Mugen Souls Z Review - Cute But Troubled

Adorable, cute and endearing are all words I would use to describe Mugen Souls Z. Tedious, frustrating and longwinded are just a few more words I would use. Oh dear, a cutesy charming JRPG with a lot of charm is let down by long, boring dialogue, performance issues and an odd premise that makes it somewhat difficult to penetrate…

Mugen Souls Z is about the self-proclaimed “Undisputed God” Chou-Chou and her personal quest to conquer the seven worlds. It isn’t long before she discovers a hitch in her plans when she encounters a girl, Syrma, the “Ultimate God”. Before Chou-Chou knows what has happened, she is shrunk down to a miniscule size and loses much of her God-like powers, with the only way to regain them being assisting Syrma in capturing the seven Ultimate Gods that reside on each of the worlds.

The cast is cute and colourful, with likeable and dislikeable characters appearing in the party in equal measure, and a high quality English voice track for all conversations, making long cutscenes more tolerable. However, even this isn’t quite good enough, as the game is unfortunately littered with cutscenes which are long and quickly become tedious. When I say long, I mean really long, with some of them easily excessing ten minutes in length when set to “Auto” play through the dialogue. It’s nice having a majority of it voiced, but all there is to look at on screen are barely animated images of the characters – barely better than static screens.

Luckily the battle system provides some decent fun – battles are turn based, with your characters moving within a set area during their turn in order to position themselves to fight enemies. Different types of attacks have the potential to attack multiple enemies at once, making your position relative to your enemies essential to battle. The battles are actually very fun, the system works well and each fight moves at a fairly quick pace, making them fun and much more refreshing than the dialogue scenes.

Another facet of Mugen Souls Z are the “fetishes”. Indeed, Syrma changes her personality and clothing to become more appealing to enemy monsters, and then she can perform stances to interest the enemies. If an enemy likes you enough, they may become your peon, increasing your overall strength. Fetishes include Masochist, Sadist, Bipolar, Hyper, Terse and more. Figuring out what kind of girl your enemies are into is an odd task, one that is definitely not going to appeal to all gamers.

The world design is somewhat lacking, though. Levels are incredibly simple and are designed so that you walk directly towards objectives, which usually trigger dialogue or a fight, possibly both, and then you go to find the next objective. It’s mundane and fairly boring, and seeing as this is how the core of the game is structured, it gets old pretty fast. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the worlds looking a bit prettier, but fairly flat and uninteresting environments litter the game, unfortunately. Bland textures and uninspired design plague the game.

Having said that, the game excels in character design.  All of the characters I encountered had their own personalities and decent voice acting helped flesh these characters out. They all felt unique and interesting and the interactions between the characters, coupled with the twists in the story were my main reasons for wanting to continue with the game.

Mugen Souls Z has a few more issues that are worth noting, such as a constant judder that appear on screen due to frequent framerate issues. An unfortunate reality, which mars a game that, despite having flaws, is also incredibly charming and cute. Perhaps some of the other faults could’ve been more easily overlooked had this game ran more smoothly.