EF - Okay, I beat this game a few days ago. Everything crumbled to a good ol' fashioned blitz. But I guess some thoughts are in order, since it was weirdly noteworthy for such a cotton candy game. So.
For starters: I've never seen a game tear so many holes through its cheeks. The script is a bonafide trainwreck, and the level of self-awareness is vaguely eerie. Nothing is deep: plot is swiss cheese in more than one way, characters have simple personalities and the conflict presented is basically "a bunch of people start trainwrecking each other because there are aliens trainwrecking the world". But none of this really matters, because, while the frame is utterly ridiculous, everything is insanely light-hearted, as if you were playing through a Looney Tunes cartoon. The dialogue is snappy and surprisingly fluid, and the jokes flow like wine (they do overload on the boob jokes, though, and that's sorta problematic). When they're poking fun at the tropes employed, at the natural ridiculousness of the setting and at themselves, you're in for vaguely shallow, but highly entertaining fun. The game is so light-hearted that basically nobody dies, even though you fight just about every boss in the game at least twice. And that's not getting into some memetastic jokes (wait a second, did they just jab Something Awful? Huh, they did). The game is a high-octane, extremely volatile comedy and it shows. Just be careful with the bounce cutins, they've been known to cause earthquakes in Iceland. ALSO: hookerbot meets Gainaxing is disturbing and hilariously wrong.
Gameplay-wise, the system is nice. It's sorta like the bastard child of VP and SRW, but with a flexibility more akin to SRW. They use a base vaguely similar to NxC, but faster and more fluid: you get to assign combo attacks in any order you want, but you have to juggle your attack resource (COM) in order to keep your offense effective, all the while keeping a combo going and building Frontier Gauge for MASSIVE DAMAGE ATTACKS once it's full - and you have support attacks and chain attacks to plug holes and keep that combo going - also useful for bypassing a few defensive measures. The more strategic options are handled by special skills and spirits. Special skills mostly grant special effects that can be quite useful: they're your only form of MT, and you can access effects you couldn't have earlier or in any sane way without them, but they cost your turn as well. Spirits... well, are SRW spirits with a more long-term mindset, so they're insanely good. These bases are enough for a neat battle system, and the enemies aren't slouches (although boss fights are the real emphasis in the system).
The thing that sorta breaks the game, though? Items. Items are insanely broken. They don't take your turn to use, can be used until you run out of COM (they have varying COM costs)... and you can get COM healing items with overwhelming ease. While some boss battles could be utterly nuts without those, they just ease the pressure a bit much, and nothing outside utterly retarded cheapness could save the enemies. Items make things like randoms that routinely 2HKO not too threatening, and bosses, which love their ST OHKO and MT 2HKO while spamming spirits, aren't terribly difficult to deal with either once you get your stocks up. Resource management is always something to look out for, at least. But they could've made items less insanely overpowered, since spirits off that resource depth are enough to make their on-paper insane bases more manageable. The spirit set balance and niches for PCs also seem a bit wonky: Aschen is terribly underdevelopped, and Suzuka feels like she should get some badass support spirit lategame, but doesn't. This isn't crippling for usability at all, but the balance could use work. On the other hand, the bases are nice and the game's navigation is highly friendly: you have perfect encounter control with an awesome run command (100% rate!) and small, amicable areas. So, it's just generally pleasant to rummage through. Music is also pretty cool.
All in all, it was a colorful, mindless and entertaining game that, while shallow, is surprisingly memorable for a sugar rush. Very short, too, so it doesn't take a huge commitment to play through either. 7/10.
