QCF: Mugen Souls

The universe is truly a space that will never be fully comprehended: terrain so wide that humankind will labor eons and eons in order to fully understand its magnitude and nature. Imagine if you will, however, a universe structured specifically around seven planets and a magically gifted little woman who aims to subjugate all who reside within it. Developed by a faction of cult Japanese development house Idea Factory, NIS America brings us latest JRPG from Compile Heart on the PS3, Mugen Souls.

The novelty of choice is refreshing with Mugen Souls being available in the pre-holiday season with titles like Doom 3: BFG, Assassin’s Creed III, and Skylanders: Giants. However, Mugen Souls doesn't do its genre any service and in the long run ends up being nothing more than tawdry theatrics with little to no appeal.

Needless grinding, obtuse crafting systems and lengthy investment times are just a few of the many issues found within your average by-the-dozens JRPG. Mugen Souls ostensibly blazes paths in different directions with turn-based combat kept in mind that attempts to address these issues within prior contemporary titles. The ideas found within the core gameplay are unique and have a lot of potential to renovate the threadbare conventions of turn-based combat, and even work to synchronize with the style and sensibility of the anime culture it works to cater to at times. These fresh new takes unfortunately fall flat once applied. Frustratingly so because the features have plenty of legs to run on beyond their initial concept except that they’re executed in a spectacularly sloppy fashion.

The main gimmick lies within the title’s titular main protagonist, Chou-Chou, who is able to enslave sentient beings, objects, and locations to her will through her special abillity, the Moe Kill, with the use of three chosen phrases that summarize an action within a ritual to accomplish the deed. The catch is enemies and potential love slaves will only do this if they find the pink haired Chibi wildly attractive, and the realization of this limitation sets in early within the game’s opening when introduced to the dynamic. Chou-Chou’s retort to such limitation is to physically manifest aspects of her persona into different forms with physical features and personality traits that work toward earning the affections of her opponents and successfully subdue her foes into loyal servants. It's novel at first but quickly becomes more of a drain than a benefit.

The eight different personalities can be switched between at any point on field, and have a burn pool when switching in battle. When you initially start using the ability in battle however, the burn pool takes ages to replenish to a point where it’s usable again. The regenerative time for the pool painfully drags on, almost to the extent of even including the ability to be superfluous with how often you’ll be able to use it. It isn't so much an issue later within the game, but it’s incredibly despondent through a significant portion of the first half. This glaring flaw puts a real dent in experimentation with the choice of personality switching and results in the practice being far more risky than rewarding. Each battle will contain different enemies with different affinities for attraction that align with one of the eight personalities and which one will be the most successful for your Moe Kills, with no earthly way to predict which persona will be needed to accomplish the seduction. Granted there are large crystals within battles that will affect all of the enemies in one swoop, yet you’re still burdened with the inability to properly decipher the appropriate dignitary and will end up going nowhere half the time. Even when the correct personality is used it’ll still take a couple of tries to get the results you're shooting for because the effectiveness of their appeal to your enemies must be leveled up via their “charm” level through successful Moe Kills. Which will lead you to grind (that’s right) even though the need for grinding isn’t necessary for physical character stats. The Moe Kill feature will need a good sum of hours of your investment in order to render it an effective talent. This flaw is compounded by the fact that it’s a required one to progress the game, one that will need to be frequently used.

Aside from the main flawed gimmick, the battle system has the potential to be different but ends up being just as half-hearted. The combat/movement of Mugen Souls is actually reminiscent of that infamous Nintendo 64 RPG, Quest 64. Each character is able to move within a controlled circular radius so that you can position them tactically in order to launch an offensive or defensive decision against any foe in the hostile cavalcade. A quirky aspect is that when you’re near one of your partners you’re given a “link” option that dynamically changes every time you use it regardless of who you link with. The link is comprised of a cinematic attack with the assistance of your teammates against the enemy that generally depicts a reference from anime culture that plays out in a humorous reel at first but then becomes a tiresome gag after the seventh roll of the same move. The “blast Off” which has you bounce enemies off each other through a ricochet effect that executes a combination attack and can conjoin with small/big crystals is largely ineffective yet again in the early portion of Mugen Souls. The flaw mainly lies with the physics set in place: any momentum that plays out within a blast off seems to defy any impressionable logic with whatever players would expect the mass of any enemy to be, and it doesn’t really pan out all too well simply from the lack of reliable physics that the tactic demands. The only other aspect for battle outside of direct combat is space ship combat, which is essentially a game of delegating text commands that will have a success rate in response to what the enemy space ship will do. These varied scenes of gameplay are easily the most forgettable of the experience as they’re nearly impossible to fail and the player will find themselves gradually choosing commands at random, simply to expedite the dull mechanic onto the next scene.

The visuals are contrived in design, though that may be unfair to say when critiquing the use of an anime aesthetic. The features involved do absolutely nothing to reinvent the wheel, and the same goes for the plot. The laundry list of insipid tropes that fit the clichés of modern anime are doled out like an uninspired checklist. The use of Lolicon conventions from anime culture gets a bit too perverse, almost to a disturbing level, and we’re not talking from the perspective of casual western anime fan but can even be hard to stomach for individuals who fall into the label of Otaku status.

The graphics are incredibly choppy and will have you tweaking the sensitivity of camera scope and speed in order to combat the inexcusable frame rate that will stutter in a frequency that begs the question of just how dependable Japanese quality assurance is. Stage design is also uninspired; it's mostly flat land terrain with walled-in areas featuring bland textures and desigsn that are lergely forgettable, and just end up becoming an ugly blur of color when moving thanks in part to the defective frame rate. The soundtrack is fusion of J-pop with some catchy metal licks and will please the ear holes of anyone inundated within the fan base.  The music is effective for the settings and style of the context in where its applied but it ultimately fails to really stand out with any memorable tracks or any need to play Mugen Souls with the volume up, and the voice acting is unfortunately some of the worst you’ll hear in localized game of this nature in recent years.

The Holiday season is jam packed with choices that will keep any player busy with hours and hours of investment. These hours that we invest into games are more and more precious, and in a genre that’s notorious with monotonous gameplay and pandering design choices Mugen Souls introduces some unique concepts but doesn’t follow through with any of them. If you need to satiate your appetite for a Japanese RPG, I suggest investing in a Vita and Persona 4 Golden and passing this particular title on by.