Charmian's Journal

This is a pretty hilarious game, but difficult to take seriously because Orochi and Dakki are such boring villains. I keep on thinking someone should write a fanfic AU where it is revealed that the real motivation of Orochi and Dakki is that they are HUUUUUUUGE Sengoku era/Sanguo era fans and so therefore they kidnapped their idols (fans gone wrong) in order to stage dream match-ups and like, resolve age old questions of who would kick whose butt.

Well, also it doesn't help that so far (I've played Wei, Shu and Wu a bit, haven't done Sengoku yet) that I tend to be thinking about the stories as follows: Shu is really like Super Mario World. Zhao Yun is Mario, and he defeats the level boss, but then he learns from the mushroom guy (Yuan Shao's hat is kind of mushroom shaped, ain't it?) that the Princess Liu Bei is in another castle. Wu seems to be all about the Sun family sitcom. Oh dear, there goes Dad again, insisting on staying behind oh-so-heroically, thus negating the entire damn mission to rescue him. I haven't finished it, but I'm sure it ends in like a family group hug. Maybe I'm biased, but I like the Wei storyline the best so far, although I ended up thinking strange thoughts like "so the relationship between Cao Cao and Cao Pi is kind of thematically like (in a v. tenuous way) the relationship between Nanjiroh and Ryouma in Tenipuri.(Wei no Ouji-sama?)"

Um, anyway, the gameplay seems significantly harder than the regular games, and actually, IMHO the amount of emphasis placed on the specials really alters things. Hard mode is really hard. Also it is kind of annoying to be having to play through on levels with everyone so that I can get more abilities. The weapons system is nice, though, as is the ability to give other charas more exp points.