Megami Paradise Game Sample -- PC Engine CD
0Original Air Date: May 23rd, 2009
This game sure has a lot of great-looking anime scenes!
In this game, the main character is Ling-Ling (Rin-Rin) who finds a fairy named Pop (Poppu). Lin-Lin goes around to fix a problem that she herself started. A lot of things were explained in the introduction, so I'll discuss the gameplay instead.
You gain level-ups like traditional RPGs by gaining experience points, but you won't learn any skills that way. To learn some skills, you must find different flowers (they look like Sunflowers) around the world and search them. The flowers actually have spirits inside them that are named after zodiac signs (Cancer, Aries, Scorpio, etc.). You can only keep four different skills and to obtain different ones, you must give up a skill you currently have. However, with other party members, you can have more skills (although no one party member can have more than four skills). Besides those four skills that you obtain from flowers, you can get a "cosplay" skill.
Megami Paradise utilizes an unusual "Cosplay System", where you change appearance depending on the clothes/armor you wear. Not only do you change appearance in the dressing room, you change appearance on the map and even in special cutscenes (depending on particular clothes setups), which I thought was pretty cool. If you wear the right combination of clothes, you can gain a fifth skill. For example, dressing up as a tennis player with a tennis shirt, tennis skirt, tennis racket (weapon) and such, you can use an ability called "SMASH". Smash allows the character to launch a non-elemental attack that can hit one or all enemies with a tennis ball.
You can buy items and such in towns like traditional RPGs as well, but you can't change equipment at any given time. You must go to armor/dress shops (or dressing areas in certain places) and use the dressing room to change clothes. This adds a little bit of strategy to the game, though admittedly not that much. An interesting thing about MP is that you must wear certain outfits to do certain events in the story. For example, you must dress in "Dodgeball" attire to enter a certain area to do an event to progress in the story. It's a little fun because experimentation is the key, although if you've seen as much anime as I have, you usually can figure things out due to the tons of typical anime cliches...fishnet stockings, bunny outfits, blah, blah, blah. It basically boils down to common sense and a little Japanese knowledge.
Music is a mixed bag. Some of it is really nice like the music in some of the anime cutscenes and the world map theme (which SERIOUSLY reminds me of Lunar). Other tunes sound as if they don't try to push the CD media. The game seems kinda easy, but to be honest, I haven't played the whole game (at least not yet).
The PC-Engine isn't exactly a system that I would play for RPGs, so this game is OK. It's not great, but I've played worse.
Basic Format: Super CD-Rom² (Super CD-Rom2)