There are countless obscure games out there, especially JRPGs! In part, it’s because some of them aren’t even translated into English, at least not officially. And in part, certain JRPGs are destined to only be “famous” among a niche audience, and that’s it. They never got more attention than that when they were released at the time, and are destined to become obscure and forgotten.

As a big JRPG fan, I think that’s a shame. There are so many amazing games out there! I’m always looking forward to discovering and playing such games, especially when I hear that a JRPG I've been eyeing is finally translated. Recently, this happened with Segagaga: a few months ago, a patch was released that translated the entire game into English. This is amazing news~

Hearing news like that lately made me think of some obscure JRPGs that I know, since I played them years ago, and talking about Rikika about that subject for reasons that will become clear soon, I think it’s time to talk about one of those that I played years ago: Eiyuu Senki - The World Conquest!

If you are familiar with games like the Utawarerumono, then it’s the same idea. You spend a lot of time reading the text, knowing the characters, and going through the plot with strategy battles in between that text. But there’s more than one game in this franchise, let’s see what TV tropes has to say about them as a summary:

“Eiyuu Senki: The World Conquest is a hybrid Strategy RPG initially released on PC in 2013. It then received a PS3 and a PS Vita port, the former of which was localized for the United States in late 2015. It takes place in an alternate earth wherein every single one of the historical heroes represented throughout the story that was a man is now a woman. Himiko, the Queen of the Yamatai province in Zipang, has had a vision heralding The End of the World as We Know It and realized that the only way to face the oncoming darkness is to Take Over the World and unite the world's heroes behind her cause.

There's only one small problem: Himiko is a terrible military leader and has suffered multiple defeats in her attempts at unifying Zipang. After suffering another loss at the hands of Nobunaga Oda, Himiko is ambushed by bandits on her way home to Yamatai. Just as it looks like she's going to be killed before her campaign can truly begin, a mysterious light shines down from above, and an unknown man with golden eyes appears and saves Himiko. This man, declared to be a Servant of Heaven but whose name is actually Chihaya, actually has no memory of who he is, but he and Himiko pledge their loyalty to each other and, upon uniting Zipang, he becomes the Supreme Commander of Himiko's army to aid her in her world conquest. Opposing them are the Illuminati, led by Mu, who wants to conquer the world herself.

A sequel, titled Eiyuu Senki GOLD, was first released in 2014, with its English version eventually coming out on Steam and JAST's official website in June 2021. It features a rebalanced cast as well as new characters, and introduces an item fusion system. The plot acts as a "What If?" for the original; instead of Chihaya appearing before Queen Himiko, he's found on Zipang's shore by Masamune Date, whose ambition is to end Zipang's isolationism by conquering it and then going on to rule the entire world.

A spin-off mobile game, titled Eiyuu Senki: War Wonder, and an adult-only version titled WWX, were released in 2018. It greatly expands the cast and even introduces new factions, but sadly ended its service as of March 2022. An offline remake for War Wonder was announced shortly after its shutdown, however as of March 2023 there's been little news on its development progress.”

Usually, when the game is a complete or partial visual novel, the bread and butter of it lies in the plot or maybe in the gameplay. But here, you are supposed to be playing Eiyuu Senki for the characters! And there are a LOT of them, over 50!

And Chihaya, the MC, is the ONLY male character. Which means that yes, everyone else is not only anime girls but...they’re all female versions of people that are either from legends or such in our world, such as Gilgamesh or Enkidu, or based on real people that existed and became famous for one reason or another, such as Miyamoto Musashi or Christopher Columbus. Except they’re all anime girls. And most of them want to be fucked by the protagonist when they meet...or want to be fucked later, after Chihaya had done some events with them xP!

There are a loooot of those women, and you will recruit most of them automatically, but not all. A few will demand that you do a few side-quests to be able to find and recruit them. And if you do want to play the entire true ending path to get the real ending of the game, you will want to do that. Will talk a bit more about this later.

As a visual novel hybrid, there is a lot of text in this game and even more if you want to do all the side-quests, which I do recommend. Not only will you always win something by doing them, which can be money for useful items, but many girls will only get anything close to an arc or development through their specific sidequests. Wanting or not, despite the big number of characters, the games only focus on a few of them to get development and such, especially Himiko and Arthur. If you want to see more of the other girls, chances are you will need to see their sidequests.

You will have plenty of time to know each character since you will start in Zipang (Japan), and from there, you will spend your time declaring war on other countries, engaging in battles with them, and the heroines that defend each country, while doing the sidequests. No, you sadly won’t see every single country from our world represented in Eiyuu Senki: The World Conquest, which can be a big bummer depending on where you are from, but it does have a lot of countries. Each of them has at least two heroines who fight against you and join your party after you conquer their country or do a sidequest.

With this “conquer the entire world” plot, you might think this is a complicated game like Nobunaga’s Ambition or something, but don’t worry. It’s the opposite! First, it’s not like you can declare war against any country just like that; you are limited by your “range”. of your territory. Which means that, at first, you are limited to countries that are close to Zipang. As you conquer more countries, you can then declare war on more and more, and so on until you get to the last country. From there, it’s a matter if you got all the heroines or not, since that’s what will determine if you are going to watch the “normal ending” or if you unlocked the path to get the true ending.

So the goal ends up declaring war on a country, invading it, and fighting your way in until the whole country is conquered and becomes part of your territory. The more countries you manage to conquer, the more funds/gold you will receive at the start of each turn in the world map. In this game, gold can only be used for three things:

1 - Before or during any invasion of a country, you will see plenty of events which can be about anything and whose effects will vary from a battle to giving you items or even to make some heroine fall more for Chihaya. You will always want all of those, especially the latter, as this is how you will unlock the best skills of any heroine. Some of those events will ask you to give some money to clear them.

2 - Restock troops: This allows you to replenish the Troop count of understrength units that have suffered combat losses up to their maximum. This also means that in this game, the number of troops that each character controls serves as that character’s HP!

3 - Reinforcing troops: THIS is where you will want most of your money going in! It allows one to increase the maximum Troop count of a Hero's troops independent of combat rewards. The number of troops also increases the character’s status a bit (attack, defense, but not speed, I believe, though it’s items that you get in events that really will raise all of those statuses more), so you have every reason to reinforce as many troops as you want and can.

That is also where you can break the game if you want, because there’s no penalty for waiting every turn and accumulating money. And the more you do that, the more you can reinforce any troop you want (up to the max of 10k, but really that’s all you need. Plus, your troops can also raise as you win battles with them, and some items increase the amount you get per battle). At most, you will be attacked by random bandits every three turns, but not only is it a very easy battle, but that means extra troops for your characters as they win!

You can’t use money to get more troops for the so-called “Ancient Heroes”. While they are the best and strongest characters in the game, you only recruit 90% of them way too late. And they have HP bars instead of troop counts, and Ancient Heroes do not get much weaker as their HP declines! However, to balance this out, they also cannot be restocked, which means you will never be able to use money to do anything with them. To recover their HP, the only way is to wait for them to recover naturally, although numerous treasures increase Recovery and thus can speed up the process.

As for the battle system itself, no matter if it’s against a normal group of enemies or a boss, the battles always happen on a 6x3 grid divided between your side and your enemy’s. While some battles have a turn limit, most of them will end when the enemy (or well...your side) has no more troops!

The battles are all about this match-up chart, much like games like Fire Emblem and Pokémon. So some of your characters will be weak against others (always determined by the kind of weapon they use), strong against others, and normal against the rest of your opponents. To use skills that can be strong attacks to buffs, debuffs, or healing, you need brave balls. However, to obtain them, you need to attack an enemy without characters that are strong against them. Otherwise, they’re the ones getting the brave balls, so they’re the ones who will be able to use skills!

At the beginning of the game, you will end up wanting to use heroines that are strong against the enemies because they tend to finish the battle very easily by one-shotting them, especially if you are abusing the wait system! But as you progress in the game, and especially when you get close to fighting against the last countries, this gets a lot harder. Not only do the enemies not die so fast, but if you use characters that are strong against them, that means that they will get lots of brave balls, but you won’t! So, by that point, you will want to do the opposite of what you were doing all the time and use characters that are not weak or strong against them if possible, or even weak to farm brave balls lol.

It’s an easy game for the most part, unless you try to invade strong countries like Russia before you’re supposed to. Sometimes, if you do that, you will get some bonus items, and a few of them are so good they help to break the game, but they will also make the next countries stronger and so harder to deal with. The more of those items you get, the harder the game will be, so it’s good if you check the items in advance and plan for which ones you wanna go for.

Gold Senki is on the easy side, and even if you happen to get stuck somewhere, you can always cheese the game by just waiting and gathering funds to boost as many troops as you want. But unless you’re starving for more JRPGs on the PS3, you will want to play this game for the heroines since, well...this was a hentai game before it had all of “those” scenes removed when it was released in English for that console xP. Still, 90% of the text you will read is about the heroines and their shenanigans! If you like to read that sort of stuff, this game will have plenty of that for ya since this is the meat of the game.

The plot is okaish and it gets quite good in the true ending route, but only a few of the heroines really get some focus, especially Himiko and Arthur among them all. The gameplay is okayish for a strategy JRPG, but I doubt anyone will recommend this game based on it alone. Maybe the “sequel” is better, though. And speaking of that...

Rikika played Eiyuu Senki GOLD a little while ago, while I only played the first game on PS3 many years ago, so it was interesting to compare both! Gold did change things around gameplay-wise, nerfing and buffing some characters and skills, plus adding the item fusion system. By itself, that’s already quite a big change! But even more than that, Gold changed the entire plot. It has nothing to do with the first game at all. Plot-wise, it’s more of a “what-if” version of the game. And that can be a problem.

To this day, Eiyuu Senki is stuck on the PS3, but you can easily play GOLD in Steam. But GOLD isn’t Eiyuu Senki, it is its own entire thing. Even the characters are quite different if compared to Eiyuu Senki, and from what Rikika told me and from what I researched, maybe not for the better. It seems they are way more one-dimensional than they are in the first game, and some of their traits were exaggerated a lot, which makes them worse as characters. For example, in the first game, Ivan (the ruler of Russia based on Ivan the Terrible) is a sadistic girl but doesn’t do much more than spank her masochistic servants. In GOLD, though, she can go as far as set them on fire, which is even described graphically...!

So, you gotta keep that in mind...while GOLD is the easiest “version” of Gold Senki to play, it’s just not the same as the first game at all. At least GOLD does add a lot of new characters, even if, as far as I can tell, not a single one of them is kemono. And speaking of which, before we talk about that aspect of the game...


IF YOU ARE INTO ACHIEVEMENTS/TROPHIES

This isn’t a hard game to get the platinum trophy, but you need to watch out for a couple of things. You need to know how to go for the true ending and get ready to follow it with strong troops, as the “extra” path is full of the hardest battles of the game, not to mention Shambhala. But assuming you make sure to have an extra save to get the normal ending and remember to save before “buying” North America before loading save to fight your way through it, the only truly missable trophy is the one for recruiting all the characters, and among them all, only Archimedes can be missable. So, watch out for that!

As for Shambhala, which you do need to conquer to get the platinum trophy, it’s very, very tough and will demand mastery of both the battle system and how to get the most out of most of your characters! But if you just want to rush through it, there is a very good faq in GameFAQs that will tell you great formations and strategies for each floor! So Shambhala almost becomes a piece of cake...almost xP!


KEMONO SCALE JUDGEMENT
Now that we put that out of the way...it's KAMIKAZETIME!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eikIhkzz9oM
Given that we are talking about a port of a hentai game (despite all the hentai scenes being removed) you would think most of the female characters look the same, but there is a wide variety here for everyone’s tastes...except unfortunately for kemono xP!

The game has some monsters like wolves and dragons, but nothing special, though they did have the opportunity to make some of them like actual characters, especially Mephisto. But we didn’t even get a full body for Mephisto, technically, what a shame.

Some of the girls do have some animals accompanying them, like sidekicks or something. Such as Xuanzang with Goku, Diogenes with her dog, and Ywain with Laudine. But while “technically” a couple of them talk (again technically), they aren’t characters, they’re more like pets of those girls, and that’s it. GOLD has more characters with those “pets”, but it’s the same thing; they’re just more like pets than anything.

That aside, some of the girls are in the kemonomimi side, and there are quite a few of those, but if we’re talking about only the full kemono ones, then we only got three: Cu Chulainn, Merlin, and Teach.

Cu Chulainn is based on the Irish mythological hero who appears in the stories of the Ulster Cycle, as well as in Scottish and Manx folklore. If you played the new Persona games, then you already saw another version of this character as a persona.

https://vndb.org/c18516

In the game, she has this canine beast form! Love how she has a little pink ribbon on xD! But, unfortunately, we only see Cu Chulainn way later in the game, and she doesn’t stay much in that form. You don’t even see her in that form once during her events.

Merlin is...as the characters say, “Merlin is Merlin.” A fluffy white rabbit...thing? A-anyway, she can use very powerful magic, but for bullshit reasons, you can’t play with her in World Conquest, though you can in Gold.

https://eiyuu-senki-gold.fandom.com/wiki/Merlin

She’s too fluffy to my tastes, but she’s cute, though I think she would be better if her body were...less fluffy? For a hentai game like this, I’m surprised they didn’t just go all the way in and make her into a full anthro/shortstack rabbit girl, such as, for example, Emul from Shangri-La Frontier, which is a shame. And I don’t get why, since they did that with Teach!

https://eiyuu-senki-gold.fandom.com/wiki/Teach

Based on the infamous pirate Blackbeard, Teach is the only full catgirl here! And not only is she cute and has a nice, fun personality, but she even gets in heat in one of her scenes xD! But the game goes out of its way to show that she wasn’t supposed to be like this; her cat body is a curse. And even gets “cured” in both games, and you can even play with her in human form in Gold...

So, as you guys can see, not only do we barely have any kemono here, but the game doesn’t treat them well. Even going as far as “curing” one of them of their kemononess! That sucked!! Sexy black cat girls aren’t a curse!!! xP
And not like any of them are important to the plot except maybe Merlin...kinda...

I don’t blame the game that much since you can tell they were going for a more “general otaku” vibe for their girls to appeal to that audience. But still, they could have added more kemono females and made them join the party earlier or something! Not only did they not do that, but the few kemono we got...yeah, hard to argue who got most disrespected!
Because of all those reasons, I believe this game deserves a...

*turns around and points dramatically at the game*

ONE OUT OF FIVE OF LOF IN THE KAMIKAZE SCALE!!!

It’s an okayish anime strategy JRPG, but that’s it. Since the hentai scenes were removed, you aren’t going to get much out of this game, especially if you are a kemono fan. I think I can only recommend it for sure to people with a PS3 still working somehow who are starving for a JRPG to play on it! But if you are curious to check it out and lack a PS3, your best bet is to play GOLD in Steam, but keep in mind it’s pretty much a whole different game! But it would be the only way to check at least a version of the game and the few kemono girls it has to offer!

The best furry character this time is...Teach! A pirate cat girl? Hell yeah~

The "kemono in the refrigerator" this time is...Cu Chulainn! Merlin was also screwed by this game plotwise, but we barely see Cu Chulainn’s kemono form! At least Merlin is always “there” after we meet her!

Aaaand that’s it for this one! Hope you guys enjoyed reading this review. Please don't hesitate to leave your comments and opinions about it, and also about Eiyuu Senki: The World Conquest, if you happen to have watched it or maybe wanna check it out, thanks to this review xD. I want to leave those journals as a place where people can discuss the respective things being reviewed here!