Senkou no Clarias
Entry posted by Clephas
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It was remarked by Veshurik recently that it seemed like I wasn't really around anymore... but that isn't really the case. I still play VNs, but the fact is, I don't play many new VNs that I haven't already blogged about yet. I simply can't muster enough interest to play most of the new stuff that comes out, simply because there just isn't that much that looks interesting coming out at any given time. Senkou no Clarias, by Team Baldrhead, was the game I thought would break through my boredom, and while it succeeded at the time, it was nonetheless a depressingly underwhelming game in the end.
First, the gameplay... this is perhaps the most easily maligned part of the game. I say this because Team Baldrhead made two cardinal mistakes... choosing to partially replicate the much-maligned Baldr Bringer battle system and linking character affection to both path choice and character ability progression. The first is problematic to rally insult, because it was obvious they were trying to pose the game as Escaflowne to the Baldr series being Gundam. It was made clunky because the mechs were supposedly magical constructs without most of the purely mechanical aspects that made the Baldr series combat so fluid pre-Bringer. However, this makes for an incredibly frustrating experience when there are enemies who can mix ranged and melee and your characters are solely one or the other outside of special moves. Not only that, but the counter and evasion systems are downright awful... yes, it is possible (with a really long learning curve) to master the system. However, the difficulty of doing so is definitely a put off for someone who enjoyed the intuitive nature of pre-Bringer Baldr series.
The latter issue is more problematic... Linking affection to both heroine choice and mech growth was incredibly stupid and short-sighted on the part of a team as established as this one. In a lesser company, we might see this kind of mistake, but in this case, it was jarring. It essentially creates a situation where the player must keep heroines crippled to let you pick your favorite. If you are following Sherry's path, this is actually not much of an issue, since the game naturally provides more in-story opportunities than any other character to build her affection. However, if you are picking Yakumo - or god-forbid - Camus, there is a distinct need to cripple the growth of all other heroines almost completely.
Now, down to the story... tbh, this is something that will be very, very familiar to fans of early isekai fantasy anime and manga. The protagonist finds a weird egg in an exhibit in a train station in London and gets transported to a magic-driven otherworld full of mechs and sorcery. There are a few reasons why this setting is hard to suspend disbelief for. One reason is that there is absolutely no way whatsoever that Sherry's position in the setting would have worked out the way it did in a nation as autocratic as Seirem. The missing traitor's daughter? Prison or execution, one or the other. No powerful (and Seirem's monarchy is powerful) monarchy would ever leave such an obvious scapegoat to live the quiet life trying to clear her name.
Another issue is Ruu... while it might make sense for a neutral country's nobility to send their kids to school in a powerful neighbor's capitol, for them to allow a former enemy (as in less than a generation in the past) to do so beggars the imagination, given that there were no apparent diplomatic concessions made one way or another.
I'm not even going to mention Yakumo or Camus' situations beyond that it was obvious they were essentially stuffed into the burrito of this story for the sole purpose of providing a variety of heroines.
In terms of actual storywriting, setting aside issues with setting and character backstory, I actually found it relatively enjoyable, though those issues I just mentioned constantly scraped at the edge of my consciousness. There were a few issues here too, though. In particular, splitting up the sub-character events even though they don't effect the story to any significant degree struck me as unnecessarily immersion-breaking. Another issue is that relatively little attention is given to making you actually care about the heroines. Most chapters consist of a very brief setup for the chapter's drama before you get plunged into battle. Heroine characterization is kept at a minimum due to this, mostly relying on the optional (and free of context) scenes you can pick on the free days.
All in all, while I just bashed this game up one end and down the other, I don't hate it... I just felt like Team Baldrhead made a bunch of immersion-breaking and amateurish mistakes in how they handled this game. A lot of the methodology for progression used here is methodology that was rejected by fans years ago in other genres. The fact that the heroine paths have relatively little difference and all end the same way is the final nail in the coffin.
In conclusion, this was a game that showed signs of potential all over the place but fell well short of where it could have been, despite an obviously large cash investment on the part of Giga.
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