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I got a large supply of new Doujin titles on the way, so y'all can expect to see a few more Doujin games thrown into the usual rotation of videos. That being said, you might not be familiar with the dev team, "Harukana Game", which is a bit unfortunate -- they have almost no Youtube presence and a very small web footprint, but the best way to describe their titles would be "Dynamic Clickers". This might scare some people off as their titles are fairly automated and utilize a GUI that accommodates desktops, laptops and mobile devices alike, but they do put some effort into their games and they're a little more involved than they appear at a glance.

While I have played several of their games, "Protect Machina" is their latest (full) title which was developed and worked on between 2017-2019 and features the notable musical talents of "TEPPAN" (including their work on the abstract anime masterpiece, "Kyousougiga" to more obscure works like the OG mecha classic for the original Xbox, "Phantom Crash") and the main character is voiced by "yuayua" ("Moekuri2", "Love Live!", "Innocent Evening Breeze", "Skyrim Mods", etc.). In the game, you assume the role of "Aqua", the sole hope of mankind in the battle against cyber terrorism. Five years into the near future, an unknown virus surfaced that crippled all major networks around the world which opened the flood gates for armies of cyber terrorists. The leading virus terrorist organization, codenamed: Leats, has all but secured their place at the top of the hacker food chain and a tremendous battle of the world's best white hat and black hat hackers was waged in secret from mainstream society.

One group built a special weapon in this battle: a state-of-the-art terminal equipped with a new OS and a sophisticated A.I. girl called Aqua who battles the viruses with a distinctive user interface that ebbs and flows. Why was she created for this purpose? Who is really behind the virus terrorist organization? What secrets will Aqua discover as she follows her calling? These simple questions are wrapped up in a shiny package that is part clicker, part simulation, part real-time strategy, and part RPG. While one could call this an "idle" game as well, the game requires way too much player involvement to leave running for very long unsupervised.

In any event, the core of the game is to carefully manage your funds and abilities to advance deeper and deeper into the cyber world. Players can buy and upgrade "chips" they can equip to Aqua that augment her abilities that have a variety of uses and vary wildly in terms of their memory usage (more in a bit), power, range, accuracy, critical hit capability, cooldown time, buffs, debuffs, number of hits, duration, etc. They come in four main categories: Attack, Defense, Search and Sub. The first two are fairly self-explanatory (although there are uncommon "manual" attack chips where you can activate Aqua's high-powered special abilities) while search can augment the overall range of your abilities as well as how quickly you can identify "stealth" viruses while sub chips offer mostly passive benefits.

All chips can further be upgraded by spending virtual currency you earn from defeated enemies to improve their stats and when they level up enough, you can raise their rank to make them much stronger. You can also spend money in the virtual shop to add new chips to your arsenal (as well as shuffle what's available a few times a run) and earn rewards by completing in-game missions to earn bonus experience points or other rewards. As you earn enough experience, you will naturally level up and earn level-up points that can be spent on Aqua's growth tree to improve stats or increase the number of available chip slots at your disposal. All the stats synergize with each other, but the one unique stat to be mindful of is memory; all of Aqua's abilities use her available computer memory and if she has too many high-cost abilities or spams too many consecutive equipped abilities, she will overheat and be completely vulnerable to incoming viruses. Aqua does not have conventional hit points... instead, you lose time each time you're hit and if she runs out of time, the backdoor closes out on her and the run ends. You can retry from certain points as the game auto-saves or try a new run (some things carry over, starting chips and shop items are random).

As you advance even further, you can unlock more decks, augment your runs, unlock more background music, etc., and time is always moving (although it slows down considerably while in menus, use FFVIIR as a modern reference). Overall, I was somewhat intrigued by this game. It costs about 15$ and can be found at:

https://booth.pm/en/items/1266912

This is a video of the game in action. Enjoy.

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