#raishi: konpeki no shou

[tiger-tally]

Raishi: Konpeki no Shou (Part 1)

Because when there’s a free tactical RPG with Wu Zixu as a hot protagonist, sometimes you give in to curiosity even if you don’t understand Japanese and some of the later plot developments sound absolutely batshit. I’ve only completed the first act of the game, covering from Wu Zixu’s flight from Chu to Helu’s death, but I thought I’d write up my impressions in case anyone else is curious. TL;DR: not bad food if you like the genre and/or Wu Zixu, but the shipping options are lackluster and the plot seems like it’s going way off the rails.

So I have the caveat of experiencing the writing of the game through a phone translation app, but my impression is that it’s serviceable at best on a line to line level, and a lot of the jokes fall flat. (I respect that in this canon Wu Zixu is into big buff ladies, thank you very much!)

But I‘m actually pretty fond of how the game writes Wu Zixu on a higher level. I still prefer beefcake Wu Zixu, but white-haired unhinged bishonen with the blue color scheme Wu Zixu isn’t not to my taste either. (I’m mad at a whole bunch of Feng Menglong’s takes on other characters, but the white hair fanon is sexy as hell, thank you Feng Menglong.) And he’s plenty unhinged! The game writes him as a very dark antihero verging on outright villain protagonist with that iconic combination of calculation and terrifying passion.

One of my favorite scenes is in the prologue, when Wu Zixu is fleeing Chu and his friend Shen Baoxu finds him, bearing news of his father’s last words: that Wu Zixu would bring ruin to the kingdom if he lived. Wu Zixu goes “ha! He knows I’ll take revenge for him!” And Shen Baoxu goes “...I think he meant he wants you to die.“ He’ll break a lot of eggs for his omelet.

I also appreciate how powerful a unit he is in the battle portions. He’s one of the few ranged + multi-hit units you get early in the game *and* he has expanded range and hits hard.

Wu Zixu stats/abilities

Wu Zixu’s special screen

I’m a little surprised he’s a mage unit, but I guess so is Sun Wu in this game. Sun Wu, the other protagonist, is unfortunately basically the only other vaguely interesting character in the cast. Aside from him, the shipping options aren’t great so far. Helu is bland as hell. Fuchai is a useless teen who keeps talking about how he wants to marry this girl who looks about twelve if we’re being generous.  Fugai is actually a little cute though. Shenyin Shu is how I’d hoped Wu Zixu would look--he gets the buff melee unit treatment--but he doesn’t have interesting dynamics with anyone.

Fugai and Helu

Shenyin Shu

Anyway, for the most part, this act sticks closely to history. Wu Zixu’s revenge story is epic; why change a good thing? 

Wu Zixu and Shen Baoxu

God he’s so sexy when he’s unhinged

Wu Zixu actually gets something of a villain upgrade at the end--in the game, he promises Yao Li that he’ll take care of his family if he’s willing to lose his arm and do this assassination mission--only, once Yao Li’s lost his arm and on his way, he turns around and burns them alive so Yao Li will be convincing enough to Prince Qingji. And Fugai rebels because he finds out, only for Wu Zixu to kill him too. And frankly everyone on his own side is, by the end, understandably a little freaked out by him.

Aside from in MVTML Fuchai is never the protagonist of his own story--in the next act you play as the Yue characters, and you’ll need a proper antagonist. Even though I don’t want to play as Yue and fight my fave. :(((( The story also seems to be going off the historical rails--toward the end, Sun Wu gets thrown into a time rift and Yao and Shun turn up as immortal time travelers trying to resist an avatar of Nuwa who wants to enslave humanity. So. Uh. I’m proceeding with caution.

But damn, Wu Zixu is so inherently hot. I appreciate the food.

[tiger-tally]

So I found out about this other random Wu-Yue game

雷子-紺碧の章-

(Apparently that’s Wu Zixu and Sun Wu and their respective wards but I can choose to shamelessly replacement meal them as WZX, Chenfeng, Tengyu, and Helu. Why is Wu Zixu so pretty even though he’s (semi)historically like eight feet tall and built like a truck? I do not know!)

Anyway weird Japanese adaptations of Chinese historical things is nothing new. Three Kingdoms has been cursed with multiple genderflip porn games. This game apparently has a Three Kingdoms prequel, in fact--but it seems to be a story-heavy tactical RPG. Apparently there’s a free PC port without the voice acting, but I don’t speak Japanese and there’s definitely some questionable-looking fanservice bits and I’m not quite that desperate yet. Instead of doing anything reasonable I’ve been trying to piece together what the hell this game is about just through Chinese commentary and random-ass screencaps and only growing more baffled. And, god help me, kind of curious. Spoilery pics and speculations under the cut.

Stuff I’ve found:

Prologue translated into Chinese

Subtitled opening MV

The OP does not in fact provide the names of everyone who shows up in it, but I’ve managed to figure out a few more through Research (TM).

Yao Li stabbing Qingji:

Apparently Sun Wu’s story has been combined with Sun Bin’s, because he shows up in a wheelchair with a tattooed face in some CGs and this is Pang Juan. This CG compilation has a lot of stuff of them. So apparently they fuck?? And also the little girl Sun Wu is with kind of looks like her sister or something?? Possibly her daughter??? With Sun Wu????

Apparently this is Lin Gufu? The dude who killed Helu? The lady Wu Zixu is cradling in that eyeball CG???

More minor characters on the official Twitter. There’s something about the Five Emperors mentioned there too.

A Youtube video containing a bunch more CGs.

So like...Wu Zixu survives losing his eyeballs? And there’s this sexy demon lady with long dark hair he ends up pals with and they fuck up Fuchai together? And since she has her eyes covered too I kind of wonder if she’s an alternate version of one of the existing ladies but there’s a lot of sexy ladies with long dark hair in this game. Is she Pang Juan? Xi Shi? Mo Ye because she has tattoos?? The grown up version of that little girl???

And Wen Zhong who is genderflipped! Is that a shot of her topless with Goujian attacking her with a sword?? Also she falls off a cliff with Fan Li trying to save her?? I’m not sure how these things are compatible but. Sure.

Anyway. I don’t understand anything.

[tiger-tally]

Raishi: Konpeki no Shou (Part 3)

Previously: [Part 1] [Part 2]

The third part of the game, following Sun Wu’s time-traveling adventures, is completely batshit. And it’s my favorite, if I’m being honest. It’s so completely out there that I have to kind of respect it.

We’re back to Sun Wu’s storyline after he was thrown into a time rift along with the war orphan he adopted as a sort of little sister figure and the assassin Zhuan Zhu’s orphaned son who’s been kind of adopted by the Wu court. In the rift he gets separated from the kids and lands, alone, over 100 years later, in the Warring States period, on the border between Zhao and Wei.

His main priority is to find the kids, but he gets caught up in the ongoing war between Wei and Zhao when he kills a Zhao soldier in self-defense and needs to save the surrounding village from being blamed for it. He ends up fighting for Wei alongside Gongsun Yang (the future Lord Shang, currently still a relatively minor official in Wei) and Pang Juan, who in this game is a hot lady, a beast on the battlefield, and followed by dark rumors of cruelty.

Sun Wu gets along well enough with both of them, but his priorities lie elsewhere. Gongsun Yang leaves after his boss dies, and Sun Wu also tells Pang Juan that he’ll be leaving so he can keep looking for the kids. Pang Juan is shocked and tries to persuade him to stay, but when that fails, asks him to run one last mission for her.

So he agrees to go where she asks to take care of a bandit problem. Only, it’s not bandits he encounters there. It’s Wei soldiers, who accuse him of trespassing on royal burial grounds and plotting tomb robbery. Despite his protests that this is all a misunderstanding, they take him prisoner, tattoo his face, and cut off his feet.

[There’s a CG for this bit. No, I'm not posting it here.]

Then Pang Juan swoops in, horrified at what’s happened. She sends the prison guards packing and saves Sun Wu and brings him to her own home to recover and gives him medicine...

...And reveals she’s the little sister he’s looking for. She and Zhuan Zhu’s son landed in this era over a decade before he did without anyone to protect them. And now he waltzes in more than a decade late, not even recognizing her, declaring that he’ll leave her to save the kids he abandoned. She calls him a liar but he doesn’t understand why.

But that’s okay! She set him up at the royal tombs to leave him a helpless immobile prisoner in her home! She made sure he can never leave her again!

Also, she’s harbored romantic feelings for him from the start. He’s going to be her plaything from now on. The medicine contained roofies and she rapes him.

After a lot of this, he manages to escape with the help of the Qi general Tian Ji (which in this game is another hot anime girl). People know Sun Wu as the name of a historical figure these days; he starts calling himself Sun Bin, for his mutilations, instead.

Yeah. We’re now at the start of the Sun Bin vs. Pang Juan historical story.

Sun Bin helps Qi fend off Pang Juan’s aggression as he works his way toward revenge. In Qi, he also finds Zhuan Zhu’s son, all grown up as Bai Gui (the name of a famous historical merchant of this era).  He and the sister were separated early on when she was taken by human traffickers, and he’s shocked at hearing what she’s become. He insists there can be reconciliation, but Sun Bin is adamant. The sister he knew is dead; Pang Juan must die. And he does kill her, as per history, at Maling, trapping her in an ambush of arrows while she screams that she was so close to succeeding at her mission and finding happiness, that she loves him, that he’d made her a promise.

It’s at the victory feast that Bai Gui meets Zou Ji, the prime minister of Qi, for the first time...and recognizes him as the dude behind her kidnapping...and that of many other young girls throughout China.

So they realize that he’s the reason she changed so drastically, and the reason she was so ruthlessly trying to invade Qi. Also, the Five Emperors squad and their pals show up and genderbent Guiguzi chews out Sun Bin for not even trying to understand Pang Juan because he was afraid to accept her love, and for failing her so utterly. That promise Pang Juan mentioned? He once told her that he’d never let go of her hand. He’d completely forgotten, but it had meant everything to her. And Sun Bin, who’s orchestrated countless battles in the name of a greater good, doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to someone else’s readiness to do anything to accomplish their goals.

Which, kinda fair. Sun Wu did kill Helu’s palace women to make a point way back when, and now he has literally zero legs to stand on. Anyway he repents and resolves to finish what she started and take down Zou Ji. He and the rest of the gang attack Zou Ji’s secret lair, where they discover that he’s a sadistic immortal follower of Nuwa who’s been kidnapping thousands of girls throughout the years to raise as brainwashed cultists, including Pang Juan, who managed to escape his brutal abuse. A grueling boss battle ensues, which is basically only winnable because Sun Bin channels Pang Juan’s memory to lend him mad strength.

A defeated Zou Ji reveals his backstory before dying: he’s actually Ji Zha--Helu’s famously virtuous uncle, who declined the throne to avoid succession violence only to watch helplessly as Helu rose to power (with Sun Bin’s help) through assassinations and invasion anyway. In his despair, he’d made a devil’s bargain with Nuwa.

And that leaves Team Humanity headed to their ultimate destination: the juncture between the Zhou and Shang Dynasties, where they hope to stop Nuwa once and for all with the help of Jiang Ziya. If they can fix things at their source, all the history downstream will become unfucked too, which would save Pang Juan. With hope in their hearts and Gan Jiang and Mo Ye’s final sword in their possession, the game ends.

Apparently there’s supposed to be 4 games in this series (this is the second) and it really shows. Wu Zixu doesn’t appear again for the entire final third act. Plot threads are left dangling left and right. Some of the sideplots were pretty dumb and I didn’t go into those in this post because it’s already long enough...but you know what, I’m forced to respect the main storyline of this act, because it’s so out there and yet it...kinda works. The identities of the immortals/time travelers after the time skip. The batshit Pang Juan twist. And, fine, I grudgingly teared up a little at the Guiguzi/Shenyin Shu romance at the very end. I can respect unwashed 俺-using hermit lady/buff manry himbo even if some of the writing made me lose brain cells.

Anyway, if you really like these characters or this era, I guess I would recommend this game. All your faves are hot anime people and this game isn’t afraid to play with the source material in ways that are sometimes dubious but generally interesting. I’m gonna totally ignore the omakes, though, because there’s too many boobs in the CG gallery for them and they seem like they’d be 90% obnoxious pervy humor.

[tiger-tally]

Raishi: Konpeki no Shou (Part 2)

Well. That sure went places. Part 2 of the game covers the Wu-Yue storyline and is where things start getting really weird.

Fuchai and Bo Pi

The Wu Zixu getting dunked on parts are basically what you’d expect, with the odd bit of cringey anime humor mixed in. It also felt like there were more chapters of just pure cutscenes without any fun battles to break up waiting for my phone app to translate the dialogue. It took me forever to get through those chapters.

The one divergence is a budding romance between Wu Zixu and Ling Gufu (the guy who killed Helu), who, in this ‘verse, is a buff lady. She’s taken prisoner with Goujian and ends up working as a servant for Wu Zixu, who is really goin’ through it right now. She ends up sympathizing with him and he ends up finding comfort in her company while his relationships with Fuchai and Bo Pi are going increasingly badly with the help of (genderflipped) Wen Zhong’s plotting. That’s not to say the romance is particularly good. The game makes some...questionable choices writing women.

Anyway all this is to say that when Fuchai finally decided to kill Wu Zixu I was like, thank god.

In this version Bo Pi comes after Wu Zixu with an army. Wu Zixu originally intends to break through the enemy lines and go to Fuchai with what Bo Pi’s done...but Bo Pi tells him that he comes on Fuchai’s orders. Lin Gufu chooses to stay and fight with him, and gets killed. Cornered, Wu Zixu rips out his own eyes and tells Bo Pi that they’ll witness the fall of Wu...but before he can die, Nuwa’s minion swoops in. She offers him dark power if he’ll serve her goddess and create prosperity under absolute divine rule, a deal she can make anyone who’s been driven into despair.

So yeah. He goes over to the dark side to avenge Ling Gufu and make Fuchai pay for his betrayal. He commandeered Yue to take advantage of their preparations, and he’s the one who comes up with all their war crime tactics like having prisoners kill themselves on the frontline to intimidate the enemy. Frankly everyone in Yue is kind of terrified of him, but he’s too powerful to go against. Also Nuwa’s minion transforms into Xi Shi to seduce Fuchai and weaken him.

Wu Zixu conquers Wu and kills Bo Pi, but not before he gets to give him a verbal beatdown about how they all scorned Lin Gufu for being muscular when she was strong enough to survive in her harsh upbringing and difficult life...which would land better if the game itself hadn’t made that many jokes about her appearance. Xi Shi eats a screaming Fuchai while Wu Zixu watches.

Caveat that I experienced this entire game through Google Translate, but Nuwa was interested in this era apparently because she wanted to take away the story of Goujian as that of an inspirational human overcoming great odds? And I guess the flip side of that is that Wu Zixu doesn’t die a hero and lives to become a villain.

By this point news of the demonic duo has reached the time-traveling immortal representatives of the Five Emperors on a mission in this era, Shun and Tang. They’ve managed to recruit Shen Yinshu after his supposed death, and Fan Li, Wen Zhong, Gan Jiang, and Mo Ye want to come with them to help fight Nuwa. Goujian tries to cover for them, but Gan Jiang gets mortally wounded by Wu Zixu and Xi Shi as they try to escape, and Mo Ye sacrifices herself to create the ultimate sword for them. Tang opens a time portal and most of the others make it through, but Wen Zhong is captured. Xi Shi wants to eat her; Wu Zixu hold Xi Shi back to give her a worse fate. I’m pretty sure the implication is that Wu Zixu has her raped and Goujian mercy kills her at the end.

And that’s the last we see of Wu Zixu and Xi Shi in the game proper! They’re now the real powers of Yue, rewriting the historical records and governing it on behalf of Nuwa.

And I’m like...hmm. Writing choices were definitely made. Wu Zixu Lives AU is what everyone has wanted for him for 2500 years, but...like this?? I’m not even sure I can say it’s OOC, because when the grand overarching conflict is god vs. man I guess he’s the god of tides, and Wu Yue Chun Qiu already has him do some, uh, highly problematic things. The most OOC thing is probably him betraying Wu like that, but I guess that’s why the game gave him a fridged love interest to take revenge for. I really thought the game was going to go for a parallel with what he says in the prologue about being unable to believe that his father and brother would die to minimize the collateral damage from a king’s misrule, but nope, time for more vengeance!

Anyway I’ve finished the game, so I’ll write up the third act soon. It’s the most batshit of them all.