1598: Filling a Niche

While the “next-gen” consoles are struggling to provide compelling reasons for people to pick them up beyond their launch lineup and a couple of more recent stragglers, there’s never been a better time to be a fan of the more niche side of interactive entertainment — particularly the Japanese “otaku games” that I’m such a fan of.

This week alone there’s Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection and Monster Monpiece (in Europe, anyway; North America has had the latter for a little while already). Later in the month there’s Atelier Rorona Plus, and prior to that we’ve had interesting, intriguing titles like Nippon Ichi’s surprisingly bleak The Witch and the Hundred Knight and Kadokawa Games’ excellent dungeon crawler Demon Gaze.

Hyperdimension Neptunia: Producing Perfection (Neptunia PP for short — stop giggling at the back) is a curious little game that I’ve been playing for the past couple of days. Ostensibly an “idol management” game — a genre we haven’t really had in the West before — it’s actually roughly equal parts stat-building life sim, relationship-building dating sim and visual novel. Unlike the rest of the Neptunia series to date, the game unfolds from the perspective of yourself as a participant narrator rather than an omniscient viewpoint which the characters occasionally break the “fourth wall” of. It’s a fitting shift in narrative tone and perspective, because the relationship between a Japanese pop idol and her producer is a close one, and this is one of the many things the game explores. Mostly I’m just happy for the opportunity to virtually date Noire, but the game itself, while simplistic and straightforward, is proving to be an enjoyable little statbuilder accompanied by a strange “live performance” minigame that I haven’t quite got my head around yet and an enjoyable, characteristically silly narrative starring the Neptunia gang.

Monster Monpiece, meanwhile, I’m yet to boot up but I’m looking forward to trying out. Notorious for its “First Crush Rub” system — I defy you to find a single article about it which doesn’t mention this aspect of the game — in which you essentially have to wank off your Vita while tweaking erogenous zones on pictures of moe girls in order to power them up (a process which, in a somewhat Ar Tonelico-ish twist, causes them to become somewhat more disrobed with each increase in strength), the game is actually, by all reports from people who have actually played it rather than getting outraged about what is, essentially, a fairly minor mechanic, rather good. (That was a clumsy sentence, I know. But you get the gist.)

Monster Monpiece is, at heart, a collectible card game. You’ll collect cards that depict various monster girls, and then throw your deck of up to 40 cards into battle against either AI opponents in the story or live online opponents via the Internet. Rather than a straightforward Magic: The Gathering-alike, the card battles unfold in a distinctive fashion, allowing you to summon your forces into several lanes, then pitting them against one another. Units advance along the “board” and clash if they run into each other, meaning you’ll have to engage your strategic brain and think a few moves ahead in order to succeed. Like I say, I’m yet to actually play it myself, but its mechanics sound interesting and enjoyable to engage with. Plus, you know, Vita wanking.

Atelier Rorona Plus, meanwhile, is a considerably enhanced version of Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland, an RPG-cum-crafting-strategy-game-type-thing by Gust that I started playing a while back but held off playing further upon hearing the Plus version was coming. The Plus version in question features considerably enhanced graphics — the in-game character models now look like their 2D counterparts rather than their little brothers and sisters — as well as tweaked, refined game mechanics based on the later installments of the series (which have, themselves, also had Plus overhauls, but were less in need of them). Again, I’m yet to play this new version, but it certainly looks lovely and I really enjoyed what I played of the original Atelier Rorona, and as such I’m very much looking forward to getting stuck in to this.

So there’s three games to get stuck into over the course of the next month — all of which are fairly lengthy affairs, particularly if you want to investigate all the narrative paths each of them offer. I know what I’m going to be doing for the next little while! Just as well, really, since I’m about to have a whole lot of time on my hands…