I see now why the series has historically not come to the west. It's a horrible grindy RPG with only pretty girls and dating sim mechanics holding it up.
The story is generic and dumb. You're a boy with a dragon stuck in him, who, for little reason, is saved by a warrior princess from the guys who imprisoned you. You then just hang out at their kingdom doing nothing much until someI see now why the series has historically not come to the west. It's a horrible grindy RPG with only pretty girls and dating sim mechanics holding it up.
The story is generic and dumb. You're a boy with a dragon stuck in him, who, for little reason, is saved by a warrior princess from the guys who imprisoned you. You then just hang out at their kingdom doing nothing much until some major military efforts need to take place. And who do they send? Not their general and his army (who puts the warrior princess to shame strength-wise), but you and your harem (well, there's a couple of guys you can bring).
For each mission you go on, you meet your opponents and possible future allies. At least 10 times this happened, and they all end the same: You fight with them over a misunderstanding, and they either run away, decide you're not worth killing, or join you. I found it amusing (which is not good) that in three battles with one particular guy, he ran away because I was too weak twice, then thought I was too strong on the third battle.
In addition to the main story, there's lots of mostly-unrelated generic character interactions (including the dating segments). It's like they had a list of generic anime conversation topics and went through it, putting every one in this game. There's shopping conversations, a makeup conversation, loads of cooking/eating conversations, self-doubt conversations, and plenty of "trying to find out about another character" conversations. It was a little jarring going into these daily-life conversations almost immediately with very little world building or character information before hand. They were so meaningless to the story as a whole or for character growth, that I eventually started skipping them, just to get the reward for watching the scenes.
The gameplay isn't horrible, but is very basic. It's similar to Tales combat, but is slower and a little less chaotic. It rewards grinding/leveling over smart play, which is a disappointment. The game has built-in grind dungeons, which it expects you to repeat over and over. I hate grinding so much that I lowered the difficulty and fought only new monsters and ones that were in my way. This wasn't too bad, even when the enemies I was fighting were 30 levels higher than I was. Though fighting bosses required lots of resurrecting.
There's quests in the game, but they're the most basic quests you can get (go kill xx monsters or get yy items), their descriptions are so unimportant that they're not worth reading, and they repeat themselves. So after you complete all of the town's quests and reload the map, most of them are back for you to do again.
The girls look good, but there's not much depth to them. The dating sim elements are bad (worse than Sword Art Online). You can talk to the girls after time has passed and can potentially go on dates with them where you walk around town. After 4 dates, you're basically done and can see that girl's ending at the end of the game. The events are not very meaningful. Also, expect the dialogue in your conversations and dates to repeat frequently.
Costumes are limited. You get some nonsensical-for-the-world costumes: Maid, bikini, modern school girl, idol outfit. You just get them, so there's no fun in unlocking them. These are so silly that I just use the default costumes, which were actually much more beautiful anyway. There's also a model viewer in the game, where you can view the main characters at any angle. Character models are unlocked through a random lottery thing, where you pay 500g per random model (you can get duplicates).
And then the game-stopping nails in the coffin are:
- When you first start the game, you're encouraged to use Original mode and not Refrain mode. What they don't tell you is that in Refrain mode, you get a couple of extra characters and events that are only accessible in Refrain mode. Besides that, they're identical. So there's no reason to start Original mode, especially when it's obvious that the extra characters will eventually join you due to the fact that most opponents in the game join you, and even the game cover shows you one of the extra characters. It's not at all a different experience like I assumed, and I'm not keen on replaying the game from scratch just to get a few more events.
- At one point in the game, you're required to fight through an event with two male characters. Since the game is primarily about pretty girls, I doubt people will play those male characters often. Characters not in your battle party don't level up, so these two characters were a good 40-50 levels below their enemies. I gave it a good effort: Spent 2 hours grinding and loaded up on potions and healing items, but that wasn't enough. Many more hours of grinding would be needed to get past that point, and that wasn't worth it to me.
So, that's it. It's rare that I don't finish games. The pretty girls were alright, but everything else was quite bad.… Expand
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