H Scene Count – 13
Created by Xuse, translated by Aroduc and published by J-ast
Length- 35~ hours
So about 4 or so years after being announced(about 6 after the translation technically started), Seinarukana(Sein), the sequel to Eien no Aselia, has finally been released. I have a lot of complaints on why it took so long but that’s not for here. For this game I’ll be comparing it to Eien no Aselia(Eien from here on out) as few other games are at all similar to Sein and since Eien doesn’t have an adult version it doesn’t get its own post. So on to this mess of a game.
Story
You are Nozomu. An ordinary highs chool student who has weird dreams where people talk in a strange language and a lot of people die. Through the events of the prologue you eventually learn that you are the reincarnation of a god by the name of Jirol, and everyone who is a reincarnation of a god has an Eternity Sword which makes them Superman levels of strong. So after awakening to his sword and almost being killed, Nozomu and a few of his friends get sent into another dimension where their quest immediately becomes going home. They don’t know how to find their home in the dimensional tree so they wander world to world meeting new people and getting into the real story of the past and battles against Gods and saving the world.
Honestly the story is set up for a grand adventure, and it feels like that for the first two real chapters but then it really falls apart. Or more like it changes genres entirely and focuses almost entirely on the Gods and fighting them. This isn’t helped by me expecting a very different idea of a story to begin with, but whatever. It works for all the different places you go, but don’t expect to be amazed by the writing.
So compared to Eien, Sein is a lot less grand but has somewhat more alive characters. This is mainly due to how the games were written. Eien had 5 heroines and they were for the most part the only characters that got a lot of screentime until the remake for the PC. This remake/port added in scenes for the subspirits, which were the majority of your fighting force. Before the port, the only things these subspirits had were rape h scenes and names, nothing else. So when they added in actual personalities and conversations with the subspirits they were done mostly as extras. Main heroines never show up and most of the spirits themselves never interact with other characters. This means a majority of the characters in Eien never really talked to each other, which is why Sein has a more solid cast. In Sein all the characters interact and play off each other making for a more lively and varied team. If only a lot of those interactions weren’t harem jealousy scenes… But whatver. In terms of plot Eien is more solid, but Sein has for the most part a better cast.
Gameplay
This is going to be long. Eien and Sein have something of a unique combat system, so I really want to try and explain all the parts properly. I’ll start by explaining combat in Eien and then mentioning the improvements made in Sein. For the most part the games combat is the same just with some slight changes that make things better.
So if I had to state the genre of the games it would be strategy RPG. You have up to six teams on the map filled with nodes. Each turn you can move each team one node, and your goal is usually to reach a specific town. You are ranked by speed of reaching that town. Eien has a few unique missions where you are defending and even one mission where you sit on base and level up, but Sein is all capture a town missions throughout.
So combat is the most unique thing about Eien. You usually have a team of three made up of the game’s few characters, each with an associated color for you to know which skills they have. Blue are strong attackers with skill cancel magic, green are good defenders with healing skills, red are offensive mages who suck at defense, blacks are debuffers who attack a lot of get around guard(guard skills trigger x amount of times per attack, and blacks thing is attacking enough that they ignore that. Blues just hit hard enough to get through guard). Your main character is considered white, which means he gets buff skills and is generally decent at everything. So all your teams are made up of three units, usually one of each of the above though you get to decide who is in what team.
Combat is automated for the most part. You pick what skill out of three a unit will use in their role. The roles are attacker, defender and support which should be self explanatory. Most attacks hit the defender until the defender dies then you attack whoever has the least health. Combat goes for I think it was two rounds and then ends. Keep attacking until one side is completely dead. You can, at the end of the game, make a team all rounders which means one character plays all three roles. Few characters can really do this but it can help speed stuff up. In Sein you get all rounders early and they get one main change from a normal team. Other then only having a single life bar, all rounders can change their skills mid battle. Battles in Sein take about 5 turns for each side, with the only option for teams is to change who is in what role. All rounders can change their skills making them more interesting and adaptable for combat. Eien didn’t have position hanging for you or enemies in combat, making Sein have more dynamic combat as you adapt to changing formations and sometimes changing skills.
Each skills comes with two things to keep in mind. One is its usages. Once a skill is used to many times you will need to rest on a town node to get uses back. The other is how much mind the skill effects. Mind is mainly used to decide endings, and Sein got rid of it so I won’t linger on that. Just know it gets annoying to track and balance. The last thing about skills is once you learn one you won’t get the replaced one back. You have three slots per combat role, and leveling gives you new skills. For the most part you just delete outdated skills an this won’t be an issue, except for route skills which are unusable outside of that girls route. This means if you learn their route unique skills, each of the heroines will lose one skill slot from each role. If you do this after they have learned all their skills they will only have two skills per role for the rest of the game. This is usually not a big issue but in a few missions you will want as many skills as possible.
Sein for the most part does skills the same way. You have three per roles, the classes each learn their proper skills(though white is now a usual type and has color blocking guard skills now), and you have three skills per role. But now you don’t forget moves, you store them. Stored skills don’t regain uses when resting at a town, but you can switch out mostly at will. You also don’t learn skills from leveling but from items. There are a couple times in Eien where I had to sit and level to learn the skills needed to win fights, but in Sein you are usually given the items needed to learn what you will need as you progress so leveling is just for stats. Sein also added a few unique skill traits that made combat more interesting.
The other main change between the two games is how their maps worked. In Eien you had one map that was for the most part kinda small. This was good as moving was a pain so you didn’t really want to move much. In Sein each chapter usually gets its own 3d maps which might be my biggest issue with Sein. Its maps are huge, but really boring. Eien had three big fights that took a decent amount of time, Sein has 6+ maps that are huge and take forever. At least in Sein you could select a town and your team could advance or retreat to that town, so you didn’t have to pick up and select where each token went. You just hit advance and then select the next waypoint which was smoother then Eiens slow map movement. Still wasn’t fun but it was smoother.
Last real change between the two is how turns worked. In Eien when it was your turn you moved every team and then ended. In Sein each team had a speed and moved when it was its turn. This meant some teams would move sometimes twice as often as other teams.
That’s everything major I can think of. Probably sounds really confusing but it isn’t. Its pretty simple and while Sein starts pretty hard it gets stupid easy at the end. Its definitely the better game for the most part, but it still has some issues.
H And Other Stuff
The porn is alright and has some strange variety. Mainly Narukana’s, the I guess main heroine, scene is just weird. You have two which are basically drug induced, a yuri rape scene, and two scenes without penetration. Its mostly vanilla stuff with an oddity here and there. It’s alright, but nothing special. The biggest issue I have with the h is with one of the two bonus scenes. The game builds a relationship between the beast guy and the girl he’s introduced with, but instead of having the bonus between them its with the main character and her. It just feels wrong, though at least the fandisc fixes this. Other then that its decent stuff.
Music for the game is good, and I definitely like the opening theme when it starts during the final boss. The graphics would have been decent back when the game was released and actually, the 3D is still decent compared to most 3D h games released today which is sad. The actual background art is good, but the sprites look kind of rough? I don’t know how to say it, but their skin doesn’t look like skin to me. The combat art is good to, but chances are you’ll turn the animations off pretty quickly. Combat is just really slow with them on, and its even worse if your computer lags during an animation. In fact, expect every battle for you to have the control key pressed down just to make things bearable.
Final Opinion and Save
I started this game with the worst route. No joke, Ruputna the miko girl’s route is just bland with barely any interactions between the main character and her. After starting off on a really bad note I thought the rest of the game would just be on her level, but it wasn’t. The other routes were all far better then hers, with only the childhood friend being a sour note. The other girls had a lot more focus and better backstory’s and endings.(Ruputna has an interesting origin, but the game only mentions it in her route skills. Never once is it mentioned or hinted at in the rest of the game).
One of my biggest complaints is with the protagonist and his role in most of the comedy scenes. He’s super dense, just like any harem protag from the time this came out, which translates to a lot of stupid “What did I do wrong” repeating in every attempt to be funny. I liked Eien’s main character more just because how dense and good he was was not his main character trait. It helped that most of his heroines weren’t in love with him from the get go unlike Sein’s.
Overall, if you wanted to play this, I would say only do two runs. Do Satsuki/Katima then Narukana which are in my opinion the better routes. After your second run you’ll enter the final difficulty which is a joke with percentage damage skills, so any challenge the game had is gone when you get there. To end this I’ll say that this game is not as good as I hoped, and it would have been far better if I didn’t play it six times, once for each heroine. If you want more of the Eternity Sword series then sure, play this. Just don’t expect a war epic like Eien. And have a lot of time to spare.
Save contains all cgs and h scenes unlocked, a completed save with all characters at 99 and with each type of skill learned(I’m not going to get every skill as that means playing each heroine route on each difficulty and that’s a huge waste of time) and saves to each route and ending.
Seinarukana
http://www.mediafire.com/download/aw3adq5ho976bt4/Seinarukana+saves.rar
http://www.4shared.com/rar/nVrWGCUMce/Seinarukana_saves.html