天下制覇

Still working on finishing up that Beat Blades Haruka post. ^^ 

I’ve already said quite a bit about Otome Crisis, so I’ll try to keep this one to just my final thoughts on it more or less.

Let’s start with the good… I am thrilled to the core that Giga finally got around to updating the Savior engine after it’s remained static for the better portion of a decade. Like most fighting game patches, the changes are subtle, but have a pretty major effect on gameplay. Items, traps, and the new ‘slamming’ physics all force the player to pay more attention to what’s going on, and assist attacks/soul explosions actually give a few more defensive options as well. It feels very different… a lot more like a fighter than a brawl, and with a few balance tweaks (as well as more soul explosions) it probably wouldn’t be that poor of a multiplayer game.

On the other hand, compared to Xross Scramble, the playable cast is tiny. It feels like going from Marvel vs Capcom 2 to Capcom vs SNK again. Yeah, there’s a bit more balance and each fighter is deeper, but why would you ever want to sacrifice the option of picking from among 70 some odd characters in exchange for 30? It makes even less sense for Otome Crisis since it’s clearly designed as a single player game. There’s still a good variety of characters though. All the girls from the Savior universe made it back in, though some (Rubinasu, Muriel, Mia, Berio, and Rico Risu for starters) aren’t playable anymore, which is just sad. All the males are gone too… poor Taiga finally got the boot. They still managed to fit in a hulking brute in the form of one of Baldr Force’s mechas though. It’s not the Leviathan, but it’ll probably suffice.

Some of the changes are also often… irksome. The difficulty has been scaled up considerably, but the AI still handles certain attacks very very poorly (Esca’s air d.B for example). It also seems to have absolutely no concept of the stage hazards and will gleefully stand on a spiked floor without even noticing its presence. The items also make battles almost impossible to lose if you play defensively and just dodge around if you’re ever low on life. Speaking of being low on life, the damage reduction (at least on hard mode) is absolutely nuts, especially if you’re playing one of the weak, speedy characters. Supers that drain half a life bar early in the battle will do maybe a quarter as much damage on the final life bar. Combine that with randomly dropping meat that recovers twice that and battles can stretch on tortuously. There are also the occasional glitches, especially with the assist supers. I like that they’re scripted events, but stage hazards, and especially Papillion’s Nanashi wisp assist create all sorts of problems. At best, they’ll just whiff entirely. At worst, you’ll be hovering 40 feet in the air, trapped in a scripted sequence, waiting for a trigger that happened while you were stunned by a wisp or a falling flower pot and are now forced to quit out or wait for another flower pot to land on your head.

The story modes are actually pretty fun, though I haven’t really done much except gloss through them. Hiiro is basically a walking aphrodisiac and Lorie is pretty close to an obsessive nymphomaniac, so… there’s actually quite a bit more sex than I had at first anticipated. Basically every battle ends with someone doing something to someone for whatever reason. There’s still a lot more charm and entertainment to be had here than in… say… Prism Ark Love^2, which is the easy sex romp comparison. Hiiro and Lorie are both really fun characters… although I hate Lorie’s rabbit. It’s not an extensive plot, but it’s an enjoyable ride for a few hours with each of them. It does help that both Lorie and Hiiro’s VAs did a really good job bringing them to life. It only takes a few seconds for Hiiro to bust out singing her own "super hero justice song" and she never really tones it down from there.

Unfortunately, outside of the story mode, there aren’t too many other options, which I honestly find baffling. There are five survival mode courses to run, but what I’m really missing is the endless survival mode that every previous Savior game had. I imagine it’s a casualty of there being so few characters in comparison to even the original Duel Savior (although half of the DS characters were just the enemy grunts with very limited movesets), but I miss getting to fight tiny or giant versions of characters in massive battle orgies. One on one is alright, but the engine honestly isn’t deep enough for that to stay too entertaining for long. Basically, I miss fighting the little blobs… and the giant screen covering blobs as well.

If you’ve never played any of the Savior games before, Otome Crisis is a pretty good starting point. It doesn’t really use any of the existing plot, and there are enough modes to give you a taste of that old Duel Savior magic. It still feels like Giga somewhat mailed it in though. I like the improved difficulty, but with the added items constantly raining down, it feels like they shot themselves in the foot there. It was still fun for about a week, but Duel Savior remains the original and the best, at least in my books, and even aside from that, Xross Scramble just has so many more options and variety in its gameplay, making Otome Crisis a distant third. Still a fun game, but it just doesn’t really compare.

I’ll probably churn out some kind of exhibition video once the ruckus from BMW and the new shows for the Spring season dies down, but honestly… I’ve already pretty much done everything there is to do with this game in under a week and there’s really not too much more to dive into here.