…Really want such a terrifying-looking Totoro knock-off? I’d think it’d be likely to induce nightmares…

Yes, my copy of Dream Club (the much-disputed additional “C” definitely not being part of the title) turned up in the mail yesterday, which of course means I’ve been playing Mana Khemia.

Holy non sequiturs? Not particularly, my copy of the sequel was bundled into the same order as Dream Club, and prompted me to notice that (a) I’d not played the first game yet, and (b) I’ve bought pretty much every one of these Gust titles that NISA have put out – that’s the three Atelier Iris games and the two Ar Tonelicos’ (though I had to search to confirm owning the second one) in addition to Mana Khemia – yet I’ve only actually got around to playing the first Atelier Iris game.

Whoops.

This detour from me writing about Dream Club is brought to you courtesy of me not having invested much time into the game thus far, and as such I’ve yet to formulate much to actually say about it – it’s a game in which you try to seduce hostesses, one of whom loves skating and movies (particularly “Toad of the Rings”, apparently), and whose ideal man is Tarzan, who is pretty much everything most the people playing this game isn’t. Ouch, no wonder she ditches you into the friend zone in order to run off with her lesbian lover whilst having you assassinated (note – this is probably a lie, though I maybe wouldn’t put it past that girl with the eye-patch).

Also, every time you start thinking that the game really isn’t all that squicky, they throw at you something like Bunny Girl Day.

I bet you can’t guess her character type!
It doesn’t look particularly offensive, but then she leans right over into the camera for a prolonged period of time. Then she got drunk ^^;

Actually, It’s not that bad of a game by any means – I’ll probably play a bit more of it at some point. There is a lot to it that betrays the fact that developer Tamsoft have been throwing together budget games for the longest time now, being one of the most prolific studios published on the Simple 2000 label (most notably The Oneechanbara series) – anything that’s not a character model is laughably low-polygon and badly textured, and some of the spot effects are kind of janky (the dissolves look really strange simply because they get them almost right).

Then there’s the karaoke minigame thing. It does like Live for You, in so much as you are performing actions alongside the girl who is singing (in this case, playing simple instruments rather than leading the cheering section). The problem is that anyone who’s played anything else vaguely bemani-esque is likely to find the timing on the button presses really frustrating – you don’t press the buttons when things overlap, but rather a fraction of a second later than your finely homed skills instinctively tell you that you should be pressing them. I’ve only actually heard the one song thus far – it was cute, but entirely forgettable. I was paying more attention to the button-press indicators than I was the dancing, so I honestly have no idea what the choreography is like.

Still, I do draw a mean ketchup-chick atop an omelette. Well, the game would have you believe that – I thought it was pretty wonky myself (it’s really, REALLY had to hit some of the finer angled lines accurately on the analogue stick), but the game still awarded me 5-stars for it. Thank god of leniency.

Really, though, the games a non-budget title in terms of the amount of content rather than the amount of polish it presents it with.