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By Steve Baltimore / April 27th, 2015

Title Omega Quintet Developer Compile Heart / Idea Factory Publisher Idea Factory International Release Date April 28th, 2015 Genre RPG Platform PlayStation 4 Age Rating Teen Official Website

When Idea Factory International announced they were bringing Omega Quintet to the West, I was pretty excited. Being a fan of their other titles, I was very interested to see what they could do on the new PS4 hardware. Was it a big improvement over their last generation titles or a lackluster current generation outing? Let’s find out!

The story centers around a world being consumed by a phenomenon known as the Blare. The Blare transforms the world’s creatures into monsters and slowly eats away the minds of the people. The only ones that can combat the Blare are the majestic Verse Maidens. These rare girls can destroy the Blare with their magical song and dance and are the only defense left for this world’s survival.

While the story is very cliché at times and a bit slow getting started, I still found it to be pretty interesting. You can find lots of hidden documents lying around the world that go into great detail about the girls and world itself. The girls are your standard anime archetypes. You have your tomboy, tsundere, and, of course, the cute little sister character. While this will likely turn some people off, I thought the girls were interesting enough that I wanted to learn more about them, and it didn’t hurt that Aria was so adorable. However, I was not a fan of the manager, Takt. His personality was pretty abrasive and he came off like an ass most of the time. Though I think, deep down, he really did care about the girls. There are plenty of plot twists and a couple of different endings you can obtain, so I felt the story was well done overall.

While the graphics are not the best thing I’ve seen on the PlayStation 4 hardware, they are not the worst, either. The character models are pretty detailed and look nice, but I was more impressed by the environments themselves. They are huge in size. This is a vast departure from other Compile Heart titles. Not only are they big, but they have a lot detail, as well. The game runs silky smooth with only a few frame rate issues. This only happens when there are a ton of monsters on the screen at one time. Combat animations are all wonderful and have some really great effects when performing some of the special attacks.

Being that this one is all about singing and dancing, you would think the soundtrack would be great, right? You would be correct. This has one of the best soundtracks I have heard in a Compile Heart game thus far. There are several nice vocal tracks you can use in PVS Mode, as well as many other wonderful tracks. I really loved the field music, most of it was somber and fit the mood of this dying world very well. The battle themes are really great as well. You gotta get pumped up to kick some Blare ass, after all. The game features both English and Japanese audio. The Japanese audio is top notch, and the dub is pretty good, as well. The English VA folks did a great job bringing the characters to life, but I think more lines should have been dubbed. While most of the main story events are dubbed, very few of the side events are.

Gameplay flows much like what you’ve seen in many other RPGs. You take on the role of Takt, manager of the Verse Maidens. Your base of operations is in the office. From here, you can take on new missions, make equipment and items, do training and many other actions. It is important to walk around the office in between story missions, as events will pop up as icons on the ground. They will show as little icons of the maidens heads. These events will help you get closer to the girls, allowing you to have bigger bonuses when paired with them in battle.

Making items works a lot like in Mugen Souls. Except, instead of selling different types of drop items, you will have to disassemble them. As you disassemble items, you gain Arcanium. There are seven different types of this you can obtain, each represented by a different color. In addition to Arcanium, you will obtain Energy Points or EP from this, as well. Think of EP as money, basically. Some items and equipment can be bought outright with EP while others you will have to disassemble certain items to obtain.

In addition to making items and equipment, you can make different outfits for the maidens wear. Idols have to look great, am I right? In addition to giving them a different look, some outfits can be upgraded further than others. This means that, by spending some EP, you can not only make the costumes more durable so they don’t break in combat as easily, but you will be able to equip more Amps, as well. Amps are accessories that can be equipped to outfits that will give you various combat bonuses and immunity from certain status aliments. The further you upgrade an outfit, the more Amps you can equip on it, but, be warned, if your clothes get damaged in battle, the effects of your equipped Amps will no longer work.

From the office, you can also access PVS or Promotion Video System. This allows you to put on a custom concert with the gals. I thought this was a lot fun and really easy to use. You can pick their dances, the way the camera moves, and even which idol or idols you want to sing each section of the song. You will start off with one song and unlock more as you progress through the game. You can even use your PS Move to control which way the sparkles flow on stage. While this doesn’t do anything useful for the story, I thought it was a great distraction.

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About Steve Baltimore Steve started with oprainfall not long after the campaign moved from the IGN forums to Facebook. Ever since, he has been fighting to give all non-mainstream RPGs a fair voice. As the site admin, he will continue to do this and even show there is value in what some would deem "pure ecchi." He loves niche games and anime more than anything... well, except maybe Neptune.

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