I was looking around for random game deals online while bored at work last week and I saw an interesting game called Conception Plus: Maidens of the Twelve Stars, a game that kind of looked like a Persona style game in which you build bonds with allies to make yourself stronger for the dungeons. Never heard of the game before, but hell it was on sale so I thought "why not?"
The game I put into my Playstation last night.....was....well let me just talk about my experiences in the first hour of playing.
You start off in character creation, though you cannot change the look of your character at all you can change their name and their birthday. There is a heavy emphasis on the zodiac sign related to your character's birthday which I suppose makes sense given the title of the game. Then the final question the game asks you before starting is whether or not you want the Maidens to wear swimsuits during cutscenes or not........ummm....ok then.
The game starts out in a visual novel style thing, where your main character describes a little bit about his life. Apparently your parents are dead and you've been living with your childhood friend. This friend has asked you to come up to the room of the school to tell you something important. The first words out of her mouth are, "I'm pregnant." In typical visual novel style you are given choices in how to respond and I asked, "Is it mine?" Because apparently this game is a soap opera. She tells me that it HAS to be my kid because we've been living together, and she hasn't been with any other boys, but our characters has never actually slept together so she's a bit confused about how it's possible. IM CONFUSED.
Then the sky turns into a portal and we are sucked into another world. Where the game puts you into a 3D dungeon in much the same way that Persona 4 does. Fully explorable, but mostly just small rooms and hallways. You run through a couple of doors and a cutscene plays where our friend screams and clutches her stomach.......where she then vomits up her unborn baby that actually is a shadow monster.
This brings about the combat. It's turn based JRPG combat with a positional system in which you can move you character to one of four positions around the enemy. This allows you to hit the front, sides, or backs of monsters, which allows for extra damage if you attack the weak side. An interesting system with some potential. Sadly this is the only fight I got to do in the first hour because before I can go back to the dungeon I have to meet up with the people of this new world I'm in and start BREEDING the maidens.
To summarize the magical world of....someplace?... real quick it works like this. There are 12 shrines that hold all the world's impurities, each shrine uses a God of one of the twelve zodiac signs to contain the impurity. Every 10 tens, one of those shrine guardians dies and has to be replaced. To replace the guardian the world summons a Star God (that's you) from the real world and creates a "maiden" in the magical world. You and this new maiden must breed a new guardian for the shrine to prevent the impurity from overrunning the world.
Where does this impurity come from you might ask? Well.....it is generate by people fucking in the world. Sex is a sin that creates monsters, but people have to do it in other to keep making new people, so this world runs on a 10 year cycle.
Except this time your childhood friend is one of the Maidens for some reason so she is with you and it turns out that becoming a Maiden causes your impurities to build within you until you expel them. This explains why she felt pregnant and then puked up her unborn monster for you to kill. By killing the shadow thing, she has become a pure maiden which you can breed with now.
Though breeding isn't quite right. Yes you breed, but it's not sex (though the innuendos are uncontrollable in this game goddamn). Instead it's a magical ritual in which you create Star Children, and you take these kids into battle to cleanse the shrines and eventually have on of them become the new shrine guardian thus protecting the world for another 10 years.
Except in this game, some calamity happened and all the shrines are fucked up. So you have been chosen to breed all the magical girls to make a shitload of Star Baby Pokemon.
With dating sim elements in which you build your romantic relationship with the girls first. The better your relationship the more powerful your kids will be.
So that's the first hour of the game as I understand it.
All i can say is......WTF?
Combat seems like it will be fun though, so I'm gonna see where this goes.
The game I put into my Playstation last night.....was....well let me just talk about my experiences in the first hour of playing.
You start off in character creation, though you cannot change the look of your character at all you can change their name and their birthday. There is a heavy emphasis on the zodiac sign related to your character's birthday which I suppose makes sense given the title of the game. Then the final question the game asks you before starting is whether or not you want the Maidens to wear swimsuits during cutscenes or not........ummm....ok then.
The game starts out in a visual novel style thing, where your main character describes a little bit about his life. Apparently your parents are dead and you've been living with your childhood friend. This friend has asked you to come up to the room of the school to tell you something important. The first words out of her mouth are, "I'm pregnant." In typical visual novel style you are given choices in how to respond and I asked, "Is it mine?" Because apparently this game is a soap opera. She tells me that it HAS to be my kid because we've been living together, and she hasn't been with any other boys, but our characters has never actually slept together so she's a bit confused about how it's possible. IM CONFUSED.
Then the sky turns into a portal and we are sucked into another world. Where the game puts you into a 3D dungeon in much the same way that Persona 4 does. Fully explorable, but mostly just small rooms and hallways. You run through a couple of doors and a cutscene plays where our friend screams and clutches her stomach.......where she then vomits up her unborn baby that actually is a shadow monster.
This brings about the combat. It's turn based JRPG combat with a positional system in which you can move you character to one of four positions around the enemy. This allows you to hit the front, sides, or backs of monsters, which allows for extra damage if you attack the weak side. An interesting system with some potential. Sadly this is the only fight I got to do in the first hour because before I can go back to the dungeon I have to meet up with the people of this new world I'm in and start BREEDING the maidens.
To summarize the magical world of....someplace?... real quick it works like this. There are 12 shrines that hold all the world's impurities, each shrine uses a God of one of the twelve zodiac signs to contain the impurity. Every 10 tens, one of those shrine guardians dies and has to be replaced. To replace the guardian the world summons a Star God (that's you) from the real world and creates a "maiden" in the magical world. You and this new maiden must breed a new guardian for the shrine to prevent the impurity from overrunning the world.
Where does this impurity come from you might ask? Well.....it is generate by people fucking in the world. Sex is a sin that creates monsters, but people have to do it in other to keep making new people, so this world runs on a 10 year cycle.
Except this time your childhood friend is one of the Maidens for some reason so she is with you and it turns out that becoming a Maiden causes your impurities to build within you until you expel them. This explains why she felt pregnant and then puked up her unborn monster for you to kill. By killing the shadow thing, she has become a pure maiden which you can breed with now.
Though breeding isn't quite right. Yes you breed, but it's not sex (though the innuendos are uncontrollable in this game goddamn). Instead it's a magical ritual in which you create Star Children, and you take these kids into battle to cleanse the shrines and eventually have on of them become the new shrine guardian thus protecting the world for another 10 years.
Except in this game, some calamity happened and all the shrines are fucked up. So you have been chosen to breed all the magical girls to make a shitload of Star Baby Pokemon.
With dating sim elements in which you build your romantic relationship with the girls first. The better your relationship the more powerful your kids will be.
So that's the first hour of the game as I understand it.
All i can say is......WTF?
Combat seems like it will be fun though, so I'm gonna see where this goes.