Moero Chronicles Hyper is a rerelease of an old ps2 game under the same name except the hyper. Now usually when a title has an extra word on it, it means its some kind of remake or more polished version of the game. Nope, besides a few gimmick features to allow use of its more marketable gameplay aspects, it is basically the same game that released on PC as Moero Chronicles but without the Hyper. I also feel obligated to inform you of the other games in this series as this is the second game in the series. Going from Monster Monpiece on vita, Moero chronicles, Moero crystal and Genki Tokki: Seven pirates. None of which are needed to play this game but as person that likes to play the full library of a series. I feel like sweeping that fact under the rug would be a disservice to people interested. You know who are as much as I know who I am.
The core gameplay of this game is a first-person dungeon crawler with a battle system that has quite a few overly complex bells and whistles, but results in you realizing their redundancy since the power of just over levelling and spamming basic attack will get you through. But despite the obvious case of dominant strategy syndrome. I’ll explain the systems to those that actually want to play “as intended.”
The dungeon crawling part is a pretty straight forward affair. You are in first person as you stare at a mini-map more than the rest of the screen as the auto-map function maps out all the places you explored resulting in you finding treasures and key monster girls to add to your collection. A pet peeve of this style of dungeon crawling is its bad habit of not marking trapped tiles on the auto-map unless you actually step into them. When I’m building a map I often want a complete one, even though in this game there is no reward for doing so. So enjoying imagining me plowing through traps tiles intentionally just so I don’t see a glaring blank tile on my completely explored map. At least with games like Persona Q or the Etrian series on the 3ds you have the ability to mark these spots yourself. Issue is though, everything is manual in those games. Can’t there be a middle ground?
The battle system is more of the same while superficially attempting to be different. As I mention the systems are rather redundant as all they do is give you minor bonuses and buffs, and the game developers know the casual audience they are appealing to. So of course, not using their systems wouldn’t result in the player being all that hamstrung by not playing the game optimally. But as you see below, there is a mechanic when the game gets mad at you when you don’t play ball.
The battle system can be summarized in 3 phases.
First phase is Io’s turn, your harem king beta male of no initiative. This phase has to do with his highly convenient pervert powers of “desire.” Turns out he has the power to store his libido into an energy form that can be used in various ways. You build up “desire p” which has a % number. And either store it to increase that % or release it to buff your monster girls. It’s a high-risk mechanic however as the longer you store it, the more chances of a backfire mechanic which essentially skips this phase. Suffice to say, this phase is highly ignorable. I personally keep using store over and over and max it out and release. If it backfires? Who cares? I don’t become as overpowered in this JRPG for babies. Its exceedingly easy to over level, especially considering you need to farm rare drops to progress some relationship tiers. As a result, you’ll be over leveled just trying to progress.
The second phase is the monster girls’ turn. You got your standard attack, skill, defend and a command called charm. Charm is basically a buff for the first phase as that increases the % of desire P. So… rendundant. Just use the usual JRPG tactics of spam attack on grinding mobs, and actually bother to use skills and defend commands on boss fights. There is a rudimentary element system to consider weaknesses and resistances. But with 4 “auras” its hardly difficult to fathom it to JRPG players.
The final phase is basically what you bought the game for. This phase only occurs vs monster girls you can recruit/defeat. But before this, you’re gonna need to hear me explain how these are a little different to mob fights. What you do is attack pieces of clothing until they rip to raise that an excitement meter. Once you got those exposed lady parts, you attack them too to increase it even more. Once it is maxed out, your pervert mascot character will go into a minigame where you will raise the affection of the monster girl by molesting them within a given time limit. If you succeed, you recruit the girl by right of conquest (I guess). And if you defeat the girl by lowering her hp to 0 before you can recruit her. She will run away and won’t respawn until a few steps. So, it’s a good idea to get them on the first go. And the best way to do that is just over level yourself.
There are four methods to molest your coveted monster girl. You poke, easy enough spam that spot on her, touch same as poke but done once (do you not see the immediate issue?), you pick “crossing two fingers” and you rub, you move over an area over and over. Poke is fine and works as intended. However good luck if the input is touch and you want to spam it to raise that desire meter to max in the time given. Rub is exceedingly slow, logically the best method to increase rate of rub is lower surface area but too much and its detected as touch or poke. As for pick. Well I guess I’m too dumb to work it out from the text “crossing 2 fingers.” And the worst part is… You got all that real estate and you need to find a few spots where one of these 4 work under a timer. If a poke works. Then sweet, spam that spot until the meter is full. But if its one of the other three, have fun wasting precious seconds finding that spot aaaaaaand you ran out of time. Luckily progress is saved with each attempt-so stalk that girl as she runs around the dungeon. I notice some run away from you after an encounter instead of towards you like the initial encounter in the dungeon. Just a thought.
You might have found the method and found the spot, but you can’t reliably do the input. Speaking of inputs there are two methods, in TV mode it will require you to use the controller with a slow moving cursor (suffice to say its not very effective). What is more effective however is the undocked mode, where you will use the switch’s touch screen to more rapidly look for those weak points and spam those commands. So have fun playing in TV mode if you prefer that, then getting up to undock it to do the mini game and then going back into TV mode.
As for the story (boy did I save the best for last). It attempts to do what most moe games do. Refuse to challenge you. It is a world of delusion more than fantasy. Its core appeal is that narratively speaking you are living a power fantasy powered by your libido. You tower over your cast in status and lord over them with your generosity. Your time and attention is a valued resource so all the characters and they’ll act like even the most wayward glance their way is a treasured moment in their whole lives. A lot of their intimate aspects and tertiary depth is gated behind grind. You make their number go up until you unlock a new tier in your relationship with them (gotta pad out that gameplay somehow). But let’s start from the beginning just to give ourselves unnecessary (no really) context.
Imagine this. You are blank slate Io, the mundane face, generic haired projection bait protagonist of this story. Whom has the illness of being unable to talk to girls because of a mixture of the blue balls and raging hormones (I wonder who the audience is…). To such dramatic extremes that his “desire” will possess him to do rather illicit things to girls in his community and his best friend (implicitly without consent due to the “trouble” it would cause). Your call to action is the fact that you are exiled from the village due to your NEET status, as you are coaxed to “go on a journey” due to the fact that you’ve been a burden on your village’s small social economy by virtue of simply existing. Your task? Find the source of the recent troubles with the local monster girls as they have been rather hostile to humans recently. Given what you do to them in the game it’s no surprise. But in actuality nope its actually some kind of brain washing done by some super evil bad person than these monster girls having any actual personal motivation for doing what they do. A supposed legendary monster girl, whom will likely be encountered mid game and it will supposedly be a big twist that she was muguffin girl all along. I can confidently make a guess that it’s one of the main heroines you get to tag along early game. Also, the whole “I must resist my desires to remain a decent human being and not do bad stuff” thing? Immediately irrelevant once you get to core gameplay. A real dissonance between character behaviour in the story and in actual gameplay that would make the rebooted Tomb Raider taking higher moral ground than this game.
The HR disaster that is your party and equipment management. So, you got your monster girls and now you need to find a place to store them all. Not knowing anywhere else to go, you return to the town you were exiled from and you get to put all the girls into the local inn with their own rooms. Rooms you can pay money to renovate. However, no rent to speak of (can this be anymore delusional?). You use this inn as a base of operations to min/max your monster girls by giving them gifts and triggering events to increase intimacy. It is also a place where monster girls you don’t use often passively gain exp (wow even pokemon hasn’t done that until recently).
Not only that, but monster girls can be used to form usable items by err… the egg system. Basically, feed monster girls panties and little mini monsters called h monsters and they pop out eggs that won’t hatch a baby monster girl like you’d assume. But an item like equipment, consumable (I bet) and building materials (that’s right, they can literally shit bricks). And you’re encouraged to use different combinations with different monster girls as each has their own traits that defines what they would produce.
Storywise it’s a very confused game. Thematically however… you know what this is. You weren’t interested in this game because it had a good story to tell. Your standard for core gameplay is at an all time low because that isn’t what’s going to keep your attention. The way this genre makes money, is what it unapologetically offers you. You want moe. And like every single game of this genre, you get it for free.99 after the reality tax of actually paying the cost of the game.
This game like most JRPGs narratively works under what I call the principle of “big number diplomacy.” So long as you are able to win battles, in the game’s story that will translate to you being very persuasive. All ideological stances and opinions and principles crumble by virtue of you having really made a convincing case. You’ll reiterate your ideals and instead of being argued against (often times with actually valid reasoning and logic), you’ll have overturned a person or group’s world view. Except in this case, you aren’t some guy chasing girls around a dungeon, ripping and tearing their clothing and molesting them. You are a really nice guy that these girls have fallen in love with. Slight dissonance there, but you’ll learn to shelve that thought if you want to tolerate reaching end game.
The thing will that will keep you around is the rewards peppered throughout. You aren’t missing much in regards to story. I think I’ve made that clear. What’s gonna keep you playing is progression with the intimacy with each monster girl, like a collectible you min/maxed to your liking. One can make the pokemon allegory and you go forth in catching them all. But I personally see it more as like a figure collection as you select every aspect of monster girl, from their costumes, to their classes and builds. For JRPG players there is appeal but its shallow. It can have all the systems and means to min/max. But end of the day this was never meant to be hard. This game’s mechanics are specially designed to make you feel powerful. The very definition of overpowered in fact. In terms of story you are never in actual danger and in the game there’s nothing a bit of grind can’t solve. But I will admit, it works. Coming into a dungeon with optimized monster girls, having putting the care and time to make sure I’m basically invincible feels nice. It feels like I earned this state of easy mode through long hours of tedium.
This game knows what it is. And it knows what you are. It’s lacking polish or compelling narrative because it knows that’s not what you stick around for. It has an honesty and lack of subtly that borders on a perverse kind of sincerity. In the end despite all my complaints, I enjoyed myself. Much in a way that I played a game that wasn’t terrible but too many flaws to ever say it was good.
