Hello guys! This is my review for the latest eroge made by Light, Soushuu Senshinkan Gakuen Hachimyojin (相州戦神館学園八命陣, Soushuu for short). This game was released pretty recently, like late February this year. (And while playing this game, your chuunibyou powers somehow awaken.) Light has also made many action-packed eroges before this like Electro-Arms and Zero Infinity, and they are also very good.This scenario for this game is also made by the same person who did the scenario for Dies irea, which is kind of popular back in 2007, and got many sequels after that. I have not played that game yet, and well my friends are persuading me to try it.
[Didn’t know that Yui Sakakibara was singing the song haha]
Let’s now move on to the story synopsis.
Whatever dream you made yesterday will continue tonight, and the sequel to that dream will continue the next night, The scenery is still fresh, and can never forget about it even after waking up. In other words, this is a continuous lucid dream. Yoshiya Hiiragi is the one who has this problem.
One day, he met a girl who shared the same problem as him, in the very same lucid dream, and her name is Mizuki Sera, who changed Yoshiya’s life right after. His friends can now enter the same dream as him, and at first it seems fun to share the dream together, but after a while, they realise something even more disastrous.
This dream realm (which they call it Canaan, which is said to be a country west of Jordan in the bible.) they are in can get people killed.
This dream realm can change the history.
Once stepped into this dream realm, one can never escape.
Hence, Yoshiya and gang are always facing this life-and-death situation in this Canaan, having to fight strong foes to ensure their survival. There are actually 2 ways to end this nightmare, one is to end your life, the second is to fight.
So how will Yoshiya and gang survive this Canaan and escape this nightmare?
Let’s now move on to the character review.
1,「柊 四四八」Yoshiya Hiiragi
Yoshiya is the main protagonist of this game, and is also known as the Spartan when it comes to training and teaching other people. He is the badass of the team and I was actually surprised he is fully voiced. (Usually you do not get any voice on the main protagonist.)
He is a very very smart person, with academic score of almost close to 100% overall and always top the level, and is a very capable leader. He is hardworking, good in sports as well, since he does his morning workout everyday. This makes him close to perfect, and whenever this kind of setting is made for a protagonist, one very obvious feature you must add into this kind of protagonist is make him dense.
However, he is strict and when he is teaching or giving his friends mock tests, he will ensure they learn or else he will make them stay awake until they manage to pass the test. (He hates slackers.)
In the Canaan world, his battle stats is very well balanced, making him an all-rounder. His weapon is a tonfa and is considered the strongest member in the team. (Well, no shit.) His ability is also very cool, 8 different abilities, one of the ability I find very cool is where he can make his allies use their opponent’s ability against them. He is also the captain of the team, and somehow he seems a lot better off when fighting alone.
[Note: All of the members follow the concept of Hakkenden (八犬伝, which is based off the popular novel, Nanso Satomi Hakkenden, 南総里見八犬伝 that was published in 1818 to 1842, a total of 106 volumes.) whereby each and everyone of them has 1 of the 8 samurais who are the main characters in the novel, each also representing 1 of the 8 virtues of Confucianism.]
2.「世良 水希」Mizuki Sera
BLEEDING….
Mizuki is the new transfer student in Yoshiya’s class and when I first looked at her art, I thought that she looks like Natsume Tsuchimikado from Tokyo Ravens. (If you look at the promotional wallpaper at their website there is one picture that shows it, though I like Natsume more. Hehehe.) She is the ‘sleeping beauty’ who slept for 2 years straight due to the events in the Canaan.
She transferred to Yoshiya’s class after she woke up because Yoshiya somehow saved her from the Canaan. She is pretty cheerful, friendly and she became popular among the guys the moment she stepped in the class.
She likes to tease Yoshiya, usually saying misunderstanding stuff that causes mayhem even though they are actually true (She just twisted her words.) The reason why she got trapped in the Canaan for 2 years was because her time looped many times in the Canaan meaning she kept going back in time the moment she became the sole survivor in the Canaan and thanks to Shino, she was somehow cursed to be unable to break the loop. She blamed herself for not being able to save them in the Canaan, and will tend to care for others more than herself.
In the Canaan, she used a long sword and is a speed type warrior. She lacks defense and power, which is the bad point, more like who gives a damn about defense, the enemies are all so broken. Note: Her route can only be opened when you clear the other routes, since her route is somehow the true route to this game.
3.「真奈瀬 晶」Akira Manase
Akira is the childhood friend of Yoshiya and her family makes a living by selling soba. She is also in the same class as him. She may seem like a delinquent to many people, but she is actually a normal girl who is weak against cute stuff (Though the cute stuff she likes are all weird)
She is also quite athletic, being able to somehow catch up with Yoshiya during his morning workout, and she is a very serious person, much more serious person than Yoshiya. She lives pretty near Yoshiya and apparently her father likes Yoshiya’s mother.
In the Canaan, she is the healer of the team, and her weapon is an obi. (Those who knows Hare from Guilty Crown, her weapon and effect is almost similar as Akira.) She is able to heal others from a range, provided her obi can reach the target, and can also deal damage to opponents. Her full power enables her to heal or restore a city which seemingly got destroyed (Kind of exaggerating but shit happens), if it goes out of control it can destroy the internal organs of the person instead of healing.
4.「竜辺 歩美」Ayumi Tatsunobe
Ayumi is also the childhood friend of Yoshiya and Akira, and well she is the boke along with Harumitsu (beside her.) which usually causes raging from Yoshiya.
She usually does things in her own slow pace, and can get really intimate with her friends very easily. She usually abbreviates her friends’ names like how she called Akira as A-chan or Mizuki as Mit-chan.
She may be terrible in sports, but in the gaming world, she is one of the top-tier players in the world, she is ranked third in a FPS game globally and her personality changes immediately when she is playing a game. From her carefree attitude, she changed to a serious and ruthless person, eradicating any enemies she sees in the game.
In the Canaan, she is a person with very high magical output, but lacks the defense and physical capability to move around, making her pretty vulnerable to fast enemies. She uses a sniper rifle which is semi-auto (Seeing how she could spam all those shots with no recoils, I am so surprised, and then I remembered this is all a dream, anything can happen.) In the story she is not really used much in battle, mainly because Yoshiya just took the whole damn show without really showing what the rest can really do.
5.「我堂 鈴子」Rinko Gadou
Rinko is the ojou-sama of the family, and is also the classmate of Yoshiya’s. She considers Yoshiya as her rival and will always try means and ways to challenge him and win him so that she could make him her slave.
She is a very arrogant person, and always look down on her friends, even though she does enjoy their company. She is smart but somehow lacks common sense, which ended up wasting her talent and making her a real idiot instead. That usually ends up in her being teased by Akira and Ayumi most of the time, and she is actually weak against quarrels and fights, causing her to flee while crying, though Akira and gang actually enjoys teasing her.
She is the other comic relief that I like since she is actually pretty cute when is she is being teased and at times she can give very very epic expressions. (If you know Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures, look at those hot guys’ faces, that is the expression she is making.)
In the Canaan, she issot also a speed type, similar to Mizuki, but she uses a naginata or a pole blade, She is more destructive then Mizuki and she is also trained in self-defense since young, making her quite a strong person to deal.
How I feel about this game:
This game is actually not as long as I expected, since I have to install 3 discs just to play this game, and it is a 11GB game, so it is quite a big file. This game is actually pretty decent I would say, the CG effects are very awesome, and especially at the prologue, which is the only part that I find the best, everything was so well done, and the graphics, so much fangasm.
Plot-wise I would say it’s well made, though everything became quite messy and confusing in the middle of the story, and I do not really like the ending for the heroines as well. At least, they made the Grand End really grand, and I find it acceptable.
One part I find interesting is that they used dream as the main concept, which may seem off the mainstream ideas, but because it is the dream, the characters can just make themselves just as strong as the others. This is what I actually feel. because they can do whatever they want with their powers, but somehow got limited. I do like the concept of mixing the terminologies in the Bible with Buddhism and the Japanese folklore, and the antagonists, SO BADASS AND SO DAMN GOOD.
I love the designs for most of the antagonists and how they portray each and every of the antagonists. The favourite one for me is definitely Kuubou Nakiri (百鬼 空亡), he is the most powerful opponent in my opinion, being able to summon Hyakki Yakou (百鬼夜行, which means Night Parade of the Hundred Demons, this parade is actually supposed to be led by Nurarihyon according to the folklore.) and can also summon nine dragons out, which are very powerful.
This is the badass…
Fight scenes in the whole story are plenty, and it only gets exciting after chapter 6, more CG effects are added to make the game better near the end, but one thing I do not like is the limited amount of CGs they used for the battle scene. The CG is basically recycled and reused over and over again, and the fight scene gets gory at times, but those aren’t really shown and portrayed in the CGs. For the H scenes, there is only 1 H scene per heroine, 2 for Mizuki, which I find it okay but I get the feel that they added the H scene just for the sake of adding it, and satisfying the criteria of eroge. They can actually remove the H scene and make it to all ages game. That is what I feel but you may not agree with me.
This is all I have to say about this game, generally it is still a good novel, but they added in a lot of very complicated terms in there, so it does take me quite some time to understand (and I did not even take any official lessons, other than self-learning.) Tomorrow is my first trip to Japan, and I am going to be there for 2 weeks, when I come back, it will be work as an auditor again. Hopefully, I will come up with another fun eroge to review.
The sexy and hot bastard who is the mastermind of all this shit…
Overall rating for the game: 8/10
Gin-patsu Kakumei! 