[review] Ciel no Surge

...or "Menu Navigation - The Game".

Genre: 7D Game

Developer: Gust

Official Website

So, my Limited Edition arrived a week ago and I've had enough time to fiddle around with the game and drool over the lovely art and music. And then this happened:

Credits? Wait a sec... wtf? I didn't even spend more than 10 hours on the game, at least actively. Since most of the time you won't have anything to do besides watching your fairies or Sharls.. or Charls, since Gust seems to have a serious problem with consistency, flutter around repairing Ion's memories.

But oh well, let's start right from the beginning:

Ion has lost her memory and after seeing some fancy opening cutscenes accompanied by some awesome music you end up in her room. Or something like that. The main story revolves around the world Ion lives in, Rashura, which is nearing it's end, since the sun has been expanding and is threatening to destroy the planet. In her world an item called "Cernotron" exists, which enables people to convert thoughts to energy, which makes their lifes comfy, but won't help with the sun threat at all.. so people started building these floating cities called "Kolons" which are protected from the sun (makes sense, the nearer you get to the sun, the less it's a threat, right? RIGHT!?) since they have some sort of technology that prevents the sun damaging the cities and whatnot. I actually didn't get too much of the story since I skipped the dialogues most of the time and even if I hadn't, I wouldn't have gotten too much with my limited Japanese knowledge.

What I realised tho, is that this game is weird.

And pretty boring.

But so, so beautiful....

  

  

Well, after the introduction you can talk to Ion in her room, you can also touch her in different ways, but that doesn't have much effect besides Ion blushing or saying it tickles, or getting mad at you if you touch her inappropriately. 

Besides that you can ask Ion to craft items for you, either food or clothes or random stuff that I have no idea what it's good for except for creating other stuff with it. Most items were locked and stayed locked while I played through the story, so I'm not really sure how to unlock them. When you're able to find and item that Ion is actually able to make, she will get at it right away and you can watch her sitting at the table and doing stuff that doesn't exactly look like she's creating the item you asked her for. But oh well..

  

That's about all you do when you are in Ion's room. Talk to her, touch her inappropriately and then watch her do stuff like sewing, drawing, cooking, eating, sleeping.. and yes, it is as boring as it sounds.

Of course Ion is awfully cute, so it's not all that bad watching her do all this boring stuff, it's cute to hear her sing a song suddenly while she's drawing a picture... but why the hell does she never show the pictures she drew? :(

And this is basically all you'll be doing besides being a creepy stalker...

Besides Ion's room you can also go out on a date with her - I never tried that, because I never found the option, but actually... I don't think it's such a huge loss. ^^; This game does not really feel like a dating game, tho it is so similar to Love Plus, but romancing Ion is definitely not the game's main goal.. I'm not even sure if you can get romantically involved with her at all, I'd be more than glad if you can't tho, as I don't really feel like it would add anything to the game.

Well then, the other way to get out of Ion's room is entering her mind world, there you can use the barcode scanning feature, which makes fairies appear, which you can then buy for a fee, the in-game currency is called HymP (Hymn Points or something) and you gain more by sending you fairis off to work. Their work consists of flying around at the "Broken Points" and fix everything with their magic, wohoo.

  

  

Basically each fairy has an element (Water, Wind, Earth and Metal) and each Broken Point needs a certain number of elements. It starts off with as little as 20 Water, 20 Wind and goes up to 160 of each element later on. So, when you select an BP, you get to a screen where you can choose one of your fairies, next a list of available fairies from other users pops up and you get to choose one again and both of them go off to the BP and start infusing it with their magic. The other user's fairies are usually your main source of magic, since you won't be able to afford much upgrading or high level fairies early on.. and later on. I wonder how those people leveled their fairies so high, since there isn't really that many Broken Points you can repair... 

Repairing can take quite some time, your usual lvl 1 fairies produce around 3-7 of their element in 5 minutes, if you are lucky you find a barcode that will produce a lvl 1 fairy who'll produce 10-15 every 5 minutes. But it doesn't matter anyway since most of the time you can just rely on other user's fairies. I've found a 100+ magic fairy almost every time when I had to choose another user's fairy to help my fairy repair something... 

  

When you are done with the repair, you either unlock a new map with more Broken Points or an event scene. There's 16 (I think? Could have been 17 as well) of those, each of them 5-20 minutes long, telling the story of how Ion met these 3 children and then there's some sort of uprising against the government (or something) and tsundere girl is all jealous of Ion, until they suddenly make up and then Ion starts singing and giant water lilies start blooming everywhere and then the credits roll...

I actually have no idea what exactly happened in Ion's past and I've gotta say I've got no real intention of ever finding out. This game felt like Love Plus without the cool parts x (Insert Random Facebook Game) x Twitter and that's just weird and pretty boring. Most of the time you are just navigating through the awfully vast menus with their 3 billion sub menus and loading times, between switching menus, are awfully slow, probably since everything is loaded from the Gust server...

  

Conclusion:

As beautiful the art direction and the music of the game is, this game is a lot less than I hoped it would be and the only thing I got excited about when playing it was the sudden appearance of a friend (?) of Ion's who came over one day:

For some reason I only took screenshots of her boobs... 8)

Well, I was curious about this game and I had some fun playing it, but I'm not too much into social networking and watching Ion sleep is about as exciting as watching anyone else sleep, I was hoping for far more micro-managing and collectables, I was hoping you could spend a lot more time with training your fairies and I was hoping for far more design options for them.. 5 hairstyles? Disappointing. And two of them are only available if you buy them when upgrading your fairies. :(

Well, I'll probably also get the second chapter, since it's gonna be free, but I guess that's it then for me and the game. But at least that super shiny Vita sticker looks awesome and so it was definitely worth importing the game.... 8)

Next up:

Finishing Hexys Force, the second Reproduction & Portal 2.