H-Scene Count- 11 with also the two openings and ending replayable
Created by Eternal, published by J-ast.
Length- 30-40 hours
Story
Yumina is the story of Yumina, an idiot girl who because she failed a test, has to repeat a year of school. In her desperation to prevent this, she is told that if she becomes the student council president she can make any rule she wants, such as no repeating a year. You play as her male friend, a laid back guy that is kinda the reason she has to repeat.
The one who told Yumina, heroine 2 Kirara, forces Yumina into her club and tries to make Yumina the president. From there on its a crazy ride as you battle the other candidates tournament style on your way to make Yumina win the presidency. Then something else happens, but that’s a spoiler.
The plot does a 360 in tone after the election, which is one of the two major complaints of the game. It goes from happy go lucky, silly plot to serious shounen action thing, and it only does the first one well. The second part is handled awkwardly, and while not terrible, is not really good enough to recommend to someone else. Also, doing Yumina’s route spoils both the other routes, and overall the unique parts of routes are not really well designed. The characters stay good and funny though, which is the only real good part during the second half.
Gameplay
Two parts to the gameplay, combat and character events. Route system works by however you do more events for out of the three mains the MC will end up with. Each chapter, a week long, has x amount of events with the three, and you are given a skill for the girl once you finish all her events for that chapter. There are also events for your opponent, which is how you unlock most of the h-scenes. You do their events, get a special skill, use that in battle with them and after that you can h them.
The combat is strange mix of things. You have four people on your side, and either 4 or 1 on the enemy side. Each side has an attacker, and up to 3 support characters, which can be swapped between turns. All characters have three skill types with up to four skills in each, an attack, a defense, and a support. Each skill causes some color(red, black, green and blue) to change in the battle. Skills cost color, and each character uses one color for most of their attacks. Battles become this strange balancing act as you try to have enough color to use a big move, switch characters and use their big move.
Skills can be bought, identified, or learned through story progression. Characters can also power up and use stronger skills by assigning points they gain at level up to abilities. Each character has a number of abilities, most of which allow stronger moves to be used and up a stat.
The battle system works, even if it might seem complex. The problem comes in how most of the fights are done. In chapter two you are brought to a training place(which is the second most common complaint), where you dungeon crawl to complete quests and train. Fights here are boring, most enemies are weak, you will never have color problems, and everything is random. Its not fun. The best part of the training place is the random skits and the top of the screen, where it shows all your characters walking and random things happening. Its amusing, but not enough to salvage the dungeon segments.
You have to train here to win matches, but its by far the part of the game I like the least. To 100% the game though, you have to complete all four of the training area’s dungeons, which will unlock floors at a pace of 10 per every other chapter or so. For every character route you do, you must finish another set of story things in the training area to unlock the final part of the game(One per difficulty, Normal-Hard-VeryHard).
The NG+ system does work. Every thing rises in level with you fairly and you should have no rpoblem going from normal to hard. Which is good, since if you try normal again there is a good chance you will be too strong. The boss fights during the election use an approval system, the bar at the top of the screen in battle. If you do not have the majority of that bar by the end of a fight, you lose, gameover. So if you become to strong there is a chance of not being able to beat the early parts of the game, though if you know this is gonna happen you can keep some weaker skills just in case…
The combat uses animations similar to Super Robot Wars, and can be fun to see a few times. You will end up fast forwarding a lot of the fights due to not to many moves in the game, and the amount of fights you have to do for quests in the random dungeon, most which are fetch items or get item by killing monster x. One good things about the English version is that boss type rare monsters will always drop their items compared to the Japanese version where the drop rates are around 1-3%. The thing is, only two quests in the game are worth doing(exploration and item bag questlines). Quests are by far the most annoying and pointless mechanic, as all the rewards are pointless items you won’t need and money you can easily get by selling things. They take to much grinding for some of them and they just become a chore.
MC is voiced during dungeon segments and fights, but not during any story or h scene. Its a nice thing to have, though why not in normal story scenes is beyond me. Another thing is that all characters have only one standing doll/sprite. All facial expressions and such are done in the text window and are not portrayed on the characters, so no matter how angry Yumina is she will appear smiling on the screen.
H scenes and other things
H is alright. Its fairly standard stuff, all consensual vanilla things. Art is fine, voice acting is okay, nothing really stands out.
Yumina is a decent game if you can stomach the genre shift in the second part and the grindy dungeon parts. The beginning is silly and fairly fun, with the second part while being out of place, can still be enjoyable. Its not a great game, but can be enjoyed for what it is. I would say try it, play until you meet heroine three and go into the dungeons for the first time before deciding.
Save contains all scenes/cgs/songs(some skills are songs and you have to use them all in battle to unlock) plus the true end mode and post game movie thing.
Yumina the Ethereal
thanks for the save file!!!
Welcome.