Real Rode Portable is an RPG/otome game about an RPG/otome game fan named Nina who gets sucked into her favorite game “Rode”. In that fantasy world she gets to meet and squee over all her favorite bishies while helping them take down the evil demon king threatening the land.

The first playthrough takes about 20 hours, which is far too long for a bland fantasy game like this, but the second run was much shorter because of the game format that let me skip roughly 90% of map battles. Nina and the other characters also carry their stats and levels over, which makes things much faster. However because of the way the “Training” system works, Nina rapidly gets much stronger than her companions, making them little more than dead weight by the middle of the second playthrough. I would have dumped them altogether, but they make good meatshields and they do get some useful hits in sometimes.

Now, where to start writing about Real Rode. I suppose an explanation of the system is in order. No, wait, first the love interests. For the purposes of this post, Alvand is the blond guy on the cover and Naoya is Nina’s boyfriend from real life who somehow got sucked into the game as well.

Alvand’s route: In the ‘original’ game Prince Alvand was supposed to marry Princess Whatshername of the Blue Kingdom. Nina’s appearance throws a wrench in that plan as he finds himself increasingly attracted to her. The disconnect between how the story was ‘supposed’ to go and how it’s actually going torments the poor guy for most of the game until he actually marries Nina in the ending sequence, then all his doubts are magically blown away. And they all live happily ever after.

Problems? First, Nina becomes good friends with Princess Whatshername and becomes her sole confidant about all her love troubles with Alvand while conveniently neglecting to mention that she, Nina, has been dating him every weekend since the game started. Uncool Nina, uncool. Secondly, Nina herself has a boyfriend (Naoya) right from the start of the game. You could argue that since Naoya went and fell in love with Nina of his own accord and she’s still somewhat unsure about their relationship, which means she’s free to love someone else… but that doesn’t really fly because Naoya asked her out, she accepted it and she herself acknowledges he’s her boyfriend. So what gives?

Again you might argue, you argumentative reader you, that I the puppetmaster gamer am the one controlling Nina and making her do all these things. True enough. However if you decide to have Nina stick to Naoya then there’s only one route in the whole game you can take. All the other routes involve her dumping her Naoya without actually telling him until he comes out and asks. It’s the writers who chose to give her a boyfriend at the start and also chose to make 8 out of the 9 love interests not-her-boyfriend, so they very obviously expect you to cheat on him and dump him 89% of the time.

Third problem: on all the routes except Naoya’s, Nina never goes home again. When she does go home on Naoya’s route it is revealed that no time at all has passed while she was in the game, so her mother hasn’t had time to miss her. That’s nice when she does go home, but when she doesn’t it means she will eventually live out her whole lifespan within the game and time will eventually move on in real life without her. How can you do that to your own mother, Nina? The sad thing is she doesn’t even spare a single thought for her friends and family and how they will feel when she suddenly goes missing. And think of all the trouble Naoya is going to get into when he goes back home without her and tells what sounds like a crazy alibi about “Nina marrying a prince in a fantasy game.” I don’t know a single cop on Earth who would buy that story.

Alvand himself is a really decent guy and a great party member because of his Hit-All attack. Plus he even bought Nina’s cock-and-bull story about coming from another world without probing too deeply, and I give him kudos for that. But the implications of Nina staying with him are just too dire, so the whole route left a bad taste in my mouth. That’s the main reason why I decided to replay the game and get a proper ending where Nina goes back where she belongs.

Naoya’s route: While he looks pretty evil with his red eyes and white hair, Naoya is actually pretty laid back on other routes. He even lets Nina go without a fuss if she says she’s in love with someone else. In his own route, however, it turns out at the end that he was possessed by the Demon King all along. There are two possible endings you can get from this, based on a choice you make in the last town. If you choose the first choice, Nina’s love gives him the power to reject the possession. The Demon King comes out, we thrash him and Naoya and Nina go back to Japan and continue dating. Nina has spent the game worrying that Naoya won’t like her any more when he finds out she’s a gamer, but not only does he still like her but he even buys her games and plays together with her.

If you choose the second choice, on the other hand, you get an alternate, less happy ending. In that ending, Naoya seems to have kicked the last boss out but it turns out he has actually made a secret pact with him for special powers. After they go back to Japan Naoya reveals this to Nina and states his intention to take over the world with his new-found powers. Nina states, rather unconvincingly, that she loves him anyway and the story ends there, for better or worse.

Apart from the alternate end, Naoya comes across as basically a decent guy. It’s just hard to understand what he sees in Nina (he tries to explain but I’m not convinced) and whether he’s really in love with her or is just toying with her for reasons of his own. It felt like I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, to the extent that the alt. end seemed like the more natural way of things than the happy end. But at least Nina doesn’t cheat on her boyfriend and does go back home safe and sound so there’s that at least.

Now, an explanation of the game system. It’s pretty simple. The world map looks like this:

The pink ! is an event mark, the brown boxes are chests and the skull and cross bones are enemy symbols. Touch an enemy symbol to go into battle, which looks like this:

That 3/4 grid view or whatever it’s called is something I’ve come to associate with half-assed RPG systems like the Nintendo DS Atelier games and L2 Love x Loop. Real Rode is not an exception. The enemies are weak but your party is even weaker, so battles take longer than they should even with a super-powered MC. Luckily you can skip most map enemies by jumping over them with the X button. It’s only the bosses and those enemies blocking your way that are a pain from the second playthrough onwards.

You clear a dungeon and get to a town where you can stay for maximum 12 days. 8 of those are training days and 4 are weekends, where you knock on a guy’s door and talk to him/ask him what he thinks of your stats/ask him out on a date/give him a present. Dating is regular dating sim stuff where you have a conversation and pick a choice. The other options are self-explanatory.

Training, on the other hand, is actually pretty interesting. At least for people like me who enjoy stat raising, anyway. All the guys have stats they excel in. For example studying with Raclot will increase magic, studying with Somari will increase strength and luck, etc. So in your free time you can ask them to give you a few pointers so you can quickly outstrip them in strength and laugh at their pathetic efforts. If you study with them long enough, harder lessons that raise more stats become available, up to a third level. This is important because as in many dating sims you need stats at a certain level to get the guy you want. It’s not enough to just raise his affection and trigger the correct flags.

However this is only really important on the first playthrough. After that you carry your stats forward so it’s pretty easy to become every guy’s dream girl without even trying. There isn’t much guesswork involved either, since you can outright ask guys how you’re getting along. Plus at the end of every stay in town the mascot character Rodeo gives a full breakdown of how you’re doing for each guy. You can see my progress on Alvand’s route below.

My random thoughts on the game after finishing it twice

1. There are some challenging battles on the first playthrough but after that it’s all easy-street. Except the bonus bosses Maxis and Paola, but I’ll get them yet.

2. The two routes I did were too sickly sweet. Alvand and Naoya are both head over heels in love with Nina from the very start and they keep complimenting and flattering her and confessing their love at every available opportunity. It’s not as fun as it sounds.

3. The game works on a flag system, which I found out the hard way when I almost lost Naoya. There are several events where if you don’t choose the correct guy, or if you pick him but answer his questions incorrectly then you will lose him forever. On Naoya’s route, for example, there’s a place where you have to choose to go the festival with him (or lose him forever), at the festival choose to watch the show first (or lose him forever), during the show, first choose to let him take part and then later change your mind (or lose him forever) and then later on tell him he would look good in a mask (or lose him forever). Maybe Naoya’s route is the only one that tricky because Alvand’s was smooth sailing all the way. Basically just make a separate save after every town so you don’t lose the guy you’ve worked so hard to get.

4. The Present system is unnecessary. There’s no way except trial and error to find out what people like, and it’s much faster to date them to raise their affection than waste a day giving them a present.

5. Dating is too repetitive. Each town only has three date spots: a park, a library and one other. And it’s always the same park and the same library. And there are only three variations of date conversations per spot. And there are only three or four patterns of conversation when you visit your love in his room. It gets boring very quickly, is what I’m trying to say.

6. All the character’s moves are available from the start so there’s nothing exciting about watching them grow. I like games where new skills pop up as you go along, or games with skill trees where you choose what you want them to learn and stuff.

7. Some of the characters are pretty much useless in battle. The mages Raclot and Lukia especially. Lukia doesn’t have a heal-all spell (baker Somari does instead) and Raclot’s magic attacks hardly do any damage at all. Maybe if I trained them right I might see a difference, but they have poor aptitudes in physical attacks so it’s not an exciting prospect.

8. Bright happy colors! And I’m not too crazy about the character designs, but the CGs were nice. And the backgrounds are lovely as well.

9. Nina is annoying in the early game with the way she keeps fawning and drooling over her favorite characters. She’s doubly annoying because she claims to have finished the game 99 times but when it comes to any essential knowledge it’s either “I didn’t see it too clearly”, “I don’t really know” or “This is different from what happened in my game.” She’s useless.

10. I’ve seen worse but the battle speed is definitely a little sluggish. There should have been an option/button for skipping or fast-forwarding attack animations.

11. The guys’ alternate outfits were pretty meh. For the most part they were just ugly recolors of their regular costume. And for some very annoying reason it was impossible to change the MC’s hideous outfit.

12. Apart from the two main guys you select, most of the other characters have no real reason for being on your team. Real Rode is probably designed to mimic your standard RPG where everyone finds a flimsy excuse to join the prince’s party, but it’s a bit weird how little presence the other characters have. It’s pretty easy to forget that any of them even exist.

And that’s pretty much it for Real Rode Portable. It was a good effort at making a fun otome RPG, but in the end they ended up making a game that won’t satisfy RPG gamers and that will bore otome gamers pretty quickly. There was no way they were going to capture the regular RPG crowd with such a girly game, so I’m not going to fault them too much for making the gameplay so simple. In my opinion they would have been better off working harder on the character side of the equation. More romantic and non-romantic events, more interesting backstories, more relationships between the guys, more NPCs, more places to visit, that sort of thing. It’s not a bad game at all – in fact I’m thinking of one or two more playthroughs – but they really could have done much more with the whole idea. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got plenty of anything-but-Castlevania to play now.