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Fire Woman Matoi-gumi |
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Added 8.8.01 | Review by Kaze Kiri FX (Jake) |
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When I first got my PC-FX system, I had very few games for it. I did, however, have three of the PC Engine Fan demo discs that contained playable PC-FX demos. Among those playable demos, there was one game that, to me, really stood out as the very best of them all. It was the (very generous) demo of none other than Fire Woman Matoigumi, found on Super PC Engine Fan Deluxe Special CD-Rom Vol. 1. After playing through this demo numerous times, I knew which game I wanted to buy for my PC-FX next.
And when I got the actual game, I was not disappointed. In fact, I would even say that my expectations were exceeded. Everything about this game is so perfect! What makes it perfect? Well, that's what I'm about to explain in this review. I'll start by saying that this is a dating game. Wait! Don't stop reading there if you're not a fan of dating games! What makes this game a more innovative dating title is the way it also combines RPG-like character manipulation, and very cool fight scenes. You start the game as a transfer student who has just arrived at your new highschool, "Shirosagi Gakuen". You are able to enter a name for yourself, your birthday, and your blood type (it is a dating game after all) and you also get to choose which year of highschool you are in: 1st, 2nd, or 3rd year, which doesn't have a huge effect on the outcome of the game. Arriving at your new school, you very quickly run into trouble with some ruffians. Outnumbered and outmatched by them, there seems little hope, when suddenly, three beautiful girls calling themselves the "Matoigumi" come to your rescue. They are: Sakai Ryouko (played by Hayashibara Megumi), a lone wolf "tough girl" who doesn't take any crap from any boy who can't defeat her in unarmed combat; Seta HIromi (played by Amano Yuri), a very sweet and charming, somewhat shy girl, but still not to be taken lightly; and Katsuragi Sayaka (played by Mitsuishi Kotono), who seems somewhat childish at times, but still studies hard for her exams. After the three girls kick the living @*$% out of those nasty hooligans, they decide that you have potential and ask you to join the Matoigumi. It doesn't matter if you say no, they'll force you to join anyway. From then on it will be your job to take care of any sort of ruckus that may arise on the campus of Shirosagi Gakuen while still participating in after school clubs and finding romance with one or many of 11 possible girls there. The game begins each day after school. Everything that occurs in the game happens in the after school hours, none of the game actually takes place during school. You move your character about the school grounds and observe the many happenings around campus. The manipulation of your character works basically the same as your average RPG. The characters are very large on screen, very similar to Megami Paradise II. You can see the characters' facial expressions and different emotions are indicated by blushing, sweat drops, hearts and musical notes appearing above characters' heads and things like that. (It's really quite cute.) When you walk up to a major character and press button I to talk to them, a large image of them will appear in front of the play field and most dialog by major characters is spoken aloud. There is a very impressive amount of voices in this game, and the voice acting is of superb quality, featuring many well-known Japanese voice talents. As you begin the game you will meet many more characters, including a whole lot more girls whom you can potentially date, a few rival guys, and also the school principal and doctor. You will also meet Otaku Joe, who has all the stats on all the girls at the school and can tell you how much they currently like you as of the beginning of the current month. All of the major female characters can be located on the GPS ("Gal Positioning System"!), which will show you their locations on a map of the school. It will also show sweat pouring from their faces on the map if they are currently in trouble and need you to come to the rescue. In a basic day, you will check around the school to see if there are any new scenarios happening anywhere, and you will eventually end the day by either participating in a club or asking a girl to walk home with you. (Occasionally the girls will ask you.) The dating part of the game is extremely simplistic and is very cut-and-dry. You have very few tools to make the girls like you. The main tool you have is asking them to walk home with you. Your secondary tool is rescuing them when they're in trouble. Another tool is giving them presents on their birthdays, but this, of course, only happens once a year. There are other things that will help with certain girls, like participating in certain clubs (sometimes together with them), and other things like beating Ryouko in combat, for instance, will make her like you more. Basically, if you want a girl, you just need to walk them home enough times. There are also dates, but they are just one picture of your character with the girl at a dating spot, and they are very infrequent. The girls will ask you on dates once in a blue moon when you walk them home. You cannot ask the girls on dates yourself. You can have as many girlfriends as you want in this game, they will not get jealous of each other. You will, however, face tradeoffs as you can't walk them all home in one day. The highest number of girlfriends I have been able to sustain at once is six. At the end of the game you will have to choose one of the girls you have won, and you will see that character's FMV ending. You can save the game before you choose and load to see the endings of all the girls you have won. I enjoyed the dating system very much, because it wasn't too complicated, as it often is in other dating games. Blue Breaker, for instance, also features a dating-type system added to its RPG gameplay, but Blue Breaker's dating system drove me absolutely nuts. I think the dating system in Fire Woman Matoigumi is just perfect, and is well balanced with the other elements of the game. As I was saying before, you also need to participate in clubs. Your character begins the game with very low status attributes. You raise those attributes by participating in different clubs. You can participate in a variety of clubs like sports, martial arts, chemistry, and even arts and cooking; and you can participate in as many as you want! Various attributes will be raised depending on what club you participate in. You will receive a rank for every club you participate in. The more you participate in a club, the higher your rank will be. Be careful though, sometimes participating in a club will lower your rank in another club. Also, in most clubs, every time you participate, your HP will go down due to physical and mental strains of participating. Don't overdue it, you need that HP for fights! And if your HP gets too low, you will become sick and need to spend a day resting at home.
I recommend you participate the most in the martial arts, because they will give you new moves in which to use in the fights and raise your physical condition overall. The best ones are kickboxing, karate, judo, and kempo. I also recommend gardening with Madoka. It will raise your HP a lot without touching your ranks in other clubs. The sports will raise your physical condition, but they usually do not give you new moves and they will lower your ranks in your martial arts clubs. Other clubs like chemistry are generally not good for much. There are very few parts of the game in which high intelligence will be useful, because the game puts a very strong emphasis on fighting, which is good, because the fights are awesome. The fights are command-based. You will choose six of your moves to assign to the six trigger buttons of the FX pad. When a fight starts, the characters will jump to their positions and a timer will begin to count down. Before the timer runs out, you will press the buttons in the order that you wish the moves to be executed, four commands per round. When the timer runs out, the characters in the fight will jump to the center to face each other and execute their four pre-decided moves. How your character fares in the fights depends on your wise decisions of which moves to use and in what order. You will need to take into account how many people you are fighting and what moves they have and what you believe they are likely to do in the next round. The animation in the fights is very well done, and looks very cool. As you may have guessed, the looks are a bit on the wacky side, these are not very serious fights. You will also see some pretty weird moves like electric shocks, spring-loaded boxing gloves, aura attacks, and cages that fall from the sky onto your enemies. The strategy used in the fights is very fun. You will want to get as many moves as you can to make your character stronger. At the beginning of each month, all the members of Matoigumi will gather and have a showdown to see who's the strongest. Defeat another Matoigumi member and they will teach you how to do their special move, so you will want to do well in this competition. And as I said before, most of the problems that arise in this game are solved by fighting, so it's very beneficial to have a strong character. What's left in this game is the many scenarios that happen over the course of your one year at Shirosagi Gakuen. Most of the major ones will involve the three main members of the Matoigumi mentioned earlier: Ryouko, Hiromi, and Sayaka; but the other characters will have their moments too of course. There are a number of important events that will happen, such as a week-long school festival, a school play, Valentine's Day (always important in a dating game, get as much chocolate as you can!), and dealing with the mysterious new guy who appears near the end of the game. There are, of course, many other smaller events that happen every week at Shirosagi Gakuen. To see them, you will need to go to the right place on the right day. Many of the occurrences of the events can be found just by looking at the Gal Positioning System and seeing who's in trouble and observing characters who are absent from their usual locations. Basically, the entire game takes place within a relatively small area. There are no scenes outside of the school grounds. This may seem limiting, but it will take you a little while to learn your way around the school and be able to read the map correctly. The game's variety doesn't lie in the locations themselves, but the fact that the school is constantly changing. As time goes on, there will be different scenarios to find, and the graphics and music will change to fit the different seasons. Everything in this game is superb. The music was done by T's music and is very very catchy. As in many PC-FX games, the music is made up of short digitized repeated samplings stored in the system's ram, so it isn't full CD quality, but it allows for necessary disc access while the music is being played. There are two sound tests, but you have to find them in the game. One has only character themes (which each girl has), and the other has all the other music in the game. There is also a vocal theme song performed by Amano Yuri which I have always liked a lot. (It has a funky beat!) The FMV animation is very well done, but you won't see it very frequently in the game. There is only the opening sequence, the 12 different character endings (the 12th one is the default one you will get if you don't win any of the girls), and there are FMV sequences shown during some of the vacation times which will be different depending on which of the three main girls currently likes you the most.
The graphics are impressive and overall just great. The school grounds and all the characters in it are very colorful and well-detailed; and the fight scenes, of course, are great. The large pictures of the characters that appear on screen when you talk to them are beautiful, and their moving lips fit precisely with the dialog. The other illustrations you will see on holidays and dates are also very well-drawn. As you can probably tell, I like this game a lot. This is definitely my personal favorite on the PC-FX, and probably even one of my favorite games of all time on any system. Everything in it is just very well done, and it fits my idea of the perfect PC-FX game exactly. By the way, there was also a version made for Playstation, but it is just a translation of the PC-FX version which is the original. If you have no knowledge of Japanese, you can maybe play this game a little through trial and error, but you will definitely miss out on a lot of the enjoyable plot and dialog which are the meat of this game; and you will be confused about many aspects of how the game works. Get help if you can, because this title is definitely not to be overlooked. I realize that most people will probably not love it quite as much I do, since I do attach some sentimental value to this game from when I first got my PC-FX, but I still play this game regularly and I wholeheartedly recommend purchasing it to anyone who owns a PC-FX. - Kaze Kiri FX (Jake) |
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