「やっぱりアナタが来た。」
Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Feb. 7 – Feb. 13, 2023).
takehata's productions are imbued with a style that always flirts with the horrific, yet does not completely embrace it. Shi-jigen no Koibito (2011) has inclinations reminiscent of Yume Nikki (2004) and already featured distorted creatures, which carry human faces in their sides and are covered with tentacles of varying lengths. Sometimes, their games lean more towards the absurd with characters whose design is reminiscent of Hoshi from Arakawa Under the Bridge (2004) or those from Hylics (2015). Majin to Ikenie no Shoujo follows this spirit, but trades the 2D over-the-top view for a dungeon crawler exploration and a card-based combat system, probably inspired by the recent success of deck builders.
The player takes on the role of an unnamed character whose goal is to rescue a young girl who has been offered as a sacrifice to a Majin. To find her, the player must navigate down the fifteen floors of a crypt of sorts, guided by the messages she manages to leave via octahedral crystals. Numerous enemies block the player's path and they must be confronted thanks to the various actions learned during the adventure. The combat system is quite straightforward, as the cards have no quantity: they are drawn entirely at random every turn and the player has to make the best of the energy reserve they have. In fact, encounters are particularly sensitive to RNG, especially in the second half of the game, where enemies can apply equally random effects to the various drawn cards: a Sleep effect ends the turn when said card is played, Poison wounds the protagonist and Death causes life points to drop to zero.
Because the game has little room for customisation and the RNG can quickly decide the outcome of a fight, takehata has rightly chosen to never really kill the player. If the character's hit points drop to zero, they can only draw cards that do no damage; the only way out is to flee the fight – and try again immediately. The lack of a penalty removes any dramatic tension that usually runs through a dungeon crawler. There is no reason to care more than necessary about one's deck, since it is possible to brute force the fights. Those are DPS races and the most important resource is HP, which has to be increased by the anthropomorphic mushroom for gold pieces. This forces the player to do all the fights in a floor, which becomes almost too repetitive towards the end.
Majin to Ikenie no Shoujo is indeed above all carried by its atmosphere. The dithering effect gives an esoteric touch to the exploration, accompanied by a sepia and faded colour palette. The game is built on this weird edge, which doesn't completely enter the realm of the horrific. The title is slightly disturbing, but never to the point of offending the player: its main purpose is to show them that they are exploring a different world, that of supernatural creatures, the youkai. The enemies borrow slightly from the works of Kazuo Umezu and Junji Ito. Simultaneously, the dungeon is remarkably clean, creating a constant dichotomy, which ultimately lulls the player's wariness. The last few minutes allow one to understand why the game is shaped by such aesthetic choices, something that the thoughtful player might have quickly suspected.
It is nevertheless a pity that the game halts on a half-measure: if the ending works properly, one remains unfulfilled. Some themes would have benefited from being explored more, to create a real narrative cohesion between the dungeon and why the hero goes down to rescue the girl: the subject is moreover at the heart of Japanese cultural anthropology, where the youkai help to shed light on behaviours and phenomena in Japanese life, as illustrated by Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776-1784) and all the following works. About halfway through the game, the walls become mosaics of rhombuses, which emit a strange light. It is unclear what takehata's true intentions were: it is as if the short hour of adventure was only an excuse to delay the end of the game, but that its content was of little importance. Hylics' aesthetic vision was much more coherent and had no trouble making its own universe distinctive; Inscryption (2020) had also found a justification for its deck builder mechanics. Majin to Ikenie no Shoujo has none of those qualities: it is an intriguing experience, somewhat engaging because it remains short and with a strong ending, but misses its true potential.
Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Feb. 7 – Feb. 13, 2023).
takehata's productions are imbued with a style that always flirts with the horrific, yet does not completely embrace it. Shi-jigen no Koibito (2011) has inclinations reminiscent of Yume Nikki (2004) and already featured distorted creatures, which carry human faces in their sides and are covered with tentacles of varying lengths. Sometimes, their games lean more towards the absurd with characters whose design is reminiscent of Hoshi from Arakawa Under the Bridge (2004) or those from Hylics (2015). Majin to Ikenie no Shoujo follows this spirit, but trades the 2D over-the-top view for a dungeon crawler exploration and a card-based combat system, probably inspired by the recent success of deck builders.
The player takes on the role of an unnamed character whose goal is to rescue a young girl who has been offered as a sacrifice to a Majin. To find her, the player must navigate down the fifteen floors of a crypt of sorts, guided by the messages she manages to leave via octahedral crystals. Numerous enemies block the player's path and they must be confronted thanks to the various actions learned during the adventure. The combat system is quite straightforward, as the cards have no quantity: they are drawn entirely at random every turn and the player has to make the best of the energy reserve they have. In fact, encounters are particularly sensitive to RNG, especially in the second half of the game, where enemies can apply equally random effects to the various drawn cards: a Sleep effect ends the turn when said card is played, Poison wounds the protagonist and Death causes life points to drop to zero.
Because the game has little room for customisation and the RNG can quickly decide the outcome of a fight, takehata has rightly chosen to never really kill the player. If the character's hit points drop to zero, they can only draw cards that do no damage; the only way out is to flee the fight – and try again immediately. The lack of a penalty removes any dramatic tension that usually runs through a dungeon crawler. There is no reason to care more than necessary about one's deck, since it is possible to brute force the fights. Those are DPS races and the most important resource is HP, which has to be increased by the anthropomorphic mushroom for gold pieces. This forces the player to do all the fights in a floor, which becomes almost too repetitive towards the end.
Majin to Ikenie no Shoujo is indeed above all carried by its atmosphere. The dithering effect gives an esoteric touch to the exploration, accompanied by a sepia and faded colour palette. The game is built on this weird edge, which doesn't completely enter the realm of the horrific. The title is slightly disturbing, but never to the point of offending the player: its main purpose is to show them that they are exploring a different world, that of supernatural creatures, the youkai. The enemies borrow slightly from the works of Kazuo Umezu and Junji Ito. Simultaneously, the dungeon is remarkably clean, creating a constant dichotomy, which ultimately lulls the player's wariness. The last few minutes allow one to understand why the game is shaped by such aesthetic choices, something that the thoughtful player might have quickly suspected.
It is nevertheless a pity that the game halts on a half-measure: if the ending works properly, one remains unfulfilled. Some themes would have benefited from being explored more, to create a real narrative cohesion between the dungeon and why the hero goes down to rescue the girl: the subject is moreover at the heart of Japanese cultural anthropology, where the youkai help to shed light on behaviours and phenomena in Japanese life, as illustrated by Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yagyō (1776-1784) and all the following works. About halfway through the game, the walls become mosaics of rhombuses, which emit a strange light. It is unclear what takehata's true intentions were: it is as if the short hour of adventure was only an excuse to delay the end of the game, but that its content was of little importance. Hylics' aesthetic vision was much more coherent and had no trouble making its own universe distinctive; Inscryption (2020) had also found a justification for its deck builder mechanics. Majin to Ikenie no Shoujo has none of those qualities: it is an intriguing experience, somewhat engaging because it remains short and with a strong ending, but misses its true potential.