[Ecchi]Mugen Souls

Those blobs are part of the image, which is part of my issue with these…

Switch version is the best version, as it’s the only version that’s not missing any content.

Mugen Souls is one of the more censored games from the PS3/Vita era of games. The company in charge for the PC wanted to release it uncensored but was shot down by Steam. That was about the extent of my knowledge for the game before I played it.

Honestly it’s a very lacking game and the actual lewd stuff is dwarfed by a decent number of games I’ve played. It’s really the character design aka loli count that got this censored.

It’s a turn based RPG with Disgaea levels of power creep and a bunch of complicated stuff thrown on top.

Censorship

Need a whole section for this to emphasize it. So the commonly found number to how much is censored is 100% incorrect. It says 100 cgs were cut and the minigame was axed. The game was axed, but only around 40ish cgs were lost. Each girl in game has 2 images in the minigame of them in a bikini where you clean soap off of them. Chou Chou counts as 8 girls because of her power to change forms and 9 others. So around 36 images total. If you include variations, it might be over 100 but really, it’s like 36.

There’s slightly more like changing tsundere to bipolar and likely small translations stuff elsewhere. It’s honestly not as much as I thought, though still a good chunk of the game’s cg count. More then just about any other example from that time period until the sequel happened.

Story-5

Chou Chou is the undisputed god of the world, or so she says. She wants to take over the 7 colored worlds, and has roped two others into this goal. Altis, the devil who can never achieve anything evil so has been turned into an angel, and some schmuk. Using that schmuks airship they travel to each world. But then a question is asked, “How do you intend to take over the worlds?”

The answer is to “peon” or make her underling, the strongest people on each world. Which just so happens to be the Hero and Demon Lord of each planet. So off they go, dealing with the comical, the dramatic, and the slightly romantic pairs of Hero and Demon Lords they encounter and… seduce I guess.

Chou Chou’s peon power works by either making the target attracted to her, or by appealing to their fetish. So in theory the story is finding out two people’s fetishes on each planet and then a cg scene of Chou Chou using them both to peon the two. What does peoning do? To Demon Lords and Hero’s, nothing if humanoid. To everything else? Turns them into shampurus, aka sponge rabbits that Chou Chou and company use in the hot springs on their ship to clean themselves.

There’s also Bellia(I think her Japanese name is Beliarose, which sounds way better), a strange girl with almost the same power as Chou Chou, except it peons by force. Chou Chou hates having her things taken, and everything belongs to her, so the two are rivals for most of the game, kind of.

Oh and Chou Chou has 8 different personality forms. There is a good reason why this is, but just assume it’s to make peoning easier. That’s how it’s actually used.

I found the game funny. While most of the Heros and Demon Lords were at best two note, the Disgaea like shenanigans and general atmosphere were enjoyable. The overall story is nothing special, but I enjoy the tropey nature and the spinning of how the different pairs are.

Gameplay-4

Think Neptunia style combat, with the circle movement and wait times based on actions and speed. Then make it complicated, throw a few others things into the mix and you have this. Then add Skies of Arcadia’s ship battles but bad on top. I’ve seen it called Neptunia meets Disgaea.

It has interesting ideas. Every battle has crystals floating in them. These give the fight a field effect, with the smaller crystals giving smaller effects around them. You can hit enemies and fling them around the arena into other enemies and the crystals, which does damage to them. Breaking the crystals then cancels the field effect and does some stuff around the crystal. I ignored this mechanic, because you are given the tools to ignore trying in fights and the game is way to grindy if you try to do it for real. The only time I had to deal with crystals was when an enemy spawned next to an invert damage to health one, specifically a couple of bosses did this. Had to use the burst mechanic to move them around which is a crapshoot at best.

Then you have moe kill. Chou Chou’s special battle action where you… flirt? with enemies and the crystals to fill one of 3 gauges. Either you turn enemies into items, into shampurus, or into angrier versions of themselves. Doing this to the big crystal does it to everything else in the fight. The range of moe kill is based on Chou Chou’s weapon, so give her a gun and try to win over enemies. It likely won’t do a damn thing for around 6 turns of trying in the personality the target likes. This is the most important mechanic in the game and it drags things out so damn much but without it you have to grind for literally days worth of extra time to even get the true end, forget going for completion.

So shampuru’s. These are the peon’s that Chou Chou makes. They each add to hidden xp gauges that do a bunch of stuff for their mechanic, so stronger shampurus are more valuable then just more shampurus They do 2 main things. One is level up Chou Chou’s 8 personalities. Each has a level cap of 100, and you need an average of 20 to get the true end(kinda, it’s more complicated then that). A good ball park of shampuru’s to get to 20 is around a modest… 30,000-40,000. I beat the game with around 7000. Her personality levels are needed for some story progress, though thankfully they don’t need to be very high for that. They also give power to moe kill, so once you get high enough grinding becomes a lot easier as it’s just bringing up the moe kill menu and choosing the random options and winning.

I almost forgot to explain the damn mechanic. Moe kill is kind of like negotiation in SMT. You get some random choices that have higher chances of success and failure based on the enemies personality(preference) and mood. You pick 3 options and they affect 3 bars. If one fills, that one happens. The enemy dies, unless you got frenzy in which case they fully healed. The personlity levels affect how effective the choices are, so higher levels just make it take less turns. Or for bosses, make it possible at all. With enough personality levels you can use moe kill on almost everything in the game.

The other shampuru mechanic? Ship battles, or advanced rock paper scissors. You take your space ship and fight something. You are given a hint to a move it will use and must counter it. You can attack, fast attack, pierce, absorb HP or SP, heal HP or SP, and eventually buff. Move pool and ship stats are decided by shampuru count. This is actually the only reason to really engage in normal combat in the game, to have enough shampurus to survive the ship battles. That and the one point in the game where if you don’t have 1000 enemy kills you are blocked from progressing until you hit that.

The only side thing to do is Mugen Field. A 100 gauntlet with difficulty based on currency betting. It’s good for kill count but generally not considered worth farming shampuru’s in until pretty late. There’s a lot to Mugen Field farming, but I really couldn’t care. A lot of mechanics are locked to this, as it has a special shop where you buy classes for the create a character stuff, level limit unlocking, skill upgrade unlocks, is where you would buy cgs if not for the dlc to unlock them all, and more.

Okay, there is other side content but you basically have to achieve true end to get access to the arena called 7 World Redux. I do want to mention true end in general. The general answer to how to get it is have the average of Chou Chou’s personality levels be 20, and that’s not exactly right. From my experience, it seems each personality has a final event check close to or at 20, and then maybe a final check for average. For me personally, I needed biploar to get to 20 for her final event to get the full set event to get the true ending. I ran through 60 floors of the Mugen Field 4 times to get this so I’m pretty sure that’s the case.

So the core game loop goes as such. Go to a new area. Run through it doing story bits. Reach the end pretty quickly, then run back through doing the Master Points. You use the moe kill system, kill counts, and spending gold on 10 points on a the map you have with some slight clues. You need to find 4 or so of them per map to get the next area to show up, though you do get a big shampuru reward for finishing an area. The kill counts get kind of ridiculous, but honestly it’s likely that they would be easy if you were playing the game as it was intended, aka no dlc weapons. But, they are free. They make the core game way quicker. The only thing the dlc doesn’t help with is shampuru count aka ship battles and moe killing.

The actual progression is very straightforward. Buying new gear is eh. You need monster parts and money. It’s not unlocking with monster drops, you sell them and if you have enough of that one sold you can buy the item. Then those parts are removed from the sold amount. It’s like selling items into an alchemy bag.

Lastly, the game is laggy in fights. Picking an option to attack, wait, pick skill, wait, skill finally happens. Enemies move, wait, use skill, then finish their turn. There’s a weird amount of nothing happening in this turn based combat game that doesn’t belong. Turn based stuff should be snappy. The animations are cool at least. Turning off skill animations helps a lot with this, though there are still weird pauses.

Oh and link attacks are garbage. Never use them. They look cool. Lots of style over substance in this game really.

Lewdness-4

A majority of the game’s cgs are hot spring related. Each chapter ends with a group shot of the current female cast with way too much steam even though most of the girls are also covered with scenery or something else.

It as Disgaea style bodies. Basically, loli’s are tubes and anything with boobs are pretty big. The actual female design is great. Altis’ underboob shirt is great, and Alys is the first time I’ve seen a tail window instead of a tail hole. She literally flashes her ass cheeks to anyone who is behind her. Her angry pose basically exists to emphasize this. The other girls are fine though loli dominated, but those two are the standouts.

Sadly the models for in game are copy pasted. They all have the same proportions and are made more for mix and matching clothing parts then for accuracy. So the literal kids have the same combat models as the booby girl.

As for the censored minigame cgs? It’s the female cast in lingerie/bikinis. Covered in soap suds. You can wipe off some of them. The second set of images is generally lewder for poses, and you get those images for doing the post true end boss fights. The permanent soap suds are weird, I imagine it’s suppose to come across as semen but honestly it looks poor in game and I personally find the images weak at best, with the soap covering them up even more they lessen the sexual impact of the images instead of upping it like this kind of bukkake imagery is suppose to. It’s poorly done basically.

Final Thoughts

The tropey story was fun, the gameplay bland, the lewd weak. I wouldn’t say it was worth the wait but I am glad I could play it, if only for the sense of having this bit of history done.

I can’t really recommend it. Maybe the sequel, Z, is good enough that playing this to play Z would be worth it, but I doubt Z is that good of a game. As it is I would avoid the game honestly. It’s just to poorly put together.

Save for Mugen Souls Switch Ver

All cgs, full bath minigame set, I think all of the avatar pieces? Save at end of postgame ready for NG+ 2 or just grinding in general.

Gameplay: 4/10 Eroticness: 4/10 Story: 5/10

Completion: I went for only all cgs, which the dlc covered the actual in game gallery for me. But the bath minigame isn’t in there, and to get the second set of images for the bath minigame you need to beat postgame, so that’s what I did. Don’t care enough for the bestiary, especially because 95% of enemies I didn’t fight are just recolors. I think I got all the avatar parts by buying classes and the permits from Mugen Field to buy outfits?