UltraGirl Alters is a story-driven SRPG, where you become the manager of a new tokusatsu-themed virtual idol group. You can command them through battling virtual monsters, growing their skills, and their growth together as a group.
It seems like an interesting idea to mix what’s essentially Vtubers, tokusatsu, and SRPG combat, so I picked up the lengthy demo to give it a try before its release.
Please note: This is just impressions of the demo and not intended to be one of our detailed reviews.
The Algorithm Controls All
The protagonist turns up for his first day at INFI-X, a top-tier entertainment company, only to be told that he’s now going to manage the new virtual idol group named Alters. The company’s algorithms have decided this is more suited to him. He signed up to become a data researcher, but they really stretch the contract terms that allow the company to change whatever they want about an employee’s duties.
With a somewhat unsympathetic AI assistant leading the way, he stumbles through meeting the virtual idols, mostly newbies themselves, and supporting them through battles, social media promotion, team dynamics, and other issues.
The cast of idols is varied, and there are some interesting personalities in there. You’ll find an often giggling and gluttonous airhead, one with a cold personality who begins to open up, an obsessive fan of tokusatsu, a classic rich girl type who thinks of others as commoners, and a hacker who is a little too blunt. As a manager, you need to ensure they come together as a team to fight other virtual idol groups, with some nice moments of friendship and growth shown along the way. As well as set story moments, you’ll need to manage their mood by making dialogue choices when they bring up issues too.
Generally speaking, I enjoyed the story moments and character interactions shown in UltraGirl Alters. There’s often a humorous tone and the occasional touching moment, but parts do hint that there’s some discontent around the company, which has suspiciously advanced technology.
That said, there is a big problem. That is, the English translation. While I can usually understand what’s being said (there were a few moments that left me scratching my head), it’s just not good. Between awkward phrasing at points, issues where the characters are referring to the wrong person, parts that have been very directly translated (calling a senior at work ‘Senior’), saying the opposite of what is meant, calling people by name when ‘you’ would’ve been appropriate, it’s often quite bad. While I don’t know for certain if it was used, there seems to be the type of issues typical of AI/machine translation. It’s a pity, as otherwise the story moments are one of the key attractions of this game.
Virtual Battles
In between the story scenes, there are plenty of SRPG battles in UltraGirl Alters. Waves of enemies appear which you need to quickly clear out before they have the chance to give you a beating.
The game doesn’t use the common SRPG system of moving down tiles in a grid-based system. You can run down roads between buildings through various routes to get within range of the enemies, and can attack once per instance of a character’s turn coming up, with both the player’s units and enemies having a cooldown between attacks. Movement advances time on the map, while picking your characters’ actions pauses the timer. It’s a bit reminiscent of the system you’d see in games like 13 Sentinels, although you lose when all of your characters are wiped out rather than it being a tower defense.
Each virtual idol has access to a handful of skills, each with a different cooldown time attached or requirements for use. The basic skill builds up EP for advanced skills, and both basic and advanced skills build up SP for an ultimate skill.
The mix of skills works quite well. Some idols are more melee-focused, and some are better at ranged attacks, but each idol feels fairly unique. Differences along the lines of ranged characters working better at different ranges help to distinguish them, as do more unique skills, such as being able to teleport another idol.
While it’s not too difficult, there is a good level of strategy in positioning your idols throughout the map to respond to enemies appearing and finding the best way to take them out without taking damage. I enjoyed finding ways to lead the enemy away from my idols who’d taken more hits, perform fighting retreats, or just figuring out the way to clear the level quickest.
Wandering Manager
When not locked in a story scene or battle, you can wander around your headquarters and elsewhere, though it does take a while for the demo to give you much freedom. There’s a decent amount to explore, with a number of NPCs and objects to interact with. While you’ll find yourself railroaded down the main quest line and following navigation markers for a while, side quests do appear, as do opportunities along the lines of visiting one of the idols’ rooms.
Outside of that, you can also manage your idol’s levels and skills. Experience is a shared pool, so you can upgrade whichever of your virtual idols you like (up to a level cap set by how much progress you’ve made). Levelling up grants an idol skill points. It gives a nice level of fine control to level you customize your battle experience.
Super Deformed and Jiggling
The ‘real world’ gameplay takes place in a nice-looking, but fairly basic set of environments. The character models are portrayed in a fairly simplified 3D-model style, somewhat similar to super-deformed/chibi type characters you often see in visual novels. This is accompanied by more detailed portraits for dialogue.
The virtual battles use much more detailed models, both for the buildings in the environment and the character models. The characters have very notable jiggle physics. Attack animations stand out quite a bit too, with ultimate attacks focusing on the character models.
The game is partially voiced in Chinese, which sounds nice enough. The music and sound effects work quite well for the setting too.
Other Little Issues
While none of these are too serious, there are a number of additional little issues I noticed in the demo. The full release is coming up soon, so I have my doubts about them all being fixed in time.
The biggest one is that the controller support is painfully limited. You can only use the controller to move your character around, but not interact with anything. This is fair enough, I suppose, as it doesn’t claim controller support, but it seems like a huge oversight as this is something I would expect in this type of game. It doesn’t even include “click to move” navigation outside of battle, instead mandating that movement is done via WASD or the arrow keys on the keyboard.
Moving around the view of the battlefield with the mouse can be a little awkward. I’ve had to try a few times whenever I try this to get it to move.
Other minor things include the button for closing the text backlog not working (you have to press Esc) and some issues around text display outside of the translation issues already highlighted. It also began by displaying text in Chinese, rather than auto-detecting my English setup or asking which language I wanted, and required diving into the settings with a translation app to change.
Final Thoughts
From the demo at least, UltraGirl Alters seems like a pretty fun SRPG with an interesting theme and characters. The translation is what holds it back the most, but there are other snagging issues to fix as well. While I hope the full game has improvements, there is already fun to be found here.
ULTRAGIRL ALTERS HAS PROMISE
Try The Demo/Purchase: Here
If you are looking for another strategy RPG, take a look at our review of Capes.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
