Today we have some insight into our latest release, Alicesoft’s Beat Valkyrie Ixseal, from one of our testers!
Fun gameplay, surprisingly good writing, and a protagonist who would unambiguously be a villain in another setting, who has chuunibyou tendencies, a crazy sex drive and superpowers that fell onto his lap by chance? Sasuga Alicesoft, though the Hyper Weapon is missing… Oh, it’s not. Welcome to yet another Alicesoft maserpiece, Beat Valkyrie Ixseal!
Quickly- if you’re new to the Alicesoft scene I want to establish that, as a rule, their games to be fantastic as eroge, but their gameplay elements and writing absolutely are major highlights as well. To the point that I personally consider them the focus. Their erotic content is great, but it’s similar to older renai in that you end up working for it. Absolutely not a nukige.
Further, if you’re new to the Beat series… they’re raising sims with a focus on branching paths through both the girls stats and your decisions in battle- similar to Princess Maker if the rpg segements took a central focus and… you know, it was an eroge. Insofar as being an eroge, there is an extremely heavy focus on content for the heroines. Combined with the heavy narrative focus, they’re the sort of game where you’re meant to fall for one (or all) of the girls hard, and commit to the bit- giving gravitas to the story regardless of where your decisions take you. The vibes from how they tend to balance fridge horror content with humor is very similar to sentai-style content… though, per having the possibility of failure, it’s not always balanced. Take care of your girls. Or don’t sicko.
Beat Valkyrie Ixseal is the third entry, coming after Beat Blades Haruka, and then Beat Angel Escalayer- but even though knowledge of the prior entries will make the experience better, they’re not necessary to enjoy it at all. I’d say Ixseal is actually a good entry point, since it’s a bit easier than the earlier entries.
That out of the way I’ll actually talk about Kirika Ixseal!
Spoilers for the first five minutes of the game: our beloved protagonist, Oudou Tsuguhiko, happens to be the most recent in a long line of reincarnations of Aidam, the demon king. The demons have been on the losing end of a war with the angels, and unsurprisingly the old heads in the demon military are mildly upset and decide to take matters into their own hands.
Betraying the latest version- Tsuguhiko, during his awakening… stealing six of his seven sources of power: Greed, Wrath, Pride, Glutttony, Sloth, and Envy… leaving him (hopefully, unsurprisingly) only with Lust. Skipping a lot of details, he joins hands together with his previous near-killer, the Valkyrie Ixseal, because it turns out divine power and demonic energy is totally interchangeable as a power source, to defeat the demon army before they take over the world!
Also, Lust demonic power is best transferred through sex. 🙂
I went in expecting an experience similar to Haruka and Escalayer… and I absolutely wasn’t disappointed. I found myself getting even more attached to Kirika My Wife the girls than I had in the earlier entries. The writing, especially after (spoilers for the cover art) Kirika joins the party, picked up really quickly and maintained a fantastic balance of dark comedy by nature of the setting and… surprisingly sincere romance Kirika my beloved?
Well, “surprisingly,” I say. I don’t know why it surprises me every time, I’ve been with Alicesoft literally forever and this happens every single big release they make. I may be stupid. Whatever. I love Kirika. Moving on.
The gameplay, as usual, is very solid. Like I said before: the Beat series are “raising” style games, where you increase the stats of your girls to fight in a turn based rpg that sort of hybridizes dungeon crawler combat and autochess style games.
Losses are recoverable- and even rewarded if you’re the type of person who enjoys watching women they love get violated by other people. Or things.
I found the balancing act of sex-rest-combat that Ixseal required to be more lax than the Escalayer remake, only getting hard stuck once for my first playthrough… Which is actually really welcome, to me. In each segment of the game there is a timer- about a week in which you need to defeat the boss of the zone, which ends up being a little tight if you mismanage your schedule, or have a poor attack loadout for Ixseal and Kirika, but the fact that it allows for any mismanagement at all is kind of a blessing!
But, here I am, talking about the gameplay and story focused eroge like it’s not an eroge- it shouldn’t really need to be said, but the variety and quality of CGs is fantastic as usual. Again, Alicesoft has a tendency for their bigger ticket games like this and Rance to have a lot of H scenes that cover a lot of bases- trying to avoid spoiler territory, but by nature of having “losing” scenes there’s a lot of coverage for content made for you little freaks who enjoy suffering(emotional or physical) in their sex, or you bigger freaks who have… inhuman proclivities. “Inhuman” includes both of noodly appendage and recognizably… animalian… natures. Of course, if you’re a good person and love Kirika like you should assuming you’re not a total monster then you’re just more invested in avoiding these things. Right? …Right? God, right?
It IS worth noting, though, that this game pretty much exclusively features Kirika the two main Heroines, Ixseal and more importantly Kirika. Do not develop a thing for the hot demon ladies please.
This game is massive. Which is, of course, partially a function of how many H scenes there are, but in general I’d actually approach this more as a traditional RPG than an eroge… again, sasuga Alicesoft. This was cooking in QA for just barely short of two months! I wasn’t timing myself, but I’d spitball getting through to my first ending was probably around 60 hours? Similar to Rance or Evenicle, the branching paths and one off “daily life” events quickly makes the scope for checking everything spiral out of control. Terrified of Rance X on the horizon. This, to me, is an absolute win. I hope you like what we’ve done, and crazy props to Yukino for pulling through all of this.
I wasn’t really sure where to put this, but I also wanted to mention that Minatsu Eru put out a banger soundtrack again. I miss Shade in the context of Alicesoft, but Minatsu tends to lean more synthy and upbeat-ey, which goes a bit better with the Magitek-esque vibe of Ixseal. No one asked, but Jinki was actually kind of formative for me. Lesbians who fall in love with one another but are actually more in love with their giant robots? It’s me.
Anyway 10/10 would marry Kirika again.
Beat Valkyrie Ixseal is available right now on the MangaGamer store, pick up your copy today!