Before we begin I feel compelled to let you know that this is not a review, I'm not trying to tell you whether or not you should buy this game and this post is not going to be super researched or in-depth either. This isn't a formal critique either, I'm not going to be looking objectively at this game, at least not entirely. This post is simply my scattered thoughts about the game so please go into it expecting this.
Mirror is a game that recently got out of Early Access and was released fully on Steam around a month ago. It's a Match-3 Puzzle Battler with RPG and Hentai aspects. We'll get into those later. I got this game at a point where I wanted to play something like Hunie Pop, a Match 3 with attractive characters but with a better artstyle than Hunie Pop since I don't particularly like looking at that game. That's when I found this.
Mirror is an interesting game. Though I don't think it will reach the acclaim that Hunie Pop did, it still has its fair share of merits as well as problems that are worth discussing.
The game has 8 total main characters, all female. These main characters are who each story focuses on but you don't play as any of them. Instead, you battle them in the Match 3 style that Hunie Pop repopularized as a means of combining it with other genres. In this case, the Match 3 is being used as a battle system, where different tokens give you different effects depending on the combos you put together.
There are Physical Attacks, Magic Attacks, Healing Gems, Rage Gems, and Super Gems. Each of these activate a special ability when you use a power token version of each of these. For example, let's say you do a 4 in a row combo with physical attacks. That will give you a two hit strike on your opponent and it will generate a power token, denoted by the halo surrounding it. If you then use that token in another combo, it will activate a special ability, in this case in relation to physical skills.
One change made from Hunie Pop is that, like most Bejeweled Style games, you can't move any single piece as far along one of two axes as you want, instead you move it one space over in one of the four cardinal directions.
Now, on the fourth character, I thought this was a design flaw. Because I hadn't beaten her yet and I assumed the game continues to get harder after her, I thought the difficulty curve would smooth out if they let us do what Hunie Pop did in this case. In hindsight, however, the game is built very well around this and that particular character is the problem, not the game in general.
As I said, the game has a total of eight girls. I don't remember all their names but they're easily identifiable by their species or occupation. In order they are the dark elf, the Miko Archer (or Priestess if you don't know much about Japanese), Chinese Zombie, the Ice Dragon, the Orc, the Samurai, the Egyptian Queen, and the Nun.
Now all of these characters have quirks to their designs that make them each at least somewhat unique, even if they all end up relying on the same tricks. However, the ice dragon was a particular difficulty spike due to the way she's handled. In order to understand this, though, we need to understand the quirks of all of the characters.
The dark elf is a speed-based thief character whose abilities surround avoiding damage. She is rather easy overall but that's to be expected since she's the first opponent and you don't want the first enemy to be too overwhelming for new players.
The Miko Archer is a sort of pyromancer whose primary strategy revolves around keeping you too busy with health management to deal damage. This can be mildly frustrating if you don't know her trick or if you don't upgrade your stats but once you realize that you just have to kill her as quickly as possible, this becomes far less of an issue.
The Chinese Zombie is primarily DPT, or Damage Per Turn. She does have a small amount of healing on her physical skill but other than that, she's primarily a DPS Racer. She's like the next grade up on the Miko Archer, since they have the same strategy but the Zombie does it somewhat better.
The Ice Dragon is a Board Locker, she locks many of your pieces under ice barricades so that you have to break the ice in order to properly damage her. She also does a fairly decent amount of damage, requiring some priority on healing, and she also has a frequent use of healing skills, making her a bit of a tank.
The orc is a sort of barbarian, she has a lot of health and deals a lot of damage but she has no healing skills and takes a lot of damage quite easily. So the best strategy for her is to get big combos, heal whenever necessary, and win the match overall.
The Samurai is also partially a board locker like the Ice Dragon, however, she has no healing skills so DPS Racing her is a much more viable option.
The Egyptian Queen was a little bit difficult due to being essentially the next grade up on the Archer and the Zombie. She had quite a bit more healing and she dealt significantly more damage. However, she also has more control of the board due to getting rid of crucial pieces with her own rather than simply covering them in status effects.
Finally the Nun is a support character. While she does do some damage, it's not really enough to justify frequent healing and most of her abilities surround healing so it's a much better use of turns to just attack relentlessly with as many powerful abilities as you can.
The way the difficulty curve went out, is that it rose steadily up until the end of the battle with the Zombie, then it sharply rose due to the Ice Dragon, then it dropped somewhat on the Orc and Samurai, then it hit one last peak at the Egyptian Queen, then it fell significantly at the nun.
The problem with the ice dragon is that she's too good at avoiding damage. Unlike other characters, who beat me at least once due to overwhelming damage output, the Ice Dragon's main problem is that she prevented damage so much and healed so frequently that when I lost consistently against her it was always because I ran out of turns and not because I wasn't surviving well enough.
Initially I wanted to blame the turn limit, but that has its own problems. Namely, that if there wasn't a turn limit, enemies that were tanky would either get beaten eventually or get you locked into the game until you lost. It could even result in an endless game by stalemate.
Not only that but since she's the only character that this was a problem for, she's the only one that would be majorly affected by the removal of a turn limit. Other tanky characters like the Nun would be way too easy due to lacking damage options, and enemies that are primarily DPS who kill you without resorting to endurance wouldn't be affected at all.
After ruminating on it somewhat, my solution is to reorder the characters a bit. To me, this doesn't seem too demanding since all of the characters and their stories are so disconnected from each other, with a small exception for two, and even then reordering would be easy so it's not exactly a demanding goal.
First I would keep the dark elf where she is. She's fine as a first opponent and good all around as a starter. Then I would put the nun right after to give players a taste of a character who is just sustain and no damage, then the Samurai for her board locking ability, then the Miko Archer for a taste of a stronger character, then the Orc for a neat surprise, then the Chinese Zombie, then the Ice Dragon, then the Pharaoh.
I believe this order would result in a much smoother difficulty curve and wouldn't feel so cheap since one of the hardest characters is not being front-loaded among the first four.
Now as far as stories go, all of them are put together well in the sense that all of them are internally consistent and don't have any plot holes but I suppose that's to be expected when you're writing eight disconnected stories that amount to about 5 scenes each including the endings.
The only stories that you could argue are connected are the Dark Elf-Nun, and the Miko-Samurai. The Dark Elf and Nun are only connected in terms of world, since characters that appear in one also show up in the other.
The Samurai is hinted at to be the daughter of the Miko if you pay attention to certain clues, which you'll only pick up on if you got the good ending for the Miko. However, apart from that, the stories seem to be almost entirely disconnected. Only one story takes place in China, only one story covers Orcs, only one story happens in Egypt, and the Ice Dragon's story is ambiguous at best.
Now, as I said there are hentai aspects. While there is some nudity in the actual battling, that is generally only there as a mechanic to improve the pace of battle, by increasing damage dealt to and by her, it effectively just increases the speed at which the victor is chosen.
However, after completing 3 battles with any given character, you can go into a sort of sex mini-game where the goal is to cause as much pain or pleasure as possible. Causing a majority pleasure will get you the character's good ending and majority pain will give you the bad ending. Completing a fourth battle will allow you to do the sex mini-game in free-play mode but there's so little to it that the only reason you'd do so is to see some animations you didn't get a good look at during the story portion.
The endings themselves are pretty hit-and-miss. I liked the bad endings for the dark elf and the zombie because they're delightfully tragic. However, the good endings leave a bit to be desired. The dark elf's good ending makes no sense to me from a character perspective since I really don't see a reason for the demon guy to fall in love with a thief. Even if he doesn't care about the wealth that she's taking it doesn't make a lot of sense for him to go stealing with her, especially since it is his character motivation to avoid trouble as much as possible.
This is a problem exclusive to this character, as the other stories either don't really give the impression of romantic attachment in the first place, like the Miko and the Nun, or romantic affection makes sense in the context of the story, like the Zombie and the Dragon.
The problem with the Zombie's good ending is simply the fact that there's nothing to it. It's simply 3 still frames of sexual intercourse, nothing about the characters' motivations or fates are really revealed here. Granted, the Samurai's good ending is fairly similar, the major difference though is that it suggests a happier future for the couple rather than just rounding out a mission or whatever.
The Miko's endings were probably the best in the game if I'm being honest. The way the ending storyline is set up is that the Miko is about to give birth to a demon baby and the shape the baby takes is dependent on how she feels about the events that just took place and her general fate. The bad ending has the baby spawn as a monster that kills her and everything around her because it was effectively a rape baby. However, the good ending has the baby birthed as a normal human, if somewhat violent infant because when you performed the act you considered her feelings. It's the most solid overall because the endings are both the result of how you treated her and not coated in contradictory character motivations.
The Ice Dragon's is similar in this regard but I didn't like those endings. The good ending has her become a full dragon instead of remaining humanoid and her romantic interest stays with her as a Dragon Knight. It's touching in a way but it didn't resonate with me personally. However, the other ending is basically just an NTR story. I hated it for that very reason. Granted, it's possible you were supposed to hate it because it's the bad ending, however, there's a difference between an ending being just reprehensible and an ending being an emotional gut punch. One is disgusting the other is powerful.
In fact, this ending was so disgusting to me that I didn't bother trying to get the bad endings for any of the others on the off chance that any of them are just as bad or worse than this one. So from here I'm only discussing the good endings.
The Orc's good ending is a bit sugary which made it distasteful to a certain extent but it at least makes logical sense between the characters and the sex mini-game. The Samurai's good ending is exactly as sweet as I believe it should be and, personally, taking this scene entirely by itself without the context of the rest of the story, I would say it's the kind of outcome I'd like for a potential future relationship. The story leading up to it is fairly good overall but doesn't aid that goal due to how many clearly fictional elements make it clear that it would never happen in reality.
The Pharaoh's good ending is really weird. The only way I can describe it is that it's the most like a modern anime of any of the endings I saw. The problem with it is just that it's too ridiculous and trying too hard to be comedic. Comedy isn't necessarily a bad thing, not even in video games, the problem is that the rest of the stories were completely serious and grounded by comparison. Sure you have to suspend your disbelief about the mechanics of the world but once you do the stories take themselves seriously. Even the Samurai's story, which is probably the most comedic overall, is so because of the time traveling aspect, an actual samurai girl is somehow transported into the future and ends up at an anime convention. However, even with this ridiculous premise, the story follows through in a fairly straight-faced manner, it's not trying to over-hype the ridiculous aspects of the premise, it's just taking the premise and following through in a serious way.
The Nun's good ending is pretty weird to the point that I'm not entirely sure if I even got the good ending. I'm pretty sure the game told me I got the good ending but after watching it play out it seemed rather bitter-sweet compared to the other good endings.
The thing about it is that it turns her from a complete prude of completely devout faith into a woman of devout faith who's fine with taking a dick every now and then. Granted, since I didn't see the bad ending, I don't think, it's entirely possible that the bad ending results in her becoming a sex slave or something. However, it doesn't change the fact that this good ending is probably the most melancholic of all of the good endings.
It's just tonally out of place compared to the other stuff I saw, and we don't really have the excuse that this story is simply darker than the others since the story of the Chinese Zombie is just as dark in terms of tone and the Miko has a story that plays to almost all of the same major beats.
In fact, the only ones that you can say have a lighter story than the Nun's are those of the Ice Dragon and the Samurai. The Ice Dragon's starts out much lighter than the other stories but gets progressively darker over time, leading into the quietest good ending and the most egregious bad ending. And the Samurai's is generally light fun all around, which is to be expected given the modern aspect and the Anime convention and all that.
The Nun's story is probably the most disturbing second only to the Miko's but its tone is roughly the same as all of the other serious stories, even if some of the other ones are less disturbing on an implicit or explicit level. This is why I don't understand why the Nun's good ending is so much darker than the other good endings. Most of the other stories are fairly dark but after all that the good endings end up being hopeful. This one is just weird.
If you're only in it for the TNA, there's plenty of that, the only major issue is that this game is on Steam and that means that the genitals are covered by some weird cartoon mascot thing and the nipples are replaced by some kind of flower, so the most titillation you're likely to get is during the battles where the character's clothes are partially damaged but not completely destroyed. So if that's all you're here for, it's too neutered to be of any comparison. Even the Otaku's Fantasy visual novel got that right at least outside of Steam.
Those are my scattered thoughts on this game. Is it good? I'd say so. Apart from the Ice Dragon which in my opinion is the character that constitutes the majority of this game's flaws, there's some fun to be had here pretty much everywhere else. And if you're here for the gameplay, you can battle all the girls individually as many times as you want after the third battle and after completing all of the stories there's also a challenge mode you can try if you feel up to the task.
Also, minor thing I want to point out that I didn't really know where to state it is that this game uses a lot of the same icons as the game Hell Girls. I don't really know why but given that both games are in a relatively similar genre and have a similar gameplay formula, I find it difficult to believe that this is just a coincidence.
Have a nice day.
No comments:
Post a Comment