[PS Vita] Walpurgis no Uta – Review

Title: ヴァルプルガの詩 ~Walpurgisgedichte~
Developers:  3Daisy & Prototype (Port)
Release Date: 23rd December 2015
Length: ~15 Hours
Links: Official Site, VNDB

Izumi Shio’s peaceful life suddenly ends one day when she is attacked by a monster who looks an awful lot like a transfer student she knows after she wandered into an abandoned mansion one afternoon. She is saved by twin werewolves who reveal themselves to be two of the most popular guys at her school. However, since that incident, something strange starts happening to Shio at the same time as a mysterious illness begins to strike down many of her town’s residents. Will the truth reveal itself upon the arrival of walpurgisnacht?

Characters

Izumi Shio

Shio is the protagonist of the game and considers herself to be an average girl who likes to cook. She lives with her brother and cares for him dearly, making sure that she does the household chores and ensures that he’s eating properly. She has a fear of dogs but can’t remember why…

The Mysterious Young Man (CV Kakihara Tetsuya)

The mysterious monster whom attacks Shio in the mansion. He transfers into her class under the name of “Shiga Takashi” but acts cold and indifferent towards Shio. As a monster he consumes the flesh and blood of humans as sustenance and possesses great magical powers. He claims that he wants Shio to become his fiancee as promised but she has no recollection of this.

Oogami Toramaru (CV Ono Yuuki)

Tora is the older of the twins and is generally the most leader-like, aiming to become head of their clan in the future. He possesses great physical prowess. Tora enjoys eating the food Shio makes for him and his hobby is collecting pretty rocks that he finds on his patrols. He has a very straight-forward but kind personality and is happy to become friends with Shio.

Oogami Ryuumaru (CV Ono Kenshou)

Ryuu is the younger of the twins and is happier to stay in the background. He tends to be quite quiet but is sharp with his words, leading others to believe that he’s mean. However, Ryuu is simply speaking his mind and sees no point in beating around the bush. Unlike Tora, Ryuu isn’t as physically strong but instead can summon a fog that has healing effects, however using his power can leave him exhausted and make him unwell.

Izumi Suou (CV Hirakawa Daisuke)

Suou is Shio’s older brother and is a complete sis-con that loves to spoil and dote on Shio. He has a weak body and was in and out of hospital a lot when he was younger, however, his experiences encouraged him to pursue a career in medicine and he now works as a doctor both at the local hospital and Shio’s school. He claims that he doesn’t like any sweets expect those that Shio makes and often refers to his younger sister as “Princess”, much to her embarrassment.

Artwork

Artwork and character design for this game was handled by Suzuken, whom has generally worked with Daisy2 on their titles, as well as working on some older BL games.

Sound

Opening: Walpurgisgedichte
Takashi’s Ending: The Light
Tora’s Ending: Dedicate
Ryuu’s Ending: Make a Fresh
Suou’s Ending: Only One
All songs by John Holiday

The game contains 25 BGM Songs

System

The game system is very standard, with many of the choices being fairly obvious. However, there’s quite a few endings (and also a route that you need to repeat with slightly differing choices early in the common route in order to get a CG) so I’d recommend a walkthrough. There are also unlockable short stories although a notification pops up when you’ve unlocked a new one. To get the final short story simply read all of the other ones and then return to the main menu to get the unlock notification.

My Thoughts

If I had to sum this game up in one word it would be “cheesy”, that’s not to say that there’s necessarily anything wrong with it though. The game is kind of like a cheesecake – you know that it’s filled with cheese and can taste it in the background but it’s so sweet and delicious that you can’t stop yourself devouring it anyway. It’s actually quite nice to get a game like this every once in a while that you can enjoy without having to think to hard about it and was the perfect respite between two quite story-heavy games.

I’ll start with Shio first – while she may not have the strongest personality, I think her caring nature really shone through and she definitely wanted to help others the best she could. I suppose the fact that the guys in the game are all super protective over her explains why she tended to rely on them a lot but I wish that the game had allowed her to try and help fight alongside the twins especially, they do bring this up in one of the routes but it could’ve been in the common route.

The twins play a pretty important role in the game and it’s fair to say that the common route almost feels like the prologue to their routes alone. That being said both of them are utterly adorable so I didn’t mind~ Older brother Tora is similar to a lot of the confident ore-sama types that Ono Yuuki often plays but has a kinder, almost puppy-like side to him which I really liked. His route generally feels like the “right choice” out of the twins and it feels like there’s a little more effort put in there. The romantic progression of this route was a little frustrating but the payoff was good and Tora’s ending is spicy haha. I actually couldn’t make my mind up whether or not I liked Ryuu’s route at first but the more I think about it, the more I appreciated how much it matched Ryuu’s personality and his bonus story was great. Personality-wise I liked Ryuu a lot, especially his sharp quips. I think the only problem with the twins’ routes is that they split really late into the game.

On the other hand, onii-chan Suou kind of gets screwed over. It’s quite obvious from the beginning that he’s the “odd one out” with the other 3 love interests being supernatural beings. He doesn’t have a lot of screen-time in the common route compared with the others and his route was probably the most disappointing. I’m a fan of older brother characters so I was a little disheartened, especially as the romantic development wasn’t that great either.

Finally is the mysterious monster/Takashi (he does have another name in the game but maybe it’s a bit of a spoiler to use it?). This route is as cheesy as it comes but is a great example of exactly the kind of routes I (secretly) adore the most. I won’t go into detail but I really enjoyed Takashi’s route as a whole and thought that there was pretty decent romantic progression and while the ending was a bit of a cop-out, I was like crying happy tears. His interactions with Shio in his actual route were pretty great too~

The sub-characters ranged from “okay” to “great” with Usa and Saruta from the werewolf clan being my favourites. I especially appreciated that the game gave us voiced bonus stories for all of the sub-characters!

I was actually really shocked by how many CGs are in the game too considering how short it is – well over 100 (not counting variations). While some are SD or sketches used for the short stories, there were more than enough for each character and I really loved that each character got a little movie section with a couple of CGs; one was in the middle of a route but the others were at the end. I think these just show that there was definitely a fair amount of effort put into the game. Also, while Suzuken’s style isn’t my favourite and there are certainly some inconsistent CGs but the majority of the artwork was quite nice.

The voice acting in the game was also pretty good – all 4 main characters are voiced by pretty well known voice actors and they did their jobs well. I particularly appreciated hearing Ono Kenshou – I wish he was in more games though! The BGM was also okay but not that memorable though. It was weird hearing the OP/ED songs in English and while I appreciated the fact the everyone had their own really-fitting ending song, they were just sooooo cheesy! I always find things to be cheesier in English as opposed to Japanese for some reason? Like, this is probably just me being weird but it’s the main reason why I prefer to play otome games in Japanese in general…

As per usual with Prototype’s ports, there’s no new content over the original game but their programming was impeccable as always and I feel really stupid but I only realized in this game that their “skip to next choice” option stops at unread text so I managed to save a lot of time but also felt like an idiot because I’ve wasted hours skipping through some of their other ports (´；ω；`)

However, Prototype do always include some nice wallpapers for your PS Vita so here’s a small selection:

Final Thoughts

My Score: 7.5/10

If you feel like playing something adorable yet cheesy and don’t want to think too hard about the story then this game would be a great choice. The characters are all pretty good and the romance is decent; Takashi’s route feels particularly romantic and if you’re weak for the whole “promised lovers” spiel like me then you’ll love it. The game is also pretty short so makes for a good in-between if you’re tired of darker/more dramatic stories since the less you think about the specifics in this one the more you’ll enjoy it as it tends to employ the “Power of Love will Save the Day!” trope.

However, on the negative side, Suou’s route is noticeably weaker than the others so if you’re after your fix of older brothers then maybe look elsewhere, although he might juuuust be creepy enough to warrant playing his route.

(I probably should say here that the game generally fits many of my preferences and has characters and route-types that I particularly like so a lot of people probably won’t enjoy the game as much as I did.)

After playing this game I’m pretty sad that 3Daisy haven’t made anything else but I think I’ll try out their sister company’s Sangoku Rensenki games at some point, especially as there’s going to be a switch port with additional content released too.

My review for Haitaka no Psychidelica should be out next Friday (1st June). I’ve also managed to finish Collar x Malice too so will post about that at some point. The only thing I’m sad about is why I never played this game earlier?! It’s so good that I’ve been eyeing up the shop sets for the FD that comes out in July already – I have the animate set of the original (and prefer buying from animate in general) but the stella set of the FD has such a nice illustration of Kei, hmm…

Thanks for reading as always!