Samurai Maiden Review (ｋｒｉｓｓ)
EDIT: Wow! They actually JUST updated the game and now Tsumugi refers herself as a high school girl! Glad to see they devs are actually listening to the community and fixing stuff. Still no honorifics though....
It's expensive,
It's censored... kinda,
It has a questionable translation at times,
but it's one of the games I've had the most fun of the year by far.
In Samurai Maiden you take control of Tsumugi, a normal high school girl that suddenly gets transported to a Sengoku-era Japan, and later is enveloped in a series of event that lead her to be the Priestess of Harmony. Alongside a trio of kunoichis: Iyo the energetic and loyal ninja, Hagane the older and more adult like samurai and Komimi the grumpy fox girl. With these three companions, she embarks on a journey to stop an evil overlord from ruling and potentially destroying the world.
The gameplay is simple hack and slash but it's surprisingly fun at times. The biggest downside that it has is that you unlock abilities by progressing the story. Now that wouldn't be a problem but some of these abilities are rolling to evade damage and even a parry that becomes increasingly necessary as the game progresses, so it would have been nice to have that already unlocked instead of doing extremely simple combos and general movement in the early game. The kunoichis that accompany you are basically a sub weapon that you can use with the B button, these range from abilities that can stun enemies, inflict them with a status effect or simply doing big damage. The fun of the game comes in how much you can use (and abuse) these abilities on fights, generally there are big guys with lots of HP alongside many small ones that barely move, this is basically free energy for you to gain use of these abilities. When you do a successful combination of the three abilities on a single enemy it's a particle spectacle and also a hilariously long stunlock to various enemies, it's a sight to behold.
However, these come with a major issue that the game has: the lock on system. I am not a master on action games like these, but I have played my fair share of them and without a doubt the biggest issue is the way the game auto-targets stuff for you. For example, Hagane's ability is to shoot a rope that gets electrified and stuns every enemy close to it, most of the times you'll want to shoot in a big group of bad guys but more often than not the priorities get screwed up so she'll shoot a random solitary enemy, it's frustrating when that happens, but a way to alleviate that a bit is to use the lock on. Sadly it's super inconsistent and, worse of all, when you're locked on you cannot give attacks any kind of direction, Tsumugi just attacks what's in front of her. When you have to juggle a variety of enemies this becomes a major issue so on my personal experience I just forgot the lock on and fight while moving the camera. Also on the scoring system, the game rewards killing the most of the cannon fodder enemies that the big bad guys throw at you. If you're going for S ranks, you have to keep and eye on the big enemy's health since you can do damage so fast you pass a certain threshold of HP and suddenly all the minions that the boss summoned just drop dead with no rewards nor couting as kills for you. It's a bit awkward but you get used to it pretty fast.
Alongside that, the PC port is... questionable to say the least. It basically has no graphical options to speak of besides resolution (at least not ones easily accessible) and it has a ridiculous amount of Chromatic Aberration and a very... bad MSAA that honestly just makes everything look blurry especially at higher resolutions than 1080p. Hopefully someone can mod this so these options can be toggled off. Speaking of mods, you may have heard this game from the controversies that envelop it, mostly about censoring ecchi stuff. There are mods already that remove the easy ones like camera angles and black voids under skirts, but other stuff like advanced clothing damage and things like poses and underwear are nowhere to be seen because the game was made from the start without focus on fanservice, whether if they make mods for this or not is yet to be seen.
I wish I could say the translation was decent but sadly it's a mixed bag. I'm not exactly referring to the controversial "Gen Z, Gen X" stuff, the problem goes deeper than that. The general idea of the story is kept in the main story, but the game has problems with the term 'high school girl' or 'school' in general that if you know a bit of japanese will make you feel that the characters sometimes are speaking something completely different that what is being displayed... I wish I could say this will be fixed on a mod but since this is Unity it may he a bit harder to do than other games like these. Also the absolute refusal to use honorifics on old japan where it makes the most sense to use them result in very awkward scenes, especially with Iyo.
Still, for what is worth it's a fun game with surprisingly good music that feels like an era that time has forgotten, yuri hack and slash. However, the price is quite high so if you're unsure on this one wait for a potential sale to get it.