Mugen Souls Review

Posted By Robert G. about 6 months, 2 weeks ago

Mugen Souls Review

Shinkara: Mugen Souls , 8.9 out of 10 based on 14 ratings

Mugen Souls, the latest title localized by NIS America, has a few strokes of esoteric wit wrapped in adequate gameplay design. But with each moment of brilliance, we get hours of cringe-worthy scenes to contend with. You star as Lady Chou-Chou, the tweenage, self-proclaimed Goddess of the Universe, who plans on traveling to seven different themed worlds on a flying castle and turning everyone and everything into a furry, subservient bunny rabbit, or peons, as she calls them. Even the worlds themselves will become your subservient slave and bow to your every whim.

Yes, I just wrote that.

See, Mugen Souls is supposed to be a comedic game that, for all intents and purposes, lampoons the stereotypes of both the RPG and the Shonen-anime genres. Some of the humor found in Mugen Souls pretty much amounts to in-jokes regarding typical game tropes–breaking into a house and smashing all of the pots you find is perfectly acceptable, because they expect heroes to do that. We also get enough double entendres to make Mugen Souls dangerously close to an eroge sim without the dating.You know, typical stuff from Compile Heart.

Let me just stop right here for a minute and keep this clear: sexual pandering is fine when it is done in moderation or kept within certain contexts. For example, having jiggle-physics as a major feature in your fighting game or making a spin-off where they all play beach volleyball is not moderation, nor is it a tasteful context. The same can be said about Mugen Souls and, to a greater extant, almost every game made by Compile Heart and Idea Factory. Putting teenage characters in a bath with bubbles covering their private parts, all the while making fun of such imagery through dialogue, is just not funny and comes across to me as missing the point of what sexual pandering is.

Mugen Souls tries hard to make itself goofier than Disgaea, but fails at any form of subtlety to the task. In fact, everything in the game screams like it’s copying the popular tactical RPG. We have megaloamiac anti-hero protagonists with less than noble goals, quirky and insane costume designs, and a touch of heaven and hell iconography thrown in for good measure. Even your peons, which are monsters you transform into fluffy rabbits, remind me of the Prinnies.

Lady Chou-Chou is a clever little girl.

Similarities aside, Mugen Souls does stand on its own two legs regarding its gameplay. A turn-based RPG at its core, Mugen Souls follows a battle system reminiscent of Quest 64, in which all of the characters are in an open field, allowing for free movement to hit foes. Mugen Souls also provides a number of different special modes and attacks that add complexity to the game. Unlike Agarest War 2, this title keeps things from becoming overly obtuse, striking a fairer balance to keep the game from being frustrating.

That does not mean that each feature works perfectly. One of the hallmark aspects of combat is the “Moe Kill” mode, in which Chou-Chou essentially tries to charm the pants off of enemies through flirting to transform them into peons. Chou-Chou has the special ability of changing her persona, so to speak, altering her appearance and personality to become ego-centric, ditzy, masochistic, or even a sadist. The satirical attempt to look at these “roles of anime girls” aside, knowing which stereotype to charm enemies with becomes crucial in using Moe Kills, since doing so will net you an increase in the number of peons you collect.

The system does have drawbacks, namely how hit and miss your personalities are on monsters. The game tries to hint at how the monsters would respond to outrageous dialogue options, but for the most part it turns into a crapshoot reminiscent of the Megami Tensei series, gambling on the fact that you can negotiate successfully with demons before they rip you apart without much knowledge as to what they respond to. Compound this with the fact that enemies can also be turned into items, or go berserk and become harder to kill if you misstep, then battles would become a bigger chore in the long run.

The complexity in combat is there.

Of course, the goal is to gain more peons, which is essentially what you grind for in Mugen Souls. Peons are used for a variety of functions on your flying castle, from upgrading your castles weapon capabilities in a turn-based, rock, paper, scissor mini-game, to creating stronger peon companions to follow you around. Mugen Souls gives you plenty of customization options for these minions, although they are almost always inferior to the principal cast. You can also use Peons to kill high level monsters, providing you have enough of them to throw a Peon ball at, like a fluffy Katamari of death. But because of the difficulty of recruiting peons, and their somewhat passive function regarding the main story, using Moe Kills becomes superfluous to the point of being almost unnecessary to play the game.

So with Moe Kills being almost useless, the only other modes of note is the “Special Kills,” which do a number of crazy, over-the-top effects to basically kill enemies in one or two hits. Another method is to bounce enemies across the battlefield like pinballs to achieve extra damage, exploiting elemental crystals that give off status effects on monsters, and even combining and changing special abilities to customize attacks. Mugen Souls is essentially a mechanical candy-coated mess, but at least most of the gears work in conjunction with each other this time around and don’t come off as tediously unnecessary. You need to learn how to stun or eliminate large swaths of enemies, not button mashing your way to victory through sheer attrition.

Sadly, that is where most of the praise will end. While the gameplay of Mugen Souls is mixed at best, aesthetically it is a hodge-podge of unbearably poor production values. I am not talking about the in-game portraits and stilted cut-scenes–they are well drawn and pop with great color. I am talking about the issues in showcasing those graphics outside of the 2D plain. The 3D modeling looks pretty basic, utilizing cel shading detail last seen in 2004. What’s worse is that the themed worlds you travel to suffer major draw issues that cause blurring while moving across the map. Considering the worlds themselves are fairly plain in most respects it’s not a major loss, but the game just looks cheap all the same.

The voice acting is decent, but the translation is clunky at best, making scenes that are supposed to be funny completely nonsensical. I also have to say it’s a bit off-putting to hear a young girl plead for a monster to clasp a dog collar on her and burn her with a candle. The effects are pretty good though, although nothing is truly memorable and the score is… well, I admit it is kind of catchy, despite being J-pop tunes seemingly thrown in to offer another dose of sugar-baked goodness on the cuteness scale. It also only comes up during a few cut-scenes and when enemies go hyperactive after failing to Moe Kill them, so the soundtrack is not overused.

At best, Mugen Souls is a playable, and possibly enjoyable experience for fans familiar with Compile Heart’s work. At the very least, it is a formulaic RPG that emulates the best bits from its superiors with no success whatsoever. It is hard to take the game seriously, but impossible to get behind because of its excesses, and that makes Mugen Souls a victim of its own design.

Mugen Souls is a PS3 exclusive that was provided by the publishers for this review. It was played for around 20 hours, and the full game is about 40-50 hours long.

Shinkara: Mugen Souls

By Taylor Hoyt

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Mugen Souls Review

By Robert G.

At best, Mugen Souls is a playable, and possibly enjoyable experience for fans familiar with Compile Heart’s work. At the very least, it is a formulaic RPG that emulates the best bits from its superiors with no success whatsoever.