Embryo takes place 150 years prior to the BlazBlue storyline. Despite its ties, it really isn’t necessary to know anything about BlazBlue to understand what’s going on. Fans of the fighting series will recognize Easter eggs throughout.
However, if you take away any of the BlazBlue links, what you have is a mediocre storyline. In some way shape or form, this story has been done before, and a lot better.
The protagonist is a high-school guy, timid and shy, that doesn’t know how to handle himself when a bunch of busty women enter his life. It all starts when he ventures out into the unknown and finds a zombie– er, a “Union”, and has the mysterious power of picking them up with a bell-ringing sound. You find out rather quickly that the reason he can hear the sounds is because he’s a Union himself. Drama ensues.
As expected, Embryo becomes nothing short of a short anime series that belongs in the harem genre. Yet for those that love that genre, it still leaves the player/viewer empty.
There’s nothing spectacularly gripping about the plot, which is a mighty downfall considering it’s a visual novel. But does the game still actually play well?
Embryo’s gameplay is exclusively in the TOi, a device that lets users pick what news stories they want to read. That’s it — based on what the player reads, the game will send them in a certain direction. While the key replay value in visual novels is to have multiple endings (and sometimes needing to avoid the bad ending), just picking paragraph-long articles to read becomes tedious.
The developers believed that picking articles may have created a unique way to progress in a visual novel, but it ends up being a chore. Especially when they aren’t written well, and a lot of them are simply boring. It actually devalues replay, because there’s really no interest to “play” through this mediocre plot. It’s completely unintuitive.
Embryo needs something more than just choosing articles to read. We all understand what a visual novel is, but one that’s listed at a $40 retail price on an actual gaming device needs a little more meat. This is something that could have come out on Androids for $10.
Not only that, but the game suffers from spelling errors and glitches. While I didn’t run into any trophy issues (to my knowledge) in my test run with the Vita version, there’s been players saying that the game cannot be completed at 100 percent due to saving glitches in between episodes. What I did run into were spelling and grammar errors in multiple instances.
It wasn’t enough to distract from the game. Especially when grammar’s concerned, it’s expected to see stuff like that slip through the cracks in translation. What’s actually disappointing is the fact that this was released last July in Japan, and there was no effort to create an English track nearly a year after for the North American audience. This is not a long visual novel — if a 50-hour Tales of game can be completed with English dialogue, there’s no excuse this game couldn’t have the option.
What Embryo does get right are the visuals. The photos are gorgeously detailed and the character design is rather unique — something the BlazBlue series thrives on. There’s even the option to remove the text on-screen with the Select button and take pictures with the Vita. Despite the substandard plot, the characters are so wildly different that it’s easy for fans to start picking out who they like and dislike throughout the story. Unfortunately, some of the fantastic art is hindered with limited, repetitive animations by the characters. Again, the effort just doesn’t feel like it was set at 100 percent.
BlazBlue fans will have more of an attachment to Embryo and will see past some of the shortcomings. But still, they’ll be left with a below average storyline that will be forgotten as soon as something else is played. It’s a game that can easily be polished off over a weekend (or a really lazy Saturday) and possibly never picked up again.
If Aksys wants to continue localizing visual novels and actually net a profit, it has to stray away from substandard plots that offer zero interactivity and doesn’t take advantage of the Vita’s capabilities. It may sell with its BlazBlue ties, but even the biggest fans of the franchise will disappointed in this effort both in development and localization.
What's Good
- Full touchscreen support
- Art slides are visually appealing
- Anybody can enjoy the story even with BlazBlue ties
What's Not
- Mediocre storyline
- Choosing your way feels unintuitive
- No English dialogue option
- Spelling and grammatical erros
Final Score: 4/10
