Eroge-ism エロゲ-ism

In my last post I ranted about the ADV genre. Now here comes a review of a ADV game from the days before the eroge industry was flooded with mediocre wannabe game makers.

AmbivalenZ is an old-school ADV game published by AliceSoft. By “old-school”, I mean it still much resembles the “choose your own adventure” books that gave birth to the ADV genre. The player controls the hero’s actions through a menu of choices, often include “Look around”, “Talk to”, “Move” etc. Unfortunately the game is highly linear, and most of the time your “freedom” of actions has no particular consequences. An action either progresses you in the story or it does not (if it doesn’t, you are back to the same set of choices and loop until you take the necessary action). This linear “fake freedom” is one of my main gripe against much of the old-school ADV genre’s gameplay. One can mindlessly keep rotate through the action choices to progress in the game.

Luckily, not the whole game plays like this. The game is divided into chapters, and most chapters involve a map exploration and a handful of battles. In map explorations, it’s usually set up like a maze where you need to find a secrete or solve a puzzle in order to progress. While a player can also get through this part of the game by brute force trial-and-error, it is much more enjoyable (and faster) to actually pay attention to the hints to find the secrete or solve the puzzle.

The battles is where the game is the most “choose-your-adventure”-like. The player is presented with a number of choices, such as “Slash”, “Cast spell”, “Dodge” etc. There are no stats such as HP or Mp, instead the player need to pay attention to the textual descriptions of what the enemy is doing right now, and how this enemy reacted to your various prior actions, in order to decide what the next move should be. Blindly making random choices can easily lead to the hero’s death. I personally find this style of ADV battles very engaging, and significantly more fun than most RPG battles.

The story is pretty decent. It starts out with a knight who’s cursed to not age, trying to hunt down his mortal enemy who had consumed the soul of his beloved princess hundreds of years ago, and meets a girl who look almost identical to the princess. The story has some interesting world settings and some quite memorable characters. And while the plot twists and the ending didn’t completely surprise me, it was enjoyable and left me content having played it.

The art style and character designs generally fit my tastes, and the drawing quality was good. I was in fact a bit surprised when I noticed the game was only in 256 colors.

Overall, I enjoyed having played this game.

AliceSoft currently permits this game to be freely distributed over the internet. You can find a copy from RetroPC.net
Links:

• AliceSoft product info page (Japanese)
• AliceSoftWiki info/guide/walkthrough (English)
• Japanese Wikipedia entry (Japanese)