One day many years ago, my aunt was really hungry so she came home with a couple of burgers. She wolfed down the first one in 5 seconds flat, then chowed down the second one with gusto. Halfway through the third one she suddenly stopped and went “Hang on… These burgers are undercooked!” The obvious moral of this story is: Even s—-y food tastes great when you’re starving.

And even s—-y games play great when you’re starving, I guess? Okay maybe that’s far too strong a description for Blue Roses Yousei to Aoi Hitomi no Senshitachi; it’s not really bad at all. It’s just that after playing through the first 14 hours like a maniac, it dawned on me in a flash: This game isn’t actually all that good.

It’s an easy thing to miss, because at first glance there’s plenty to love about Blue Roses. The character designs are fine, the fairies are cute, both your party members and the NPCs have their own personalities, relationships and personal issues, the music does nothing wrong, the game has bright, colorful graphics and a cheery atmosphere, etc, etc…

Best of all, it reminds me a lot of the Summon Night games. So much so, in fact, that I paused and did a bit of research and discovered that Blue Roses was developed by Apollosoft, formed by ex-employees of Flight-Plan, the ill-fated developer of the Summon Night games. The similarities are numerous, but the key telling factors were 1) Walking around town talking to people/party members after battles 2) Not earning EXP during battle 3) Only being able to assign EXP after battle 4) Everything being stupidly expensive.

There’s a branching story (I think?) depending on whether you pick Roche or Alicia as your main character, which should make for some replay value. When I played Mana Khemia 2, I picked Raze first and he turned out to be such an asshole that he put me off not only MK2 but the whole Mana Khemia franchise for good. So I started out with Alicia. Eh, she’s okay, in a dumb, rash airhead kinda way. I prefer that type of protagonist to the glum, moody, ‘leave me alone’ type anyway.

So what woke me up from this pleasant reverie? It was a slow process of realization that culminated in a moment of epiphany, but the main source of my discontent was the tedious battles. Unlike normal SRPGs, battles don’t necessarily take place one-on-one in Blue Roses. Any character that’s attacked/attacking can choose up to two other nearby characters to assist them in battle. One character initiates the fight and up to 6 characters (3 vs 3) take part in it. A character that has already attacked can still take part in team battles. And, a character can move after attacking if it hasn’t moved already. You can attack, move the character, move another character up to attack while the first character assists, etc etc. It’s a very interesting system with a lot of potential, but then a few pesky flies got in the ointment and spoiled everything:

1. To prevent the game from becoming too easy (I presume), enemies are extremely strong. A single turn can take off half of your HP if you’re not careful. Even weak, lower-level enemies can’t be killed easily, making the free battles a pain to slog through. And there are a lot of enemies on every map. Every time I start a battle I just groan.

2. You can field up to 8 characters per battle but you only have 5 fairies to pair them up with. The three fairy-less characters will be weak and grow poorly, making them annoying to use. Since the enemies are so strong, the most effective way to beat them is to either smack them with status effects or hit them with the magic they’re weak to, and for the most part only characters paired with fairies can do so. I don’t know how far along I am, but I’m already using the same favored characters with the same favored attacks repeatedly, so the excitement factor has taken a huge nosedive.

3. They added a little gimmick where you have to tap correct buttons to power up your attacks or defense. Each attacking animation takes long enough as it is, so this did not help at all. Also having a character go from healthy to half-dead because of one missed press is most unfair.

4. I hate fighting the same bosses over and over again. I’ve fought Charlotte and Hamilton about three times now and hated every minute. There’s not much variety in normal enemies either.

Blue Roses is an SRPG, and 90% of the time in an SRPG is spent battling. If the battles are slow, frustrating and unfair, then the game itself becomes the same. Once the novelty of the team battles wore off, the pretty veneer quickly flaked away and Blue Roses‘s true nature as a rather mediocre game were rapidly exposed.

But wait, what about the story? Yeah, that was stupid too. Stupid, obvious, cliched and predictable. That’s probably the worst part of this game and the main reason why I haven’t played it in over a week. Should I spoil or not? Hmm… Okay, not this time. And there’s still the possibility that it could salvage itself, so it’s too soon to go on a rampage.