Dancing Blade: Katte ni Momotenshi II -Tears of Eden-（dancing blade かってに桃天使II〜Tears of Eden〜）

Let's talk about my gaming habits because this is valuable information that I must leave on the internet for prosperity. As you can plainly tell, I'm pretty far behind on almost every popular game series that has continued beyond the PS1 era. As I mentioned, I was too poor to have more than a couple games as a kid and I also had a pretty long blank when I was preoccupied with real life and trying to figure out jobs n shit. So these days, I'm mostly playing "retro" games (as the kids call em) while for some stupid reason still buying new shit cause you know, nowadays games are strictly, totally, "if you don't buy like RIGHT NOW it's incinerated so nobody else can ever have it" limited.

Oh I'm sure this collector plays ALL his games (wink wink)

Unfortunately unlike the hoarders collectors on social media, I can't afford a giant room filled with games so that means I often have to go through all the shit I bought and figure out what needs to go and at last we get to the topic on hand which is today's game: Dancing Blade: Katte ni Momotenshi II.

As I noted when I played the first game, these "games" are basically animes with a few selectable clips that can be beaten in under an hour. So when more packages showed up at my door, I knew it was time to go load this anime up and get it prepped for the Gamestop dumpster.

Liked the cover but you know, I ain't got a game room, much less a game house.

I don't know how well the first game sold (lol the poor sods paying 5800 yen on day one) but they were probably planning on this sequel anyway as evidenced by the sneak preview in the first game's omake. It's pretty much the exact same system and once again no way to skip segments you've already seen. In fact, I'm now starting to think the lack of skip capability was intentional as it would be pretty laughable to charge full price and have the poor suckers manage to watch every clip in a little over an hour.

Of course, that just means you're multitasking and waiting instead of just being done with it. In fact, because this game has 7 endings, 3 more than the original, it means even more time wasted. More endings would suggest that there's more content but remember the only difference is a short clip at the end. It has the same number of discs and is still essentially 2 OVAs depending on the first choice. This time you can either decide to stay in the city for the main scenario or go to the sea. Actually, two of the endings were tricky to figure out because you have to go through both scenarios.

What if you eat burritos instead of ramen? That could totally be a life changer! (not really)

At least in this final Momotenshi game, you get some kind of conclusion. I didn't get into the plot for the first game but the whole premise of your journey is that you are trying to find out why Momo was born from a giant peach. The first game pretty much ignored that objective in both stories so at least this time they answered some questions. Unfortunately, I couldn't give a rat's ass about Momo's biological origins so it was pretty much a mediocre anime once again. Oh yeah, I guess you can also enjoy like 10 secs of Suzuna's naked shoulders if that's your kind of thing.

This screen cap does not reflect the core values of this blog.

I noticed Otsu-hime (the girl/mermaid from the sea episode) was voiced by the same girl who did Yue in Memories Off. At the very least, I'll probably check out the drama CD just to get the full franchise experience.

Score: 2 wheeee time to go order some more shit on amazon jp!! out of 5

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

DS Dengeki Bunko Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu（DS電撃文庫 イリヤの空、UFOの夏）

Continuing my public service to the internet by providing witty prose about Japanese only games that no other English speaking person in his/her/popular-gender-neutral-pronoun right mind would play, here's part 1 of Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu. Fucking finally! I managed to slog, mostly half asleep, through this game, part of DS Dengeki Bunko series aka "oh wouldn't it be cool if the DS was like an ebook reader?" (The answer: not really.)

Kindle? Pfft, not nearly enough moe

While I normally play all my DS games on my New (not actually new) 3DS LL (Jhipster for XL), for games in TATE mode, the heavier model puts too much strain on my delicate gamer wrists so I usually bust out my regular 3DS for these occasions. For those not up on gamer terms, TATE is the weeb term for vertical screen（縦画面）primarily for shooters or shmups as the expert Youtube "gamers" (hoarders) call em. Speaking of shooters, this game comes with one in the form of a mini game that uses the touch pen to target enemies.

Extra weeb cringe if you pronounce TATE like Tater tots.

It was ok, about as good as you'd expect for a mini game hidden in a sound novel. I wouldn't exactly rave about it as some awesome shmup "hidden" gem to BUY NOW BEFORE PRICES SKYROCKET!! Or actually maybe I'll do exactly that as I'm looking to purge this one out of the collection. Anybody want my copy for the super fair price of $99.99?

There's also an annoying quiz mini game with questions about the story. Making even ONE mistake requires you to start over and while you can skip 5 questions they come back around again basically requiring you to memorize every single question anyway. Getting a 100% perfect completion is a fucking ordeal but it unlocks an extra side chapter. I know this because I played through the stupid quiz more times than I'm willing to admit to do a perfect run.

I actually read the whole thing and completed this quiz. Yes, I have no life.

All of the mini games are unlocked by finding cards that are hidden by tapping certain words of interest in the story. The cards naturally can be used for a card battle game that apparently supports up to 4 player multiplayer competition action. I would guess that 4 people with 4 copies of this game unlocked all the cards and got together to play against each other probably exactly zero times in this universe.

As for the meat of the game, which is the book, you can read it for yourself free, provided you're fluent in Japanese of course. I did like the artwork which is primarily the reason why I bought this game in the first place (yeeaah, I need to stop buying shit based on the cover). Unfortunately, the music and sound effects are unremarkable and totally forgettable. In fact, I forgot about them already.

I should've checked Metacritic first (pfft, ya right)

While the reviews are pretty good overall, personally this story was just not for me. It was perhaps too slow paced or maybe a bit too unrealistic for my tastes. I don't know what it is but it did serve as an excellent way for me to knock myself to sleep faster than popping some Benadryl. I really wouldn't recommend this one unless you want to waste 20 hours of your life. Or you can just watch the OVA anime through the magic of Youtube. (Content ID so totally legal, right?) In the end, I really regret wasting my time on this... Alrightly then, onto part 2!!

I'm not sure if I was awake the whole 18 hours...

Score: 2.0 but does it support TATER tot mode?? out of 5 (18 hours to complete)

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely