Recent reviews by T-Patch [rip]

As someone who has played this game since the early days, helping players, figuring out events, and even being a community leader for a short time... I just can't recommend it.

(This is a pretty long review that goes over every part of MNG, so if you want the TL;DR, skip to "My Thoughts" below.)

NTT Solemare is an odd company, based in japan, but seemingly only catering to the western market. Most people know of them as the developers of the Shall we date? otome line of games, which are localized mobile ports of Idea Factory's otome games. Moe! Ninja Girls is their first original game, and their first foray into catering to the male otaku market.

Moe! Ninja Girls is a Mobage-style VN, featuring beautiful artwork and a great story, but bogged down with some of the worst mobile game mechanics you can imagine. The game is 100% web-server based, meaning it's online only, and your account can be tied to a Facebook account to transfer between devices. The Steam version is nothing more than a bare-bones Unity front end that allows you to sign into facebook to load your save and allow for Steam micro-transactions.

The main story features the main character, a former high-skilled ninja, leaving their village to pursue a normal school life. The problem is, almost everyone he meets at the school is also secretly a ninja, whether by infiltration, mission, lineage, or just wanting to leave their past behind. Harem hijinx ensue.

Admittedly, the story is very cliche, with every character fitting into a familiar anime archetype, but as the story progresses, the writers and artists do an amazing job in making the player feel invested in the story and to care for the characters.

Event stories are where some of the more fanciful stuff happens. What-if stories, 1-on-1 stories with each girl, Harem Hijinx stories, and more. These stories are usually earned through events, gacha, or ninja fight.

The main story works through a ticket based system, where you have 5 free tickets and paid tickets. 1 free ticket is recovered every 4 hours, and when you run out of free tickets, you will be using paid tickets.

The story is broken down into Seasons, Chapters, then Parts. There is an average of 8-10 chapters + 3 ending chapters per season, and 6-10 parts per chapter, averaging about 100 total parts per season. A ticket is used every time you complete a part. There's also a checkpoint system, which requires either a specific ninja tool or a certain amount of Soul, which is talked about below.

Moe! Ninja Girls has one main gameplay system, plus three types of events: Ninja Fight, Fight Master, Cookie Collection, and Heart Troops. This is where I have most of the beefs with this game.

Ninja Fight is a blind RPS minigame, in which whoever has the highest of two elemental stats wins. These stats are based on the player's avatar, also called a body in-game, and their ninja tools. The problem is though that it's kind-of a crapshoot on how you set up your equipment, and you have to whale to get equipment of even decent value.

Fight Master is an event similar to Ninja Fight, but the player will be chipping away at a character's HP instead. This event leans heavily on having high point value items, and is nothing more that a heart sink, which is the currency that is used to recover energy for Ninja Fight, and can be purchased with the real money currency.

You acquire Soul, which is required for checkpoints, from playing Ninja Fight & Fight Master. If you don't have enough Soul, you'll be stuck playing them until you do to continue reading.

Tools and avatars are acquired from events and the gacha. Due to the game not being available in Asia, they can get around gacha mandates, like showing the drop chance of each individual item.

Cookie Collection is a passive type of event, where you collect cookies by reading stories, playing the gacha, or doing Ninja Fight. The problem is that, due to the limits of the free currency, you'll need a considerable amount of paid currency to get much of the rewards from each event.

Heart Troops is a variation of Cookie Collection, but with rewards split between two teams and six of the girls, making this event needlessly complex.

I still love the characters and story, but all the barriers to read it has all but killed my interest in playing this. Every event feels like it's required to spend chunks of cash just to complete a story. Ninja Fight is nearly impossible now as I keep running into people who have ~250 points in multiple elements. The ticket system is a huge drag, and it's impossible to read event stories for events I missed.

I hoped, back when Solmare originally announced the Steam version, that it would be an offline compilation of some of the early season and event stories, and be updated with DLC of later seasons, stories, and art over time. It would serve as a way for the game to live long past the life of a throw-away gacha game.

Of course, this was back when the future of MNG was questionable. They had just finished the first full story arc with Season 6, and the future of the game was unknown. Since then, MNG has thrived, if not due to the heavy handed whale fleecing, then at least due to the story. There's no guarantee that it'll last, though. There has already been signs that there was trouble (Copyright striking YouTube videos of gameplay), and I sincerely hope Solmare has a plan for securing the future of MNG.

Start off with Season 1. Go at your own pace, don't rush it. Do some Ninja Fight between parts. Make sure to claim your cookies if there's a cookie collection event on. Do the free pulls on each gacha.

If the story is interesting to you, definitely keep going! It gets much better with each season, but remember that if you are strictly free to play, it will take a very long while to get to the end.

If a cookie collection story catches your eye, be prepared to drop up to $50 to complete it. Never go for the rankings, that's a horrible money sink. Season 1 is the best to marathon through if you need to burn tickets for cookies.

Hearts are fairly easy to come by, but if you want to do a Fight Master event, save up several thousand hearts, and make sure you have at least a total of 250+ points worth of items for each element. 6000 hearts would be just enough to get the story rewards.

If something is frustrating to you, be sure to let your voice be heard! With the Steam release, we now hopefully have a new direct point of contact with Solmare via the discussion forums. Let them know what you like and dislike about MNG!

My only request is that you treat your visual novel like a visual novel, and not as a throw-away gacha game. Allow us to replay whole seasons without tickets, instead of just select parts and endings. Give us the option to acquire event and gacha stories after a period of time. Something like "Yamabuki's Booth" would be great, a place where you can get stories with maybe a rare story ticket, or just straight with diamonds. And most of all, have a plan to preserve the game after the mobile money dries up.

Poppo?

Beyond hell

Two ol' chaps, named Ben and Dan, get board one day, and decide "♥♥♥♥, let's take over the world". They then create a crazy plot which involves time travel, interdimensional shenanigans, and game-developing dinosaurs. But, when they finally become rulers of the world, they realize they didn't want to rule it after all.

There, now you can move straight on to Time, Gentlemen, Please! and not have to spend 10 hours only to find out the blue tac needed to go on both the string AND severed hand.

Also, cow butt portals

Thread the needle.

The greatest "slamming into everything" simulator ever.