i tried mugen souls
this game really really really want to be disgaea and it's not just a matter of sharing the artist,game goes like this,a little girl called chou chou (who's totaly not etna) her angel pal (who's totaly not bizarro flonne) and her servant (who's... well he sorts of looks like laharl but doesn't act like him,he just act subservient) decide to conquer the universe,to do so she has to conquer 7 world each following a theme (the first is fantasy,the second is japanese edo,the third is fire) she can do this because of her special power which force things that
her to become her servant, of course since everybody has different taste in anime loli's she can actualy morph into different personality and each persona follows an anime trope and an added element
for example the fire persona is a dominatrix,the ice persona is a
"sorry" girl,the wind persona is a
Genki Girl who sort of look like yotsuba,the earth persona is a
Tsundere,the light persona is a
Dojikko (uh didn't know this one) the dark persona is an
Emotionless girl and lastly there is a graceful persona
just to make the disgaea comparison even more heavier and pronunced each world is populated by a HERO and an OVERLORD,since they are the strongest creature on each planet,chou chou conclude that the fastest way to become the ruler of the planet is to turn them into peons... as such the plot pretty much follows the same formula of chou chou landing on a planet,encountering a wacky pair of characters and forcing them into the party
the first pair she meets include a stereotypical hero (you see they recognize that he's a hero because they find him breaking pots and searching drawers) and a princess (who's forced to wear a bikini for a while because it "gives great defense",so the hero says) but the character tends to get more diverse as you progress and it makes for a really big and colorfull cast of characters,one of the hero you meets really look and act like mid-boss,did i already mention how much this game reminds me of disgaea?
the disgaea comparison don't just end at the plot,when you enter battle there are crystal scattered that afflict your character in specific manner... just like that system... how was it called..... was it geo-panels? i have such an hard time remembering... oh and there is also a random dungeon feature of sort that it's called mugen field where you go trough 100 fight... it's sort of like... how was it called? was it the item world? oh and did i mention your character do team up attack? and one of them consist of the character doing a tower? and that you get to create your own character and then power up them by fusing?
so yeah i sort of digs the game for being disgaea-but-not-disgaea but unfortunately tragedy had to strike,the game is a chore to play,each planet is just a bunch of hallways that kinda looks like a bad ps2 game and yet the game somehow ends up slowing down once in a while,the best is in battle where sometimes you end up meeting 7-8 enemies all at once and the game gets to a crawl of something like 15-20 frame,like you are playing on an emulator,the battle animation are all skippable so the battle's go fast enough but sometimes the enemy freeze in their movement for 1-2 seconds and it's really annoying when there are 4 enemies acting all in a row
the real bad part comes from one of the subsystem of the game,you see as i said chou chou can turn people into peons (who are called prin... err shampuru and resemble cute peng... rabbits! rabbits,they resemble rabbits!) that include monsters so in battle you are supposed to switch your personality so that it match the monster personality and then tell it sweet stuff until he turns into a peon (which the game calls a "moe kill"
) getting peon's make's you better at charming stuff and also power up your ship for ship battle's (you still get peons if you just kill enemy normaly but you get more if you charm the enemy)
the ship battle's play like rock-paper-scissor with the enemy giving you a hint about what he's going to do (think the duels in suikoden) but unfortunately they are also super tough,at the ship battle i'm in at the moment the enemy can kill me in 3 hits but i need to like something like 15 hits to defeat him so even if i win a lot of rounds it's still quite hard,obviosly i could make things easier by recruiting more peons but that's a pretty stupid artificial wall
another stupid artificial wall comes when you have to charm continent,each world has 3 map and you access to the other 2 maps by making the current map a peon,this consist of finding some hot spots and then charming them,unfortunately some of them require certain level of charms and some flat out ask you to defeat 300 monsters or ask for gold adding another layer of stupidness
everybody talks about "THE HORRIBLE SEXUALIZATION BLABLABLA" but it's not really that bad,there is a hot spring scene at the end of each chapter (in another disgaea-like twist at the end of each chapter you get a summary of previous event done by bizarro flonne) which is about as much as smutty as a fashion magazine and that's it... i did hear they censored some content and after making some research.... let's say it's fathermikeNSFW, and that it's a good thing it got censored
i think i'll probably watch some poor sob going trough it,i enjoy watching the game but not playing it if that makes sense and uh... wow i think i'm the first guy on the internet who's making proper impression of this game,yay me for suffering trough horrible jrpg
