NIS America brought Mugen Souls to the West in 2012, and a year and a half later, we find Chou-Chou and crew embarking on another adventure. Finishing her takeover of the Seven Worlds, she sets her sights on becoming even more powerful, distributing her peons amongst the aptly named Twelve Worlds to bring her conquest to a new level. With a story like that, something obviously has to go wrong at the beginning. Naturally, this happens, but since this is a Compile Heart game, it’s taken to a new extreme.
Ready to conquer the first of the Twelve Worlds, Chou-Chou and company meet the sleepy god of Scarlet World, Syrma, and the rookie hero, Nao. With our godlike protagonist wanting anything and everything she can get her hands on, she messes with the coffin Syrma was found in and finds herself conveniently losing all her godly powers and turning into a cute, chibi version of herself. Not taking any of this lightly, she sits atop the Syrma’s head and orders her around.
Aesthetically, Mugen Souls Z falls in an odd area. All the hand-drawn stuff — from character conversations to the many, many bath and coffin scenes you’ll be seeing throughout the game — stays true to the company’s signature art style. The 3D touches on the characters are extremely nice as well. It falls short when you finally see the rest of the game and start moving around. The character models, from important characters to one-off foes, are poorly crafted, leaving a lot more to be desired.
Not much has changed with the game’s battle system. The Makai Kingdom-esque free roam battle system, large ship-to-ship battles, linked battles and blast-off mechanics are all still present. New to the game is the Fetish Pose system. Replacing the Moe System mechanic, this allows players to transform enemies on the field into either items or peons depending on the actions chosen to appeal to the opponent. Oddly enough, you’ll be using this instead of battling in the traditional sense.
Battling normally doesn’t earn you any bonuses, but absorbing the enemy not only awards you full battle experience, but also transforms enemies into peons which are used to power-up the G-Castle in ship-to-ship battles. You can also create your own peons to battle alongside the main cast, much like you can in Disgaea. The customization isn’t incredibly deep, but it gets the job done. To create more powerful characters, you must fuse them with other created peons. Sadly, there isn’t much of a reason to venture in this direction, since most of the cast can get the job done fairly easily.
Much like the last game, you’re overrun by the mountains of tutorials that do little to help you along the way, as well as the constant allusions to sexual situations. Considering how Syrma’s coffin absorbs the powers of her fellow Ultimate Gods, you have to wonder exactly how far the writers could push this material before it gets weird. The scenarios outside of these awkward instances are well-done, but it does make you question how the game managed a Teen rating.
Like most games NIS America picks up for Western releases, Mugen Souls Z has side dungeons that can be explored to further train your characters, as well as ton of replayability built around maxing out characters’ levels and achieving the game’s multiple endings. If you can overlook the abundance of questionable situations and the number of mechanics this game has, you can definitely find some fun in Mugen Souls Z.
Pros: Interesting cast, battles are still fun, new mechanics streamline the battles
Cons: First game’s creepy factor still present, tutorials still don’t help much
