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[Review] Omerta ~Chinmoku no Okite~


MaggieROBOT

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Sometimes, I want to pick a game with a setting that I'm not used to read about. It's good to try something different once in a while, right? Medieval, fantasy, steampunk and robot-infested future settings quickly catch my attention, but I need an extra push to try something more mundane, more post-apocalyptic or something like this game. Mafia stories. I understand about mafias as much as know about cars (as in: nothing, seriously I tell them apart by color), but the art was so pleasant to look at, so why not? Of course, the BL part was the other push. Good thing what awaited me was a cool and very badass game.

 

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Why Ugajin (glasses guy) is there with the heroes with locked routes? He must feel so important...

 

The story follows our protagonist JJ (center in the above pic), a famous hitman that always do his job right. One day, he's given an assassination mission by the mafia that pretty much controls the region, King Caesar. Said mafia will probably start a war with the opposing mafia, Dragon's Head, soon, making the choice to involve himself with them a bit dangerous, but the job pays too well to be ignored. Too bad the wrong people were killed, the target escaped, JJ was blamed for all of it even if he did nothing wrong and and now the guys from the biggest mafia around are pissed off. To make things even worse, the wrong people that were killed happened to be the parents of one of our heroes, Azusa, and after he saw JJ in the crime scene he started to follow him around to find a chance to kill him.

Wow, lots of things already happened and this is like 15 minutes into the game. The rest of the game also jumps to one action scene to the other with not very long parts of slow building up in between (some exceptions in certain routes), to keep you always entertained. The scenes are packed with regular gun fights with no absurd tricks or superpowers involved and the author makes the scenes longer giving us a lot of gun trivia. Since I only know about guns through Resident Evil games, I was a bit lost when sometimes the attacks were identified by ammunition and not by character mid fight, but I got the hang of it with time. In fact, the guns are so important that you'll notice that each hero weapon of choice kinda matches their personality.

On the other hand, like a lot of action movies, it's not uncommon for you to be asking yourself "but what about the plot?". Calling it a charage is a lot of stretch, but each route in Omerta have it's own plot and half of the time it doesn't revolve around what happened in the prologue that I described. The intro sequence serves more to introduce the characters and to show you where JJ stands in this whole mess. And before you can pick your choices, he's pretty much avoiding both mafias and living with Azusa in his shadow.

 

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Better not to pick another snarky choice...

 

Not having an overaching plot can be a bit disappointing for some people, but that's not a bad thing in the least! Having a very good amount of heroes (seven in total) with different alignment, the game gives you the opportunity of explore their life in this harsh world and take a look at both sides of the conflict. Your allies in one route are your enemies in another. I felt their portrayal were a bit too much black and white (one mafia is clearly portrayed as the good guys and the other as the bad ones), but some shades of gray in their morality are in fact present.

As for the routes themselves, the game splits into three routes and only then it splits into the heroes. If you decide to ally yourself with King Caesar, you have tsundere boy Kiryu and seductive boss Luca. If you decide to go to Dragon's Head instead, you have manipulative Ugajin and the boss everyone fear Liu. And at last, if you decide to stay neutral, you have the blabbermouth Tachibana, the guy that knows well how the city works Toudou and our bratty cat-ears-haired Azusa. At first, Luca, Liu and Azusa's route are locked, but they only need a single playthrough to unlock. Order is also not enforced, so you can really read in the order you prefer. The only recommendation I give is to read the subordinates of each mafia before the bosses. And if you think that the prologue's arc is the closest thing to call a true route, let Azusa's route for last. Either way, there's one epilogue that takes things from most routes that is the Grand Ending (as the game itself calls it) of Omerta.

 

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The game didn't gave me a threesome route with these guys, and I'm still pissed

 

The characters themselves are interesting even when some of them aren't exactly likable. This game is tagged with "Villainous Hero" in VNDB, after all. But if there's one character that steals the show, it's the protagonist. JJ is one badass guy in the action scenes, and he stays true to his "killing with no hesitation" nature for the vast majority of the novel. Even so, he's also caring and even a bit naive in the "slice-of-life" parts. Seriously, who would thought that a hitman could be this cute? Well, it makes some sense seeing that he's a dork who lived on the run most of the time. Not many opportunities for normal human interaction.

The romance is done in an very uneven way. Of the seven routes, two follows the "MC was swept away by the hero's affection" pattern, one have more of a "close friends that also have sex with each other" vibe (that I liked a lot), one is the villain route so there's more pity than love there (also nicely done), one have that true canon hero vibe since the very beginning of the route so we could see the love already there somewhat and in the last two the romantic development was so fast that I almost thought that I skipped something by mistake. It's good to have some variation, but in at least two of those I felt the romance very unconvincing. Not that I was expecting epic and fluffy romance in a mafia story anyway. Althought I must say that I was very sad to not have a route with a particular side character...

The H-scenes are very good. Like VERY GOOD. The art in it was so good, the voice acting was also very well done, there's some nice variation of positions (the CGs never felt recycled, just changing one of the guys) and the MC is bottom in some routes and top on others. H-scenes alone, of all the BL games I played, this one takes the prize for me. Of course, since most of the heroes (and the MC himself) are no saints, there's rape and dubious consent in spades in there and I felt quite bad about liking some of those CGs aaaaah, some of them used for threat and domination and not for "love" at least. While this is understandable in the setting, 80% of the time this is done to Azusa, that is the weakest guy, so it felt more like picking on the weak. Not cool. 

If you're planning to skip them without seeing even a glimpse of the CG though, unfortunately they're very randomly located in the game. Not that is hard to see one coming... most of the time. There's a PSP port that got rid of all the H-scenes, but, while it was more than welcome with some rape scenes and some replacements were even more gay than the original, if that was even possible, I kinda missed some of the best H-scenes (I have both version: read the PC one and skimmed through the PSP one).

 

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Stop hurting my precious cat boy please...

 

The soundtrack is nothing special. The tracks were cool, but nothing really memorable. Voice acting was quite good, at least for the main characters and the side characters that had more screen time. I could listen to Luca's voice all day, Kiryu's tsun voice is just adorable and Ugajin have the same voice actor as Emiya Shirou from F/SN (and they sound exactly the same) so the H-scene was... funny to listen to say the least. Almost everyone that don't have a sprite have a cheesy or generic voice, but well, they are generic anyway.

Despite all the problems, Omerta was a fun read and very badass. It's hard to make the MC the most likable character, but here they did a good job. Of course, maybe their portrayal of the mafia world is completely wrong, I wouldn't know any better, but eh, just enjoy this piece of entertainment. Because entertainment you can definitely find here. I hope to come back to review the fandisc, but I have to read it first... I can't wait to meet these boys again!

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1 hour ago, MaggieROBOT said:

Fun trivia: this game is the source of my blog's header.

In the header, from left to right: Luca, Kiryu, Toudou, Tachibana, JJ, Azusa, Ugajin and Liu.

By "source" you mean it's a fanart of that game, or those chibis were actually in it? :o

Once more a great review. Also, I find the idea of randomly all-gay mafia even more amusing than an all-gay catholic boarding school. VN settings FTW! :D

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1 hour ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

By "source" you mean it's a fanart of that game, or those chibis were actually in it? :o

It's not in the game per se, but in Karin's (the developer) official site. So yeah, it's an official artwork!

1 hour ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

Once more a great review. Also, I find the idea of randomly all-gay mafia even more amusing than an all-gay catholic boarding school. VN settings FTW! :D

Hahahaha, funny you said that when I didn't even mention the best part of it: they run some brothels, but there's not a single female prostitute in them, only guys and crossdressers. Gotta love these ideas!

Edited by MaggieROBOT
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2 minutes ago, MaggieROBOT said:

Hahahaha, funny you said that when I didn't even mention the best part of it: they run some brothels, but there's not a single female prostitute in them, only guys and crossdressers. Gotta love these ideas!

Oh wow. :D I think I should push this game to some gender studies people on my university, they would have some fun with this kind of super-masculine/harsh gay world. I would do something about it myself if I had the time. ^^

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*SOUNDS OF BACKLOG GROWING*

This looks so good. ;_;

Why must life take away my free time. I really should become BL Clephas...

...Aside from that. Great Review as always! Keep bringing light to our beloved BL & Otoges.

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I think it sounds legitimately interesting especially since the organized crime world has to a fault been extremely masculine, and, chauvinistic,and explicitly homophobic. Might have to check it out based on that alone. Plus, I like some good mafia shit.

Was it ever translated? Oh and here

Edited by Ranzo
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2 hours ago, Ranzo said:

I think it sounds legitimately interesting especially since the organized crime world has to a fault been extremely masculine, and, chauvinistic,and explicitly homophobic. Might have to check it out based on that alone. Plus, I like some good mafia shit.

Was it ever translated? Oh and here

The translation is partial at the moment. 3 routes are fully translated (both subordinates and one neutral) and the 4th one (another neutral one) is at 90%. But the translator never found someone to insert the translation into the game in the form of a patch, so it was done with VNR user-submitted subs. I have the subtitle file, I can put it here with a guide like I did in the review of Sakuya later on.

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