Winged Sakura: Mindy's Arc

Fun as hell. Grid based Tower Defense. Visual Novel Storytelling. Steady Progression.
It combines Tower Defense with RPG progression. End game has survival mode that lets you play forever.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much grinding required. A lot of designers somehow grossly underestimate the balance of a game. This is because they forgot what the purpose of any game is. As soon as your game is underbalanced to the point that the player has to grind so much that it's not FUN anymore, because the player can't WIN, you've failed.

TL;DR: Farmer's paradise.

Perhaps instead of Mindy's Arc, it should be named Mindy's Farm, considering how much grinding and farming it contains. And by that, I don't mean to insult the creators; in fact, it seems that they have put quite some care into this game. Still, the words "grind" and "farm" have a bit of a negative connotation these days (probably related to people having more interesting or necessary things to do than repeating the same relatively pointless activity over and over again). Maybe this game would fit in the 90s, but nowadays, when there are tons of games coming out every day and life in general is so incredibly fast, it's hard to see that many people would like this concept.

Sure, significant grind&farm is also associated with very modern games (although many of these series started in the 90s), such as World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Final Fantasy, just to name a few of the more famous ones. But the difference is that in many of these games, the elements of repetition are much better served to the player; either the story is so interesting that in its background you don't care to pay much attention to the farming element, or it's just that it's so rewarding or integrated into the game that it's not a big issue.

However, what happened with Winged Sakura, at least for me, was that the motivation to continue suddenly started to drop sharply. To progress in the story, you have to spend a lot of time in the first levels of the game to collect coins and make your characters stronger to have a chance at higher levels. It might sound like "What's so bad about it?" but in reality, it's pretty agonizing to find yourself doing the same level for the 50th time. And every time, everything is exactly the same as all the previous times. The exact same enemies, in the exact same order. What could be more annoying and boring? And when you have become so strong that you can destroy enemies as fast as they appear, then at some point, during the attack, they will stop emerging (every wave has a certain number of enemies), but you will not be able to manually end the wave to quickly move on to the next one; instead, you have to stare at the empty playground until the time reaches zero, and only then will the next wave start. Like this, you often find yourself sitting idle for 20 seconds, and needless to say, the longer you play, the more your total playtime (and probably your patience) suffers in this way.
To be honest, the story doesn't help to tolerate such a concept either; it's just very cheesy. The sound side is also questionable; it resembles a bit of shopping mall music. So the overall picture starts to fall apart pretty quickly.

What's more, not much attention has been put into proofreading since the texts in the game often have all sorts of errors, whether the words are in the wrong order, some letter is missing somewhere, or something's up even grammatically. Considering how big a role dialogue and texts play in this game, one would expect better quality in this area. It was also frustrating that some parts of the dialogue started to pop up in the middle of the battlefield. In other words, while you are tower-defensing and trying to not let the enemies run over you, all of a sudden some conversation bubbles between the two main characters start appearing on the upper side of the screen. Who has the capacity or desire to read them in such a situation?

Now, if I were to point something positive out, then the visual side is absolutely fine, and also from the technical point of view, everything works nicely. And really, the mechanics of tower defense as such also work competently; just everything around it leaves to be desired.

Adding to the general strangeness is the fact that there are quite a few playable characters in the game, but in reality, the whole game can be completed only with Evil Bunny and Fury alone. Well, Magicat, who does solid damage from a distance, can also be a great additional background force. So here's a little tip for potential new players: just focus on making these three characters stronger, and that should be enough. The rest of the roster is practically not needed.

So it seems to me that the creators have gone a bit overboard with all this farming and whatnot and underplayed many other important elements. And as such, it's hard to recommend it to anyone if playing it feels more like hard work without a paycheck than entertainment.

Achievements: Very challenging. Requires beating every level in insane mode-- meaning that strategic pause is disabled and enemies scale to above the player's level.

Full disclosure: I have not played the entirety of this game. I did not beat the story mode, I have not seen all that the game has to offer. Regardless, I feel that I gave the game a fair chance and I don't have any desire to return to it.

Winged Sakura: Mindy's Arc is a fast-paced tower defense game. Unlike most other tower defense games, the towers here time out after a few seconds and must be constantly replaced. The layout reminded me of Plants vs. Zombies and I was initially excited to have found a similar game that did not appear to be a blatant knockoff. To the game's credit, the gameplay is significantly different to Plants vs. Zombies and there is clearly an attempt being made at implementing new and unique mechanics.

The game's RPG elements were designed in a way that make sense for a tower defense: stats can increase a towers rate of attack, decrease its cooldown, etc. Enemies have elemental affinities/weaknesses that correspond to the attacks of towers. The player has numerous skills at their disposal to help turn the tide of battle. Towers have unique strengths and weaknesses, each serving unique functions. The character art looks nice.
I am not saying that the game has nothing going for it. It's not broken. It's not unplayable. It seems to have a lot of content at a reasonable price. It's just not fun-- at least for me.

My problems with the game have nothing to do with the difficulty. Granted I only played the first chapter, but the game was actually pretty easy as long as I used the strategic pause every time a cooldown was ready. Unfortunately, this meant the game had to be paused every ~3 seconds because some towers have incredibly short cooldowns with similarly short lifespans. The constant recycling of towers on the field made the game feel so much more repetitive than it needed to be. Every level consists of several waves of enemies and each wave necessitates the placement of every single tower multiple times over. Each of these individual towers may need their targets modified in the strategic pause so as not to accidentally heal an enemy with an elemental affinity-- thus further compounding my issue with the constant pausing.

There are many quality of life problems that I have with this game. Firstly, the menus are unclear. The text on different parts of the menu have no borders to help distinguish themselves from one another. Items in the inventory do not stack, making it feel very cluttered. The game does not stop the player from placing a tower too close to an enemy, instantly destroying the tower without resetting the cooldown. Stats sometimes only show icons with no tool tip explaining what it actually represents. There seems to be no way to despawn a tower even though it's very easy to accidentally spawn a ~20 second tower that ends up healing the enemy. Some levels reward the player with important recipes or items in the store, but earning them is not a guarantee and it can take multiple attempts of ~15+ minute levels to obtain them. If the player has a full inventory, the end of level rewards can't be obtained.

In terms of the visual novel portion of the game, it is not clear enough which character is speaking (making it easy to mix up Nino with Nina and Mindy with Minzy). The story itself was confusing to me, though that could easily be due to the fact that I only played through the first chapter. Dialogue was a bit rough in places, but it was still fairly comprehensible.

Ultimately, this game was more stressful than fun for me. I didn't enjoy the micromanagement necessary to maintain a battlefield with timed towers, and I didn't feel like the rest of the game was polished enough to compensate for that. I will acknowledge that Winged Sakura: Mindy's Arc has its merits, so I recommend that you try out the demo to see it for yourself.

It annoys me that I don't like this game. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the game, but the fact that I don't like it makes me want to find something to critique. But it's OK to just not like a game, even if everything in the game works fine as it does here.

Why don't I like it? I love Plants vs. Zombies, Trolls vs. Vikings, and every other lane defense game I've played. So I should like Winged Sakura: Mindy's Arc...but I don't. Graphics, sound, sprite design, color palette, attack patterns, variety of units...I like all of this. The only thing that I don't like in this game is that your units time out: each unit you place has a short duration, and they disappear after a few seconds, without getting defeated. Obviously, this changes the gameplay in a major way from any other lane defense game: you can't set up a defense of a lane and rely that the defense will continue to deal consistent damage over time. Instead, you have to budget to put smaller defenses in play, because you will be buying them over and over and over again. I just wasn't able to enjoy that change to the basic lane defense gameplay. That's on me. You may like the game, and there's lots of reasons why you would.

I wish I did. I keep coming back, trying the game again and again. It's like trying a food that you just don't enjoy but others love, like Red Velvet Cake: you periodically come back to it, sure that you're missing out on something great because everyone else loves it, only to find that, nope, your tastes still haven't changed.

I love planning a defense and then executing that plan in lane defense games. I love arcade games. But this blending of the two - having to form a plan that involves frequently, frantically replacing your defenses because they simply vanish - just isn't to my taste. I don't know why, and I hate that. It makes me feel old, unable to enjoy something new and different.

EDIT: I have since played a bunch more of this game, and my attitude toward it has mellowed a little. Built into the assumptions of the game is that you will be replaying each level multiple times, grinding in order to earn the currency to upgrade your defenses. Knowing that there is a way to get to complete levels makes me feel a bit better, but at the same time, I don't like being forced to play the same levels multiple times.

Winged Sakura: Mindy's Arc is a tower defense game where the towers disappear after some time, so you have to keep replacing them. After you complete each level, you'll be rewarded with loot to upgrade your towers and dialogue to progress the story.

A hardcore TD game which requires a lot of micromanagement and punish you for even little mistake.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1401315726

This game feels and plays like any Japanese game. UI reminds me Final Fantasy. There is a story in anime visual novel style and etc. So, for me, European player, It was hard to understand the game. Especially because of annoying and forced tutorial and... extremely hard difficulty. I lost third level 3 times before I beat it.

After you gather you attention the game becomes good. It bring new mechanic to the TD genre. All battles pass on the same map. There 5 long rows. Reminds Plant of Zombies.... but.. All your towers have limited lifetime. So you need to constantly summon new towers. For example, there is a tower which last for 4 seconds and has 1,5 cooldown.
So this is more action game, then strategy game. Yeah, you can set the game on pause, but anyway the game requires a lot of micromanegment.

You start with 1 tower and unlocks new tower during the story. I unlocked 4 towers in 4 hours of the gameplay. You also get some stuff after the missions. You can sell it to but items with permanent effect for your towers. Also, you can upgrade these items.
And there is a skill system with a few option.

In overall, the game offers a lot of interesting hours. But be ready to suffer :D

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1401315669

Pros
- Innovative gameplay for TD genre. All towers has limited timelife.
- There is a story in classical anime novel style.
- Gameplay could be very enjoyable for people who seeks challenges
- Nice soundtrack

Cons
- Game is incredibly hard. If you leak one pack of monsters - you lose. And there are many packs.
- You play all levels on the same map
- Not enough diversity in towers and enemies
- Annoying forced tutorial
- Confused UI. Reminds me old Japanese games. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how it works

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1401315783

Resume

This game is awesome, if you love TD games you'll definitely like this game
there are 2 only downsides of this game
1. The UI is very very simple in all aspects (info, sfx, graphics, animation)
2. It's taking too much time and too much concentration, and if you die you'll have to repeat the whole level (it can take more than 1 hour for hard difficulty in later levels)
Other than those it's all good, gameplay is quite unique, nice story

In Winged Sakura: Mindy's Arc, you read through brief dialog segments, interact with a shop/menu system, and experience a Plants-Vs.-Zombies-like combat system. I'm often a sucker for tower defense sorts of games and persistence progress such as level-ups and relevant unlockables, so I gravitated toward this purchase and gave it a fair go.

Story

Brief Positives

Grinding, Grinding Ad Nauseum

Conclusion

Okay, I know what you're thinking. Looks like some dumb anime game, right? I can't actually be recommending it. Well, I totally is, and I am.

First of all, if you don't have a tolerance for this kind of thing, I'd check out right now, because Winged Sakura is pretty much exactly the kind of game you'd expect from that title. It's pretty much unironic about that, which had a certain silly charm to me, but obviously not for everyone. You play as Mindy, a young mage, and her Sakura Minzy - basically a spirit partner. They find themselves stuck in a building, and have no memory of how or why they're here. To find out, you'll need to head through four areas of twelve stages each, defending the place from attacks. Objectively the story is kinda bad; it often brings up new plot elements out of nowhere, all the characters are pretty one-note, and there's a lot of it.

What really drew me in was the gameplay. Like Plants VS Zombies, it's a lane defense, but far more complicated. From the start there are far more enemies coming at you, there are considerations like elemental resistances and shields to take into account, and most importantly your towers in this are all spirits (the same as the enemies you fight, which is neat) that show up temporarily, generally ten seconds at most. That's enough time to get a few shots off, but every spirit has a cooldown period before you can place another, meaning there's a lot of micro-management to put them where they're most useful. That's helped by the game offering a tactical pause you can use at any time to plan out what you want to do, although Insane, the hardest difficulty available in each stage, disables it. If you enjoy that kind of gameplay, it's quite fun, and all your spirits are fairly unique to one another in what they can do.

Despite you potentially being able to have multiples of them out at once, every spirit is treated as a unique party member, and you can equip them with a personal weapon and one accessory, the latter of which do things like increasing the time they're on the field or decreasing their cooldown period. This is where the game gets a bit imperfect, as after every level you gain up to six drops depending on the difficulty, which include the ability to buy or craft items at the store. There are several tiers to each item, so you may find yourself having problems upgrading through no fault of your own. I remember unlocking a spirit fairly late in the game and not getting its weapon after the level, so I either had to go without for the next one or run that level again. After the first couple they become standardized at fifteen waves each, so this can definitely be a bit of a pain, and it would have been nice if there was a system where lower-tier items became unlocked automatically. The actual crafting can take some lucky drops as well, and while more straight-forward, buying the materials for that takes money, which you get by selling stuff you get. So it's a big cycle.

It sounds odd to recommend Winged Sakura after my review of Prime World Defenders, but the actual game part of it was good enough to make me play it all the way through. Still, I would fully agree it is not necessarily a game for everyone, and that you need to have a reasonable tolerance for trashy anime and watching numbers go up. If you do, it will serve you well on both accounts. If not, give this one a pass.

I was totally ready to kick a$$ at this game, but the grind became tedious. Really tedious. And I even like a good grind sometimes if the gameplay is fun.

The worst part is that someone clearly spent a lot of time making the grind so boring. I feel sorry for that guy.

The first arc of the game was very cool , but then , that´s all there is.The game is like plant vs zombies with some cool powers , skill , ....However the progression is very slow and the grinding unbereable.You will have to do the same level hundreds of times to advance even on easy.That game would be better if:
-progress was faster
-I did not have to pause the game every 2 secs.That kills the imersion and every level takes hours.
-Your spirits did not die with one hit.In plants vs zombies each plant takes some seconds to get eaten,Here it´s 0.01 secs

Not a bad game , but it takes a lifetime of grinding to advance

This is like the Dynasty Warriors of Plants vs. Zombies. You grind and grind and level up and then mow down hordes of enemies. That is all this game has to offer; but sometimes that's all I'm in the mood for, so I give it a weak thumbs up.

Positives:
+ It's simple and plays fast.
+ If you like grinding and leveling up, you can do plenty of that in this game.
+ Enjoyable game play, particularly if you like Plants vs. Zombies-esque games.

Negatives:
- I really didn't enjoy the story. I'm not an otaku, but I know enough about anime to know that this took all the common tropes of anime, and just threw them together. This game brought absolutely nothing new to the table storywise.
- The humor (and just the writing in general) really grated on my nerves. It felt like everything fell flat.
- Grindy. If you like grinding, great. But if you don't, you won't enjoy this game much.

If you like fast paced strategy and Anime-themed Games, then this suits you perfectly.

Pros:
- Good Art/Animation Style and neat graphics
- Unique strategic gameplay (rare to find in other games)
- Well thought-out and good designed story
- Alot of end-game grinding in Survival mode for those who want to
- Variety of enemies and own defenses

Cons:
- Gameplay gets a bit boring if you play for to long in one go
- Pretty hard sometimes (farming could be required)

Although I'm giving this a negative review with the only choices being the black or white "Recommended" or "Not Recommended", I'm doing it more to give constructive criticism to the developer and inform potential buyers of some things positive reviewers might be leaving out.

The difficulty curve is extremely harsh. You have four levels of difficulty you can play at. Easy, Normal, Hard, and Insane. In the first three you can pause the game at any time in order to take your time placing units (spirits), looking at tooltips to read weaknesses, etc. In Insane you cannot pause at all. I started out playing on Normal and assumed that it wouldn't be too hard to progress at that level. Wrong. Even at Normal you will most likely quickly get overwhelmed and have to fall back to playing levels on Easy. Even on Easy you will most likely have a hard time completing progressive levels and have to go back to earlier levels and grind random rewards (Item Blossoms) and sell those rewards for money that you can buy enchanting items with from the store and upgrade your Spirits items with.

This however is another issue in my opinion. Completing levels only gives you experience that levels up your spirits and the item blossoms depending on what difficulty level you played and if you did it perfectly without any enemies making it across the end line and damaging your 10 health points. It used to give fewer item blossoms but it was patched to increase the rewards. On Easy you will get 4 random Item Blossoms (3 + 1 if you do it perfectly) from a specific pool of items that the level can give. Completing levels does not give you any money. You have to sell your random rewards to the shop for ~33% of their value that the store sells the same items for. Also, sometimes rewards consist of patterns that unlock items in the shop; aka they have no monetary value. So to enchant one of your spirits weapons up to +10 you need to grind easy levels repeatedly getting rewards such as Bows that you sell for about 33 currency or Coins that you sell for 97 currency. You might get around 200-350 currency per repeated grind. You need 400 for each level of enchanting up to level 10. I think it would be better if the game directly rewarded currency for each level completed instead of needing to grind materials and sell them for low percentages repeatedly.

The story is pretty random and hard to follow. None of the characters know why they're there or why they're doing what they're doing. The main character seems to have amnesia. It's hard to follow which character is even talking when you're clicking through the dialogue at a decent pace. When there are four characters on screen and two are named "Mindy" and "Minzy" and two are named "Nina" and "Nino" it can kind of be confusing which one is saying what. Especially when there is usually no indication of a character starting to talk besides the (very similar) name changing. Aka the character art won't change and the speech is not appearing above their head; it is always in the same place down in the center. Even when the character suddenly changes moods and says something like "What!? Really!?" their expression won't change and they still have the same smiling expression art used. And you cannot scroll back up to past conversation to check something if you missed it or were clicking through too quickly. You can usually do this in visual novels and having that feature would be great.

It's worth pointing out that there is some Engrish. It's not constant but there is quite a bit of it. Incorrect grammar, missing words, words in the wrong order. For example: one time a line said something like "Quick, we to need go now!" instead of "Quick, we need to go now!". It's definitely not impossible to understand but there are a bunch of errors.

Although it isn't a huge deal it can be kind of annoying dealing with the different elements of the enemy mobs. They have weaknesses and affinities. The weaknesses are simple enough; a raccoon spirit enemy has a weakness to fire? Great, your fire archer spirits work well against them. The annoying thing is the affinities. If they have a lightning affinity for example they will absorb and heal from any lightning damage. There are Leapie enemies which hold shields that have a lightning affinity and are immune to all damage except any that has shield piercing on it. They're weak to wind so once you get the wind archers with shield piercing you obviously use those to kill them. But when tons of Leapies come out on all five rows it's kind of annoying to have your Lightning Mage spirit up. It will just constantly attack the Leapies and heal them. You can't even desummon spirits once you summon them. You do have the ability to pause the game and manually click and redirect the Lightning Mage spirit's attacks to another enemy (if any are there) but as soon as it kills it it will just attack the next closest enemy (probably a Leapie) and start healing them again. It's not worth constantly manually redirecting your dim-witted spirits attacks for every kill, so I just end up not using the spirit at this point. There have seriously been rows of enemies that include alternating Leapies (weak to wind) and Squirrel spirits (wind affinity, heal from wind damage) over and over. One leapie, one squirrel, one leapie, one squirrel, etc. You need to place your wind archers to kill the Leapies, but as soon as the first Leapie drops it will continue to shoot the next enemy - the squirrel - that will just block it's attacks and heal from it. You can use other spirits to kill the squirrel enemies but your wind archer spirit will continue to shoot them as well until it despawns, constantly healing it and competing against your own spirit trying to kill it. The elements can be kind of frustrating and rather than purely rewarding using the correct elements to do more damage the affinities seem to limit what you can do and punish yourself in some instances.

Another thing I hope could be changed is sometimes you try placing your own Leapie spirits to block incoming waves and if you misjudge whether or not you have enough room to place the Leapie it will just instantly delete it once you resume game because it was a fraction too close and got placed on top of the enemy. And then you are sort of screwed or at least at a big disadvantage as it goes on its 10 second cooldown and the wave you were trying to block is probably sprinting or equally dangerous. You can be very conservative in such situations and just place it another square back but having an indicator telling you that you can't place it there would be nice.

Overall I think that it is a pretty fun game. It can be rather hectic and the difficulty curve does seem kind of broken as of now. I don't think it should be necessary to both drop down to the lowest difficulty and still need to grind to improve your spirits because you can't even progress on said easiest difficulty without doing so. The developer is very defensive about people commenting on this. I've seen responses with him questioning if they listened to the tutorial or are using strategic pause enough or that he sees they haven't enchanted a weapon to +10. I have done grinding to enchant multiple weapons to +10, etc, paid attention to every tip given and pause a lot (it's necessary); it's still challenging even on easy. I hope the information I provided was useful. There are many positive aspects to the game; I am simply chosing to focus on the negatives since nobody seems to really point them out. The developer seems to care about the game and still be involved in improving it. I do think it's a decent game. I recommend picking it up.

Edit: In a recent patch (you can see him post patch notes in the announcements) the developer improved the electric caster spirit's AI and increased item sell values (from 35% to 50%), improved some typos, etc. He continues to work to improve the game.

Great game the place and disapear tower machanic brings a new way to play (to me) and the dialogue is funny and light. the only issue i have is the needed grinding at certin pionts

An excellent defense game with heavy RPG elements.

Gameplay consists of enemies appearing from the right side of the screen, and you summoning spirits to prevent them from reaching the left side. The spirits you summon are short-lived, so you constantly have to summon new spirits to keep up with appearing enemies. You can pause the game anytime (except on highest difficulty), allowing you to plan your defense precisely.

As mentioned in the opening line, Winged Sakura has extensive RPG elements as well. Each spirit has level that increases as the spirit participates in battles, and can equip its personal weapon and an accessory from a fairly large list. Equipment’s quality can be improved by both finding or crafting higher-tier versions of the item, or upgrading existing item (and as upgrade cost raises with item’s tier, upgrading lower-tier items is often a preferable alternative to getting higher-tier items).

The story is very interesting, and cutscenes are done in anime style, with beautiful character art. Both cutscenes and battle art is very good in general, as can be seen on screenshots.

I recommend Winged Sakura to all fans of defense games, doubly so if they like anime style as well!

This game is for experienced lane defense gamers. It is not a tower defense game. It is a twitch based lane defense game on steroids. This game will test your mouse reflex skills to the extreme limits. Maybe even break a mouse or two! lol There is no rest for the wicked in this game! There is too much going onscreen all at once to enjoy the game for even a minute for me.

Don't let this discourage you from buying the game though. It might be an extreme challenge, but it seems professionally made and has great support from the devs! It's got great art and good RPG elements. I'm just getting old and slow. I would have loved this game when I was younger and my reflexes were faster.

I only recommend this game to experienced twitch based lane defense gamers. It's fast. Wickedly fast!

They Remembered the Neko Maid: A Winged Sakura: Mindy's Arc Review.

I love tower defense. I do, the idea of building up a massive wall of peons and watching them go about bringing destruction to the lemmings below has always been a type of game that inspired me. And my other guilty pleasure is that cute anime garbage that makes me happy. Games like Recettear and 100% Orange Juice, whereas lacking in violence, still can make you smile just from the smiles on the cute characters faces.

But wait. Those things don't mix...or do they...?

They can sure try. And here we come to Winged Sakura: Mindy's Arc: A fast paced anime-styled tower defense game by Winged Sakura Games.

I'm sure I've lost you already, so allow me to clear things up now. This is not the type of tower defense game many people will be expecting. It's beyond fast paced, it's hectic, and though I've yet to actually find a need for it, the game comes with a "Strategic Pause" (This is a normal pause, but allows you to catch your breath, refill your drink, think about your next move, or run out into the rain and question your current life choices). The game is structured very similarly (so far) to the first levels of Plants versus Zombies, another tower defense game that this one, like many others, so desperately wants to live up to. Except this time around, it's cats versus....the same exact cats, and your cats are on a timer. By this, I mean they fade away in seconds, or even after they attack ONCE. So you will be constantly reapplying the towers and struggling to keep yourself from being overrun by.............cats. Oh and a chicken! And I *think* I've seen bunnies by now.

The gameplay is honestly pretty enjoyable. Fast paced is a nice breath of fresh air in the genre, and I'm always willing to try something new. So let's move onto...the...story......
Hm.

If you're looking into buying this game, or at least have read the review up to this point, you're probably an anime fan. And most anime fans have enjoyed anime on television, from Adult Swim to Toonami, all the way to Anime Unleashed by from Techtv. Think back to those good old days--remember when you'd turn it on, and it would be an anime that you've never seen before, but the story was a good ten episodes in already? But you watched it anyways, not really trying to get into the story? Mine was .hack//sign. God save me, I had no bloody idea what was happening, but I watched it anyways. Point being, that's what this story is. You get into the story, and CLEARLY, you're in the middle, but the game makes no attempt catch you (or its characters) up to speed. They all start out like they know a bunch of secrets, act all chummy, and guess what? You're not in on the joke.

The art style is charming if cliched', and there seems to be a lot to do for your characters. There's a skill tree, item crafting, upgrades, so on and so forth. I use the word upgrade despondently because Claws turns into Claws, but with a green name and a bunch of upward pointing green arrows on the stats. I would have liked to have seen the artists come up with cooler weapon and accessory upgrades akin to Drakengard style, where each upgrade looks a little more menacing. But since you only see these items in the inventory between rounds, I'm sure I'll get over it.

This game is still very recently released and Team Winged Sakura Games seems to know what their doing when it comes to patching the game. But for now, don't be surprised when you have to grind the same "rounds" (all the levels are the same) over and over again. Which is probably a good thing, because the STORY mode, a term used VERY loosely, looks to be very very short from where I stand, at just around 5 hours, grinding included. However, I HAVE NOT BEATEN THIS GAME, so this shortness may and or may not be true.

EDIT: Good news. It's infact quite a bit longer than I expected! This is a good thing.

There is a neko maid added about an hour in. I am still waiting for an explaination for this beyond "because anime."

All and all, I'm still playing the game, and it knows how to keep my focus. I feel like there isn't much substance, only one level, enemies are also allies, storyline thinner than the maids blouse's fabric, and upgrades are only just so because the game tells you they are. If you like anime and tower defense, you'll probably enjoy this game. There's a survival mode that I assume becomes unlocked once you beat the game, and there are some trophies, though it seems like they'd be easy to get.

Lastly, the steam cards trade for this game at around 2$ a piece, and I've currently gained for. Do wih this what you will. This is Faust, thanks for reading.

+Fast paced Gameplay
+Classic modern Anime Design
+Fair amounts of strategy required
+Rewarding Grinding
-------------------
-Unappealing storyline
-Slightly non user friendly
-Lazy design
-A neko maid? Really. Come on. You're better than this! And Sakura? REALLY? Didn't sakura spirits just come out? Didn't it just forcefeed us these stupid trophes? This is what is known as profiling. These are not elements that make anime. I'm sorry, but this had to be said, and you know it as well as I do, Team Winged Sakura Games.

Recommended:
To those who want a tower defense game that is slightly different, but not outside the realms of what they've come to know and love from the genre.

This game is really unique and extremely challenging. It is a very fast paced lane defense where you use spirits to kills enemis and spells for mass lane damage. It is very enjoyable, with many upgrades, spells, weapons, and spirits to choose from. I played for over an hour and cannot wait to continue later this weekend! The only downfall of the game is some of the menu buttons are hard to recognize as they only have a couple letters on them...but eventually you figure everything out through experimenting.