Queen’s Gate: Spiral Chaos Review

Queen’s Gate: Spiral Chaos is the type of game which you’ll only see come from Japan. It’s pretty much a fusion of all geeky things Japanese, being SRPG, anime, cute girls, fanservice and ecchi. Yep, enough to get any hot-blooded otaku interested.

I’ll be pretty honest in saying that I wasn’t expecting much when I first started playing Queen’s Gate.  The game is based off  a series of ecchi “Visual combat books” featuring a cast of exclusively well endowed female fighters, and it’s almost too easy to say that Banpresto are just cashing in on the SRPG crowd with a bit of skin, bounce and fanservice. After playing for a bit though, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the gameplay of Queen’s Gate is stays pretty true to the Super Robot Wars mould.

Where Queen’s Gate differs from the original Queen’s Blade on PSP is that the  game is more of a cross-over, featuring select ladies from various other animes and fighting games  such as Mai from King of Fighters, Dizzy from Guilty Gear, Mina from Samurai Spirits  and Ivy from Soul Calibur. All of the playable characters from the first game also return, and previously enemy and boss characters such as Melona, Menace, Claudette are now usable later in the game.

Here’s how the game works.  You and  the AI start out with your army of units, which you’ll then take turns in moving or  attacking in the player and enemy phases respectively. Attacks consume Action Points  (or AP) for that character, and determine how many attacks you can chain together  (upto a maximum of 5). Each time you engage an enemy, both sides get a chance to attack, so don’t expect to completely roll over the opposition in your phase. Also like Super Robot Wars, each character has a set of skills which they can use at  the cost of some Spirit Points (SP) to achieve various buff effects such as doing 50%  extra damage for one attack, healing, or debuffing an enemy.

There are a few differences that stop the game from being just “SRW with boobs” though. All units have an  affinity, either being, Strength, Beauty  or Gentle. The system works  in a rock-paper-scissors fashion, where Strength units deal more and receive less  damage from Beauty units, and so on, so there are some things to consider when you choose who’s attacking who, especially hard hitting boss units.

In addition to the standard HP, each female character also has 5 additonal bars of HP which  corresponds to the different parts of their armour (head, arms, legs, chest, waist).  Each attack targets different armour pieces in addition to draining normal HP.

Where  exactly is this going? Well, by reducing a piece down to 0, or “crushing” it, you get  a free bonus attack which you can use to cause additional damage to other pieces. And  if you manage to crush all of a character’s armour, you get a “Perfect Knockdown” which not only instantly defeats that enemy, but you also get a rather…revealing picture of them. Other than the obvious fanservice, the game rewards extra experience and cash for defeating enemies with Perfect Knockdowns, and sometimes tough enemies are easier to defeat using a PKO. It’s also important to note that the AI can make use of this system to defeat your characters as well, so it’s something extrat to be aware of.

Between missions, you can spend money earned during battle to buy healing items or upgrade the  weapons and armour pieces of your characters. You can also free duel between 2 members of  your squad to increase their relationship level – this eventually leads to new  abilities between them such as support attack and defend. Finally there’s also a “Free  battle” option, where you can grind it out with a bunch of generic enemies to raise  some cash or just plain level up.

While I had fun going through the game’s 50 or so stages, I never really felt challenged at all. There isn’t a turn limit on most stages or any bonues for completing a stage in as few turns as possible, so there’s no real need for planning on how to tackle a stage.  Most of the time I was able to equip most of my characters with healing items and brutally swarm the enemy units. A few units you get quite early are also pretty overpowered, like Dizzy, who hits like truck, and Mai, who has really high evasion.

Graphically, the game is quite *ahem* pleasing to look at, with the character sprites being drawn in Super Deformed fashion. Characters are well animated during battles, though they do look a bit low-res at times, while cut-ins on the other hand are extremely crisp and look amazing on the PSP screen. Banpresto are pretty shameless with the fanservice during armour breaks and perfect knockdowns for maximum ecchi-ness, though you never really get to see anything, with the naughty parts strategically covered.

Of course, Queen’s Gate was designed for multiple playthoughs. There are a few route splits during the game which affect which secret characters or costumes you’ll unlock, which you’ll need to play more than once to collect if you’re a completist.  Each subsequent playthrough is also treated like a “New Game +”, where more and more items, experience and relationship statuses are carried over, until the 4th playthrough where everything is transferred over (including character levels).

Queen’s Gate is worth a play, but is definately hard to take seriously given the sheer amount of fanservice in the game. If you can look past that, there is a pretty good battle system underneath, while can be complex, is simple enough for anyone to beat the game without utilizing all of the features. Of course, the downside is, you’ll feel just plain dirty playing this game at times.

Now excuse me while I go hose myself down.