Recs.
Updated
Omega Quintet is a Japanese turn-based role-playing game that parodies the pop music industry. You play as a group of pop idols who fight, sing, and dance to purge the world from an evil darkness.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Rewarding and strategic turn-based combat
Omega Quintet's combat gives you control over your party members' formation on the field, rewarding you with access to powerful combos when you plan out those formations just right. You'll want to prioritize keeping your melee-oriented characters on the front lines, and your long-range companions in the very back. This gives you access to flashy combos where the characters attack one after the other with powerful critical hits, doing lots of damage to enemies on the field. Even better, when you kill an enemy, you're automatically granted another turn. If you manage to one-shot enemies one after another, you'll be rewarded by taking no damage in battle. Keeping your party members in the best formation and one-shotting enemies are the best ways to stay a step ahead in battle.
Pro Cool concept of parodying censorship in the music industry
The story in Omega Quintet revolves around the Japanese public entrusting your group of pop idols to fight against a darkness whose name is censored, only playing the recognizable beep sound when mentioned in the dialog. It's meant to be an interesting metaphor for the idols fighting against censorship in the music industry. This is a cool parody that mirrors the struggles that artists deal with when fighting against censorship.
Pro Cute anime art style
The characters in the game all have a pleasing anime style, both for their normal 3D character models and their 2D versions in the visual novel-style narrative. The pop stars have lots of different hairstyles, eye colors, and cutesy outfits with plenty of bright, vibrant options like pink and purple. Fans of this anime aesthetic will enjoy the art.
Cons
Con Shallow, generic story filled with anime tropes
The pop idols' quest to save the world from an evil darkness feels done to death because of all the cliches. The story is filled with bad writing, like the male manager being surrounded by cute female pop idols, and the silly, shallow drama surrounding the romantic and sexual tension between them. Despite the clever angle of the parody on censorship, this concept is underutilized and underdeveloped, instead overshadowed by the generic storytelling. The tropes are lazy and distracting, adding nothing to the plot.
Con Terrible graphics
Textures for environments are poor, making the game look dated. They lack detail or any kind of realism, looking a lot like something from a PlayStation 2 game. Even though the character art is nice, the overworld graphics stand out too much. These can be a turn-off for players who want something more pleasing to the eye.
Con Overworld exploration is padded in frustrating ways
The forests, city locales, and other locations on the overworld map have a lot of filler to pad out your playtime. They're bloated with obstacles like makeshift bridges you need to push down to get from one area to the next. It's nice that each of your party members have unique ways of dealing with these barriers, but you're limited on how soon you can access them. If your character isn't a high enough level when you approach the indicator to interact with the obstacle in your way, then she'll apologize and say she's not sure how to get past it. This happens a lot when you explore new areas, imposing an arbitrary level gap on getting from one place to the next.
Con Awful framerate drops
While the game normally runs at 60 FPS, the performance isn't too reliable. In battle when there's a lot going on, and you're using all of your flashy skills and attacks, the framerate will dip below 30 FPS. It's really distracting and slows down the action way too much.
Con Too many complicated tutorials
The tutorials are huge sections of text with the occasional image here and there, overloading you with information. Instead of implementing more intuitive tutorials through gameplay demonstrations, the game expects you to read everything to figure out how things work. Even descriptions for what each button does have lines and lines of complicated, descriptive text. You're better off skimming the basics and figuring out the rest from there.
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