Visual Novel Diary: Galaxy Angel

Well, its been far too long since I last did a VN diary. To be fair, this is mainly due to having not too many to play, and also due to my work commitments, but even so.

Anyway, Aroduc is responsible for this Galaxy Angel translation; his next translation project after Battle Moon Wars was done and dusted (well, this and Daibanchou), so hats off to him as always. The patch is basically complete at its 0.98 version; which is just missing the fmv subtitles (I think) as far as I can tell.

So, some of you might be familiar with the Galaxy Angel anime and its spinoffs, right? Well, they have absolutely NOTHING to do with the games on which they are based, much to my surprise. Besides the characters and universe setting, that is. The game is an intergalactic war story; with you protecting the last heir of the Transbaal Empire, Prince Shiva, from certain death as you retreat from the villanous usurper of the throne, Eonia and his creepy loli pet Noa.

As a game; its what happens if you take Homeworld, slam it into a squad based strategy RPG, and add a well executed non-H visual novel as topping. It sounds like an eclectic mix, and it is, but its certainly one that works a charm:

You play as Tact Meyers, Colonel of a outlying fleet that is suddenly put in command of the Empire’s top of the range prototypes, the Emblem Frames, born of lost technology and piloted by a bevy of lovely young ladies who form the Angel Wing.

Each chapter has several VN sections that give way to a bunch of space battles. Space battles occur on a full 3d plane; as you might expect:

The Elsior is Tact’s flagship from the second chapter, seen here, unloading its main batteries into a frigate. Despite its looks and apparent status as top of the line battleship though, most missions involve protecting the Elsior, which rarely sees a good fight despite its excellent range, due to its low speed, surprisingly low durability, and the fact that the angels typically outclass the massive warship. (!)

These sections are very reminiscient of playing Homeworld, but there is no resource management. The only focus is on your movement and strategy and keeping the Angels alive long enough for them to whup the enemy into shape. The interface for this is pretty good, all in all, since there’s the ability to pause and give commands with hotkeys, which I liked (and is a lifesaver) at several harsher moments of battle.

Since Emblem Frames apparently grow in power in relation to their pilots mental state, Tact’s duty as the Angel Wing commander is to ensure all of the ladies are as happy as they can be! Talk about a cushy military assignment! As a result, in each of the downtime periods between fights, you get to wander the ship and chat to the ladies:

But of course, you typically only get six picks in each downtime; so theres alot of time management. On top of that, there’s often a multiple choice question in each of the scenes; and choosing the correct response is what causes the ladies to like you more. Naturally, showing courage and tenacity are nearly always positive; but each girl has certain needs you should tune into as well:

Each Angel also pilots a unique emblem frame, and its quite true that making them happy affects the ships. As affection goes up, the Angels start to get pretty serious buffs for combat, and the girl you eventually select as your valentine gets truly obscene bonuses and turns into a death machine.

If you’ve seen the anime, you should be familiar with the girls, but their units are of interest for me to discuss here, so I’ll do a bit of both, going top to bottom, left to right:

Ranpha is the tsundere that loves fitness and fortune telling as well as exuberant girly things (she has a streak of ojou-sama, and pulls out ~the laugh~ every so often to prove it). She doesn’t like to show weakness to others (especially Tact) and initially despises him, though she does a hilariously amusing turnabout if you pick up the right events.
Her Emblem Frame is the Kung-Fu-Fighter, which is intially a Fragile Speedster, but turns into a Glass Cannon if you get up her affection. She gets into trouble easily due to her vastly outstipping the others in speed; but can really clock up kills too. She has dual vulcan cannons and a single launcher, and her ultimate weapons shoots two rending claws; each of which literally destroy 1/2 of the targets max. health; making it a pretty much guaranteed kill, though only single target unlike some of the other specials.

Ranpha on her attack pass; she loves to play chicken with cruisers!

Mint is the telepathic refugee noble girl who joined the military to escape her father and his overbearing mercantile roots. She has a great fondness for tea and sweets; as well as honesty. She has a secret hobby of dressing up in weird cosplay outfits.
Her Emblem Frame is the Trick Master, which is the Carrier type. Its marginally faster than Happy Trigger; but offsets its mediocre speed and average armament of a couple of launchers by having a wing of ion cannon drones that independently attack the target, allowing her omnidirectional coverage and high accuracy. Her special is to launch all her drones at once which spam beams at everything in an area of effect. If you’re lucky, this can be the best offensive special as the enemies often fly in formations.

Milfie is the genki air-head girl with ‘ideal wife’ characteristics (loves to cook and clean). She also has extreme luck; which swings from obscenely good to terrifyingly bad (she wins the lottery 1st prize five times in a row and then nearly causes a forest fire the same day!).
Her Emblem Frame is the Lucky Star (LOL) which has high speed and is above average in most other things, sporting a good selection of mass drivers and missiles; and she has a giant pink laser as her ultimate weapon that literally destroys anything in a line in front of it, across the ENTIRE map. Sadly, only a few enemy fleets dutifully line up for her to take advantage of this.

Milfie’s Pink Laser of Death. What you don’t see is that health bar suddenly reduce to zero and the mobile battle platform exploding about 1.2 seconds after this screencap.

Forte is the ‘big sister’ character, stern and wise yet flirtateous and stunning at the same time. She’s the nominal squad leader of the angels, as the oldest and only one who’s a 1st Lieutenant. She also loves gunpowder guns in an age that has embraced energy weapons; and has a huge selection. She is perhaps the most grounded one of the Wing.
Her Emblem Frame is the Happy Trigger, which is the Tank. Its the slowest by far, but its a gunship that’s bristling with about eight launchers and at least 5 mass drivers, allowing her to seriously lay smackdown onto whatever wanders into her sights. She has no unique weapon; her special is to simply boost and discharge her entire arsenal in a single huge barrage. Since each weapon gets a big accuracy boost as part of this attack, its usually pretty decent damage.

Vanilla is a hardworking silent girl that is uncomfortable in social situations, but she becomes vastly more vocal as the game progresses, especially with the right events. She controls nano-machines and loves animals; and devotes most of her time to earnestly helping others in need to her own detriment.
Her Emblem Frame is the Harvester, which has the highest defence and is the only one with the ability to repair the others (but she can’t repair Tact’s Elsior). She also has a decent rack of swarmer missles and a cannon or two, and is average elsewhere. Her special is a total lifesaver, sending a huge wave of repairing nanomachines that give a full-heal to all of angel-wing, no matter where they are on the map.

Vanilla goes in to support Milfie’s dogfight. The missile barrage is about to begin.

Of course, as already noted, your favourite girl becomes a death machine regardless of her usual battle role, however:

This was shortly after I started heading up the Vanilla Route; and as you can see, she went on a bit of rampage. To give perspective; in Vanillas case here, with the love buff all her swarmers suddenly guarantee a hit and each does a bucket of damage, and she charges up her map-wide full heal continually, which makes everything a bit hilariously easy if you do the same as me. I’ve heard the others get similar huge leaps in power, like Ranpha dodges everything and decimates battleships in a single pass; Mint’s drones go mental and so on.

Well, I think that just about covers it all. Hope you enjoyed this little soujorn and tune in again soon!

EDIT: And just a quick edit; to showcase the Vanilla End:

Dawww! Vanilla melts me with her cuteness. An amusing reversal, ne?

I guess I’ll head back and do the Ranpha route next since I like my Tsundere’s almost as much as my hard-shelled girls.

Read Full Post »

Retro Diary: Millenium 2.2

Here’s something old I decided to return to. Recently, I decided to re-indulge in some retro goodness, and of course, my first stop was grabbing the STeem engine to play Atari ST games, which I grew up with as a nipper.

Specifically, Millenium 2.2 holds absolutely fabulous memories for me: it’s the first game I ever completed (at 7 years old!), so I decided it would be a good test experiment for this, a ‘retro-diary’ type post that is similar to my old ‘visual-novel diary’ posts. The slight difference in this case is that; because there is distinct lack of info for this around (which I feel is a travesty), I’ll also put up a summary and strategy guide.

Introduction

So what’s this game? I guess its an early prototype of a 4x type space strategy sim. Basically, on the 30th of January 2200 the Earth suffers a huge environmental catastrophe, annihilating the billions living there. You are the commander of the Moon Base, whose 100 souls represent the entire remains of human race:

As you might imagine, your objective is to cure the environment of earth and make it re-habitable. Of course, its not simple:

Earth is pretty much fucked. What actually happened is anyone’s guess (they might have told you in manual, but I don’t remember, since I was 7 when I read it last…lol). And that’s not all. Just in case you actually try to move a finger:

In other words, the martians, whom have had their genetic stock mutated, nevertheless feel it is their right to have to have the Earth; and instantly go to war with you over it. Twats.

Build me a base

Of course, initially, the Moon Base is in a pretty shoddy state as well. Your first goal is upgrade your ability to produce power and resources. You have a measly super battery pack to start, the SolaGen MkI, so kick your scientists to start researching better options. In the meantime, you also want to start mining and think about building a probe to find out just what went down on Earth. The early game is about juggling your power resources as, usually, you can’t run the mineral refinery and the production centre at the same time. Your early production of photovoltaic cells is also shoddy, and your first set of solar panels is often liable to explode (!). Although [Spoiler: This is a scripted event that can be dodged if you’re intelligent…].  Anyway, with a little time, you should be able to research and hold a decent staple of Solagen MkV or so:

After that stability, you can look into better exploration of the system. For this, you’ll need to build an automated probe for each moon or planet you wish to survey and send it on its way:

You’ll also need to start researching other kinds of transportation; starting with Grazers and Waveriders, though this is discussed later.

The War on Mars

Also, the Martians are very serious in their threat to attack you. You absolutely mustn’t forget to spend some time looking into constructing some defensive weaponry. You can build Fighters immediately, and having a bunch of them is highly recommended. Though the early attacks will be merely one of two ships, you actually pilot the defense yourself (apparently your commander is multitalented!) in a rather primitive 3d dual against an enemy ship:

This can be a bit tough your first few times, as you pilot with the mouse, so you may lose a couple of your fighters. Eventually, you’ll get the hang of it though; its really mainly lining up the correct axis and holding down the shoot mouse button.

Unfortunately, it seems that no-one else ever bothers to pilot fighters…so you have to deal with the rather ridiculous thing of continually landing and taking off again. It can be taxing, dealing with waves of enemies like this, and you also have a time limit. I’ve personally never managed to best more than about 8 enemy fighters before they reach an attack vector (whereupon they’ll kill a chunk of your population, destroy mineral stores, and wreck your power generators). Whilst you’ll only see stragglers to begin with, it eventually becomes impossible to avoid damage, so upgrading your defence is a high priority.

Fortifications

So, that means one thing: orbital laser platforms. These sweet things can be researched immediately, but not built, because the Moon does not have a good source of radioactives (i.e. Uranium). Hence, things start to come together: your next priority is finding a place that can mine Uranium before the Martians become overwhelming. [SPOILER: The most efficient option is Jupiters Moon, Leda. It’s fairly close by and also provides Copper which you need for your space fleet. Even if you know this from me, you’ll still need to send a probe first, mind you..].

To do that, you’ll need a Colony (S.I.O.S.) and a means to ferry supplies around (Waveriders & Carracks). This is the start of your transport fleet. Of course, to build these, you need Copper for both and S.I.O.S. also needs a stack of Platinum. Neither of which are available on the moon. This is where the Grazer I mentioned earlier comes in:

Basically a huge grapple and tug with a cockpit, you can send these to the Asteroid belt, where they scan for good sized ‘roids and tug them back, complete with their wealth in resources. This is the only means to get Copper and Platinum until you establish colonies that can mine this.

Also, once you’re a bit more stable, with Fighters, you’ll perhaps want to look at expanding the Moon’s population capacity by building Nodules, which attach to this main module:

You can eventually have up to 600 people, which marginally increases production/mining performance, and perhaps more importantly gives you a larger pool of population to use on crewing ships (they can pilot normal ships well, it seems, just not fighters, sigh).

Fortunately for you as well, the population breeds ridiculously quickly. Seems like about 1 new person every couple of days (!). Perhaps clones are involved (?).

Anyway, it might take you a year or so of game time to get fortified and build your first colony:

Colonies cannot produce or research, so you’ll need to send SolaGen’s to them for power, as well as defences. Waveriders are great for quickly shuttling small bits of equipment to the outworlds, like lighter weight SolaGen’s and single Fighters or Laser Platforms. SolaGen MkIV’s are sufficient for Jupiter’s moons, fortunately, but the further out you go, the less energy solar generators make (obviously). You’ll need the vast storage space of Carracks to shuttle larger generators to Saturnian moons and further colonies.

Its worth it, though:

Take that, you fiends! It’s terribly fun to hear that laser charging sound and then see a silent radar as a result. BANG!

Orbital Lasers will easily take out 5-15 enemy ships per shot of their Valefor laser. Unfortunately, doing so always causes them to overload and explode, so they’re disposables. Since they can be precious early on until you have lots of Uranium, take out the vanguard of the attackers with their shot and mop up stragglers with your immense piloting skills in a fighter. LOL.

What Next?

Well, I don’t want to spoil anything further, but continue to develop your colonies and obtain all the missing resources. You’ll eventually need Silver and Chromium, which are pretty rare and hard to find. There’s also a few more scripted events for you to look into as well. Having a diverse transport fleet helps later on. You’ll also notice that certain places have strange effects on your colonists, causing them to mutate into new strains of human (like the martians have already done). Of course, these ones are under your control and benevolent [SPOILER: Well, until the sequel to this game, Deuteros, anyway. Methanoid bastards.].

Other Stuff

This game and its sequel, Deuteros, are the brainchilds of Ian Bird. He also went on to make Millenia: Altered Destinies, for DOS in the mid 90’s, but that marks the end of his original produce as far as I’m aware. (This is also an amazing game that involves dicking around with time, though hardly anyone has heard of it~ it doesn’t even have an entry on GameFAQ’s…though you can watch a rather silly video review on Youtube)

In the days of yore, my old geocities site actually had a downloadable copy of millenium (which is considerable abandonware); but of course, that’s long gone now. Instead I point you to here and here, where you can download Roms of the game’s two floppy disks. You’ll need an emulator, like STeem, and a relevant TOS, to play.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this blast to the past.

Read Full Post »

Oho, Sparklies!

Just a short post again today. I’ve been rather distracted with various games, which have all been eating away at my spare time. As noted before, I’ve been playing Syarin no Kuji and will eventually get around to doing a VN diary for it, though it took me longer than anticipated to complete it. Rather interesting game, though, with a world that replaces prison time with ‘obligations’ like losing some hours of your day, not being able to disobey parents or not being able to speak with the opposite gender.

I also picked up the new Heroes of Might and Magic game for the DS. I haven’t actually played a Heroes game properly since HoMM 4, since I had to return HoMM 5 since it never worked on my laptop, apparently due to some bugs, since I met the system specs and Oblivion used to work fine, which I’m sure was more graphically intense. Nevertheless, I’m told it returned more to the HoMM 3 type system, which I thought was inferior to 4, so it probably wasn’t much of a loss.

Back on topic, however, I’m very impressed with this game. It takes the classic, if tired HoMM like formulae, and forces a puzzle game down its throat, revitalising it in the process. Lining up columns of troops to attack and rows to defend, along with chain linking, merging, spells, artifacts, and both elite and champion class troops each with their own rules of engagement, and you have a very deep and fascinating strategy blend.

This is tagged onto a standard HoMM like map for exploration, recruiting, resource gathering and quests. Most of the standard sides return, with Haven, Academy, Necropolis, Sylvan and Inferno, creating a pentagon of wholly different sides that in some ways feel similar to the five colours from Magic the Gathering.

I’m currently on Godric’s campaign, which is a step up in difficulty from Anwen’s, I have to say, as his requires a much more defensive playstyle with his slower charging troops and damage prevention spell. Fortunately, you can get XP for solving puzzles too in this game, which helps in the more difficult battles. It’ll be interesting to play the more ‘evil’ sides after completing this, I should imagine.

To finish, I also created a new wallpaper again for you to use.
Its Ruri Matsuri, a new God girl and student council president from the latest Shuffle! game, Shuffle Essence+:

As always, click the above to see it full sized

Unfortunately, I’m told that Ruri doesn’t actually get a route in the game, which is kinda odd since they’re using her for the advertisment in Dengeki Hime. Whatever. In case you were wondering, this game is basically a revised version of the original shuffle, with a stack of extra girls thrown in and some slight amendments to the routes of the original girls. Most of the new ladies are God girls, actually. But then again, they already did a side game featuring the Demon world (Shuffle! Tick! Tack!) so I suppose its just. Or something.

And yes, you can actually romance Kareha-sempai now (hopefully complete with her ‘brrrinng, brrrinng, brrrinng!’ noise and her sparklies):

“Mai! Mai! MAI!” <brrrinng, brrrinng, brrrinng!> etc.

Which is perhaps the best development, since she was the most amusing character, IMHO.

Anyway, thats all for today. Cya again soon.

Read Full Post »

Visual Novel Diary: Sengoku Rance

Its been awhile since I’ve done one of these, eh? I believe Kanon was the last one.

Anyway, this has been consuming ludicrous amounts of my spare time over the past few days, since a full-english translation was released on the 10th of October for it thanks to the efforts of the hardworking guys of Yandere Translations (and TakaJun, who seems to be everywhere!).

This is actually the SEVENTH game in the long running Rance series by AliceSoft (hence, Sengoku). As far as I’m aware, previous Rance games were dungeon crawlers with Visual Novel Elements. This one, however, is a tactical strategy game with Visual Novel Elements:

(This is showing the Items and Inventory screen, by the way)

Rance himself is…well… I guess, in a way, he’s like the fantasy version of James Bond. ‘Sex Freak’ doesn’t even begin to describe him. He unashamedly asks random women his just met to sleep with him and even seems to draw power from the act. He’s beyond arrogant and isn’t above forceful, dirty tactics to get what he wants. And yet…for all his arrogance and being a total dick, he’s a surprisingly likable character. His ‘Strongest man in the world’ claim isn’t just self appointed either; he really is one of the best warriors in the world, and is the bearer of one of the few legendary sentient demonslaying blades, Chaos. And underneath the lust is actually a strangely decent guy. Although:

Expect to see this alot. Gahahahaha. Rance has the ability to strip out of his Half-Plate in about 7 seconds when he thinks he might be able to get some. Which is impressive, I’ll give him that…

In short, the opening story is: After his adventures in Zeth, Rance decides to come and visit JAPAN (yes, in capitials) with his slave, Sill, in order to visit the hotsprings and of course, have sex with as many girls as possible. Rumours of the beauty of the princess Oda Kou lead him to the territory of Oda, where he meets a seriously chill version of Oda Nobunaga, whom apparently finds running a dango store to be more enjoyable than actually running his country.

Apparently (for no real reason) the two get along, and Nobunaga decides to appoint Rance as the new Shadow Ruler of Oda. Rance accepts, feeling this is a great oppertunity to test his strength (and of course, after conquering countries, its also a good oppertunity to exhert his right as the victor and test his bedroom skills…) Since Nobunaga is a pretty dozy guy, theres about to be a rebellion, and your first battle of the game is leading the remaining loyalists against the rebels (whom are actually an atrocious force, but I suppose this could come down to it being the first battle and hence, meant to be easy).

After surpressing the rebellion, Rance is told to basically do what he wants with the country. Leading you to this:

You’ll spend some time here, of course. Clicking on a country gives you many options for actions in the top left box.

This ranges from preparing for battle and searching for dungeons to advancing the plot and talking to your various commanders (Purple ???’s show something brand new).

Speaking with commanders raises their affection towards you, and once you accumilate a certain amount, they’ll usually have a special ??? event which raises their trust level (Its Hate > Normal > Trust > Love on a sliding scale). Each time the trust level goes up, the commanders unit levels up, allowing you to give them a new ability or upgrade their stats. Of course, only female units can reach Love and as you might imagine, raising female commanders to Trust and Love also usually results in H (and more Satisfaction for Rance).

Each time you do an event or battle of any kind, you’ll use an action fan. You normally start with two (I have 3 here, since this is from a new game+).

There’s also resource management involved, with items, gold, national power, and Rance’s Satisfaction (Sat.) to keep track of. As you might imagine, you get gold from taxes, items from winning battles or clearing dungeons, power from developing or conquering countries and satisfaction from doing Hentai type things with girls. The latter is surprisingly important, as every 10 satisfaction gives you a great bonus, from upgrading Rance’s Unit and getting more action fans, to calling for reinforcements and getting really rare items.

Rance’s objective (at least initially) is to simply conquer all of JAPAN. This can and will change as the game progresses, as you can go onto different story routes. Usually, you’ll end up having to deal with the demon lord Xavier and his demon army in some form or another.

This naturally leads to battles, which look a little like this:

You pit up to six of your units against up to six foes. Initiative order is shown on the top hand tabs. As you get to one of your turns, you select an action and a target. Troops have a number of action banners, and time counts down on the middle column. To win, you have to either annihilate all the enemy units or have the battle rating (the topmost bar) in your favour when time runs out. The number of troops left in a unit acts as its HP (a little like Advance Wars). The above shot shows the Ninja unit of Gekkou (and his Loli sidekick). Of course, winning a battle is rather strategic, and it helps to use a nice variety of units, which come in lots of types:

This is the Unit Roster, currently focused on Kanami the Ninja girl.
I’ll list the types in the order shown in the list above:

• Rance himself leads a Warrior unit. These naturally excel at doing lots of damage really quickly, especially once they learn Guard Break. Once you recruit Kenshin, she is arguably the strongest Warrior unit in the game.
• Footsoldiers are defensive. They halve damage against them when they have their guard up, and can leap in the way of attacks targeting other units. They deal pretty mediocre damage though.
• Knights are a special unit (you only get one, led by Leila, through a Satisfaction bonus). They combine the offense of Warriors and Defence of Footsoldier, but are very expensive to recruit.
• Archers are naturally backrow units and are useful mainly for versatility, since can target either row, though not for huge amounts of damage. Yamamoto Isokoru is best since she can learn penetrating fire that hits an entire column and can’t be guarded against.
• Musketeers (not actually shown in this shot) are front row units with atrocious defence but high offence. They can be a bit dubious though since they also have a low action count and they’ll be slaughtered by Warriors.
• Cannoneers are special (again, you get Maria through a Satisfaction Bonus) and are upgraded Musketeers (they’re actually a huge unit of girls with rocket launchers!). They can shoot from the back row and deal high damage, making them generally pretty good.
• Miko’s are your healing and utility unit, able to replenish dead troops. They can also provide archery support  (though not as strong as actual archer units), and with a certain ability, also grant buffs to male units at the start of a battle (apparently, in this version of Japan, Miko’s are also ‘working girls’, if you catch my drift, hence the buffs to male units).
• Mages are special units again (you can get three, two from satisfaction bonus, one from a New Game + bonus). They are ‘western’ mages in the traditional sense, in that they typically throw fireballs (though Rizna learns a hit-all, Angel Cutter, whilst Magic and Shizuka learn a Penetration laser Beam).
• Diviners are the ‘eastern’ mages, who use spellpaper and shikigami. They are the best artillery units with their charge up hit all attack, and can also throw up damage prevention shields that completely negate a single attack against a unit.
• Ninjas are fast, dealing about as much damage as archers with Shuriken. However, Ninja Shuriken also cancels spell charging, which is very useful against enemy Diviners. They can also assassinate enemy commanders, which if it succeeds, OHKO’s an enemy unit (however, it succeeds only if the number of ninjas exceeds the foes unit and then not all the time, and regardless of outcome, always uses all of the Ninja units actions).
• Tacticians add buffs to your units at the start of battle and as a command. They can also de-buff enemy units (making them important to bring along if the enemy also has a Tactician), and finally, provide archery support (at a lower level than normal archers though, like Miko’s can).
• Cavalry is only recruitable by capturing enemy units from Takeda (horses don’t exist in this world, and these cavalry ride large ostritches which can only be bred in Takeda). It basically acts as a more mobile Warrior unit, able to attack from the back row and against the enemies back row, making it pretty deadly. They are hence both rare and expensive.
• Finally, Monks are a utility unit. They have decent attack (higher than footsoldiers, less than warriors) but awful defence. However, they can give other units actions, heal themselves, remove enemy buffs, stop enemy footsoldiers from guarding, and various other weird things.

Thats all that I’m going to explain about the game. The AliceSoft Wikia goes into a ludicrous amount of extra details if you’re interested. I’ll just finish with some more screencaps:

Yep, Kenshin (right) is a girl in this game. She is known as the goddess of war and is the best swordswoman in JAPAN. She also likes fighting for underdog, randomly defending nations that are under attack (including you, or nations you attack), until you engage Uesugi. Of course, when you do, the poor girl gets more than she bargained for with Rance:

Maybe its because he actually duals her and blocks her blows? Or perhaps its just the whole him saying ‘you look beautiful even up close’ scism? In any case, its love at first sight for her. Poor girl.

Nevertheless, once recruited, she becomes a ludicrously strong unit for you. With her Commander Charge, she often personally kills about 300 troops before her own troop then attacks immediately afterward. Brutal. (Rance has a similar move with RANCE ATTACK!)

Yuzumi the Musketeer girl adores cute things, apparently.

Souun is the head diviner of what I call the ‘Triforce nation’ (LOL). He is, naturally, the most powerful diviner unit, as this might suggest!

After taking over the Blacksmith nation, Rance’s sentient Sword, Chaos, gets some very special treatment from the female blacksmiths! I LOL’ed at this scene.

And to finish, Rance at the cherry blossom festival with (left to right) Suzume, Sill, Nobunaga and Kouhime. 3G, their Youkai minister, is in the far right background. Sill is very pink, isn’t she? (and yes, Suzume is indeed a catgirl ninja, sigh…though her ability to use Naruto like clones in her scenes is quite…disturbing…)

Anyway, that was a long post, ne? If you like your tactical strategy, this game will keep you going for at least 120 hours if you follow all of the routes, and its pretty darn addictive, so I’d recommend it solely on that. Of course, theres also the VN side attached with an above average story and lots of fun easter eggs (and of course, H-scenes, if you’re entirely here for that…) so its a very substantial, slickly presented package.

Thats all for now. I’ll probably do the last couple of reviews for the new anime season soon, so see you then.

Read Full Post »