Bebpo
Banned
Well, since someone had to give Image Epoch and N1's latest dungeon crawler a try, I thought I would take one for the team and against my greater judgment play a game with cute moe girls in NSFW poses; oh the horror.
And what do you know, it's actually a fun retro dungeon crawler that's a little perverted.
The game feels like a mix of Etrian Odyssey x Baten Kaitos battles & your average visual novel in Japan where it's 1 guy + a bunch of stereotype girls (the loli, the pissed off all the time one, the tomboy, the glasses girl, etc...).
The game takes place in Hell, and these girls can't go to hell because even though they were destined to be criminals in their lives and eventually go to hell, they died young before they could commit crimes. So they're given a chance to redeem themselves and be reincarnated if they can clear the 4+ dungeons of the tower. As the first day on the job warden-like figure in charge of these girls you have to lead them through the dungeons of the tower.
The dungeons are traditional dungeon crawling. Locked doors, treasures, save points, random encounters. Mini-bosses, big bosses, etc...
What makes the game unique and interesting is the battle system. It's a luck based gambling system.
Each girl has a set of attacks. As you beat your girls (will get back to this later) they learn new attacks. In a way you could say their attacks are their "deck"
When you go into battle, every turn the game randomly rolls the deck of each of the 4 characters and the dialogue lines tell you which attack they will do.
The key is that instead of all 4 characters taking their turn each round. Only 1 character acts per turn. So you look through your 4 rolled choices ("cards") and pick one and it does that. Some of them allow multiple characters to attack like the one that says "attack x 2" at the bottom in the above pick. This means two characters will do their basic attacks. But whoever the other character who attacks is besides the speaking one is random. So it might be your mage who has terrible physical attack. Chance there.
That being said the game has several ways to balance this because otherwise it'd be way too luck driven and annoying.
1. At the start of every turn you can use 1 item before you choose your attacks. So you can heal characters, revive characters, cure status every single turn. This helps, especially when bosses 1 hit KO your character since you can just use a revive item next round.
2. You can switch characters once you have more than four. So if you think of them as decks, you can cycle through your 8 available cards each turn and the chances of you finding SOMETHING that's useful is pretty high.
3. There's no documentation on this, but it's not all pure chance. The game thinks and pulls out attacks when they are appropriate. For instance if your DEF girl rolls a "GUARD ALL CHARACTERS FOR 1 TURN" skill, the chances the boss is going to do a devastating attack this round is pretty high. Likewise when encounter an enemy that's weak to fire, your mage will roll "FIRE MAGIC ATTACK" first turn pretty much 100%. So the game helps you along.
All of this is important because the difficulty is EXTREME. Basically EO levels. The enemies will hit hard (they all get to act every turn even if only 1 of your chars does!) and the bosses are insane with instant kill and huge all party attacks.
Because of this the game is old-school DQ GRIND-A-THON. You're gonna be constantly walking around in circles next to save points (because you can rest for free there) to build up XP for leveling (increase stats, HP/MP) and to build up MONEY AKA OP.
Money is the most important thing in the game. If you used a cheat code and gave unlimited money from the start the game would be broken and no fun. Money is what balances the game.
At save/rest points you can shop using OP to buy items, which you can guess are fairly useful since you can use 1 per turn. Though between enemy drops, stealing items from enemies and chests you tend to have lots of items all the time.
You can also punish your girls. For a certain amount of OP you can use various weapons to playfully tease your girls. Each weapon has a set of 4 attacks/skills it unlocks for each character and you get a new weapon at the end of every dungeon. For instance the first one is spanking girls with a whip. When you whip the girls you get a goofy little mini-game that's pretty inoffensive. The best you score on the minigame the more points you get and those points fill up their attack/skill bar. If you get "very good" on all the hits, after doing a punishment twice you'll level up the bar and unlock the next attack or skill for the girl.
Oh and while you're doing this you chip away at pictures of the girls in umm creative poses in order to try to distract you and mess up your mini-game timing skills.
The thing is that these are not cheap at all. And each time the attack/skill bar goes up a level, the OP cost to use that punishment and unlock that attack/skill tier goes up. Better weapons unlock better attack/skill sets but are more expensive from the start.
For instance here is the pricing for the first two sets that I've seen:
Whip lvl 1: 10 OP per use
Whip lvl 2: 30 OP per use
Whip lvl 3: 60 OP per use
Whip lvl 4: 100 OP per use
Electric shock lvl 1: 100 OP per use
Electric shock lvl.2: 150 OP per use
So you can see how having to use each one twice and on each girl can cost A LOT when you're getting like 10 OP per enemy in tutorial dungeon and 20 OP per enemy in the first dungeon. Especially if you are buying any items.
Which pretty much means you grind a lot. But grinding is, like EO and DQ and good retro-games, a fairly enjoyable grind. The battles are short, there's no loading, you get item drops, they require a tiny bit of brain power so you're not just mashing O.
But yeah, at the end of the day the game is a grindy dungeon crawl with HARD enemies and little bits of story as you progress through the dungeons. The story is entertaining enough. One of the Famitsu reviewers said he didn't like the story because everyone treated him badly. And yeah I see where he's coming from. If you've ever seen that anime/game where the girl treats the MC like shit even though she secretly like him. That's pretty much how all the girls treat you at first, which kind of makes sense because they're prisoners and your their warden so they hate your character. Whether the girls grow to love the main character through his constant beating them with objects is something I do not know, but I guess the answer to that will tell if the story is a creepy porno story or just your average harem anime or maybe there's really not much difference between the two?
Visually the game looks good enough for the retro style. The art style is enjoyable and the battles are moving stills but if you can enjoy EO it looks fine and keeps them paced quickly.
Audio is a whole different story. The OP song by Yuzo Koshirou (who I'm guessing does the whole ost?) is solid as is the full voice acting. The problem is that like The Last Ranker, Image Epoch has THE WORST SOUND TECHNICIANS IN JAPAN. The game is full voice and 200megs apparently. This is because the voices are recorded at like 2kb/s. Every piece of dialogue is scratchy and sounds like shit. I can't even play with headphones because the scratchiness claws at my ears. Last Ranker also had really LQ voice recordings. UMD is 1.5 GIGS, USE THE SPACE, KTHNX. You'd think in a game that is trying to be a bit of a visual novel-like where there's a bunch of girls with full voice saying moe things that they wouldn't make the voices sound awful, but IE really fails in this department.
So yeah umm, it's an enjoyable, though repetitive and grindy dungeon crawler. If not for the challenge and battle system it wouldn't be worth a look, but if there's one thing Japan shows us they know how to do with this game it's
