Lucian Bee’s!!!

Yay, I got Lucian Bee’s on Friday! Since I have to work today (*wrote this on Sunday*), I’m posting some of my first impressions. I’m almost done Luke Rockwell’s route, so I still don’t know the reason why the bad guys are trying to make dasao/dameotoko.

Let’s see, where should I start? Well, the setup, once you get through the introduction, is kind of a mix between Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and VitaminX/Z. You, as the heroine Anna, choose what guy, or target, to start the makeover with, and then as you progress (there are 5 missions for each) you can go back and redo them to improve your scores, or choose to work on another character.

Each mission focuses on making over one aspect of the target: food, design, hair, fashion, and manners. You work with the other two strikers of Lucian Bee’s, M and Q (your codename is A), and the member of Metropolis V in charge of that aspect. Part of the fun is all the banter between M, Q, and the Metropolis V members, and later on, Anna as well. When you finish a mission, you will see the targets’ grades in each aspect before and after, and if it’s something visible (like fashion), then you’ll see the difference in the characters as you go. So once Luke’s hair mission was done, he has that hair for the rest of his story (probably not for the other stories though).

Before starting a mission, you watch a backstage video of Romanxia highlighting the target and their particular problem, with say, hair.

During the missions, the majority is normal visual novel style, with two parameters to increase: Custom and Love. What’s Custom? I *think* it’s the target’s general improvement, whereas the Love parameter indicates how he feels about you.

Near the end of a mission, you’ll go into “stealth mode”, where your answers will not only increase or decrease parameters, but will increase or decrease your stealth meter. The stealth meter measures how suspicious the guy is of your disguise (since all of your interactions are in one disguise or another), and if it gets down to zero, the mission fails. During stealth, there’s a time limit on the choices – only 10 seconds! That’s pretty short when you have to read the Japanese and try to judge which answer is the best.

Finally, near the end of stealth mode, you’ll go into “emergency mode”, where you have to direct not only Anna, but all three strikers in coordination to head off disaster. Though all these events are just timed choices, the game does a great job of using cut-ins, zooms, and movement to make it feel dynamic.

Since I haven’t finished any stories, I’m interested to see how they’ll deal with the guys falling in love with Anna’s disguise and what happens when she shows her true self. Also, though the other Romanxia guys are in the missions a bit, there’s really not that much interaction with them, so I’m hoping that the conclusion, or the last chapter, has more of them as well.

If you can’t tell, so far I’m really enjoying it! I can’t judge the overall story yet, but the gameplay is a lot of fun. Lots of good characters too, not just Romanxia – actually, I think until I play their routes the Metropolis V and Honey Buzzard VI are more interesting…and I really like M and Q too.

Next post will be either a followup of this one, or about Saikin Koi Shiteru? which I also just got and started playing ^_^

2 Responses to “Lucian Bee’s!!!”

1. Yamialexa says:

   August 11, 2009 at 3:37 pm

   Sounds really good, can’t wait to play it, though I don’t really like time limits cuz my japanese is not as fast most of the time
   Is it as funny as the vitamin series?
2. admin says:

   August 11, 2009 at 7:01 pm

   It’s pretty funny, I’ve laughed several times…not quite the same humour as VitaminX, so I think some people may think it’s more funny, some less. For me it’s a little less.