bat back fireballs while I begin wondering when the art budget ran out and how much use we’re going to get out of that single dragon CG. Spoiler: A LOT. She finally gets around to introducing herself as Kururu, so we steal her magical girl chant. Then we chant it together a few more times before cutting the dragon in half. We expect to get laid for our troubles… but instead wake up the next morning and wonder if it was a dream. But wait, there’s a new student, so we decide to ask them out. AND YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHO IT IS!

Next Episode Preview:

Maybe there’ll be some actual interaction, or I’ll start trying to antagonize characters.