Who this game is for
– People who really like dungeon crawlers. Like, really, really like them.
– People with at least 20 hours to devote to the game, usually more.
– People who are tired of always “saving the world”.
– People who are tired of playing as the usual plucky kid with his prickly love interest.
– People who have a lot of patience for long-term party growth and grinding.
– People who don’t mind a bit of initial difficulty in return for curb-stomping galore towards the end.
– People who can let go and don’t mind changing parties frequently (this is always really hard for me).
– Anyone who thinks they’d enjoy playing as multiple generations of the same family.

That’s a pretty specific set of people, but if you can tick off even two or three of the items on that list, Ore no Shikabane might just be for you.

Having said all that, and despite my hearty recommendation, this game is far from perfect. They left a modern-day sequel hook at the end, and if they ever make a sequel (ha!) there are a couple of things I’d want them to look at.

What’s wrong with Ore no Shikabane wo Koete yuke
1. A total of 10 short dungeons (5 for much of the game) is way too few for a game that can drag on so long. There are also way too many of the same enemy/palette swaps to fight. Either make the dungeons longer and more involving or shorten the game or design more enemies. Preferably all three.
2. The pacing is a bit slow. There was a long stretch in the middle where I felt I was just running in place, raising characters only watch them die, then raising more, repeat. I’m not sure what could be done to relieve this. Maybe shorten the game in general, or add more story landmarks (i.e. bosses) so you feel you’re making progress at every stage..
3. Walking is slow as heck, dashing reduces your HP quickly and is not very fast either. Later on you get items and learn skills that make things much better but until then moving around is a real pain.
4. One wrong hit to your leader and it’s bye-bye for that trip. It would help a lot if they put at least one save in the dungeons, at least on the easiest setting.
5. The roulette should be manual, not automatic. As it is getting rare items and scrolls is hard and frustrating. Sometimes there’s a stat requirement before you can land on a particular item, but the game never tells you what it is.
6. Random perma-deaths for KO’ed characters is too painful. I once lost a promising swordsman at 4 months! Another time I almost lost an archer at 7 months, but her mother offered to stand in for her. Only her mother was even better, so I just restarted and lost all the progress I’d made in the dungeon that month.
7. You can only carry 30 items, and the slots fill up in a hurry. There should’ve been some way to either send things home or increase your capacity.
8. Not really a flaw, but after spending all that money upgrading the town it would have been more fun to let me explore it, visit landmarks, talk to NPCs and generally take a look around as it changes through the years.
9. Fighting the bonus boss will make you feel bad. Not bad as in “sorry for the boss” but bad because the bonus boss is as patronizing as hell and clearly lets you win to make you feel better. You can even choose to re-fight the boss over and over again until you’re “satisfied”, but you’ll never really win. I don’t recommend it if you want to walk away from the game feeling good.
10. Some of the stuff that happens in the story is kinda nasty. The anime scenes are hard to watch in general.
11. Characters don’t talk unless they’re dying, so you don’t really get to know them. Bad for people who enjoy character interaction, of which there is virtually none in this game.
12. The stats are kind of confusing, even with lengthy explanations in-game. I’m still not 100% sure I really “get” them, because sometimes it seems the stats don’t correspond to the damage your character dishes out/takes and stuff like that.
13. Breeding takes a whole month, plus another month before the sprog shows up, plus another 2 months before you can actually use them in battle. It calls for careful planning, but it’s also kind of annoying.
14. No sidequests. Hardly a dealbreaker, but I enjoy sidequests and it would liven up those dull, dull slogs through the same old dungeons. A few optional ‘kill 10 frogs’ quests would be cool, since I’m going to be mowing them down anyway.

Apart from Nos. 1, 2 and 6, most of these aren’t as bad as I made it sound. It’s a very good game, all things considered.

Enough about the past, on to the future. I’ve been making good progress with Lunar and Rune Factory Frontier, so I’ll provide an update on one of those next.

“Ore no Shikabane o Koete yuke” is often translated as “Over my dead body,” which is what it means, but not in the usual sense of “Hell no!” More like “Cross over a river of the dead bodies of your ancestors until you finally manage to kill the boss,” which isn’t nearly as catchy. Not that it matters; they could have called this game Poopstained Bloody Avengers and it would still be just as awesome.

It’s on the PSX and it’s on the PSP. If you get the chance you should definitely play it. Don’t ask any questions, just do it. Is it– YES! Should I– YES! What about– YES! YES! YES! YES, just play the darned thing already!

Good, now that we’ve gotten all that ‘review’ stuff out of the way, it’s time to post some screenshots I took along the way. But first the backstory, which is simple enough. A demon named Shuten Douji killed a man and his wife and placed a curse on their son which dooms him to live out his entire lifespan in 2 years or less. He can’t have kids with normal humans either, but the gods intervene so he can breed with them instead. The rest of the game is about fighting, leveling up, getting money/treasure and passing on your genes to the next generation so they can continue the vendetta until they finally kill the boss.

First the people doing the fighting: the Shitanomori clan (named by me). With their lifespans so short you’ll be going through a LOT of characters, but the photo gallery lets you memorialize them like so:

The guy with the mark on top of his head is the original main character, Akane, along with 4 of his kids and one grandkid. In honor of his passing all subsequent family heads adopt the name ‘Akane.’ I went through 76 Akanes before finishing, which is entirely too many. I’ll tell you how to avoid this fate in a later post but for now let’s look at character stats.

From top to bottom you have the character name, gender, age (at 1 year 7 months he could drop perma-dead at any moment), hobby (just for fun), HP, MP and Health (used for special attacks, if it drops to zero your character has a good chance of perma-dying). In the purple box is his attack, defence, total EXP gained, agility and loyalty to the family. The lower the loyalty, the more likely a character is to run away for good. Press the left/right button to see weapons equipped and more detailed levels.

The colored lines on the right represent other stats. Fire = red, Water = blue, Air = green, Earth = yellow. The first set of four, Heart, show the character’s temperament. More water = more loyal, more red = less loyal, more attack-oriented, that sort of thing. The second set, Skill, shows magic def/atk. More fire = better fire magic atk and def, etc. The last set, body, stands for physical stats. Fire = phys attack, Water = HP, Air = agility, Earth = phys def. All three sets affect the kind of magic your character can learn.

Since all your characters, no matter how wonderful, will die permanently between the ages of 1 year 7 months and 2 years, you have to keep the bloodline going by breeding constantly with gods/goddesses. To do this you need “Worship points”, which are earned along with EXP. When you have enough, you go to the breeding screen and check out the resumes of the gods available, like so:

They all come with a resume of dominant and recessive “genes” i.e. stats that may or may not manifest in your offspring. You might be wondering if there’s a, uhh, ‘physical’ element to breeding or not. Fortunately/unfortunately the game is deliberately ambiguous on the matter so you’ll have to use your imagination. Either way you end up with a child (or twins) like so:

Don’t quote me on this, but I’m almost certain the stats on the left are the “father’s side” genes and the ones on the right are the “mother’s side” genes. You won’t know which set the kid gets until they show up a month later. The set they don’t have may or may not be passed on on to their kids, making this whole breeding thing kind of a crapshoot. I think a character’s dominant stats also affect their hair, eye and skin color but again don’t quote me on that. Once the kid shows up a month later you give them a name and pick a class for them.

Clockwise from the highlighted job it’s Naginata fighter, Demolisher, Dancer, Martial Artist (best class), Lancer, Gunner, Swordsman and Archer (second-best class). The purple box in the upper left shows what class his parent is. This is important if the parent knows a special move: they can only pass it on to one kid who is in the same class. This can only be done in the first two months by having that parent train them. 2 months later, they’re ready to fight.

Pick a party, any party, equip them and send them out. The world map looks like this, only with 3-5 dungeons when you first start out. Uhh oops, I seem to have lost that screenshot. Have a random obituary instead:

There are also 2 seasonal dungeons that can only be visited in June-July and November-December respectively. Pick a dungeon – they’re all around the same level to start with – and explore.

Dungeon maps aren’t displayed by default; you have to use items or skills to show everything. The round thing in the upper left shows the current month and the blue flames show how much time you have left before the end of the month. You can keep exploring into the next month and on and on, but it’ll play havoc with the health and stats of very young and very old members. The bottom left has shortcuts for skills, items, status and equipment. The blue arrows on the map show entrances/exits and the red dots stand for enemies. Approach them to get into battle.

The roulette shows what you’ll get if you win the battle. Three of the same item = double EXP. Three stars = triple EXP. Yellow items = stuff you haven’t gotten yet. AFAIK the roulette is fully automatic and stops when/wherever it wants. BTW the yellow item in this case is a Gunner’s manual, which I will need before I can use the Gunner class.

Battle itself is the usual turn-based stuff. The characters will suggest moves they want to use, based on the situation and their temperaments. Rejecting too many suggestions will hurt their loyalty but since anyone who gets KO’ed in battle stands a very good chance of perma-death after battle, you have to do whatever it takes to survive. The nice thing about the battles in OreShika is that you only have to defeat the enemy leader to win and get all the items. The leader might even run off with the spoils if you’re not careful, so if you get into a sticky situation you can just focus on taking out the leader.

In emergencies or if you just want to do extra damage, you can have characters joint-cast the same magic to do up to 8 times normal damage:

I should have waited a few seconds to take a shot of the resulting payoff, which wiped the boss out in one hit. It’s worth trying to pull an attack like that off if you’re confident you can keep everyone alive long enough to do so. An even better option is to have a parent and child pull off a joint attack using one of their family specials. That’s how I beat almost every boss worth beating, because the damage dealt is truly staggering. The game tells us a grandparent-parent-child attack is even better than that, but for logistical reasons I never pulled one off.

That’s most of the game in a nutshell. Raise your kids, visit dungeons, earn money and weapons and skill scrolls to pass on to the next generation, earn Worship Points so you can breed with better and better gods and keep going till you can beat the final boss. Various sub-bosses will drop fragments of story if/when you beat them, but 1) It’s not required and 2) This really isn’t a story-oriented game. It’s all about revenge!

Let’s round this up with the home menu:

The lady is Itsuka, our perky immortal family retainer. From left to right, top to bottom the options are:

Family: Check your family’s status, pick a party, equip them, train the young ones, etc.
Items: Store, sort, use, dispose of items.
Buy/Sell: Exactly what it says on the tin.
SAVE: Exactly what it says on the tin.
Sortie: Go dungeon-crawling/take part in a tournament.
Reconstruction: Rebuild the city after it was destroyed by demons. Donating money to the city improves store inventories, reduces the WP you need to breed and adds a variety of services and facilities.
Chronology: Family tree, family facts, family history. Also where you can store family photos.
Settings: Exactly what it says on the tin. You can make the game as hard or as easy as you like here.
Breed: (lit: mix with a god) Exactly what it says on the tin.
Facilities: Medicine shop, photographer’s shop, goods trading point and some other things I can’t remember.
Explanations: Giant walls of text about anything and everything in the game.
Rest: Let a month pass by so everyone can recover their health. Don’t use if you can avoid. In fact, just don’t use.

Armed with this info and a minimum amount of Japanese knowledge, you too can play Ore no Shikabane wo Koete yuke. It’s not a perfect game by any means (I’ll cover the flaws in another post), but it’s a lot of fun for anyone who likes dungeon-crawlers even just a tiiiiny little bit. It took me 60-80 hours on the Normal setting to finish this, but with a more efficient playing style you can do it half the time or less. I hope it comes to the west or gets a fan-patch someday so more people can try it.