Pentavus clears his backlog! Mugen Souls Review (PS3)

Compile Heart and Idea Factory are back at it again, bringing the charm of light hearted comedy to the roleplaying genre with this colourful title. Creating a main character that’s a master at switching her personalities to sway the opinion of her soon to be loyal subjects her way, mixed with a cast of characters each bringing their own charm, ranging from an angel trying to prove she’s evil to an android songstress.

The story is a fairly straight forward one. Chou-Chou wants to become Undisputed God followed by her crew, Altis and Ryuto. They set on their way to subdue and claim the Hero and Demon Lord of each of the 7 planets in the system using Chou-Chou’s ability to turn beings into Shampuruu, bunny like peons, thus conquering the universe.

The game plays in one of three different areas. The G-Castle (your spaceship), down on a planet or inside the Mugen Field. The G-Castle acts as your central hub for purchasing equipment, items, creating characters, interacting with the various NPC in your crew and selecting where to go. This is where most of the character development happens and most of the silly interactions do tend to happen during skits on the G-Castle.

Creating new characters is very limited at first as most of the customization options for characters you create are locked in the Mugen Field. Even if you create characters early does not penalize you by having to start a character over. You can reincarnate previously created and select a new class for them, letting them retain some skills and some of the attributes they have earned leveling up, unfortunately they do start back at level 1 but much stronger than a basic level 1 character.

The overworld map of each planets follow the aesthetics and theme of the worlds, either it be a grassy plain or futuristic world, and can be linear considering each segment is not very large. All battles come either from story triggers that can be spotted on the map from a special marking or are triggered by touching an enemy on the field.

Battles are played out on an open battlefield. All actions have a radius or a clear defined strike area making it easy to line up your attacks and try to hit as many enemies when using special skills. The basic attacks can cause link attack between characters, which makes them a valuable asset even with the multitude of special abilities available. Even though they can be fun at first, they do get repetitive quick. All skills can be skipped with R2 which is useful to increase the pace of the battles. There is a surprise/ambush system for battles depending on how the encounter was triggered as well if it’s not a story based fight. If you attacked the enemy on the over world, you will get a surprise round on the enemy while if an enemy touches you from behind, you will be ambushed, straight forward system but effective. Something note worthy about the battle mechanics is a pinball like system were you can knock enemies around on the battlefield, making them bounce on the field limit, other enemies, your allies and against crystals to create a combo of damage and can be used to distance enemies from you or get them closer to other ally units. Talking aobut the crystals, they have an AoE that can be either both positive and negative, ranging from no movement to healing every round.

The skills are pretty straightforward and revolve around the basic elements (fire, water, etc) and in addition, also revolve around the 8 personality traits used in the game (Hyper, Graceful, Masochist, Egotistical, Sadist, Bipolar, Ditz and Terse). The personality trait of the skills work much the same as the elements, being resistant to one while weak to another. Each unit has its own trait which affects the effects of the skills it uses or gets damaged by. If you kill an enemy using a skill that has the advantage in the personality chart, the chances of subduing them and turning them into peons is greatly increased. You can also try to turn enemies into Shampuruus while they are still alive with Chou-Chou “Moe kill” ability which lets you combined three key words tied to each personality and charm the enemies into joining your forces.

Peons also play a role in battle as the main protagonist, Chou-Chou, can use abilities in battle tied to the amount of forces she has in her army. This feature is called a peon ball and grows in power with every turn in battle until used. If the mass reaches critical, it can trigger on its own and wipe out all your units as well. This effect can be prevented by having Chou-Chou give commands to the 3 other units in your party that must be done every turn or otherwise, the peon balls grows even more unstable.

A fun part of the game is the G-Castle battles. The battles plays out much like a big game of Rock, Paper, Scissor along with a few side rules. Attack skills deal damage, defence skills will prevent attacks from connecting and fast attack skills will increase in damage against an attack skill or go off before a defensive skill gets activated. You base stats for your ship is directly connected to the amount of the Shampuruu collected and which type of Shampuruu they are. The more you have also opens up more skills for your ship.

The Mugen Field, mentioned earlier, has a lot of extra goodies to be unlocked within it. During the main scenario, they do introduce it and force the party inside to achieve a certain goal but ultimately, this area is optional. Acting as a sort of trial stage, you go through a series of encounter as you delve deeper and deeper in the dungeon. Inside the dungeon, you will end up encountering all of Chou-Chou’s personalities and they will provide a lot of information regarding the heroine of the game’s ability and background which is something the core scenario barely scratches. On top of getting more about the heroine, you will also gain Mugen Points which can be spent on alternate classes, CG Gallery, BGM Gallery and various other upgrades for all the characters. If the basic encounters are too easy for your taste, it also allows you to set certain modifiers like “no items allowed” or “no special skills allowed” which makes the encounters harder but do have a bigger pay off at the end of them. The Mugen Field is the only aspect of the game that I can see offering some replay value once the core story is completed as it delves into Chou-Chou’s personalities.

Overall, the game delivers a quirky and fun story as long as you can overlook an excessive amount of battles and some issue with the frame rate.