Remember how usually in a game’s sequel the writers find on clever ways to make all your hard earned progress, levels, powers, and upgrades reset? Mugen Souls Z is not the exception even though it’s a silly and funny reason. Idea Factory, Compile Heart and Ghostlight bring us this flashy and marvelous port to Steam.

The game centers on a new main character, Syrma, who is according to the game’s lore an “Ultimate God” who was sleeping in a Soul Eater style coffin. This magical artifact is the one responsible as well for her secret powers, as its abilities absorb the ones of powerful beings, such as Mugen Souls’ charismatic Chou-Chou, transforming her into a tiny companion for Syrma. Together with their team and peons, they aim to uncover a solution to this curious mess, and go forward to absorb even more powers from more Ultimate Gods, this will allow them to unlock hidden secrets and the whereabouts of special characters.

THE MECHANICS ARE PRETTY CRAZY

The game’s mechanics follow up on the previous title’s. As a turn based RPG, you manipulate your characters around a battlefield and perform specific commands like regular attacks, special skills, and even try Affection to attract foes and trigger the coffins special damage, healing and buff abilities. One of the most interesting mechanics however is the ability to change Syrma’s personality, switching between appearance and attributes.

You can still do that silly rock, paper, scissor game with the giant vehicles, which is very straight forward and like most games from this developer you will have more than enough tutorials to cover everything.

The game puts you on either hubs or small landscapes outside of battle, where you can find loot, save points, hidden passages and of course creatures to fight against. It’s very difficult to get lost as you can simply follow the progression marker, just make sure you saved because sometimes the game can go on and on with cut scenes or a tough battle straight up.

THE FANTASTIC APPROACH TO VISUALS

This game’s art style does not back, at all! It’s one of the greatest perks it has as it is just simply nonsense action with a bunch of special effects flying everywhere, flashy particles and crazy animations.

It’s cousin game, the Neptunia series even though having some crazy stuff, it’s much more calmer in comparison. Mugen Souls Z simply excels in bringing a great show of RPG action. Does it get landed with cut scenes? Yes, but if you’re not much into them you can just skip them, but you’ll be missing on special story marks every now and then from all the clumsy dialogue.

THE CAPTIVATING SCORE!

Of course the game has a few too much fan service. The Lolita style for the characters is somewhat unique but really go on different paths and distract from what the story is developing. This in the sense that even though the character’s have unique dialogues between each other, they feel really flat, they don’t go on a rollercoaster ride that much and usually each one will bring up predictable lines. This roster does not evade the usual anime tropes.

Whether or not this could be your type of game, it does offer unique game play and it’s story is something not very common in this industry and it’s quite enjoyable. As for the aesthetic, it’s a matter of preference and all in all, a full combination of points can make this a great RPG worth playing.