Sashiburi deshitaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! (Long time no see), I've just played my 2nd character play through of Sweet fuse and had to write something about it. I wasn't sure if I liked it at first, but once you get through the rigmorall of setting up the story it really heats up.
Sweet fuse is an Otome game recently (last week) released on psp and Vita here in the UK by Aksys. For all you vita users sat there thinking "But it didn't appear till wednesday" you are only half wrong. In fact they were one week late with vita compatibility forcing the rest of us to boot up the 'ole psp, not such a problem in japan as it's pretty much known as the visual novel machine. Let's hope we have many more VN to come over here in the west.
Anyway back to the game. It's around £16 which I'm sure most of you will agree is a decent price point when confronted with £30 per VN or even worse £2.50 per voltage story line that lasts 1.5-2 hours max and when you add up all the side stories and sequals each Voltage game comes to an excess of £50 (our poor poor pockets). Play throughs of Sweet Fuse will last you around 4-6 hours for the first play through and then once you gain the power to skip pre-read text it's roughly 3 hours per character. 6 or 7 (you gain a person after play through 1) will take you 3 hours. So that's roughly 25 hours of gameplay for your money and in my recent mitarashi play through I somehow missed the kissing scene so I MUST GO BACK AND DEFEAT IT...later...on fast forward...alot. On the plus side, missing the one image didn't give me the bad ending so the game isn't hard and it isn't brutal to you.
The "game play" aspect, aside from choosing dialogue involves using Saki Inafune's insight to solve the problem at hand. She chooses 3 words from a set of dialogue and one of them must give her insight incite which allows her to come up with the right answer. It's very logical and they let you go back and retry if you fail. In the end it's all about the story rather than being mean to the player.
The actual storyline you ask? Keiji Inafune (Megaman) is the proprieter of a newly opening theme park. All the people at the event are family members of the staff, including his niece Saki. Just as Inafune is about to make his speech the evil COUNT HOGSTEIN takes Inafune and some of the staff hostage. He announces a game for 7 people which Saki naturally offers to play. The 6 other people are coerced. And so begins your adventure with 6 men.
I would highly suggest picking this up if you wish to give your psp's or vita's some love. The characters really grow on you and you won't get the whole mystery with one play through. I've been really happy with this game and I thought I should let you guys know about it because I believe it can be easily missed.
In other Vita news: Atelier Mereru was just released silently onto the psn store for vita and Aksys recently announced they would be bringing over danganronpa for us. In the meantime if you love spoilers go watch the danganronpa anime over on hulu or other streaming sites.
Over and out!
