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Kikouyoku Senki Gin no Toki no Corona part 2: Mini-review


Clephas

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blog-0907546001436520253.pngFirst, I should state that I couldn't stand Yumina from Yumina the Ethereal, so I dropped the game about halfway through. I hate it when a ditz is the main heroine, and Yumina is one of the most air-headed heroines I've ever run across... and I've played a lot of moege. As such, I went in without a lot of the knowledge you are supposed to gain in Yumina's late-game, so my experience will be slightly different from those who played Yumina.

First, Touka, the protagonist, is a former chuunibyou patient and perpetual loner... until he gets involved with the 'deep night' phenomenon which is the focus of much of the story. He evolves from there into a caring young man who loves his friends and new 'family' (Corona) deeply and will do anything for them, which makes him about par for the course with a lot of gameplay-VNs with a similar concept, lol.

One thing that drove me up the wall about Yumina and has continued in Corona, is the fact that tachie (the sprites) do not change expression or posture, and instead they just appear on the screen, the characters' emotions expressed by a portrait in the lower left corner. This is a huge minus for presentation and a large reason why I think Eternal's games are hard to get into, despite some unique and interesting characters. It is like placing a TV on a doll's head that creates a copy of their face to express emotions for them, and it is kind of disturbing, for someone accustomed to VNs in general.

The three main heroines are Corona (the dragon-girl), Tokino (the warrior-leader of the group), and Muriel (a perpetually lazy blonde who states from the beginning she has no intention of working or doing anything useful, tossing all responsibility for Corona onto Touka and Tokino). Corona is a really straightforward deredere imouto/musume character who adores the protagonist and has a very childish aspect throughout the VN. Tokino is a very serious character who is devoted utterly to her cause... but has her own hidden weaknesses. Muriel is... a lazy, hopelessly degenerate pervert who lives only to eat and sleep, throughout most of the story.

I'll be straight and say this story doesn't utilize several of its cliches very well... Touka and the others are strong characters with a good dynamic, but in exchange, the pacing of the story is badly messed up by the battles, which will frequently last hours at a time before allowing you to go back to reading the story. I've probably said this before, but creating an in-depth story in a VN requires that actual storytelling not be too broken up by the gameplay. Unfortunately, in this case, Corona fails badly.

Another downside to the story is the side-skits... there is almost no sense of continuity between them, and the side-characters' stories basically end in 'alternate world' h-scenes and events that are never referred to in the main story. There is a definite sense of laziness to the way they put this together, and I hate the essentially false nature of these stories, as I prefer to avoid this kind of impossible 'what-if' story whenever possible in a VN like this.

The actual central story is fairly strong... and I imagine it is much better if you just load a clear save and skip all the battles from the beginning. While, at first, fighting some of the bosses gives you a sense of accomplishment, by the time you are halfway through the game, there is a sense of 'Oh god, save me from these battles!' to the entire experience. Part of it is the clunkiness of map-movement on the battlefields, and another part of it is that you have to constantly manage your units' elemental affinities in order to keep yourself alive, which leads to battles seeming even longer than they should be.

You are saved near the end, somewhat, when Touka gets his skill that lets him eliminate all MP use by other characters for the rest of the turn, thus letting you use Tokino's 'control' skill to stop all enemy attacks and Corona's barrier-stripping attacks (one strips a single barrier layer from all enemies, the other strips all barriers from a single enemy... considering what HP looks like toward the end, you almost have to use them if you want a chance at beating the bosses without lots of unit rotation). However, this leads to a huge gap in the experience of battles, as you see Touka and his group wiping the floor with the more powerful enemies and the other units struggling with the others...

To be frank, I found some of the earliest battles harder than the final battle, which probably says a lot about the game's design in general. You can basically kill the true last boss just by using Eri's skill that seals Order skills and Touka's attack that hits LP directly over and over on all difficulties. Really, you could do that for ALL the bosses after you get those two skills on those characters, if you had the patience, lol.

Despite my criticisms, there are things I can recommend about this game. As I said above, the basic story is quite solid, for all that it misuses one of the most overused fantasy tropes in existence, and the character dynamic is quite strong. However, it falls into the trap of many VN-gameplay hybrids of the type, in that the gameplay becomes a slogfest, ruining a lot of the experience.

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