Seirei Shoukan: Princess of Darkness (精霊召喚 〜プリンセス オブ ダークネス〜), released 6/25/1998, developed and published by Shoeisha Software Solutions

This game is a lazy piece of shovelware garbage that was obviously put out just to capitalize on people buying things with bishoujo characters on the cover. Honestly I feel like that’s all I have to write about this game, but I will put more effort in than the developers did to write a full post.

Apparently some players think this character art in the cutscenes is good, but it looks awful to me. In any case, this is the opening scene, where the King of Light’s wife gives birth to twins. But the King of Dark attacks the castle in force. A soldier is able to escape with the two twins, but one of them is stolen by one of the Dark King’s forces. The soldier escapes with the other one (Fitt) and cares for him as a son. 15 years later, the son learns that he is the Prince of Light as the soldier finally dies of his wounds.

The rest of the “story” follows him walking down a road, where he just randomly encounters five elemental spirits that make a compact with him, and kills random servants of the Dark King. They reach the old castle and defeat the monster that originally stole his sister. They continue on down the road and meet the sister, who they beat and then she joins the party. They find a mascot character in a forest. Then the road leads them to the Dark King castle where there’s some philosophical discussion about light and dark needing each other but the party defeats him. The whole thing is only 13 stages and can be beaten in less than 6 hours.

The only thing about the game that shows more than minimum effort is the voice acting, which was done by well known (at the time) professionals like Seki Tomokazu, Ogata Megumi, and Hisakawa Aya.

Each character goes in stat order (I guess the WT stat). You have three “orbs” to spend each round to act. You can spend the orbs in any combination you want, but a 3 orb attack is going to be more powerful than three 1-orb attacks. The special moves also get stronger with more orbs. A huge problem with the game is that you can’t move through your allies, which often traps people behind others, especially in the narrow areas that are in most of the battles. You also can’t take back your movement.

“Well,” you might say, “Why not just split up the party so that you don’t get trapped?” You can’t do that because if the spirits get too far away from Fitt, you can no longer control them. This will cause them to either freeze in place for the whole battle, or rush ahead at maximum move into the middle of the enemies.

There are also unskippable battle animations.

If Fitt dies you get a game over, if the spirits die they will come back the next battle and there is a part after the battle where you can increase your “love” points with the spirit by answering a question (which seems to have little effect on the game). Fitt can also use a guard move to take damage for the spirits. The game overall is easy, but if you have trouble you can just retreat (and keep your XP from the fight) and try again.

Outside of battle, there are no towns or shops. You can equip things, and use items.

There is no reason to play this game. Because it’s so short I can’t say it’s my least pleasant playing experience of this blog, but as I said in the opening, it’s an insultingly lazy effort that exists just to pander to the bishoujo fad.