You'd think that after recently obtaining some vintage, bona fide bangers like MGS1 and Ex-Ranza, I'd be feasting on classic games right about now as my retro setup nears completion for the foreseeable future. You wouldn't be entirely wrong, I've been doing plenty of that. But I can also never truly turn off the part of my brain that feels the urge to play any mildly novel-looking Japanese galge and see if there's actually any meat to it, which is how, after years of looking at its cover art and thinking, "I like these character designs at least," I finally found myself picking up a copy of D3's Idol Death Game TV on the cheap over the weekend.
As I warned at the end of that last post, I have indeed decided to keep soldier on with this game, against at least probably your better judgment (longtime followers know my tastes and tolerances in games, I can't really vouch for my own). It turns out that even if you engage in a challenge that an idol explicitly declares is a forte of some sort, the game's RNG is seemingly so rigged against you that you're still ultimately compelled to cough up money for the item buffs from the game shops just to get a passing grade, a design decision I genuinely cannot fathom since it ostensibly deprives the idols of any meaningful gameplay differences between each other outside of triggerable story events. I initially intended to keep playing legitimately for as long as I could muster it, but between that and the tedious grind to earn more coins, by the time I managed to reach the last stage of my third route and was put into an essentially unwinnable state without restarting and potentially subjecting myself to possibly another hour-and-a-half-plus grinding, I got fed up and installed a memory editor plugin onto my Vita so I could essentially out-cheat the game and give myself enough money to rig the final challenge in my favor and buy myself ten times more fans than the other remaining idol.
I usually only ever futz with cheat stuff when researching stuff using emulators and try to keep things legitimate on actual hardware. But Idol Death Game evidently has such little respect for your time that in this particular case, I don't have any reservations about resorting to cheats and will just blitz my way through the rest of the game in this manner without engaging in any of the other completely throwaway systems. At this point, I'm purely in it to see just how little its writing stacks up to the competition because I have a sickness and that sickness is an unending thirst for knowledge of galge good and bad.
You haven't seen the last of this game on my feed, Cohost. I'm sorry.