Monster Hearts R (PC)

Once again, I've been able to get ahold of a game released at a recent Comiket, and once again, it's a shooting game. This time, it's a shooting game about three monster maids: a vampire maid who is just that, a werewolf maid who is also a ninja, and a Frankenstein's monster maid who can summon a giant robot. Though there are obviously a few common systems no matter who you pick, their weapons and playstyles are all so different, they could almost have come from different games. But first, we'll get to those elements that are the same whoever you play.

Firstly, there's the power-up system. There's various differently coloured kanji that might appear while you play, but the two most important ones are the orange ones, that power you up, and the purple ones, which power you down. The orange ones gradually fill up an experience meter, until your weapon reaches level 5. You can keep collecting them once you're at level 5, but now every time the meter fills, it makes three big bonus coins appear on screen. These coins are worth so many points, that, should you be playing for score, this is the main thing on wich you should concentrate. The purple ones are fired in patterns by certain enemies like bullets, and obviously should be avoided like they are bullets.

As for the differences in characters, obviously, there's the differences you'd expect between their normal shots: the vampire has a regular spreading vulcan shot, the werewolf has a shot that just goes straight ahead, but is a lot weaker than you'd expect from a weapon of this type (due to this, she requires a slightly non-traditional, counter-intuitive playstyle that I'll get into shortly), and the Frankenstein's monster slowly fires powerful drill-shaped rockets, with faster lasers accompanying them as she powers up. The real differences between the three come from their super attacks, which all work differently, and require very different tactics.

We'll start again with the vampire, whose super weapon surrounds her with a bullet-absorbing forcefield for a few seconds, after which a bunch of familiars will storm across the screen, their number and the power of their attacks being determined in correlation with the amount of bullets absorbed. After about 10-20 seconds, it will have recharged, and can be used again. The werewolf's super has two different forms: tapping the button will simply make her release shurikens in a circle outwards, using up a third of the power meter. Holding the button while the meter's full, though, will make a bunch of shadow copies appear all over the screen, before they start shooting shurikens in every direction for a couple of seconds. This is the quickest super to recharge, taking only a few seconds to come back, which, along with her almost useless normal shots, so playing as the werewolf means relying on your super as your main form of attack.

The Frankenstein's monster's super is the coolest, but also the hardest to really use effectively: it summons a giant robot, vastly increasing your firepower, and also letting you absorb a bunch of hits, until it's had enough and goes away. How long you get to use it depends on how much it gets hit, though obviously, it's hitbox is huge, and it's pretty hard to avoid bullets in this form. What makes it hard to use, though, is that it takes several minutes to recharge after you summon it, so you're left betting on your own skills: can you survive until the boss without the robot, or alternatively, do you want to uuse it to storm through the stage, and hope it doesn't take too many hits and can get you through at least some of the boss fight too?

With all this in mind, is the game actually any good though? Well, it has a lot of problems, like how every time you get a game over, the time it takes and the amount of stuff you have to skip through to start a new game is way too long. Also, as a result of the three characters being so completely different in playstyle, the initial learning curve is pretty brutal, even for an STG. On the other hand, though, despite the minor problems it has, and how frustrating it can be in general, it's a game that once you start playing, it can be hard to stop. You can easily while away the hours without even realising. Maybe it's wasted on PC with this strong a hook, it could probably rake in the coins in an arcade setting! Anyway, if you're ordering a copy from Japan, there are probably way better games you could buy before it, but if it ever gets a nice convenient download release, then I definitely recommend picking it up.

Knights of Valour 3 (Arcade)

It's strange that even to this day, none of IGS' arcade games have been ported to home consoles, the only reason I can think of being that no console publisher wants to bother with a Taiwanese company? But still, their beat em ups were always pretty ambitious, taking the inventory system from Capcom's Dungeons and Dragons beat em ups, and gradually expanding on the idea, eventually culminating in this: Knights of Valour 3, which brings various console game concepts and brings them to the arcade.

The biggest and most obvious thing is the use of memory cards. Though this is actuall pretty common in a lot of post-2000 arcade games, this is, as far as I know, the only beat em up that uses them. What does it use them for? For saving your progress in the game, and the stats, equipment and inventory of your character. Yes, it is another beat em up with those dreaded "RPG elements". But in this case, I'm willing to be a lot more forgiving than usual.

There's a couple of reasons for this, the least important being that the "progression" is very slow and very gradual, so it's not like grinding over and over to make the game easier is going to be a big thing, especially since there's a couple of barriers to this: firstly, it's an arcade game, so every time you play and die, that's the price of a credit thrown away, so you'd be better off getting better at the game, than waiting for it to get easier. Secondly, the item/equipment shop is only accessible after completing a stage, so there is a minimum barrier of entry before you can unlock new moves and better weapons and such.

The big reason I'm more forgiving, though, is simply that it's an arcade game, and it's not meant to be played the way I've been playing it (alone, on a computer at home). It's meant to be played in a public, social setting, with other players. And I can really see how that would enhance the game greatly: a group of friends, each with their own memory card containing their character, playing every day on their lunch break or whatever, gradually making progress through the game over the course of months. As far as I'm aware, there aren't any other arcade games that offer that kind of long term experience (like I said earlier, there are other arcade games that use memory cards, but as far as I know, they're all competitive, rather than co-operative), and it sounds like something that'd be really enjoyable. And after you've all finished for good, the memory cards themselves look really cool, so they'd be nice keepsakes to hold onto.

If you're curious about this game, it's still worth playing in MAME: it's decent enough fun, and it also looks incredible, but I have to say that, though it's very unlikely, I really hope I one day get to play it as it was originally intended, since the developers really did make an arcade game that offers and experience you can't perfectly replicate as a home game, even though the game itself could easily be ported to any of its contemporary home systems (Knights of Valour 3 was originally released in 2011).