Thoughts on Ougon Musou Kyoku

Yeah, been sitting through my backlog for a while, and by the end of the day being too lazy to make any posts. I thought I'd just break back into blogging again with something simple. One game from C79 I've been investing a lot of time into is the new Umineko fighter, Ougon Musou Kyoku. I've blogged about it before its release, because I was excited about it. Figured I'd give some of my impressions about the game and such.

Me playing online with someone, we disconnected at this scene.

First thing I want to say is the animation and overall quality of the game seems really nice. The art style of the sprites reminds me a lot of Blazblue. I've seen a lot of people saying how characters are too similar, but I don't see this at all. Speaking of characters, this game has a rather small selection of them.

There has been a sprite of Bernkastel found in the game data, but nobody knows if she was a tossed concept, or if they plan on adding her later. The cast is small, but this is a fully voiced doujin game (the same seiyuu for the anime were used for the characters). I'd imagine sometime like this took a lot of time, and they wanted it out by C79, so they had to make do with this small list for now. I'm sure they'll have updates along the way. Melty Blood was missing a lot on its first release as well, and look how far it's gone.

Matches are fought kinds like Versus games. You pick a pair of characters, and you hold one in reserve while one fights. You're also able to switch between your two characters every now and then. However, unlike the Versus series, you can't use assist attacks, and every character has their own individual special bars.

The matches aren't composed in rounds, rather it's one long round (you have 3 health bars) to determine the winner. It kinda reminds me of Darkstalkers. One unique mechanic this game has is the "meta world" activation. Every character has a passive ability while the meta world is activated, and every character has a specific special that can only be used while meta world is active. You activate it by pressing all 3 attack buttons at the same time while having a full meta meter. Your opponent can cancel yours out if they're not stunned and also have a full meta meter. It's interesting, because you not only gain a bonus from your main character, but your partner character as well. This means you can mix and match characters to have nice bonuses, like extra damage plus lowered amount of hits needed to break the opponent's guard; you'll be dealing out some decent damage even if they block, and their block will break faster than normal.

Other than that, the game doesn't seem to have too much depth. Most characters have fairly simple combo strings, but dash canceling seems like it'll be a big part of this game (I just recently learned when to dash cancel on Eva Beatrice to make her combos long and keep pressure). But it's fun, and I doubt it's near completion yet, with revisions along the horizon. 

The music is great, as to be expected from an Umineko game. It has well known tracks from the game such as Goldenslaughter, which goes really well with the fighting. As for game modes, there's not much. There's a story mode, where you get different scenes and endings depending on what pair you decide to use. Some of the stories are funny, and a lot of the stuff isn't even hard to understand with some basic Japanese. Some of the stuff is just dialogue pulled from the VN with a few altered parts here and there.

This is canon

 There's practice mode, and then there's versus. Of course, everyone wants to play online, right? When you play a fighting game, you usually don't want to spend your whole time fighting the CPU, right? Most of the time they get too predictable in their patterns and such. This is where the game falls. The netplay in this game is really bad. I mean, it's obvious they only tested their netcode on Japanese internet (which is a lot faster and has superior infrastructure to American connections), but it's simply horrible. The Japanese seem to be having some issues with it as well, from what I've read on their forums. Sometimes lag isn't even the problem, the game goes completely smooth, but the connection simply drops. When playing online, my connection is sometimes good enough with people to get 1 full match after 3 disconnects, but with others it's 1 full match after 10+ disconnections or so. 

I really hope they fix the netplay in this soon. It's a fun game, but it's no fun having to attempt for 20 minutes of failed matches before getting one full match with someone. If you'll excuse me, I'll get back to disconnecting with more people.

~ Kirari ミ★