#remake rage

Eruca’s original design was, according to the devs, meant to not make her look like every other princess, and the PC devs’ explanation for why they changed it was just, “We wanted to do something different this time!”

From my view having now played 95% of the goddamn thing before taking an extended mental health hiatus in the middle of the ~new~ ending, at this point the creepy fanservice and general mistreatment of the entire female cast is only about 30% of my beef with it.

The other 70% is that aside from the voice-acting and adding said fanservice, the budget for the game seems to have been about $3, and the translation budget was apparently about 25¢. It actually looks worse than the original in many places due to graphical glitches and cutscene blocking that’s awkwardly unchanged from the original despite a larger field of view, there are a number of features that are clearly only half-finished (most obviously the minimap- it literally just displays rectangles with the x,z coordinates of the exits marked), arguably the biggest balance problem of the original has actually been worsened, and I’m pretty much certain the new content was written in a rush by people who had never played the game and only read summaries of the plot.

There are a few major convenience features like left-right-arrow page scrolling on menus and allowing you to pick what node to go to from a bad end, and at least in English the voice-acting is solid. But that’s the extent of the credit I’m willing to give it, and even said VA is tarnished by a) direction that often seems to miss the point of scenes, lines, and characters, b) the vastly blander and less interesting new translation, and c) the incredibly jarring experience of a character with a portrait who talks in full voice clips having a conversation with a character without a portrait who talks in monosyllabic grunts.

It’s painfully obvious that Atlus did not care at all about this game, and slapped together just enough to say they’d remade it to wring a quick buck out of the IP before the 3DS became completely obsolete. And that’s why the fanservice: they put in anime boobs to sell it to the crowd who buy games for anime boobs, because they figured that was the biggest return on the least investment.

Several things, actually! I got roped in by another person who wishes to remain anonymous, and stuff’s paused at the moment while I scream about PC, but we were planning several patches:

One that’s just another editing pass to fix the typos and rank mistakes and tweak a few wordings and cut some of the gratuitous ellipses

One that’s just a rebalance, especially of the equipment stats

One where I fanfic to my heart’s content and do things like make Liese’s boyfriend less of a stalker, because I’m mad with power

The modded version where everything dies in one hit, for anyone who doesn’t want to fight stuff (which isn’t nearly as much of a reduction in hassle as PC’s friendly mode, but oh well, I don’t know how to change the engine)

Anon, please. I am a very busy woman, and my time is a valuable commodity.*

$10 and all “drowning my sorrows” ice cream and chocolate expenses paid, or no deal.

My god this remake hit rock bottom, and then decided drilling past that was now a good idea. Give it long enough and I guarantee it’ll hit the earth’s core.

I wouldn’t call it rock bottom, because they did at least add some real gameplay quality-of-life improvements (like quest markers, difficulty levels, and being able to push boxes diagonally).

But from my perspective what it seems to have going for it, in its entirety, is:

quality-of-life gameplay improvements

sound quality increase on the music

portraits have different expressions (that I don’t like much, but at least it means no, “*sob, sob* :D”)

voice acting is apparently not terrible?

chibi portrait pack (that you have to pay for, and only covers the playable party, Lippti and Teo, and Nemesia)