If you knew you would die within two years, what would you do with your life? Would you aspire to greatness or YOLO up the party circuit? Oreshika extends that concept to your entire bloodline, as you must lift a curse set upon your clan in Alfa System and Sony’s newest release on PS Vita. Are the trials and tribulations worth the pain, or is YOLO the way to go?
Oreshika takes place in feudal Japan where, as mentioned, you’re the heir of a cursed bloodline that was set up by a God for total genocide. You have to retrieve five items to help prove your bloodline’s innocence to the Emperor and lift the curse. It is an easy plot to get the story going but there is a good amount of intrigue and mystery surrounding the the backstory. Are you solely fighting to restore your name, or are you also the unwitting pawn in a powerplay of the gods?
The unique concept of the game is you know you’re going to die. You have a limited lifespan, and thus you must breed with the various gods to keep your bloodline going and make it stronger. Each turn equals one month and at most a character will live twenty-four months. But every character is random so they can die out long before that.
This is the meat and potatoes of the game as you slowly get further and further in the dungeons and progress through the story of your bloodline’s history. With the exception of the menu screen and the town screens, time is always flowing. When navigating the dungeons time will pass. Once the month is over you can stay another month in the dungeon or leave, but if you leave you’ll have to begin the dungeon from the start again. Time in battle also continues, although a lot slower, making the gamer have to think about what is important: loot and experience points or completing the dungeon.
Combat adds another unique element to the time managment mechanic by making your rewards solely at the whim of a slot machine. When a battle starts you’ll see three spinners and what they land on is what you get if you defeat the enemy leader. If the leader runs away then you get nothing, except for the devotion (aka XP) from others you’ve defeated. This is great but frustrating at the same time. It freshens up going against weak enemies as there is special loot you can get, and everything is random so you’re not stuck only getting bad gear for a long time. But, due to the time management it means wasting the good months of a solid set of characters trying to get those special items.
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The art style in combat is beautiful. 99% of the time I don’t really care about graphics, so long as it looks presentable for the atmosphere the writer is trying to portray for his story. But the art staff of Oreshika took an anime approach to the design and added some traditional Japanese elements to give it that feudal feeling. Instead of blood spurting out of a demon, you’ll see the blood come out like flower-like petals, floating to the ground. It is something best seen than described. It is a good change of pace for those tired of how blood normally works in games. The music followed a similar route, going with a lot of traditional sounding Japanese instrumentals instead of heavy rock ballads. Again, that is great for those needing a change of pace in their RPG soundtrack.
Devotion is the main currency of the game over money, as it serves as both your experience points from battle and also your payment to the Gods to keep your bloodline going. In combat you can have a maximum team of four, and you split the XP with them. The more enemies killed in combat, the more devotion you get meaning sometimes you have to make the choice of going solely for the leader to get the gear, or killing everyone for more devotion but risk the leader running away. Outside of combat, each God in the pantheon has a devotion requirement for breeding with your clan. The more expensive the better the stats. The more you breed with a certain deity and the better that deity’s stats will go up, and cost too. Not every God is available from the start as some are locked away and will need to be freed if you find their gear in combat. Half the fun of the game is trying to make that super soldier child, and the game knows that, thus those devotion increases help keep the game from being abused easily.
The biggest strength of the game is also its biggest flaw. The time management, while fun and makes you think and pre-plan stuff, also has drawbacks due to the poor implementation of character bloat. A lot of actions like breeding a child or going to a dungeon cost a turn, meaning you have to choose to do one over the other. You have to prioritize. But if you manage to do a good job and build a clan with lots of people, there is nothing for them to do. They just sit there and do nothing. For example, if I have five members and choose to breed, those other four just lose a month of their life. There is nothing I can assign them to do to be of use.
Breeding is not the only way to increase your clan. After you get the first story item you’ll be able to travel to other ‘lands’. First it is an AI controlled one, simply to train the player in the mechanics, but once you hop online you can go to other players city’s. Here, for a fee, you can adopt their characters into your family or marry with them. They come as they are, so if the person is 16 months old with weak stats then that is what you get. While this is a fun, and ingenious way to make your clan better, it has the same problem as mentioned earlier. What do you do with all the extra characters?
Oreshika is a game that has a load of potential. It gives the gamer a lot of bang for their buck, and is different compared to any other RPG on the market. How much joy you can have with the game is how well you handle the character bloat, and feeling like you’re starting from scratch all the time.