Londonian Gothics 〜迷宮のロリィタ〜
aka Londonian Gothics: Meikyuu no Lolita
Release Date: 13 October 2005 (Japan)
Company: Megacyber
Official site

Londonian Gothics is a self-described "Gothic-Lolita Action RPG", though it's more like a maze-running action/puzzle game. It's a good attempt and had promise, but ultimately isn't that great of a game.

You control "Alice" (how original!), as she runs through floor after floor of mazelike dungeons, in search of her missing father, the mad-scientist-looking Nabokov. It seems (as near as I can tell, my Japanese isn't so great) that he was doing some experiments with these evil orbs called "boademon" that cause the usually docile monsters to become aggressive. You have to navigate the mazes, avoiding monsters and triggering all the magic symbols marked on the floor, which opens the doors to the next room. It basically plays a lot like pac-man, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. When you find and destroy the baodemon orb, all the monsters on the floor become weak, and now you can chase after and kill them (by stomping on them rather comically) to get items. Some monsters you can even talk with, or buy items from!

Now, for some reason, all these monsters are carrying various dress patterns, fabrics, and sewing implements; which you turn into "magic dresses" at sewing-machine rooms scattered throughout the dungeons. Each dress gives you some ability to help you avoid the monsters, such as jumping over holes, walking over water, shrinking to walk through cracks, showing the location of magic circles, slowing down the monsters, etc. There's a lot of dresses to make, and since you can only hold 6 items at a time, you have to pick which items to keep (each dress requires 3 to 5 specific items). It's really clever and fun, and the dresses are pretty detailed. There's even a mode where you can view the dresses you've collected up close.

The graphics are nice, but the animation is really bad. The whole game is grid-based, and there's no animation for turning, so things kind of jerk around a lot. But the dungeons vary a lot in appearance, from caves, castles, water, forests, etc. Sound is ok, music is forgettable and sometimes annoying ^_^.

The real problem with the game is it gets kind of tedious. It's fun trying to collect items and make dresses, but on the later floors the enemies move so fast, and can usually fly over barriers or walk through walls, that I found myself using the same two dresses over and over. It became more frustrating than fun.

As far as language barrier, there's not a whole lot of dialog, and most of it's pretty mundane (from what I could make out). There's a time early on when you're forced to go back to the mansion and search every room for a particular dress pattern. And at the very end (if you have the patience to get that far) you need to talk to specific enemies and solve a few simple riddles that you really can't do unless you know what they're saying. Knowing some katakana really helps with remembering item names, too. If there's anyone out there with the game that's stuck, email me or comment on a recent entry in my LJ and I can help you out. I thought of doing a walkthrough / basic translation of the dress abilities, I still might. I don't think this one'll be getting an English release.

So, overall? A good idea, with new twists on a classic concept, but just didn't come out that great.