[h1][i]“We drink your blood!~ 🎶”[/i]
~Powerwolf[/h1]
Long story short, this here is yet another one of those Wizardry games from PS Vita nobody asked for. And yes, it requires an explanation; bear with me. See, the original Wizardry was a cultural phenomenon in Japan. Wizardry for Japan was akin to what D&D was for the US. Partially because D&D was never a thing in Japan, partially because of it being a perfect fit for local hardware (Japan was dominated by NEC computers back in the day)—let's not go too deep into that. Let's just say sitting around a PC-88, drawing maps on graph paper? It was the Japanese alternative to what we've seen in Stranger Things. It made a huge impact. Up to the point where now there's not one, but two Wizardry series – the original Western one and the Japanese one. Which follows a heavily different route.
While the original Western series kept inventing the new things (Wizardry VI, for example, allowed players to manually type in words to ask NPCs about specific topics), Japanese games were all about the core element – maps and coordinates. All math, no story. Very Carmack, if you know what I mean. And when portable systems like Game Boy arrived? Boy, oh boy... Having such games on the go put the experiences on a whole new level.
Unfortunately, time's a b*tch and you can only re-use the formula that many times. Innovations were needed. Did Japan try? Well, yeah. We even got the first BUSIN: Wizardry Alternative (that utilized things like QTE) translated into English on PS2. What's important to us today, though, is Michaelsoft's Wizardry XTH. Drastically different from what we had before, it was an anime military-school spin-off. The one that had all the chances to become a thing on its own. Unfortunately, due to terrible management, Michaelsoft went bankrupt. But no, it wasn't the end. Michaelsoft's core staff founded Experience Inc., which would soon make a game that'll change things forever. I'm talking, of course, about Generation XTH. And yes, in many ways it was Wizardry XTH without Wizardry. And yes, for a moment it wasn't really that big of a thing. But. It proved that the Wizardry XTH engine was rather... perfect for recycling. And only a few years later? DEMON GAZE happened.
WTF is DEMON GAZE? My point exactly. The fact that it's on Steam now and nobody really cares is a nice proof of what happened and why Mary Skelter is... what it is. What DEMON GAZE did was take a modified version of the Wizardry XTH engine, adding some quality-of-life features (like auto-movement, for example) and bringing it to PS Vita. That's it. That was the whole thing. Yet it ended up defining the whole generation. There was nothing really special about DEMON GAZE, yet it was so comfortable, so smooth, that it was a perfect fit for the portable environment the Vita provided. Everybody started to want that. And pretty soon? It ended up being the only thing we were getting.
Like pretty much every point-and-click adventure from a certain time period used to look like it was made by Sierra, and pretty much every RTS at some point looked like C&C, pretty much every DRPG from the 2010s looked like DEMON GAZE. Experience Inc. alone released quite a lot of those, while all in all there were more than 20 titles like that released for Vita. And all of them looked and felt nearly identical. Mary Skelter? It's one of such games.
Which is a [i]huge[/i] problem. I mean, if it's gonna be your very first DRPG of such kind? You won't feel bad. Well, you will, but we'll return to that later. In a nutshell, Mary Skelter is not a bad game. The problem is, if you'll play it after beating some others? You'll instantly get a “been there, done that” feeling. The game has the same exact “city” hub, it has the same exact map that looks a lot like good ol' graph paper, it has the same exact traps and features... It's [i]the[/i]. Same. Bloody. Game. End of the story.
Talking 'bout the story, BTW. Don't expect it to be any good. The premise isn't really that bad and the character design (while being yet another take on “shinigami girls”) is quite charming, yet almost all dialogues serve no real purpose. Same thing about the characters themselves. Even though there's quite a lot of girls here (what we have here is yet another one of those “harem” games that revolve around a single male protagonist), neither of them comes with a real personality. The girls here are just “meat”. No more than shallow archetypes. This here is a tsundere, this one is petanko, while this is bakunyū. Naturally, you'll be able to give the girls gifts to build up the relationship and get some erotic stills, and yes, there's a pretty typical mini-game that lets you touch the girls in all the funny places. Because, while doing the fighting, they'll become “unclean” and therefore require some... purging 🤦♀️
Talking 'bout that, by the way. As funny as it is, that's actually the best thing about this game. Despite being a clone, Mary Skelter does have its own mechanics. And those work. While doing all the fighting, our girls will go berserk. And in order to go back to normal, they'll require our Protagonist-kun's blood. Combined with DEMON GAZE's smooth mechanics (you can skip both all the shallow dialogues and battle animations that quickly become annoying quite easily) and the FF III (the original Japanese one) job system, Mary Skelter actually looks like a pretty good choice. Unfortunately, there are two major problems with it.
First, in a way, this game tried too hard. Aside from a neat battle system, it comes with the advanced dungeons, which are... confusing. See, dungeons in this game are alive and come with three meters: Hunger, Sleepiness, and Libido (yes, you heard that right). And while the first two are designed to make things harder for you (make enemies more aggressive, etc), the last one is directly related to exploration. There'll be times when you'll start with a mosquito-like dungeon and will need to satisfy its Libido (Hello, hello, hello, hello~ 🎵) to make it grow. Sounds interesting, but unfortunately... like I said, it's confusing. Again and again you'll find yourself in a situation when there's nowhere to go and you'll be like, “now what?” The fact that, aside from 99.9% of useless talks, there's also 0.1% of those that are important for progression yet can be easily missed due to the lack of a proper journal doesn't help either. Things were so bad that when IF-chan ordered the improved version of this game for Switch, they actually made sure to simplify the dungeons. To make them smaller and less confusing. That's right, the dungeons here are so “great” that the superior version of the game has those simplified.
Now, about our second problem. Our second problem here is the port itself. The Steam version of Mary Skelter is pretty much a direct port from Vita. Which doesn't sound like a bad thing per se (even despite the much more confusing dungeons and the lack of the new ending that was added in the Switch version), but the thing is – this port is downright broken. Again and again the game will crash to the desktop. Runtime errors, DirectX errors... Did the devs know? Yes. Did they provide fixes? No. They just said, “disable your AV software or somethin'.” Which I tried. And it didn't help. And since it's a game that won't let us save anywhere and actually comes with quite long “no save” sequences, should I say that it feels [i]terrible[/i] to have it crash so often?
Despite some of the nice ideas, Mary Skelter is just one of the many DEMON GAZE clones. Which, like I already said more than once, all feel the same. There was no real need for it to exist in the first place. Still, as a big fan of the genre, I was ready to give it a thumb up just because. Unfortunately, the PC port sucks. So, if you [i]really[/i] want to experience this game, go either for the Vita version or the Switch re-release. PC version? As sad as it is, it's a no from me. Dixi.
