Tuesday 13 May 2014

Uta no Prince-sama Debut


I remember when I really looked forward to the 2nd installment of the all singing, all dancing Princes of Song. The 1st game had an over-the-top craziness, which was mainly attributed to the eccentric Principle, Shining Saotome, to an otherwise fairly regular high school romance scenario with a run of the mill cast. The music mini game was simple but quite addictive and provided hours of fun in its own right. All in all, it was a great who because it knew who the intended audience were and how to mix wacky humour with heart warming moments and gushing romance. Awesome.

So, how on Earth did Broccoli (the studio) get it so wrong with Debut? Firstly, the fun was knocked out of it with so few Shining appearances, no HAYATO and the game generally took itself too seriously. Secondly, the scripts were long and boring and had our main heroine basically doing nothing but sitting idly, watching her other half trying to solve some out of the blue problem which you don't care about. Sometimes, it feels like any character or relationship development at the end of the 1st game is just hurled somewhere and forgotten. Other times the whole character has been stripped of any personality they had and reconstructed so they can squeeze in as much implied homo-homo as they can. As a result, the romantic instances Haruka has with her boyfriend just doesn't have the same heart fluttering gush that was there in the 1st game, it was lukewarm at best.



The game also struggled to attend to an extended cast of 4 additional sempai to the original 7 princes. They crop up often just to make things difficult for Haruka and her princes, which is very annoying. They also come with all their emotional baggage and they are not dateable choices so what's the point of painstakingly going through all their dialogues and backstories?!

The music mini game was still fun but Broccoli has been really cheap and reused existing material they had such as the B side of the character songs from the CDs of the anime. The game sprites also used the same poses albeit with different outfits but even some of the backgrounds are the same as in Repeat.



The bottom line is the creators have lost sight of what made the original (and Repeat which is the remake) so popular and while trying to please the BL fangirls, they ended up pleasing nobody with such boring screen writing and cringe worthy Princely homo time. I only managed to play through Masato's and half of Tokiya's route because he's not the Tokiya who we'd known and loved.



I had to quit before the PSP went flying out the window so a Rage Quit worthy 5/5.

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