Duration: 8:15

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Original Air Date: September 27th, 2009

I had this game lying around and decided to put a video up for it, like so many of my oddball video games.

D+Vine [LUV] was originally a graphic adult Japanese PC game. Another game was later made for the Dreamcast with virtually every graphic element removed and D+Vine spawned a small cult following, which helped spawn an OVA on DVD and a Doujin PC game of sorts known as Tobi D+Vine. The story revolves a travelling swordsman and his best friend named Hyde and Sakura respectively. Hyde is a relatively laid-back and kind fellow, but he's also slightly cocky too. He is looking for a legendary treasure in a cave near the town of Arville when a dying man gives him a mysterious pendant, which is the beginning of a bigger mystery.

I have to say... I'm certainly no graphics whore, but the presentation for this game is absolutely pathetic for a Dreamcast game. If you told me this was some kind of TG16 RPG, I'd take your word for it at a glance. Beyond the vibrant color use lies a game with characters devoid of any real detail and textures and environmental designs questionably comparable to roleplaying games from the 16-bit era. The character models aren't really much better than anything you'd see from Phantasy Star II-IV and menus are bland and a little hard to navigate, not to mention some text is damn near illegible. Ironically, this game looks MUCH worse than Tobi D+Vine, which was actually a great-looking shooter.

Even the anime stills are pretty average DC fair (not quite as clean as Kuon no Kizuna Sairinsyo or Kuon no Kizuna: Sairin Mikotonori) and the opening movie is pretty grainy with dilluted-sounding audio (but still somehow manages to be nice... maybe I'm just a sucker... yeah, lets go with that). There aren't really many vids beyond the opening movie because these are the kinds of DC games people don't really put up footage for on YT (unless usually provided by a Japanese member)... BUT, how is the gameplay? Well, it's not a straightforward RPG, much to my surprise. I'll say a bit more about it when I put up a gameplay video.

Yeah, I might be sounding pretty harsh, but I'd be lying to myself if I didn't say how I feel about it.