What better way to end a year than with a D3P kusoge amirite!? For some strange reason despite knowing that every D3P game this year had horrid reviews, I decided to give believer a chance. After all it was a straight VN, art looked decent, story seemed legit and it had some nice voice actors – what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Well sadly the one thing that went wrong is the awful writing which basically ruined the rest of the game. But more on that in my final thoughts! Our story starts when Sonozaki Mia’s mother gave her a book when she was little and then both of her parents died. She was adopted by her childhood friend Omi’s family – but then his parents went missing in action! So now Mia lives with Omi and attends school where she has a harem of dudes who just so happen to be her guardians! Turns out Mia harbors some serious magic powers and the book she was given was her personal spell book to defeat the dark lord!! Somehow though, Mia had no idea about any of this until she gets to school and a bunch of angry NPC monsters attack her. After her man harem fights them off, 4 dudes come down calling themselves the Heavenly Four and say that they need her magic book so their Dark Lord can take over the world! *evil laughter* So now Mia has to take on her job as the mage priestess and band with her man harem guardians to save the world from destruction.

Takahashi Kyo – I made the mistake of basically playing this game backwards as far as “most relevant to least relevant” plot. Therefore by starting with Kyo the game assumed I had played all the other routes and a lot of stuff just passed off as “oh yea we all know this and it’s completely normal.” (For example: Omi’s portal ability.) But that’s okay at least I got to enjoy Suzuki Yuuto’s deep voice because it wasn’t his usual shota voice that they constantly pigeonhole him into. Kyo appears to be the shy kouhai who Mia got to know by literally taking his hand and leading him to the gym when he got lost on his first day of high school. So ever since then he’s had this obligatory crush and wished for senpai to notice him. On top of that though, he has this problem that he’s Mia’s guardian, but he keeps hearing telepathic voices in his head from the evil dooers to bring Mia to them! And so the moment they find the door to the underworld, he can no longer resist those voices so he just grabs Mia’s hand and drags her in there. 😆 So then go in, then the evil dude who’s brainwashing Kyo named Ruid tells him to lock up Mia in a dungeon. She’s like oh noes Kyo kun what’s wrong with you and after he kabedons her, she manages to bring him back to normal. Unfortunately when they try to escape, Ruid catches them and turns on the brain wash o meter once more. Just in time, the man harem shows up and beats up Kyo, some durds and Ruid escapes. Everyone returns to the school and lets Kyo rest in the nurse’s office while they try to figure out a plan. After Kyo wakes up he and Mia chat and realize that the only way to be able to read her magic book is for their feelings to be IN SYNC. So they think they defeated Ruid but obviously they didn’t so when they all go back together into the world of darkness, oh look Kyo gets possessed again! Also about this time suddenly Mia has apparently fallen in love with him (I don’t know I think it’s been 3 days since they like had some kind of snack party and spent a night sleeping like hobos on the classroom floor for no apparent reason.)

Soo then brainwashed Kyo takes Mia to Ruid, who then reveals that Kyo is the distant son of his older bro which makes them distant relatives. Due to this, it makes it super easy for Ruid to control Kyo and he plans to turn Kyo into his manslave to do his dirty work for him ＼(^o^)／. But as it turns out, Kyo was not brainwashed after all. Apparently Mia’s magical book was created by one of Kyo’s distant relatives, and inside was a letter from his great great great etc grandpa. By having this magic letter on him at all times, he hears the brainwashing – but he is able to completely resist it. So he continued to pretend to be under control while secretly helping Mia and the others escape. He figures since Ruid still thinks he’s controlling him, he’d go along with, and when he’s not looking, he’d defeat him. Ren and Yuu were in on the whole thing so only Mia had to uh…go along with the do-S without knowing the truth 😆 Kyo tells Mia and co. to escape back to their world, but she’s like no BBY I WANT TO FIGHT WITH YOU! And so magically their feelings sync up and the letter Kyo has in his pocket lights up and starts talking to them. It tells Mia that she can now use her magic grimoire and so they all go to fight the 4 guardians. Best End: Thanks to Ruid’s oniisan (aka Kyo’s great great something grandpa), turns out his letter is part of the magical grimoire and so using that they defeat both Ruid and the dark lord! Woohoo that was easy! 😆 And so then Kyo calls her out to some lake where they watch the stars and he confesses he loves her and they make out and live happily ever after yay! Bad End: Efenad destroys Mia’s grimoire which makes her go batshit and now Kyo and the rest of her manharem look like the bad guys to her. Meanwhile Efenaud looks like Kyo to her so she runs to him and everyone is shocked at being NTRed by the final boss 😆

Inami Yuu – Yuu always calls the heroine honey and is popular with the ladies kind of character. I still have no idea why exactly he took interest in her or why he liked her in the first place. After the first time they are attacked, they get blown into the underworld (no magical classroom doors this time.) After they kill some durds they realize all of them have the same face as Yuu. Just then one of the 4 evil guardians come out – Mad and he tells them that if they want to know the truth, to come see him at the castle. They decide to go the castle where it’s revealed that Yuu is in fact a clone! His parents had asked Mad to make a clone of the father because they need to make sure they continue the guardian bloodline. The clone was made with the father’s sperm and mother’s egg so he was still born normally BUT then Mad used the extra genes to see if he could raise Yuu’s clones on his own to be stronger – vs one raised by parents ／(^o^)＼.  Aka basically he was paid to do a job but now he’s breaking all his ethical rules and doing whatever the fuck he wants for SCIENCE! Because Yuu is kinda weak and a shitty guardian clone, Mad offers him a SPECIAL DRINK that will make him stronger. And you know the guy who admitted to fooling your parents and making a million clones of you….IS TOTALLY TRUSTWORTHY RIGHT!? He tells Yuu that if he wants the drink he must give him some blood to use for his experiments but Yuu refuses. They return back to the world via Omi’s magical door and then Yuu goes to rest in the nurse’s office. Mia comes along and that’s where he tells her about his trash child neglect parents, who got mad that their clone came out to be this weak child. They spent their whole time insulting him until they got to a point where they would just completely ignore him. The only time they would ever talk to him is when he was training to be a guardian – and it would usually consist of more insults!

Yuu however was happy that they stopped ignoring him even if all they did was insult him (´；ω；`)ｳｩｩ. I’m seriously shocked that he didn’t turn out to be some quiet angry teenager with the kind of shit environment he was raised in to be honest. Soo then they go back to Mad, exchange the blood for the drink which is a big mistake because – 1. it allows Mad to basically use Yuu’s blood to experiment to create stronger durds and 2. the “medicine” to make him feel better in fact made things worse because it sealed off his ability to summon his weapon! When he finally reveals the truth to the other guys they’re like (　´_ゝ｀) are you a freaking idiot? Yuu’s response is “but I wanted to be useful ;-;” lol. But that’s okay cause thanks to the power of love, Yuu reawakens his powers and is able to summon his weapon once more. Along with the other guardians they find the durd making factory and try to destroy it until Mad shows up and he’s pretty mad 😆 He then reveals he’s completed his new Yuu clone and takes Mia as hostage. He tells Yuu that he’ll let her go if he fights with his clone to see who is stronger!  Yuu wins but then Mad is like Lol I change my mind if you want her released you must come be my lab rat. Yuu refuses to make anymore deals with him and says he’ll defeat Mad and get Mia back. Mad brings out yet another Yuu clone and he’s like lol unlike you,  I don’t have a weak point and attacks Mia. 😅 As usual thanks to power of love,  Mia awakens her powers,  gives the magic buff to Yuu and he defeats his clone. Just then Efenaud shows up and its revealed that he and Mad are twin brothers – but Mad relinquished his rights to the dark lord throne so that he could spend time experimenting instead. So while Efenaud fights with Yuu, Mad is like LOL I love watching my experiment kicking my little bro’s ass!

Efenaud gets pissed lol and says he’ll destroy Mad, and while they are bickering Yuu and Mia kick..both of their asses….＼(^o^)／. Good End: After defeating the bad guys, there’s only one thing left to do – make out and live happily ever after. Mad also gave Yuu some medicine that he takes once every 2 years in order for his body to not fall apart…cause if that happens his great experiment will be a failure!! And now that the bad guys are gone, he has no reason to practice summoning his weapon so it’s all good :lol:. Also Ren is extremely buttmad that Mia is cockblocking his BROMANCE with Yuu since he chose hoes over bros `,､(‘∀`) ‘`,､. Actually the amount of bromance cockblocking from Ren in this route was pretty hilarious. Yuu also now rejects his harem because he’s in love with Mia and wants to be a one woman man. And so Yuu confesses to Mia and asks her to go out with him. Just when Mia agrees, the other guys show up upset about this (except Ren who is only upset about his BROMANCE with Yuu). Yuu then grabs her and kisses her in front of everyone to show off and they indeed live happily ever after! Bad End: They defeat the bad guys but then Yuu dies from his health problems. Mia regrets for not telling him her feelings before it happened. Also it was kinda funny I mean he was in a coma and soon as she “kissed his sleeping body” his heart stopped beating WTF XD That’s  the OPPOSITE of what normally happens in these things lmao.

Teshigawara Ren – Ren is the do-S megane but his route was the best for me because he doesn’t blatantly start off as fawning after the heroine. Well maybe he’s a tsundere, but it felt a little nicer compared to the other guys I guess (or I am just biased to Ishikawa Kaito :lol:). He uses a gun as his weapon but has a fear of missing so he often….doesn’t actually shoot anything. When he was a shota at a gun range with his dad training his aiming, he accidentally shot his dad in the leg. So ever since then he’s terrified of shooting moving targets. So they get sucked into the demon world, and the homo okama (who the site lists as “Drag Queen” lol…) Maccara bitches that he wants to buttsecks it with Ren and Mia is just one big cockblock to him. Mia magically uses her book and sends Ren back to earth, but Maccara is pissed so he throws her into a dungeon. The next day, Mia’s man harem uses the magical Omi door powers and rescues her. I guess it only took one day but Ren is totally like in love with her now and the moment he finds her he hugs her and makes kouhai-kun feel awkward as he walks in on them XD. They manage to escape the underworld but unfortunately the bad guys have Mia’s grimoire and if they manage to decipher it, everyone is screwed cause it means they’d be immune to all of her spells 😆 After Mia hears his sad story about his gun problems, she offers to come with him to the shooting range so he can get over his fears. The shooting range happens to be….in the basement of the school 😆 Mia finds him practicing in there the following morning and Yuu tells her to let him be. And so just this one practice at the range suddenly makes him get over his fear and he shoots the durds who attack some random girl at the school the next day! ヮ(ﾟдﾟ)ォ! And so after this they hug in the nurse’s office and spend the night in the same bed together where they feelings ~become one~. The next morning he teases her some more and says he will be her guardian. (This is such a god damn shame cause Ishikawa Kaito’s voice was so hot in this game why u do dis d3p ;__;).

They all go to the underworld the next day to defeat the dark lord. But first she has to be all like bawww I’m so useless to Ren in the middle of some lake while all the other guys baww because their harem queen just got NTRed. They all watch until Kai can’t take it anymore so he runs in complaining that they shouldn’t be kissing. Ren is like lol pls we weren’t doing anything. Later on Yuu confirms to Mia that Ren’s never been this nice to anyone so as his BRO he totally knows that Ren has the hots for her 😆 And so they invade the castle to try to destroy the clone factory and they run into Maccara and he’s so mad that Mia just took his man candy :lol:. They fight with them and manage to get the book back but for some reason Mia cannot read it. On top of this Maccara takes Yuu hostage and tells Ren to shoot if he dares but seeing Yuu in front of him, he’s terrified and says he can’t do it with the fear he might kill him. Mia then SLAPS the pansy out of him and tells him to BE A MAN AND SAVE UR BRO. щ(ﾟдﾟщ)ｶﾓｰﾝ This is super effective cause Ren then shoots the raging okama in the face m9(^Д^)ﾌﾟｷﾞｬｰ. He gets mad that Mia is coblocking him so he rages and Mia ends up taking a hit to protect Ren. Ren is mad so he beats up Maccara and just then like a MIRACLE Mia is able to use spells from her magic book once more. Ren shoots Maccara and he vanishes, and just then the man harem crawls out from under a rock (I have no idea where they were :lol:). Mia is shocked at seeing the gruesome violence and death and Ren’s like “deal with it, we still gotta seal the dark lord!” ＼(^o^)／ Good End: Ren shoots down the dark lord in a span of like 3 minutes and everyone goes back to their world. He continues to tease Mia while he helps her study and her punishment for getting answers wrong is a kiss. ご褒美だろうが(　´_ゝ｀). After much babbling eventually he confesses that he loves Mia and he wouldn’t constantly kiss/hug/help her study if he didn’t feel anything for her and calls her dense. Mia is like yay I love you too! Lol well template aside, I really did like Ren as a character. It’s a shame that like everyone else, he’s a victim of the shitty plot & writing of this game. Bad End: Mia ends up sealing the dark lord once more, but she ends up sacrificing her life. Before she disappears she tells Ren she loves him. Man what a waste of Ishikawa Kaito’s voice this route was ∑(ﾟωﾟ; )カ¨ーン

Kamishiro Kai – Kai is like the Naruto of this game, the shounen hero and totally accepts his role as guardian because of the legend his dad told him about the guardians & miko sealing the dark lord every night. Since everyone gets blown to the underworld but Kai & Mia, they magically find the door in the school basement and decide to check it out! When they go in they fight some durds who attack them but just then Kai goes out of control and nearly attacks Mia. He shrugs it off but when they run into Suquet (I don’t know how to spell this but apparently it’s a seafood stew so whatever lol) he loses control once more. Suquet doesn’t care as long as he gets his sword back from Kai. Just then Ruid shows up and to stop the battle for whatever reason, he blows Mia and Kai back to earth. They go back to school and try to form a plan to figure out how to find the others – who have all been scattered in the underworld the whole time :lol:. They end up sleeping in the nurse’s office bed together because Mia had a scary dream~. The next day they go back in, and as usual Kai loses control of himself but fortunately the man harem arrives just in time. Omi yells at Kai for giving Mia a cut on her cheek and is like wtf bruh you’re hurting our harem queen! After they finish fighting the endless pile of clone durds, Omi tries to talk to Kai about his weapon but Kai just avoids the subject and keeps running off. Eventually Mia talks to him and he admits the sword of his is what makes him lose control of himself. Mia then gives him the necklace her mother passed down to her as a luck charm in hopes it will help him be able to get a hold of himself.

The necklace does manage to get him to CONTAIN his INNER DARK SIDE that pops up whenever he uses his sword…but he feels he ain’t manly enough if he relies on it so he eventually returns it to Mia. I mean, why do this though? It’s clear you cannot contain yourself, so yes let’s return the necklace to her so you can attack your friends once more! ヽ(。_゜)ノ So they all go back to the underworld for the ~final battle~ and Kai claims that he doesn’t need the necklace to be in control as long as Mia is “watching” him fight. (;´･ω･) So then Suquet revealed that one of Kai’s distant relatives, Yoh, tried to stop him from going mad with that sword, and he ended up just having to take the sword from him. He then took the sword and with the miko sealed Suquet so he’s fucking buttmad that he was sealed & his sword taken away. He did this because he and Suquet were BFFs and he didn’t want his BFF to FALL TO THE DARK SIDE! So Suquet’s been buttmad all these years and unfortunately he’ll have to be buttmad for all eternity cause Kai ends up stabbing and defeating him. And then as usual they find Efenaud and knock him out cold too. ┐(´д`)┌ﾔﾚﾔﾚ Good End: A week later, Kai and Mia confess their feelings to each other while all the other guys listen and cockblock as they fall through the door. Kai gets annoyed so he runs off with Mia to make out in the school garden instead. Bad End: Kai loses control of himself and kills Mia. Sigh you can tell by the time I got to Kai I was ready to chuck this game out the window. I mean seriously for no reason he just gets over his blood thirst because ~power of love~ since obviously you get the bad end only if you don’t wuv him enough. ಠ_ಠ

Maikawa Omi – Omi is the childhood friend that Mia has lived with but his parents have been missing so it’s been the two of them for a while. Obviously has a crush on her since forever so everytime you get with one of the other guys in the game he gets extremely upset xD So after the whole explosion attack by the bad guys, Omi tells Mia that he has a way to go to the underworld cause of his family of gatekeepers. They go to the school basement and when they get to the underworld, they find Omi’s parents have been killed.  He gets horrified and they fight against Ruid but eventually Ruid runs off so they end up wandering through the underworld together. After they run into Ruid again they find out that the one who killed Omi’s parents is one of the guardians – Kreisis (however that’s spelled.) So now Omi wants to take revenge on Kreisis but he’s angry at Omi’s distant relative cause apparently he did something to him as well. When Omi’s like wtf are you talking about, Kreisis just rages but before he can hurt him further, Efenaud sends the signal for his lackeys to get back to the castle. After this Omi asks Mia to stay away from him because he doesn’t want her to get hurt again since she got in the way in the last fight and got injured. Mia refuses and he starts crying so she takes his hand and is all like its ok bby I’m gonna be by your side no matter what. (・´з`・) After this they get closer to each other that Kai points out that maybe the 2 of them are lovers now. Omi says that they’re not going out but tells everyone that he’s in love with her and Mia’s like !? 😆

He points out that despite this tho he ain’t got no time for any of that because they gotta destroy the dark lord! As they reach some random lake, Mia has a Lion King moment where she sees her descendent miko who was also named Miya. Old-Miya tells new-Miya that she needs to sync her powers with her guardian to be able to read that book of hers. All the other guys decide to leave Mia and Omi ~alone~ to themselves and go off elsewhere at the lake. Omi then reaffirms that he loves Mia as both, a friend, a family member and a lover. Well at least in this route I can somewhat believe it since the two of them pretty much spent most of their childhood lives together. Mia the clueless protag is all like well I like you too but I have no idea if I like you as family or not! Thank you for following the template D3P, I expected nothing less out of your writers. (　´_ゝ｀) But hooray during the next battle this is all resolved because her feelings become one with Omi’s and she’s able to read her grimoire yay! And so they reach the castle and fight with Kreisis again only to find out that Omi’s distant relative killed Kreisis’ lover. The ring that Omi had handed down to him was a ring that Kreisis had originally given to his lover Sylphina. Omi’s distant relative Maikawa Ken found Sylpheed and demanded that she give him her ring because it’s a ring that they made and she must have stolen it. Ken then said that the stone in that ring is special and if she won’t hand it over, they will take it by force.

Aaaaand so they ended up killing her and when Kreisis got there he found her dead with the reasoning of “yea we needed that ring.” He continued to say that they’re midst battle and they need that ring so a sacrifice had to be made because Sylphina refused to hand it over. So ever since then Kreisis hated Ken  his entire lineage and pretty much vowed to take revenge on them…which is why he killed Omi’s parents. But yea, sorry Kreisis the good guys win really fast in this game so Omi pretty much kicks his ass – and as usual it’s followed by fighting tera-Koyasu and saving ZA WARUDO. (；´∀｀) But oh yea everyone sucks in this route so they all get killed and have to be brought back to life thanks to Mia’s magical book. Oh and not only is her book magical enough to bring them back to life, it’s magical enough to immediately teleport them back to their world! How convenient! ヽ(。_゜)ノ Good End:  Omi admits that he’s been in love with Mia ever since they were in elementary school. This is why I did his route last cause it’s just such a guilty feeling of knowing that the whole time you’re basically NTRing your childhood friend. (Not that it wasn’t obvious since lold3ptemplates.) Also his dad told Omi not to tell Mia his feelings or it would get in the way of their mission as guardian & miko…but well Omi blurted them out anyway cause he didn’t wanna lie to her anymore. And so they smooch and live happily ever after (somehow the 2 of them even though their families are both deceased so I have no idea how they are paying their bills.) Bad End: Efenaud’s derpy bad guy army is revived and Kreisis decides that the best way to quell his raging strikes is to kill Mia so he stabs her to death. Before she dies in his arms she tells Omi that she loves him.

You know if I had played this game only a month earlier, I probably would have nominated it for kusoge of the year. It’s really amazing how a poorly written story can basically ruin everything. It feels like a chunk of the game is missing.  You start off with the fact that Mia knows every guy in the game but not all of them know her…but it didn’t matter since all of them are magnetically attracted to her even though they didn’t  know she’s the priestess.  Once it’s established that they’re Guardians and dark lord and all that suddenly it’s time to battle. Like where is the development  between all the characters?  It feels as if chunks of the game were removed and all of these things are happening at a totally natural pace!  For example early on they discovered that a door in the school basement leads to the underworld.  Everyone is like how did you know Omi, and he’s all like cause I’m the gatekeeper lolol. Oh wow so tell me something else I don’t know!  Well I guess I would have known if I had played his route first – but I played his route last, woe is me. All these things that should have been developed slowly are just thrown in your face.

The entire thing just felt like a joke, the bad guys felt like renditions of 1980s RPG bosses and all the BGMs further contributed to the running gag. Everything was just template RPG, there was no development of any kind, I have no idea when/why the heroine fell in love with the guy…let alone why all of them were in love with Mary Sue in the first place. I would have been ok with the dumb template if things were developed properly and not just rushed out the door like some shitty shovelware. It’s like make me CARE about these characters! Let me spend some NON RPG BATTLE time with them to make me get to know them, make me see that yes indeed there’s chemistry between the heroine and her man. But no, they just introduce us to the guys, and immediately jump to the battles, the guardian shit and before we know it, we’re fighting the last boss. Wtf? It’s the kind of plot depth I’d expect from a mobile game, not a fully voiced PS Vita game. Also the bad guys are fucking sad lol. They get defeated so easily it makes the entire thing feel even more like a joke. How did nobody notice that there’s a shooting range and a door to another dimension located in the school basement? Also how was there nobody to tell them to GTFO at the end of the night and they just…spend the night lying like hobos in the nurse’s office/classroom?? xD　Honestly it feels like D3P pretty much dropped the ball on all of their writing this year which is why a lot of their games seem to have great artwork and seiyuu and then you get to the story and it’s like…..did you hire a 13 year old to give you his school project as a story???

Ironically enough, this game had a lot of things in its programming that I’ve complained about in other otome games this year. For one, it had the jump to next unread dialogue/choice. Amazing! Why can’t all games have this? Why do we need to sit there watching the text skip by while we eat popcorn waiting for the next new scene? The sound quality was also crisp and clear, which seems to be a rarity these days on Vita games. The last 3 games before this had awful sound quality but here? Perfect. The voice acting was actually great and I really enjoyed Ishikawa Kaito and Suzuki Yuuto the most – they did voices they don’t normally do in their otome game roles and I hope to hear them doing these kind of voices again. The artwork was pretty decent and some of the Cgs were pretty cute – but too bad the scenes felt really shoved in and I just couldn’t feel moved by them. They honestly felt better looking in my headcanon before I actually played the game ;_;.  And if it wasn’t obvious, the heroine is written like shit. In some choices being humble raises affection – while in other choices being proactive and confident raises affection etc. It was the typical template heroine you’d see in well…a mobile game or maybe an otome game from like 2005-2006 or something.

Overall huge disappointment, but not really that surprising. I actually expected it to be bad but it’s bad in a “how could they ever possibly think this story would flow well with otome gamers?” kind of way.  I don’t usually call otome games “reverse harem” but I think in this case you literally could call this a reverse harem shounen RPG anime :lol:. D3P has been a massive let down this year and if you go on Amazon all the reviews for their releases in 2015 are 2 stars or less. It’s pretty awful since I’ve played a lot of their games in the past so I really have no idea what happened. All I’d say at this point is if you value your money, don’t preorder their future games until reviews are out because you’re likely in for another shitty story which seems to be the bane of their releases lately.

Anyway this is my final post for 2015, hope every has a happy new year, see you in 2016! (p｡･∀･q)☆｡.:*あけおめェェ*:.｡☆(p･∀･｡q)