Moékuri: Adorable + Tactical SRPG – PC Review – by CrimsonMomongaSSS

Genre: Indie RPG Strategy
Developer: MokyuSoft
Publisher: Culture Select
Release Date: Dec 16, 2016

Adorable characters? Check. A heroine on a quest? Sure, why not. Surprising tactical depth? You have no idea. Moékuri: Adorable + Tactical SRPG is exactly what it says on the box: Cute girls doing cute tactical things. From doujin developer MokyuSoft and localization start-up Culture Select, Moékuri is a project of passion that seeks to bring a piece of the Comiket experience to the rest of the world through the power of moe.Our story takes place in a land teeming with “Creatures,” anthropomorphized entities from myths and legends the world over. You’d think life would be rough with errant demons and demigods wandering everywhere, but fortunately there are “Masters,” girls with the ability to tame, summon, and control these Creatures. Iruse Strenz is one such Master, protecting her home village in lieu of her missing mother. However, one day after returning from training she finds her village deserted with mysterious lights falling from the sky. With her charges vanished and her only clues being a magical grimoire left behind by her mother and the trail of a mysterious (w)Itch, Iruse sets off on a quest to discover the truth about her family.A promising premise indeed. Sadly, it isn’t brought out to its full potential. I’ll be blunt: the writing isn’t this game’s strongest point. Now, it’s not bad; the narrative is consistent, coherent, comedic, and a few other words that start with “c”. But it isn’t great. The plot has twists, but they are largely predictable to those who have seen a fair share of adventures. Characters have distinct personalities and do get some growth, but it’s a mixed bag; while some feel like they get genuine growth and depth, others feel like they had a second trait slapped on to prevent them from becoming a walking trope. Locations change as needed, but they are also only brought up as needed. Preemptive or expansive world-building is minimal. Even during moments of tension, there is rarely a sense of urgency conveyed to the player. While the setting could allow for fascinating exploration, such as the Master-Creature dynamic or the consequences of commanding literal gods, in the end the flow of the story feels rather generic.The story is neither off-putting nor enthralling, but is firmly in the middle as acceptable. It does nothing more than its job of setting the stage for the gameplay segments. Fortunately, that is where Moékuri shines.

Initially, the gameplay seems fairly simple. You move your Master around the grid, you summon your Creature(s) of choice, be it a guardian of the underworld, a goddess of light, or a sentient icicle, and then you proceed to smack your opposition into submission. Straightforward enough, yet even in those actions lies a hidden depth of mechanistic complexity. First off is your Master. When you start your campaign, you are given the choice of one out of ten classes. While you may expect your Creatures to do most of the battling, your Master is actually a vital component of your team. Aside from the Master’s defeat being the default loss condition, each class has a distinct playstyle. Some lend themselves as additional front-line fighters, while others provide ranged support. Intermediate classes focus on support, be it rejuvenating your own army or swarming your opponents with crippling status conditions. The trickiest but most rewarding classes of all are those that focus on exploitation, or even subversion, of the game’s mechanics.Important as the Master may be, however, the true stars are the Creatures.

Now, if you’ve read other reviews, summaries, or anything, really, about this game, you’ve probably seen at least one comparison to Pokémon. And it’s a fair point. I mean, for starters, there are literally 151 of these adorable little forces of destruction that you carry in a party of up to 6. You know what, I’m gonna start calling them Moémon (not to be confused with the gijinkas). ANYWAY. Each has one of 10 elemental types, with a specific chain of weaknesses and resistances: Ice beats Flying (Wind) beats Grass (Wood) beats Ground (Earth) beats Electric (Thunder) beats Water beats Fire beats Ice. Light and Dark beat up on each other, and Neutral is just off doing its own thing. Amazingly, each creature is unique, with its own abilities, skills, and stat distributions. While you can certainly identify certain roles that are filled within each element’s roster, there is still a degree of specialization for each character. Stat-wise, you’ve got your standard attack, defense, magic, movement, HP and SP, and then a few quirks. There’s summon time and summon cost, which determine how easy it is to get a Moémon out onto the field, summon capacity which determines how many Moémon you can have out at once, and ZOC which I’ll talk about later. An important quirk of this game is that running out of SP results in death even if you still have HP left, and regen in the field is scarce, so you need to plan ahead for longer encounters.Much of the strategic complexity of the game comes from the skills and abilities your moe minions muster. These come with a wide array of functions, from basic attacks to individual buffs and immunities to team support and even tide-turning abilities unique to individual Moémon. And they’re not (all) limited to just four! When you acquire a Moémon it’ll already have all the abilities it’ll ever learn, but you may need to level it up in combat to learn new skills. With 151 of these out there, that can prove intimidating for somebody trying to find the right Moémon for their team. Fortunately for the time-conscious Master, when you get a new Moémon the in-game encyclopedia updates with its stat-distribution, abilities, entire learnset, and lore, so you know from the start whether you want to add them to your party or store them in the PC box.On to the matter of expanding your personal waifu army. There are three ways to acquire a Moémon. The first you’ll likely encounter is to defeat an opposing Trai- Master. Since badges aren’t a thing in this game, if you win they may give you one of their troopers as a prize. The second is through battles with wild Moémon. If you battle a pack of Moémon without a Master, then you can try to shove one of them into your magic book. Now, choose carefully because you can only fit one o’ them in there to take back with you per battle. On the plus side, Iruse is smart enough to pick the book back up after she chucks it at the wild Moémon, so you can keep trying each turn until you finally succeed. As you’d expect, bopping the target until it’s almost-but-not-quite dead makes it easier to catch, as evidenced by the visible success rates.The third method is gem summoning. Fight some free battles and you earn gems. Pay gems to spin the wheel of Moémon and receive a new, random friend. Pay slightly more gems and you can choose its level. More still and you can choose the type. Or, if you’ve been saving up, pay a bunch and be guaranteed a Moémon you haven’t caught yet. Quite nice for end-game completionists, I’d wager. And just in case this sounds microtransactiony, I’ll clarify: it’s all in-game reward credits for playing beyond the campaign.

With these tools, you’re well on your way to a proud collection of Moémon.The last battle element that I haven’t mentioned is the environment. This is comprised of three components: the weather, the terrain, and the element level. Each of these has a specific form corresponding to each of the 9 non-neutral elements, with the neutral form being the default state. Weather provides a global buff to all creatures of that element. Terrain affects individual squares on the grid, providing buffs to same-element creatures standing on it and weakening creatures that are vulnerable to the terrain’s element. Element level is another global effect that emerges when 3 or more creatures of the same element are on the field, buffing that element or weakening all others, and the effect grows the higher the number. While extraneous at first, these mechanics become ever more critical to understand as you progress. Fortunately, the difficulty scales nicely such that you don’t have to know them when you start off, but instead learn them as you progress through in-game hints and your own experimentation.To round this off, a bit about the ZOC, or Zone of Control. It is effectively a character’s area of influence on the grid, possessed in varying degrees by Masters and Creatures alike. If an enemy creature walks into a character’s ZOC, its movement is immediately halted. Again, thanks to difficulty scaling the effect will be negligible at first, but you WILL find out the hard way how drastically it can limit movements and force you to rethink your tactics. Melee fighters aren’t much good if they can’t reach the enemy, after all. Or you could just spam flying units; they don’t walk. Character’s with large ZOCs may also have skills that specifically use their ZOC as an area of effect, so it’s best to be wary. Learn to use it so it won’t be used against you.

That last bit applies to all the mechanics, really. You don’t need to know them to begin with, but learning ’em makes the difference between chaotic clutter and a coordinated coup.The character artwork is, well, moe as [insert expletive of choice]. There are two main types: sprite, and portrait. The sprites have consistent style, quality, and adorableness across the board.Portraits differ between Masters and minions. The Masters have consistent figures that they utilize during story scenes and stat summaries. Emoting tends to be limited to changing facial features, but it does its job. The summons, on the other hand, are quite varied. Their art is pulled from an array of different doujin artists, encompassing different styles, aesthetics, and flairs. Since they didn’t have to be inserted into story segments, the artists were able to come up with some impressive pieces. I feel I should note that while I have encountered no outright nudity, some of the outfits are a touch skimpy.The background art and attack effects are comparatively lackluster, but honestly, that’s not where your focus is gonna be now, is it?

The sound design is fairly well done, particularly in battle. The music always fits the mood or event, and one track in particular that plays during Iruse’s counterattacks brings back fond memories of a not-quite-moe VN I played a few years back. I would say the primary issue with the music is somewhat jarring transitions during tone-shifts and imperfect looping. The dialogue during the story segments is unvoiced, but in complete contrast the in-battle dialogue is fully and uniquely voiced in Japanese with English speech bubbles. Let me say that again. Every. Single. Character. Is fully voiced in battle. It may be short quips, but this is where you really get a feel for the personalities of your individual Moémon.There are a few other little details that I appreciate. For one, the game makes ample use of tooltips to provide info when needed without cluttering up the display. There’s also a nice bit of customization of the battle screen, allowing you to rotate your camera around the battlefield, zoom in and out, and toggle enemy and ally stat displays. The ever-present in-game manual is always available for quick reference, and actually details all the mechanics for the avid reader. The configuration settings are pretty nice too; they even included a toggle for whether the game pauses when you alt-tab to another program, which you can do often, as this is delightfully light on your hardware. Plus, even the config menu is cute.The only miscellaneous gripe I have is that the save system is a tad confusing at first. Rather than the standard independent-save-per-slot, each save is a system save and the slots are basically team and scenario load-outs. If you load up one save file and level up a character, then when you save that character will have leveled up across all your save files. Both positive and negative changes are shared across them all. Also, the load and save options are differentiated only by the tabs at the top and the color of the interface; everything else looks identical. So you can switch from one save file to another and go straight into battle, and when you return the save/load menu will still be on the “load” tab. And if, out of habit, you go to immediately save without switching back to the right tab… well, let’s hope you didn’t do anything important in that last fight.Overall, I quite enjoy this game and can see myself playing more. Even after the main story stages there are still free battles and the extra challenge trials to take on. The mechanics are complex but not overwhelming and allow for immense variation in playstyles, lending to the replay value of the game. It’s cute, it’s tactical, and if you enjoy those aspects then this is the game for you. Even if you’re not a tactical whiz, it’s nothing a little grinding can’t fix. Though if you’re in it for the plot, look elsewhere. The story is just a sidequest on your true journey to be a Moémon Master!

CrimsonMomongaSSS give Moékuri: Adorable + Tactical SRPG an 8.3 out of 10 (83).

Pros:

• Impressive variety of playstyles
• Complex yet approachable tactical interactions
• Adorable and/or impressive Creature art
• Oozes moe
• Fully voiced battles (Japanese w/ English speech bubbles)
• High replay value
• 151+ unique characters
• Nice quality-of-life options
• Playable with one hand
• Can run on potato

Cons:

• Plot is lackluster
• Story dialogue is unvoiced
• Unintuitive save mechanics
• Battle screen can get cluttered depending on settings
• Occasional typos as of current release
• Battle grid is in a background-less blue void
• Music transitions and looping are a bit rough
• No hotseat or multiplayer; only AI opponents

Moékuri: Adorable + Tactical SRPG is available on Steam for $11.99 and MangaGamer for $11.95.

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