Hey guys, bet you’re excited it’s time for this thing again, right? I know I am, even if I might have just woken up. I mean, since when has a proper sleeping schedule ever helped anyone? This is the penultimate entry in my blog that talks about videogames and visual novels, two of the most amazing things in the world, and that’s just fact. Well I guess let’s get this over with!

Portal 2

Portal 2 was without a doubt one of the best games I played last year, the story, atmosphere, the amazing co-op that I played through no less than 5 times with different people and somehow managed to have fun every single time. It’s hard to deny how good the game is. Then they released free DLC for user created levels, annoyingly actually releasing it just before I had university submissions, which sweetened the deal even further.

While I didn’t get the chance to actually mess around with the level editor itself, because I’m usually incredibly terrible at stuff like that, I decided to sample some of the higher rated levels that were already released. I got to the game a few days after the DLC was released, and already the amount of levels were in the thousands, which is insane .I downloaded a few pages worth of levels to see how crazy people are.

They’re pretty crazy.

The standout is called 12 Angry Tests, a 7 level long saga featuring 12 or so puzzles, finally ending in a straight up boss battle against the defective turret. It’s fucking crazy how well produced these levels are, especially for showing up within the first few days of the editor even being available. My brain can’t actually process it, and I love that.

There really isn’t much to this section other than ‘guys you really need to play 12 Angry Tests’, I played a lot more from the first few pages of the top rated section, and yeah a lot of them are really well done. Puzzles that would rival some of the harder stuff from the main game, even a few that I honestly couldn’t figure out and ended up skipping. Considering the only problem I had with the main game was the puzzles weren’t that hard, this DLC fills that void with abundance. The idea that now any time I load up Portal 2 there are an impossible number of new puzzles to play is both scary and amazing, and I can’t wait to actually sink some time into contributing levels myself.

Eiyuu*Senki

So my love for Sengoku Rance is rather well known, and I would honestly put it as one of my top 10 games I’ve ever played. Naturally, when I stumble across a game and the only information I have on it is it’s a “Sengoku Rance clone”, my ears perk up and I immediately buy it. That’s how I came across Eiyuu Senki, and man, was that the best decision I’ve ever made.

The story is rather straight forward, you control a rather Rance looking dude called Chihaya (though the name can be changed) on a quest to take over the world. To do this, Chihaya teams up with a girl called Yamato through a series of events. Once you take over Japan, Yamato betrays you and splits, leaving Chihaya to take over the world himself... or something. To be honest that’s about as much as I could understand of the story, given that it’s still entirely in Japanese. Whatever, I’m pretty sure that’s close enough. After Yamato splits, King Arthur shows up and forms a pact with Chiyaha, so that he won’t take over Hong Kong. Chihaya then continues his quest for world domination, starting with the rest of Asia.

You may have noticed I referred to King Arthur as ‘she’ in the last paragraph, and that’s one element of the game that is completely insane. Every country is ruled by various leaders or important figures from that country’s past. The UK is ruled by King Arthur and the knights of Camalot, Europe is ruled by Napoleon, Nero & Ceaser, America is ruled by Christopher Columbus and Geronimo. All fair enough, the mishmash of history has been done before, but in this game, all the characters are Japanese girl versions of said people.

This is a rather insane thing, trying to re-imagine these leaders (and in some cases really fearsome leaders like Ivan the Terrible) as Japanese girls, but I think it’s so insane that it makes the game that much more hilarious. After all, Nero is a magic girl. That’s just silly.

Since this was described as a Sengoku Rance clone, there is gameplay here too, and it’s a lot of fun. Each side has a 3x3 grid that can hold up to 6 commanders. Each commander takes turns in attacking and so on and so forth until one side wins. Positioning in a big part of the strategy as each commander can have different classes. Chihaya can attack to columns in front of him and in any of the three rows, gun units like Columbus and James Cook can attack only in the row they’re in, archers have a much larger range, and so on. After every attack each team gets a small amount of brave balls, which build up to allow magic attacks. Also each attack will net brave balls depending on the amount of damage it inflicts. Magicians such as Copernicus can heal using this bar, and most commanders will have super attacks that use the majority of this bar. Attacking works similar to Sengoku Rance in that, each commander’s health is also their power, as it actually indicates their army’s size. On top of that each commander has their own strength, speed and defence stat, which can be boosted by equipping items. Each turn nets more money, which can be used to increase the size of a commander’s armies.

On top of all that each turn also has a bunch of missions that can be taken, which results in anything from more money, to more story, to a commander learning a new ability. These missions require a certain amount of points to actually trigger, which requires a certain amount of commanders. In each turn you can only use a commander once, so if you send them on a mission, they can’t in the same turn attack, or in fact defend if the enemy ends up attacking one of the cities you own.

So that’s a decent summary of the gameplay, and if you’ve played Sengoku Rance (which I keep saying you should) you’ll notice that a lot of that is almost identical. The key difference here though is that this game streamlines a lot of it to make it, well, more fun. Sengoku has this whole capture and kill mechanic, meaning if one of your commanders goes down they could be killed off altogether. That doesn’t happen here, and all of the named characters are automatically added to your plethora of commanders as soon as you take over their country. Not having to worry about those things makes the game a lot more forgiving, and to certain extend a lot more fun.

So here’s the weird thing, this is the best game I’ve played so far this year. I honestly think when/if it gets translated it’ll shoot right up there as one of my favourite games ever. The characters are ridiculous to the point where it’s just funny, the gameplay has a lot going on while still being simple enough to pick up straight away, and even though I didn’t understand much of the side stories, the main story’s plot twists made me literally stand up and applaud. Seriously this game goes in a really stupidly awesome direction and, while I probably would have seen it coming if I understood more of the text, when it happened it was the greatest thing ever.

And that does it for another week! Man, this week didn’t feature that much stuff. Probably because instead of playing a bunch of games I just played those two, for like days and days at a time. I’m surprised my friends didn’t think I was died because I don’t think I’ve left my flat in the last week... I should probably get on that.

I get Sengoku Rance and Koihime Musou mixed up sometimes, I'm not sure why as I've only played Koihime Musou so far. I haven't been playing as many visual novels as I'd like to lately, I"ve been meaning to play Sengoku Rance and Katawa Shoujo but haven't gotten around to those yet.

If this doesn't get translated would you say it's still enjoyable and easy to play without knowing any Japanese?

uh, Nero WAS a magical girl irl. Pay attention to history class next time :|

I should probably hurry up with my play through of Kamidori before moving onto this.

@Turambar: I really need to get back into my run of that too. It's weird that more recently I've been having a lot more fun playing visual novels than other games.

@Animasta: nyoro~n. :3c

@TopSteer: The gameplay is certainly the focus, but it'd probably be best to wait for a proper translation. There already exists a UI translation patch which translates the character names, the map and the battle scenes, so the only thing you'd be missing out on is the actual story, and in that regard it's pretty easy to just stumble your way through how things work. There is a translation project under way but who knows if or when that will ever finish.

I do love some stupid alternate Japanese history type stuff, that sounds great. Penultimate entry though?

@ImHungry said:

Penultimate entry though?

Yeah really. What!? This can't be the next-to-end!

I played both Sengoku Rance and Big Bang Age and I can honestly say that the word "difficult" has been redefined for me. Those games are brutal, one bad move and you need to restart the whole bloody chapter. No events that "wait" for you, no overpowered equipment, no starting in a nice corner which allows you to expand, no, you start in the smack middle of the bloody map surrounded by a ton of empires all that may or may not decide to steamroll over you in a very violent fashion. No tons of resources, no surefire defense. I find it funny that these games that are scorned because they contain adult content are actually some of the best strategy games to date in fact I can't, for the life of me, come up with one wester strategy that has dynamic events let alone the sheer mass of them that SR has.