If you’ve played Moero Chronicle, then you’ve already played this one. It’s literally a copy-paste of the previous game, but with different characters and dungeons. And also, it somehow runs worse than its predecessor. It’s still just as fun as the last one, but it doesn’t necessarily fix any of the problems that I had with the previous game. If you enjoyed Moero Chronicle, then you’ll have fun with Moero Crystal too. However, don’t expect anything beyond just more of the same.
I was really excited to get an early copy of Moero Crystal H, since I loved the previous game Moero Chronicle. It was a fun Pokemon-esque romp though silliness and slice-of-life moments with attractive and adorable monster girls. I even revisited the game for a little bit to refresh my memory. However, when I booted up Moero Crystal for the first time, I was almost confused thinking that I had just launched Moero Chronicle again by mistake.
Jokes aside, I do sincerely feel that the game felt identical to the last one, with almost no significant changes to the formula to distinguish itself from the previous iteration. It’s simply more of the same, which was never bad, but some steps forward wouldn’t have hurt. Because of this, I fear that this review might be fairly short, since my thoughts on Moero Chronicle essentially echo my thoughts on its follow-up. I will mostly likely end up focusing more on the things this game does differently.
Moero Crystal H, just like its predecessor, is a dungeon crawling RPG where you can recruit a ton of cute and sexy monster girls into your team that you can then socialize with and level up in various ways. It’s fun to explore dungeons and finding a ton of them along the way. Enjoying their personalities and how they all communicate with one another is also very fun. Most of the monster girls you find tend to be more interesting than the main cast, funnily enough.
The protagonist this time around is named Zenox, whose appearance and name both come off as some sort of villain, but it’s far from that. He is actually the most normal guy out of all normal guys. If there was an award for being the most average and “whatever” person ever, Zenox would win by a landslide. Even with this said, he is already miles better than the pathetic loser that was Io in the previous game. However, one advantage that Io had over Zenox is that he at least had some sort of internal conflict going on and had a much better reason to go off on the adventure that he does. In Moero Crystal, Zenox is a country boy going to a big city looking for his dad, but that is quickly forgotten and thrown out the window when he gets thrust into this quest by accident. What quest, you may ask? Well, it’s a quest to find the Bra of Darkness that needs to combine with the Panties of Light to bring balance back to the world. That is seriously what the story is, and I’m laughing just typing this up.
Yes, the story and world of this game is just as silly and ridiculous as always. Absolutely nothing in this game is taken seriously and is constantly entrenched in comedy. A lot of it is very predictable and not that different from the previous game, but it’s still an element of levity that makes the game quite pleasant to get through. Speaking of comedy (or a lack thereof), Otton’s back! Voiced the Tomokazu Sugita yet gain, and now with the addition of a dark version of him called Dark Ottonias. This particular character is voice by Yuichi Nakamura, who is one of Sugita’s closest friends, making this new character a joke in and of itself for those that are informed on who the voice actors are. Needless to say, Otton is the same cringey, disruptive and annoying character as before, and Dark Ottonias isn’t much different. As expected, most of the fun will come from the monster girls in situations that have nothing to do with the main story at all.
Capturing monster girls is the same as before. You get them into a boss fight, tear their clothes off and then do a scratching mini game to fully get them to join your side. This scratching mini-game is identical to the last game, in that it can range from easy and fast or infuriating after a ton of tries with no results. The game tried to relieve the scratching mini-game of its shortcomings by creating a special crystal item that seals the monster girls inside of them. That way, you can skip the scratching game and save it for later on a training ground, with the crystal acting like a literal Poke-Ball that catches monsters. This sounds fine, except for the fact that even if you do this, you can still fail the scratching mini-game, in which case the monster girl will run back into the dungeon, so you’ll have to go back and look for her again anyway. It’s a waste of time that adds an extra step to something you can get done right then and there. I never needed to buy these overly expensive crystals, so I wouldn’t bother if I were you.
After recruiting your girl, here is where we can see the biggest amount of changes, or rather, additions to the game. The combat, dialogue, story, and even a lot of the music, is identical from Moero Chronicle, but the main hub for the game has a bunch of new things now. Like usual, there’s the shop and the inn, where you can visit all of your teammates and socialize with them. But then, there are these new areas that can be used for training, boosting up stats and enhancing accessories. There’s even a top down shooter within the inn that grants you access to optional dungeons to explore. It’s a lot of optional areas that can help you be better prepared for the dungeons ahead. Other than an environmental change and a few obstacles here and there, the dungeons are identical to the last game.
Before you know it, you’ll be going back and forth from the dungeons to the town as you spend hours just talking to your team and preparing to take a deep dive into the dungeons and their annoyingly high encounter-rate ahead. You can expose weaknesses, build up your party, use different builds and pretty much do all of the same things that you did in Moero Chronicle. You kill the same enemies, and even recruit the same monster girls from previous games. None of this is particularly bad, but definitely disappointing. I like to think that sequels are opportunities for developers to further improve upon what was done before and the take the gameplay to the next level.
However, I feel an enormous sense of complacency throughout the whole game. It’s as if the team cynically thought that they could get away with just doing the same thing again because pervy players like me would fall for the attractive girls and not notice anything else. Well, as much as I love building my relationships with all of these cute monster girls, I would’ve appreciated more new things than just more of the same. This game is still good and fun to play with a ton of hours of gameplay time in store for people that really want to take full advantage of every monster girl at their disposal. However, the only reason for why this game is good is because the previous one was good. There’s literally nothing here that gives Moero Crystal an identity of it’s own. The ultimate summary for this game is, “It’s like the other one, which was good, so this one’s good too, I guess.”
If there is anything else that truly baffles me about the copied homework that is Moero Crystal is that this game somehow runs much worse than its predecessor. All of the menus are slow and run at a terrible frame rate. The sound effects of your movements within these menus are delayed by a lot and every press of a button feels like the game might crash at any moment. This is in stark contrast to Moero Chronicle, a much older game that has menus that run at 60 frames per second and are very responsive. Pausing the game to heal your characters or simply look at their information is always a chore to get through because of this. As I said before, this game is literally a Super Smash Bros. Echo Fighter of Moero Chronicle, so I don’t understand what is different here that makes these menus run so slow, and by extension making the game less fun to play.
In conclusion, if you have already played Moero Chronicle, you have already played this, except they somehow managed to make it run a little worse and put even less of an effort into improving any part of it. If you have enjoyed what you played previously, then you will enjoy yourself just fine with this new title. It doesn’t distinguish itself in any way to its predecessor, which I find really sad when there were many opportunities here to elevate itself into something truly great.
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