Now, I have a very bad history with Cybird games. I started with Midnight Cinderella, read a bit of a route then deleted it because the game felt a bit cheap and laggy, played Kenshin's route in IkeSen deleted it, reinstalled then played a bit of Ieyasu's before deleting it again, then I read a bit of the prologue of IkeRev before forgetting about it and deleting it. As you can see, the games don't really stick with me for very long. I do enjoy them, but mobile games don't last very long with me, because I forget about them and I prefer playing proper paid Vita games instead.
But when Ikemen Vampire was announced, it interested me. I like vampires. Monster High probably made me into a fan of them. I really like Diabolik Lovers, and I sort of like the Twilight films, even though they're mostly really bad and I can't stand the two main leads. So when IkeVamp came out I installed it.
I played the prologue on my phone, then decided to start a route on my iPod Touch instead. I'm only one chapter through that route now, keep in mind.
So, what do I think about it?
BEWARE: The text down below is a very long, rambling list of thoughts.
I personally think that the game feels less like a cheap mobile game than what I felt sometimes with their other games, especially Midnight Cinderella. The UI looks really premium, and the soundtrack is actually quite good. I can't compare it to the other Cybird soundtracks because I never played them often with the sound on, and I'm pretty sure that MidCin doesn't even have sound.
The art's quite good too. I think the artist is the same as the one who did IkeSen and IkeRev. I like most of the character designs they did, except a few of the LIs look very similar to the ones in the other two games. The backgrounds are alright I suppose, I haven't really noticed them that much, to be honest.
So basically, the plot is that the MC's this travel writer person who's currently on holiday in Paris. She's actually a lot like me, she like travelling and languages, plus she's in the Louvre, which is where I've actually been before. I think our main girl's supposed to be speaking French in the game, but the dialogue's written in English and the voice acting's in Japanese.
Yes, there's a little bit of voice acting here. I never paid much attention to Cybird voice acting before, but it's quite good. The same standard of voice acting you get in fully voiced otome games, except there's just not as much of it. I don't really recognise any of the voice actors here, except Daisuke Hirakawa, and that's only because he's in so many of my other games. I'm not really an expert in the seiyuu field, so I can't really comment on any of this stuff.
The MC meets this man dressed in fancy old fashioned clothes, then I think she follows him and goes through this magic door. This magic door takes her back in time, where a lot of old historical figures are there, except the gimmick is that they're hot bishounen vampires. Sounds cool, right?
Oh yeah, and the man she meets is the Comte de Saint-Germain, who I think is the same Comte that Sainty-G from Code: Realize is based off of? I'm not really sure because I'm not that good with literary figures and history and all that. I suppose that's quite interesting.
All of the bishies are historical figures that I know of, but some of them I don't know that much about. It's a bit more awkward seeing them as dateable characters than the historical people in games like IkeSen and Hakuoki, because I actually know who they are this time. Plus, when I think of most of them, I just imagine some painting of an old bloke instead of a bishounen. But I'm going to try to distance these in-game characters from my impressions of their real counterparts, because otherwise it's going to feel weird.
For some reason Joan of Arc's there, but she's a male love interest instead, because there weren't already enough bishounen there already. If they wanted another male character, they could've just picked one of the many, many male historical famous people out there. The decision to put him in there just baffles me really.
The prologue reminded me a lot of IkeSen and IkeRev's counterparts, because they're really all quite similar. In all three of them, you have your MC who gets sucked into another world/time/whatever and meets a bunch of hot men. I suppose Cybird used the same writers for each game, so that's probably why.
I liked all of the potential love interests that were shown, but some caught my eye more than others. I was quite interested in Mozart, Napoleon, Shakespeare and Arthur, probably because I thought they were hot or something.
When it came for me to choose a route, I was quite stuck. Although only three were available, it was still a hard decision. It was a tough decision between Mozart and Napoleon. I was going to go for Mozart first, because tsunderes are often my favourites, but in the prologue Napoleon interested me quite a bit. I always have difficulty picking a route in these mobile games, that's why I prefer making choices in a common route first.
After thinking for quite some time, I went with Napoleon.. I normally pick the tsundere or yandere first, so I wanted to do something different for once.
All that I know about his real life counterpart is what from Horrible Histories, and he's not really shown in a very positive light there. (If you don't know what that is, it's this historical comedy sketch series we have in the UK that I watched as a kid, it's really good and quite educational) From my very vague memories, he's a short man who was the emperor of France in the 1800s, and he was in a lot of wars because he tried to conquer a lot of Europe? I'm sorry, my knowledge of some history isn't that good. In IkeVamp, I don't really know much about his character yet, except that he's definitely not short, and that he's some kind of half vampire or something?
Also here's a fun fact that I totally didn't shoehorn in not long after publishing this:
The IRL Napoleon had a really small penis that was preserved and put on display in some museum somewhere. I know that's weird, but who knows, maybe one day it might be useful in a pub quiz or something?
There's not really much I can say from only reading the first chapter, because not much has happened. MC gets taken out shopping by Saint-Germain and then Arthur Conan Doyle comes up and almost sucks her blood, but Napoleon stops her and a little bit later, we get this CG:
This CG's quite decent, I suppose. It looks good on my iPod at least. The game runs well on it too, so that's alright.
That's all I can really say about the game so far. I'm quite enjoying it, and I'm going to try to not drop this game. This game will probably appeal to people who want to play Diabolik Lovers, but can't because of the language barrier. I dunno if I'll review the route or not, it's quite hard to with these mobile games because it takes months to finish a route.
I just hope that the love challenges won't be difficult!
That's me done for today. See you all later!
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