The first release in Idea Factory’s now abandoned Otomate Forte series of games. The idea was to produce regular games with a ‘girl-friendly’ coating to make them more appealing to female gamers. The second game was Date ni Gametsui wake ja nai, which was a remake of Master of the Monster Lair with added bishies. Apart from the new character designs, there was nothing girly about that game. Alas, the same goes for Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru, a tough but enjoyable Metroidvania-meets-dungeon crawler type of game.

Ah, Idea Factory and their wacky ideas. I do so love them. Their thought process must have gone something like: girls don’t play Metroidvania games –> Why not? –> Because they’re too hard and don’t have enough bishies –> So if we make an easy one we can rake in the cash! Brilliant!

Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit here. Maybe producing all those otome games went to their head and they started randomly adding bishies to everything. Either way they went ahead and the result was a pretty good game. It must have sold like trash though, firstly because apart from the bishies, it’s not very girl-friendly and secondly because the “made by girls for girls, now with 20% more bishies” premise must have turned off many a male gamer who might otherwise have enjoyed this game. Heaven forbid anything attack their budding sexualities.

For the purposes of this post I won’t be taking into account the many female gamers who eat action games for breakfast. After all Idea Factory sure as heck didn’t. Their target audience for the Otomate Forte games was most likely the same people who buy their many, many, seriously they have like 1000 titles, many, many otome visual novels. Maybe the intention was to introduce them to other genres and thereby expand the market for Idea Factory’s regular games? If that was the case, then they failed from the start when they chose a male protagonist. Then they failed even further in the following ways:

– The nice art and character designs were calculated to appeal to visual novel fans, but 95% of the game is spent in a dungeon that looks like the screenshot on your right.
– The game is actually pretty hard and requires a decent amount of skill to finish. Yet their target demographic are fans of “games” that require lots of reading and nothing else. There’s a fundamental disconnect there.
– Very little story. The story that does exist is decent, but super duper predictable. There’s this ultra powerful stone, your master sends you and your best friend to get it, haha JRPG best friend, of course he’s gonna get the stone and go crazy and make you have to kill him. The end.
– Very little character interaction. Again, contrast that with the standard visual novel where you do nothing but interact.
– Linear, no choices to make.
– Bad end. Let’s just say your best friend doesn’t go down alone. No alternative endings, no chance to play as another character. It would have been nice to replay from the point of view of your best friend. No New Game+ either, btw.
– No real romance. “I will protect you” is the title, but the hero spends the game keeping the girl at arm’s length. The ending has them going their separate ways in an “I’ll see you when I see you” kind of way. Basically she finally gets the memo that he’s not that into her.

How did they ever expect this to appeal to visual novel players? This is just my guess, but it would have been better to start with a normal turn-based jRPG with an otome game flavor. Maybe something like Arabians Lost, but with less talking and more playing. If that works, they can move on to other genres, like SRPGs and platformers. I mean, I still think it makes more sense to create games that anyone and everyone can enjoy instead of slapping a “for girls” label where it doesn’t belong. But that said, I wouldn’t mind playing the girlish equivalent of Final Fantasy or Fire Emblem. What’s the feminine form of Ike… Ikea? I’d play that.

Gameplay – Who’s gonna protect ME?!

A 2D side-scrolling action game. Run, jump, roll, hack, slash with your sword, throw your knife. You can escape damage by rolling, but you can’t block. There’s an HP bar, but no EXP and no leveling up. You can’t grind your way through, so you must survive by your wits unaided. While you can leave the dungeon at any time, the escape item costs 420G each, so you have to be careful at the start. Your only hope is to get better at running and jumping, quickly. Improve or die.

If the inability to tank your way through doesn’t deter you, welcome to Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru. Apart from the main story mission, most of your time is spent just exploring the dungeon, killing monsters, foraging for alchemy ingredients and carrying out quests for the adventurer’s guild. Along the way you find various power ups, such as more HP and the ability to double jump, as well as several equippable skills that boost your stats and add new abilities.

I might not be the gamer Idea Factory had in mind when making this game, but I sure had a great time playing it. Of course it’s easy to boast now that I’ve finished the game, especially when it ended with my stats like this:

But really, it wasn’t so hard. Really. And I had a blast all the way through. I especially enjoyed:

1. Collecting random treasures that do nothing but look good in your inventory.
2. Using the alchemy pot in the item shop to make tons of useful items and accessories.
3. Marking up the dungeon map to remind myself of useful information, like where the save points are, where the friendly monsters are, where the best farming points are, etc. All DS games should come with markable maps.
4. Being able to warp around the map to save myself a ton of walking. Discovering a new save point was like winning the lottery!
5. Upgrading and synthesizing powerful new weapons at the weapon shop.
6. Doing all 75 fully optional adventurer guild quests. Fetch quests, extermination quests, go talk to this monster quests, I did them all. I’ve gotta stop pretending I hate sidequests. I can’t live a lie any more.
7. Dat feel when you find a great new accessory or skill in the dungeon.
8. Dat feel when you kill a tough boss, especially early on. It’s too bad they got so easy towards the end. I had like 50 of the best healing item, so I just walked up to the late bosses, tanked their hits and healed when things got bad.

If all Metroidvanias are like this, I think I’ve found me a new genre to explore. Having said that, apart from the problem where it was marketed to the wrong kind of fans, Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru was rightly panned for the following reasons:

1. The horribly, incredibly, shockingly bad slowdown you get when more than two or three enemies appear on the screen. I’ve never seen anything so bad in all my years of gaming. There’s no way Idea Factory didn’t notice this in testing. Which means they deliberately released a game they knew was buggy and charged full price for it. For that alone they deserve to be soundly criticized. Shame on them.
2. Those 3 places where I got stuck for ages. The crumbling platform with the damned bat on level 2 (slash it in mid air), the room with the golden knights in level 3 (there’s a switch hidden behind a pillar) and the place just above that with the backward and forward jumps (don’t use double jump, just fall, throw a knife on the next screen then jump immediately to land next to the golden flower). Together they must have added 3 or 4 hours to my play time.
3. It got a little too easy towards the end. Even I was itching for a little more challenge by the time I cleared the game.
4. The S-rank quests were a joke. Go fight the same dragon 3 times. Then go fight this other dragon 3 times. Then fight this wolf 3 times. That’s the S-rank? I was really hoping for some crazily strong bonus bosses.
5. Palette swap upon palette swap upon palette swap. I hear they got a famous artist to do the main character’s design. They should have spent the money on a famous monster designer instead.
6. The graphics were kinda bad. Not bad enough to interfere with enjoyment, but there was plenty of room for improvement.
7. The sound quality was bad too. Bad enough for me to notice, and I normally don’t care about that sort of thing. It’s a pity because the game is fully voiced by (apparently) well-known voice actors.

Still I’d like to see Idea Factory make a “regular” i.e. non-girly version of this game with the crippling lag issues fixed, more monster variety and a little more challenge. If they do that I’ll wholeheartedly recommend it. I enjoyed it that much.