Service with a Smile

So after a main manga series and three spin offs the dragon maid series dips its toes into video games with Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: Burst Forth!! Choro-gon Breath a bullet hell/touhou style game that has you control three main characters, Kanna, Tohru and Elma; each embodying different archetypes throughout the genre. Kannas attacks are weaker, but they track to enemies, and she can deflect some projectiles. Tohru fires a channeled attack in a line with a bit of side tracking. Elma has a spread shot, her secondary shot/ability is not clearly defined, and the game doesn’t go over it.

The story is a little lacking for a video game but would make a cute filler episode or omake chapter in the manga. The plot of the game is that another character summons the main playable characters and Kobayashi into a cursed computer, and they have to play through 6 stages to escape, without spoiling other things that’s all their is for story mode which took me 30 minutes to complete with reading all the dialog. Aside from story mode, there is a boss rush mode that lets you face off against bosses back to back meagman style, stage exploration mode that acts as your stage select to replay certain levels, and Lucoa’s challenge, that has you face Lucoa again but her attacks are on an infinity loop with no timers and her attacks get stronger. Beyond that you can upload your scores to a leaderboard, and that’s all the game really has to offer, you can grind levels to earn treasures that unlock pieces of pictures in the gallery, which is the games gameplay loop just replay the same 6 levels and gets better scores to unlock pictures.

The game doesn’t really have a whole lot going for it in terms of gameplay since you only have three attack options, your basic attack, a physical charge attack that doesn’t give you invincibility so you can be hit on your way to attack and after an attack if it doesn’t kill the enemy, and a screen wipe that does varying damage based on who is attacking.(Tohru, Elma, Kanna from strongest to weakest.) Normally this wouldn’t be too bad, but the game carries over your health from one level to another which again is fine but the only way to heal your characters is to swap between them and hope they don’t die because, once they do they are gone for the whole 6 level run. You can get full life refills in 2 levels but if you’re down a character or two it feel more insulting than helpful. (As a small aside I couldn’t tell where any of my hit boxes for the characters where, at any given time. Sometime I wouldn’t be moving and the bullets would pass through my character and other times my character would be moving around a bullet would hit me and do at least a third of my health making swap to another character to heal the first only to be hit again since I can’t tell where my hit box is and start the cycle all over again.)

The few good points I can give the game is that the voice cast did a great job at their roles making the very small romp feel like an episode if you can imagine all the in-between. The art is true to the show and retains a soft lines and bright colors even in the menus, and the music for the menus feels like snail’s house had a hand in making it but he did not.

For 40 dollars the game just doesn’t feel like it’s worth the price, if you’re dying for a bullet hell game there are better options for switch and PS4 for a better price, however if you’re a Weiss Schurz player like myself the game may come with a Japanese promo card, so if you’re a fan of that game this maybe worth it.

Overall 4 out of 7 yams