相州戦神館學園 八命陣 – Thoughts

I really do enjoy stories like these much more than moeges. Those games seem to just never get out of the “above average” region for me. Probably the lack of impact a story can have when it’s about daily life.

And lately I’ve been feeling that I’m already spitting out all of my impressions on twitter so when it comes to blogging all I’m doing is summing up my tweets over the past week.

When it comes to Senshinkan it’s hard to not compare it to other Light games, especially as I’ve been playing quite a few lately.

Won’t bother summing up the story so I’ll focus purely on thoughts.

This time around the heroines were somewhat average (maybe a bit above average depending on how you see things) but it was made up with great character interactions and some more side character pairings as seen with in KKK. It’s always awesome when you can enjoy a story whether it’s relaxing or when it’s serious. Some stories don’t do this well and you end up yawning when everything isn’t going to hell.

Talking about this inevitably brings up comparisons with previous works like Dies Irae. I feel like this time around the writing has become easier to comprehend. Things were confusing as hell during the start as usual but once you reach the final route they kindly explain things to you one by one through a long ass conversation about the backstory for the entire thing. Speaking of which there were quite a bit of references to it scattered all over the place, mostly played for comedic purposes.

Guess who won?

The highlight of the story was pretty obviously the final route as every other route really only served to flesh out characters which was by no means bad but wasn’t particularly impacting either.

That’s probably the biggest fault of Senshinkan. Although the final route was great for all of the build up paying off and the final battle was amazing fun to read, it was at the same time more or less the only highlight of the story. The other routes ended up above average at best. Though Rinko’s route was quite entertaining but that wasn’t for Rinko herself. Our protagonist himself was actually MIA for most of the route.

Thank you for being an awesome antagonist

However even considering that part of things, it was still a great game. Perhaps it didn’t quite surpass its predecessors but It’s still a good read regardless.

Another point deserving of a mention is the OST and voice acting. I don’t notice much about voice acting most of the time unless the voice sounds incredibly out of place (e.g. Al’s voice in Madou Koukaku) but this time around I actually felt “whoa, this is pretty well done” during some points of the story. Really makes me think again that voice acting is a vital part of a good eroge. It’s simply unimaginable to go back to reading eroge with no voices at this point.

Will be diving back into Eushully games now. Still trying to reread Zero/Verita and picking up some other old Eushully games before Memoria shows up. Hopefully I’ll make it in time but March eroge releases look pretty amazing so I’m beginning to become worried.