The sweet fairy-tale characters you knew and love have all grown up and now they are rebellious, gun and sword wielding mafia members. If you haven’t already guessed from the game title (I didn’t until I was about one hour into the game), involves the characters from the Wizard of Oz as well as characters from the Brothers Grimm and other stories. OZMAFIA!! is an otome game (which literally translates to ‘maiden game’) and is aimed at females (or males, if they are into this) where you play as a female in a world with a bunch of handsome males to choose and develop a romantic relationship with. If only all relationships were this simple.
Visual novels have always peaked my interest as I enjoy the art style, anime and reading so these types of games have the right amount of everything. Having played a visual novel game before called Amnesia: Memories I knew what a visual novel requires the player to do. For those new to these type of games, there is a lot of reading involved; pretty much you are reading a book but you are also being treated to beautifully drawn characters, backgrounds and there is even voice over! Only effective if you understand Japanese, unfortunately I don’t but it does make the game a lot better in my opinion.
The story line of OZMAFIA!! is quite intriguing, you play as a girl (default name is Fuka but you can change that) whose has lost her memory and she wakes up in a place she does not recognise with a crazy wolf man trying to kill her. During her escape she is saved by the don (the boss man) from the mafia famiglia of Oz who drives away the attacker and takes her underneath his famiglia’s wings. Oz is only one of the mafia famiglia in the town and every day of the week apart from Sunday’s where there is a mutual compromise, these famiglia’s battle and fight each other for territory. So who will you trust your life with in a world where everyone is a stranger? That’s for you to decide as there is over 20+ endings in this fairy tale adventure.
The controls are very simple, you just need a mouse or your touch pad to click-through the text and select options when you need to. If you need to save or load your game data, at the bottom of the screen there is a bar with everything you need. There is a save, load, quick save, quick load, auto text, skip text, the log and the option button so you won’t get lost or confused when playing the game.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, the visuals are so, so nice – just like what you see in manga and anime there has been a lot of detail and effort put into these drawings. Seeing visuals like these make me want to play a game more as the characters are unique, colourful and realistic (apart from the characters with cat and wolf ears of course!). To sum up, the images are very aesthetically pleasing to the eye and it would be hard to be disappointed with this art style.
The sounds in this game matches the different scenes well and I really like the addition of the voice overs with the various characters as it just adds that extra touch. There is no singing in the music, just instrumental so it isn’t too distracting during the game play. To change the sound settings, just select the option button at the bottom of the screen and adjust the sound to your preference.
I have played a total of four hours on OZMAFIA!! so far and I am not disappointed, the story line holds my attention and the choice of guys to have a romantic relationship with is very difficult to make as there are too many to choose from! I’m sure that I will be playing this game to completion and make sure my female protagonist has a happily ever after. OZMAFIA!! is available to purchase on Steam if you need some otome fan service!
REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.
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