天下制覇

Nothing like WordPress eating a post to make you really appreciate writing it twice…

Before we get started, there should probably be a quick note on The Official Aroduc Approach to Japanese Games^(tm). It’s actually not overly complex… I just don’t like reading Japanese. I can, but my relationship with the written language is best described as antagonistic. I think it’s silly, and it tries to confound me. Therefore, my first approach to new games is to poke and prod at them for awhile to see if there’s an actual game in there that I want to play. In some cases, the game is so immediately and awesomely playable that I know from the start that I’ll be making sweet sweet love to it for many hours to come. Only later do I find out that it also includes undead bunny girls with detachable heads and I become a true fan. Most of the time, if it ends up being something that does look fun, I’ll poke and prod and experiment for as long as possible before starting over and paying attention the second time around. Beat Blades Haruka has now entered that second stage for me.

Beat Blades Haruka OP

BBH is the latest offering from Alicesoft… who I guess probably deserve their own introduction as well. Alicesoft is somewhat unique in the hentai game world because they make games. These are no silly little visual novels with a half-assed baseball sim thrown in to break up the monotony, but full fledged, complex games. If you want a far more in-depth example, I suggest reading through Hemisphere’s excellent writeup of another recent Alicesoft game. Alicesoft games do tend to be a little ‘cheaper’ feeling than most of the higher budget titles. They’re typically not extensively voiced nor will you see luscious art and a compelling story, but they do excel at being rather humorous and full to the brim with sex. You need only mention Rance’s name and all women in the room will fall on their backs begging for him. Even for a fantasy hentai game hero (all of which are especially manly), you have to feel for Rance’s nearly ten game quest to have sex with anything and everything female with a pulse, even if it takes conquering an entire country to do it.

The Titular (hee hee) Character, Haruka
  

On to Beat Blades Haruka then. This is the touching story of Takamaru, thrown into the world of ninjas, sex, dice, sex, girl raising, and… oh yeah… more sex. Takamaru’s got an issue, and that if he lets the evil ninjas run amok, he’s going to become all possessed and do horrible things. Luckily, he has the three ninja girls, Haruka, Narika and Subaru, on his side, and they’re ready and willing to do whoever whatever needs to be done in order to save his life and probably also the world… also to find a decent pair of pants. Sure… it’s not conquering the world and having sex with dozens of women along the way, but if you can get tired of these three, then there’s no saving you anyway. It does beg the question of "how good a ninja can they be while wearing bright red, using a weapon the size of a motorcycle, and walking around in public without pants?" I ask this question then… "How awesome of a ninja are they to be doing all that and still remain undetected… eh?"

The Techmaster, Narika

BBH is not an overly complex game since it’s derived from Escalayer. Your goal is to defeat the evil army by training your girls and waging war against them. Time progresses and there are scenes every day regardless of you actually doing anything of value towards your goal. At the same time though, you do need to make sure that things don’t get so bad that Takamaru succumbs and hell breaks loose. Defeating the monsters lets him gain back a little control, doing nothing makes him lose some, etc. There’s also a 99 day limit, but I only got to about day 25 before I decided to start over and play for real. I don’t imagine that they bake you a cake and throw a birthday party when the 99 days are up though.

The Only Subtle One, Subaru
  

Unlike Sengoku Rance or Daibanchou, BBH is a pretty compact game. Characters have a very limited pool of stats, so it’s not hard to stay organized and it immediately tells you what stats are updated the moment it happens. No guess work, nothing confusing at all… aside from being in moonrunes. The game also makes itself very accessible by listing who the choices affect at each point and keeping a rather extensive series of autosave files. You can also skip all text from the getgo, if you want to get to actually playing the game itself.

Choices Choices Choices!
  

Every day is split into three portions; Morning, Afternoon, and Evening. The Morning and Afternoon are when the majority of the training takes place. You can choose one option per segment, and are further limited by your dice pool. At the end of every day, you get a pair of dice. You can also gain two more dice during the Morning/Afternoon phases. To successfully complete an exercise you need to hit the target number for it by rolling dice until the total is above it, or until you run out of dice at which point you fail. You are minorly penalized for it, but the exercise is easier the next time around. You carry over unused dice to the next day, so there are target numbers in the 12+ range. Of course, there’s nothing quite as disappointing as having a target number of 4 and taking 3 dice to hit it. One incident like that and I learned that the random seed is preserved across loads, so you can’t cheat like that. Knowing what the dice rolls will be just lets you cheat in different ways though.

They’re Like Tamagotchis Fueled by Dice and Sex
  

The training stuff is likewise straightforward, though since this is an Alicesoft game, they’ve got to throw the oodles and oodles of sex in somewhere. The main stats are improved by… yup… sexing up your ladyfriends. See that list in the pic on the left above? That’s Haruka’s chunk o’ loving scenes. Every single one of those is a sex scene with her that improves one of her core stat and drastically refills her SP. Each one has multiple parts too. Granted, they’re mostly the same, just with different dialogue and… say… part 1 will be a blindfold and part 2 will be with a foreign object. Got to keep the foreplay and sex fresh, you know. I do find it funny how sad they sound when you successfully roll to start one of the exercises in porn.

A Couple Days in the Life of Takamaru (ps, don’t play like this video, I just wanted to show stuff off)

A brief aside, if I may… even though the vocals are not extensive, they did a really really good job with them, especially for how heavily repeated a lot of them are. Not much outside of the combat, porn and the key story scenes are voiced, but all three of the girls lack the whiny, shrill attempts at being ingratiatingly cute that are so prevalent in the Japanese female VA community. They really sound that disappointed when I start them into the sex scenes. Come on, Haruka… you need more power… work with me here… On the other hand, hee "Yarimashita, Takamaru-sama!" is also dead on when you win battles and makes me smile in spite of my usual frowny self. Despite the fact that you head the same vocals over and over again for battles, I haven’t become irritated with them yet, and I consider that praise. Of course, this is from somebody who eventually had to turn off Nanashi’s system voice for Duel Savior because her "Auuuu… sayonara desuno…" always made me feel guilty when I turned off the game.

Rarr Rarr, Fight the Power!
  

Combat is a pretty simple affair. Monsters spawn pretty constantly, but need to be materialized during the Morning/Afternoon phases before you can actually attack them. There’s always one ‘boss’ monster far stronger than the grunts that you need to defeat to advance the combat parts of the game along and unlock new training options for the characters or the like. Defeating the first boss, for example, unlocks Marika and adds her to the party. Each girl can only fight one monster a night.

Three Girls, Zero Pants

In-battle action is also very basic. There are only a few choices and it’s mostly a matter of not getting yourself into unwinnable fights. SP is the real limiting agent here because the girls’ basic attacks are terrible and unlike HP, it doesn’t really regenerate outside of sexin’ the girls up. Once you have more than one girl in your party, the others will sometimes assist for a few extra damage every now and then. In addition to that, you soon gain the opportunity to attack the enemy’s tower, sending your little spritely girls rapidfire through a ton of enemies. There’s no control there though, and while they’re not full battles, it takes some serious training to ready them for that kind of assault.

Arranged in Order of Hotness, Pantslessness, and Inverse Stealth
 

So anyway, as I finish up writing this for the second time (thank you, WordPress 2.3 and your broken autosave), Beat Blades Haruka is a rather fun game thus far. It’ll probably take me quite a bit longer to go through it while actually paying attention to events, but it’s officially on my plate as a game of interest now. I’m enjoying the music, the characters, and most importantly, the game itself. It’s not the most complex thing around, but it combines my weaknesses of sprites, ninjas, and raising things into one compact package that you could certainly do far worse than check out. At some point, I’ll have to face unhealthy facts… like the tentacles at the end of Subaru’s hand… or the question of who stole all their pants, but I’m sure Hemisphere will have a lot more to say on the story and whatnot before I do and probably a far more insightful analysis of the system, so go bother him about such.

If I go missing in the next week or so, don’t worry, just send dice.