Today’s deck is the Mystical Realm Tarot.
I really dig the… caricature-esque style of this one, it’s very expressive.
Today’s reading points out to how I feel like I can’t properly pursue what I wanna do right now, but reassures that not only will things balance out eventually, it’s inevitable that they will.
Went to pharmacies, the one I went to last time no longer had my meds, and elsewhere the shortages continue.
I didn’t need that in my life, thankfully there was a game I could lose myself in for the rest of the day.
Unison:corD (which I’ll shorten to U:D) is a fantasy game that stands out immediately for two reasons: the first is that it’s not made in RPG Maker but in Light VN, and the second is that it has a character creator.
A 2D character creator. Whatever you do with your character from breast size to appearance will be reflected in the CGs.
When I saw that, the oddly long time it took to decompress made a lot of sense.
Curiously enough it’s not the first thing I’ve played this year with a 2D character editor. There’s another one called 流民娘と始める食堂繁盛記 that’s a restaurant simulator with similar 2D procedurally generated girls AND an in-engine EVENT EDITOR. ALL OF IT IN RPG MAKER.
The game wasn’t anything too crazy, but its technical accomplishments scare me.
Back to U:D, the game starts pretty simple. A fantasy game where you’re a female warrior, you go to the big capital city to the adventurer guild and when you return your hometown is being attacked by weird creatures.
As you explore you find a portal that takes you to a sci-fi setting and this is where the game shows its true colors. You get an AI companion in a ring called UD and mention is made of Gear Liberators, an all-female force made to counteract the weird alien invaders.
Gear Liberators is another game by the same developer, a sci-fi counterpart of sorts to this game with a similar character creator function.
U:D is actually a sequel game. Though to its credit you don’t need to have played Gear Liberators since that game’s story, like this one’s is kinda sparse.
So with UD in your hand you get the objective to go to an island with The World Tree in order to prevent the bad future UD comes from. Would you be surprised to hear that you go there and the biggest invader is there? Would you be surprised if I told you UD goes back to her time in order to make sure her world gets a chance to survive? Would you be shocked to hear there’s a true ending where you reunite back with her?
The story isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s effective because it’s more about the journey. You can actually go anywhere in the map from the beginning. Aside from being blocked in the initial chapter right before the sci-fi twist, you could go straight to the last town if you try hard enough… but that’s not what the story is about.
There’s a LOT of events in this game, and UD will chime in on everything from major sidequests to random conversations. Not only that but there’s a bunch of sub-heroines you meet in your travels.
To mention a few, there’s your childhood friends in your village, there’s an eccentric adventurer that keeps getting stuck in traps, there’s a blacksmith with self-esteem issues and huge tits, there’s a miko dragon girl with even bigger tits, there’s an alraune monster girl and after you finish her sidequest other monster girls appear around the map and you can capture them and they start living in the town where humans and monster girls live together.
You can sleep in an inn until night and peep onto people’s windows while they fuck or even play hide and seek with a cursed dolll that will kill again, you can pay your inn fee with your body but only if the innkeeper is a man, you can work in a brothel where your rank goes up as you serve more clients, you can gamble on who will win in a fight arena, you can get pregnant and your kids will start showing up at your home in the initial village.
And combat isn’t even half bad! It reminds me a bit of Sakura Gozen with how fast it can get and to my surprise it had a weapon-switching mechanic that kinda reminded me of the DQ1 remake.
The defeat sprites for the enemies are brutal too holy shit.
There’s also an option where every combat ends in a one hit kill and it was a godsend as I did a second run to get the true ending (which you only get if you’ve seen all the subheroine stories).
So even if the plot is basic, it’s the fact that it’s a journey and the characters are fun that makes the ending, simple as it is, hit as hard as it does.
And while all of this is happening, it might be easy to forget that your character is a super complex layered dress up doll where ever variant was accounted for in EVERY SCENE. Chibi CG? Combat animation? Overworld? Every single variant accounted for. It actually does wonders in making you attached to the main character.
My only complaint is the controls, it does a thing where you move with the arrows/WASD but then instead of something like Z and X you use the left and right mouse clicks. It’s not the worst and you get used to it (I suspect it was some compromise to make it work in the engine) but it sure is odd.
But not even that can take away the positives. This game is a capital A Accomplishment technically and a delight plot-wise. Easy recommend.