Irredeemable. Whoever made the decision that a UI made for phone-size touchscreens should be translated as-is to a fucking TV setup with a button interface should burn in hell. They made two versions of the UI specifically for this version as well which are somehow even worse because of the batshit insane decision to have the lanes not be anything even remotely resembling equidistant. Look at this and tell me there was any thought put into this whatsoever. You can't. This is also a lane setup specifically only available to mid-level and above charts, meaning there is no actual way to get even remotely used to this war crime posing as a UI other than trial by fire. This UI is the death of all things.

Also the song prices are fucking insane, lmao. $314 for a comparable amount of, if not less content than a good majority of modern rhythm game releases, all of which have at least one brain cell invested in the idea that actual people have to play it.

Glad beyond belief I had the foresight to try this on an alternate account so I'm never on the hook to actually play it more than I did, much less having to actually FC two of the godawful 6-lane charts for trophies.

Until that godawful Love Live SIF port came out on PS4, this held the dubious honor of the worst rhythm game UI I've ever seen, even ahead of shit like the Persona Dancing fish eye UI (admittedly mostly saved by that series having surprisingly smart and sane charting; it would likely edge out in hindsight otherwise) or the Senran Kagura Bon Appetit two lines that can each hold all 8 of that game's note types with no rhyme or reason. Imagine the DJMax Technika UI as made by people who have never played Technika in their lives and you have a slight idea of how this game's UI operates.

To give a rundown, the note track is represented by an endless upward-scrolling list of 4-lane sets and the hit line scrolls across the bottom-most lane as it makes its way to the top, at which point the hit line is at the end of the current lane and moves down to the next lane. Unlike Technika however, the hit line always comes in from the left instead of alternating which, combined with the constant upward motion, means you're effectively having to dart your eyes from one corner to the other every measure, which is needlessly rough to get used to, especially for something as casual as this.

Compounding this is the fact that as with a lot of Vita button-based rhythm games, the control scheme is kinda garbage due to the inherent issue of the Vita having tic-tacs for buttons, which the game does not work around in the slightest. The first warning shot is that the entire d-pad is just one mappable button for whatever reason with no option for separation, making it effectively impossible to have anything more comfortable or sane than the default d-pad, triangle, square, cross config. The second warning shot is that this game pulls a GH/RB and kills your combo for overhits, which is less than pleasant in a button-based game in general, much less one where the buttons are practically kissing each other to make accidental presses that much more likely.

Songs in this game also have a whopping 7 difficulties associated with them, which seems quite generous at first until you realize that this game tops out at moderate difficulty overall, so for the most part, the charts kinda just end up stepping over each other and/or going to the most boring extremes with how little they get to work with to differentiate themselves 7 times per song. This also ends up making 100% in this game a slog since for every "almost fun in a kusoge way" Pro chart, there are 6 different charts before it that are all vying to have some natural progression to each other while still being significantly easier than the Pro chart, meaning you get a whole lot of basic rhythm playing to an even more absurd degree than most rhythm games.

For what it's worth, as mentioned before, it is more or less moderate difficulty at most. In my grind for the platinum (which required a Pro FC as it stood; Independence is still stuck in my head four years later from going for that), I ended up going above and beyond by just going through and S Ranking the entire game, which was frankly not that difficult for the most part, with mostly a few songs the fucking high-BPM ones giving me some trouble. Doesn't stop the issues above from making the whole process more annoying than it oughta be, though.

If nothing else, the soundtrack is frankly pretty good and while admittedly Independence is the only one that's still stuck in my head after all these years due to PTSD from all the FCs lost to a single overhit, I do remember the game having more than a few bangers. Should arguably go without saying given the genre, but it's certainly worth mentioning (glares menacingly at Bon Appetit again).

At first glance, the idea of having to effectively breed your party members with this being a main mechanic of the game makes it look like this game is going to be a grind, especially once you realize that your starting children are gonna have shit level caps and you're gonna need to keep breeding as your bonds deepen with the game's 13 maidens to get more capable children. Instead, the grind comes in from how horrifically repetitive and easy the game is.

The general gameplay loop of this game sees you talking to the 13 maidens and breeding children with them by day and going dungeon crawling by night to fight off bosses and make your children stronger. Thing is the dungeon crawling in question is an incredible slog due to the game's absurdly easy difficulty that lets you basically auto-battle at all times with no risk and the randomly generated dungeons with such a simplistic layout of square rooms where the action happens and connecting hallways with nothing to do but walk that every single floor of every dungeon feels damn near the same. Combine this with how much exploring you're expected to do between general progression, quest grinding, and even the occasional bout of actual grinding (mercifully useless after one or two dungeons due to the shit difficulty curve) and you end up with one half of the gameplay loop being absolute garbage, which is especially damning when said half is more like 80-90% of the game.

This is compounded by the battle system itself since while it has some interesting ideas, they end up completely squandered between the aforementioned ability to auto damn near every battle with shocking competency and how broken the game's Chain Gauge system is to the point that it dominates over any other strategy for the entire game on the occasions where you do have to fight manually. This is made even worse by the moves which are meant to explicitly raise said gauge by dramatic amounts, meaning every proper fight in the game is solved the same way regardless of anything.

As for the story itself, the game is at least well enough aware that you're likely here for the dating sim aspects rather than an actual plot and more or less just gives you an excuse plot that does little more than contextualize why you're doing what you're doing. It's more or less fine for what it is, if a little long-winded, with the exception of Mana, a raccoon-looking fairy who mainly exists to neg on you and the maidens and would frankly be better served as an ingredient in a stew.

As for the maidens themselves, I'll admit to only reading through some of the maidens' stories, specifically Tarua (she is best girl, she goes awawa), Mahiru, Ruka, Collette, Yuzuha, Alfie, and the back half of Reone's story. Overall, they were mostly light-hearted fluff, though a couple had some slight dramatic moments sprinkled in (I can't remember if I necessarily cried towards the end of Yuzuha's story, but it was probably my favorite of what I read). Nothing groundbreaking in any of what I read, but it's all fine enough and if you're in the audience for such a thing, it's probably the one aspect of the game that's actually acceptable.

The actual delivery method of said stories is... questionable. Basically, each maiden has an intimacy meter with five gauges, one of which is unlocked at the start and the other four of which unlock upon clearing one of the three dungeons in each season (one for Spring, one for Summer, etc). In addition, filling up each gauge to move to the next one requires reading through the two mandatory events unlocked by each gauge segment as well as whatever extra events need to be read to fill up the current segment so you can initiate a classmating ritual to access the next gauge. As all intimacy gauges unlock at once, this means that for optimal results (namely getting every maiden's gauge to its current maximum in preparation for the next unlock), you'll be reading through a whopping 26 events minimum between dungeon clears, which ends up being a massive slog. While it is technically possible to put off some girls until later to mitigate this, this instead led to me, in the heat of the moment, only reading whatever immediately grabbed me and just skipping through the rest to get it over with. Admittedly, I doubt I missed much given the general content of the stories.

Overall, you're pretty much here for the cute girls, but it's hard to ignore how fucking tedious the gameplay in between is and it really drags down the game overall. Add in that nothing here is really all that noteworthy and there are far better ways you could get what you're looking for unless for some reason, you really want to have shitty and repetitive dungeon crawling in your dating sim experience. Either that or the premise of the RPG where you have pretend sex to make warriors to save the world piqued your curiosity that much.