Introduction
In a world dominated by terrible free otome games, one not so awful game will come and save the world. That world is the mobile market and that game is Niflheim+. This is a game that has its problems, a lot of problems, but that’s more than expected when it comes to any free-to-play game on the mobile app market these days. Despite its problems it still is a pretty fun experience that I thoroughly enjoyed -- when I wasn’t wanting to throw my phone at the wall because of how hard they made it to not put any money into the game.
The story
The story in Niflheim is pretty simple, you’re a dead princess of a kingdom who’s awakened from your eternal slumber in the land of Niflheim to become the bride of Niflheim’s king, Jean. You can choose to marry him or you can choose from a list of suitors including a skeleton, a ghost, a mixture of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, and several more.
You go through a prologue story where you get all of the men introduced to you, save characters that were added to the game later on, and then you pick the man you want to date and you go from there.
In the route I ended up going with, Leo’s route, the plot was that the king of Muspelheim, Leo, came to Niflheim to find a bride eventually getting caught up in a coup to overthrow Jean, the king of Niflheim. You have to work with Leo and the other characters in order to find out who is behind this attempted coup and finding a bride to bring back to Muspelheim with.
The story was pretty predictable, as soon as you’re given a blue rose you know that the masked man is up to no good. The playable girl is also pretty flat and dull, but it’s an otome game, what else can you expect from it? Despite that, it was really fun. The art in the game is really nice and despite the problems with the story, I did enjoy it.
The features
The biggest non-story feature in this game, as well as every other Shall We Date game, is the avatar system. With the avatar system you’re able to buy outfits for your avatar and dress her up as well as outfits for your boyfriends. I had fun with this, because let’s be real, who doesn’t like a good dress up game?
You can get outfits in plenty of ways, from the balls which are like gatcha machines that will either give you gold, items, or outfits, you can purchase them with gold or coins, earn them through spin offs, or get them through love challenges.
The feature that goes hand in hand with the avatar system is the Bride in Training system where you have to clash against other people’s avatars to see who has the higher charm level so you can earn princess points. The princess points are used a few times in the story, usually as gateways in the love challenges.
This system can get pretty buggy at times, sometimes you can’t refresh the other person’s avatar to get a new one, or sometimes it won’t even let you do bride in training. It’s not the worst feature ever, it’s a million times better than the other way of getting through the love challenges, but it can still get pretty frustrating.
Spin off stories
A lot of the fun in Niflheim+ comes from the spin off stories you can do. There’s usually a few you can pick up at any time and run through with any boy, not just the one you chose for the main route.
So far I’ve been playing through the Alice in Wonderland themed one with Jean because the outfit that it will give you in the end is really cute and the mafia one with Leo because he’s Leo. Each of the spin offs are their own self-contained story in an alternate universe where the characters take on their own roles in those worlds.
The only real problem that ever stems from these spin offs is that they don’t change the sprites up for the characters. I understand why, but come on.
When you have Leo playing a police officer while still wearing his jacket with no shirt it makes you wonder if you’ve stepped onto an adult film set where Officer Hot Bod has to tackle the opposing sister capturing mafia for you and in the process you fall in love. It would have been easy to fix that problem! Just give him a shirt, save him from the public indecency.
Who I chose
As I mentioned in the summary of the story of this game, in the end I decided that I would go with Leo for the route I went. Nothing really pushed me towards him besides the fact that he was a new character and I was interested to see where the route would go. His route was a lot of fun, though, and Leo’s character is pretty adorable as well. If I hadn’t gone with Leo I probably would have gone with Skeletiano for the laughs.
General gripes
I thought long and hard about how to address the general problems I had with this game, because none of them really fit in any of the sections I usually bring up. The problem comes in the free-to-play model that Shall We Date series uses for its games.
It’s a pretty general free-to-play model that they’re using, but wow does it irk me more than most other f2p mobile games I’ve played. Throughout the game there are “love challenges” that pop up sporadically throughout the story, in the love challenge you have to buy an item or raise your princess points enough to pass through the challenge so you can get back to the story. That sounds reasonable enough until you actually start looking at the prices for things.
You can choose to buy items with gold or coins, the gold being what you’ll get from just playing the game and the coins being the premium currency. 100 coins is one dollar, but you’ll get diddly squat for the hundred coins, when I was first looking at one of the love challenges I got, the item to get the super special story was 700 coins. Seven dollars. That’s insane! Who would pay that much for a f2p game? It wasn’t me, I saved up regular gold so I could get the regular level items.
Obviously they need to make their money somehow, but come on, seven dollars for a dress for your avatar is just ridiculous. The game almost goes out of its way to try to get you to spend money as well. To read the story you use story tickets which regenerate one every four hours and occasionally the game will give you some extras. But usually if you don’t want to wait the four hours to get a single ticket you’ll buy it yourself.
That doesn’t sound that bad until you really do the math, if you want to regenerate all five of your story tickets it’s 20 hours. Nearly an entire day to wait so you can breeze through five tickets in five minutes. Tack that onto the love challenges and it becomes a challenge to not spend money on this game. I nearly got to my no-spending breaking point towards the end because I just wanted to finish the dang game!
I overcame those temptations and completed Leo’s route, but not without wanting to collapse into a pile of sheer rage over annoying this game can be without spending money. No more will I complain about Pokemon Shuffle taking 30 minutes to regenerate a heart, not after I went through the pain that was waiting 4 hours for a single story ticket to regenerate.
Game update
I didn’t get as much done this week as I had hoped to, I mostly just solidified the way I want the story to go. I finished up the talksprites for Dhruv, one of the available bachelors, however, so I’ll give you all some of those.
What’s up next
Next week I’ll be playing Seduce Me the Otome! You can find that for free on Steam and play along with me.
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