Yes, Idea Factory actually managed to make a game worse than Kurunugyaaah. And they achieved it quite easily too, by making L2 Love x Loop unspeakably dull. Bad games I can handle. Boring games? Urgh… If this was on the DS or the PSP then maybe I might have toughed it out and completed at least one route, but my PS2 is on its last legs as it is so I have no time to waste. And seeing as the game is so poor, I’m not going to waste too much time writing about it either. I quit and here, in short form, is why:

1. Main reason: There’s too much talking. Yeah, I know it’s a visual novel, but still! They keep repeating themselves – robots this, robots that, Eua this, Eua that. On top of that their dialog is choked with lengthy, unnatural explanations about things that don’t shouldn’t need explanation for the in-game characters. And the writing just doesn’t read very well, so it’s hard to follow much of the time.

2. The battles are sluggish. They take a while to load and even longer for any actions to play out. Plus useless characters will always be useless from start to finish while your robot Kagome is a gamebreaker through and through. I basically guarded with my MC every turn because she only hit enemies for 1 damage no matter how much I tried to level her up. It was no fun at all.

3. I was looking forward to the guild quests, but they’re all terrible. They just expect you to grind up enough money to buy overpriced items to get “rewards” you really don’t need. There are about 20 quests unlocked from the start and no new ones are ever added.

4. The time traveling gimmick was poorly designed. Most videogame time traveling devices and abilities come with some limitations so you can’t spam them willy-nilly. Here there are no limitations, but nevertheless the characters act like there are. Kagome’s powers allow them to go back to any date in history, yet instead of just shadowing the sister they’re supposed to be saving, they spend their time running around doing all kinds of useless things at useless points in history. It’s annoying to read.

5. The story is moderately interesting, but just when it’s about to kick into the next level, the character-specific routes begin. And then suddenly the main character who was all focused on saving her sister is now boy-crazy and *dokidoki*ing all over the place because some boy told her he loved her. If she was 15 I’d cut her some slack but at 18 she should really know better.

6. It’s a romance game but there was no one I particularly wanted to romance. In any case, as I said in point #5 the story is serious enough that any romance feels seriously out of place.

I will admit that the soundtrack and the character designs were both really good. This is probably the first time I’ve seen Iwasaki’s art given its just due. In the Rune Factory games either everything is small and tiny on the DS screen or you spend most of your time looking at 3D models of the characters instead. Here it appears the background art and music were deliberately selected to complement the design so the game has this uniformly gentle and mystical mood that I really like… but that’s about it. I didn’t even like it enough to finish one route and I don’t like it enough to write any more about it, so there.