Mugen Souls is an outrageous, over-the-top, and a JRPG title that never takes itself seriously and was most recently ported to the PC. 2015 has been a spectacular year for JRPG ports on the PC with the release of the wonderful Hyperdimension series as well as Fairy Fencer F, add to that list the Final Fantasy games, Tales of Zestiria, Legend of Heroes, and Grandia II and you have some of the most popular (and powerful) JRPGs in the genre having been ported. Mugen Souls while far from a serious affair, adds its name to that veritable list of powerhouse ports and in many ways can hold its own among the giants of the industry.
Japanese roleplaying games that contain an art direction reminiscent of Anime tends to be a bit on the immature side and Mugen Souls is no different. Though the art is gorgeous and really speaks to me, the combination of the art, over-the-top action and voice acting, and pop culture-esque soundtrack is (at the risk of sounding horrible), decidedly "Japanese." Bright colors, chibi artwork (in places), moe, fan service, overly exaggerated everything, the whole works just SCREAMS "otaku."
I love it!
The premise behind Mugen Souls is basically world domination (well, the domination of 7 worlds). You start your crazy adventure as Chou-Chou Infinite and you will spend the next 30+ hours roaming an expansive world using crazy skills to dominate the enemy. A particularly moe-filled skill, the Moe Kill allows you to turn enemies into slaves then into items; each enemy has a weakness and the Moe Kill exploits that and the items are then used to customize your characters. As for customization … holy cow there is a ton. Body parts, job classes, expressions … you name it you can pretty much customize it in Mugen Souls.
With the high resolution upgrades and power of a PC, Mugen Souls looks stunning and runs fast; extremely fast. Load times are decent and I only ran into a single framerate drop throughout the 40+ hours I put into it, though I am fairly certain that the framerate drop was due to some unintentional background updates (dang you GeForce Experience) as the majority of the game moved smoothly. Combat is challenging, turn-based, and full of possibilities which makes grinding (a personal favorite of mine) much less of a chore than it is in more serious titles. Add to that the solid voice acting and excellent soundtrack and you tend to fly through the various areas without feeling like you have wasted any time.
My biggest struggle with Mugen Souls is in the moe aspect; it does not do anything for me. Having characters that are mostly relatively young looking and then panty shots or large, jiggly assets, is becoming creepier and creepier the older I get. That is personal taste though and at times it was just too much, for the most part though, Mugen Souls is an enjoyable experience that any JRPG fan will be excited to play. Add in the plethora of extras added to the PC port (see: http://screencast.com/t/Ywhgh3Gvy for a comprehensive list; there are simply too many to list here) and you have all manner of things to sit back and enjoy as you travel the various worlds in Mugen Souls.
| Platform | PC |  |
|---|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Idea Factory | |
| Publisher(s) | Ghostlight LTD | |
| Genre(s) | Adventure RPG Strategy | |
| Mode(s) | Single Player | |
| Other Platform(s) | None |
Article by Robert
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