Omega Quintet is a JRPG by one of the developers of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series. As a result, you’ll probably find the graphics very familiar, feeling quite low-res at times and somewhat bland looking. The premise is that there is something called the Blare which spits out monsters known as MAD. The only ones with the power to defeat the MADs are Verse Maidens, young girls using their singing abilities. It sounds more imaginative than in practice, as the characters end up using conventional weapons like guns and swords to deal damage anyway.
You play as Takt but he doesn’t actually participate in the battles himself. Instead, his childhood friend, Otoha, discovers she has the ability to become a Verse Maiden and Takt ends up being a manager for the group. The story itself is somewhat lighthearted with a lot of jokes that ends up relying on insulting a character. It can be charming in its own right but utilizes a lot of anime tropes. The character models are the 2D / 3D style with proper animations so they’re more natural than a 2D portrait but less awkward than a complete 3D model.
The worst thing about the game in the beginning is the abundance of tutorials and how it introduces them. Instead of easing you in and introducing the mechanics naturally, it ends up throwing walls of text at you very frequently. Just when you thought that all the features of the battle system were explained, up comes another tutorial text, which is quite annoying. The battle system itself is nothing too fancy, despite all the tutorials, it is a turn-based system with assists by Takt, who does not participate in it directly. Each character can use various skills, items or defend, and there is a weakness system. The coolest part is probably how the characters, and also enemies, get to do multiple actions in one turn once they have levelled up enough.
The negative thing with the game is that is still continues to introduce new mechanics with the cumbersome tutorials 10 hours in. However, once you get the five characters to form the full party, you’ll come to realize that the battle system has a lot of elements, much more so than at first glance. You’ll start strategizing more, especially since the game ramps up the difficulty with harder and more numerous enemies. You’ll consider chaining your combos to dish out bigger damage without expending all of your SP, plan out turn orders and play around with the different attack abilities of each character. Basically, you’ll stop mashing X and actually have to think about your moves.
Naturally, being an anime game protagonist, Takt is popular with the ladies. There is an affection system with each of the Verse Maidens, which is a requirement for the true ending. Increasing affection is as simple as watching their events and pairing up with them during battle. However, if you want to max it out (only if you care for Trophies), then it’ll require tedious grinding that is simply not worthwhile.
The environments are deceptively big. You can never explore it all the first or second or even the third time you enter an area. Sections are blocked until you progress the story, and complete quests, where you gain and level up your abilities to unlock those areas. Then you will come to realize how massively huge these areas can be, although since they’re filled with enemies and more sections that are blocked off until later, it can become tedious. However, the load times are really fast, which is surprising so going between areas is really quick.
A lot of enemies in the environments in tight spaces means it is annoying as you’ll inevitably get pulled into a battle even when you don’t want to. The items that allows you to avoid battles only lasts a really short time, and since the spaces are so tight, there are oftentimes where you cannot get past them so you end up having to waste your time either waiting for them to move or the item’s effect to run out so you can battle them to get them off the map.
There are a few quality-of-life issues with the game. For the true ending, you need to complete certain quests, but these are all on a time limit that you must complete them before each major story event. Furthermore, it can be easy to miss one or two and it doesn’t tell you which ones are needed. Even if you are completing the quests, it requires specific enemies and items but the search and sort functions of the monster database is not robust enough to find them easily. This gameplay loop of doing the multitude of quests, sitting through an abundance of cutscenes and running through the same areas again and again trying to find that one monster can get tiresome by the midway point.
There are several difficulty spikes. These could be the enemies in the environments, or more likely, the bosses. Enemies have the ability to “order break”, which ignores the turn order and gives themselves a few turns, this is only available for them and not your own characters. It is usually triggered by defeating other enemies or getting the boss down to a certain amount of health and it is frankly very cheap and unfair. It is literally giving the enemy an ability to cheat, making any time you lose something that you feel was completely luck based.
There is a fairly robust studio where you can design your own dance routines for the characters. You select the song and then pick specific dance moves, as well as scheduling when the characters move during the song. Unfortunately, this is a niche appeal and isn’t required for the story (apart from the initial introduction), so can feel superficial and is easily ignored.
As mentioned, the story is lighthearted but only at the beginning. Taking place in a world with the Blare, that generates monsters known as MAD, only Verse Maidens have the power to eradicate them. As a result, a lot of areas outside the town are dangerous, and to make it worse, there are usually only one or two Verse Maidens at a time. It’s a bleak time, but with Otoha becoming a Verse Maiden, things seem to change for the better. It’s a roundabout story since it mainly involves the party traveling around and defeating MAD, getting into typical anime shenanigans and slowly finding out the truth about the Blare.
The ending felt a bit rushed, especially with the twist in the last few chapters. Once that was easily resolved (idealistically as typical of the genre), it was final boss time. You could rush through the final dungeon but it also means you might get surprised at how strong the bosses got. That is the biggest problem of the game, there are difficulty spikes, and it just keeps spiking and spiking. Unless you’re playing on the easiest difficulty, you’ll need to grind and upgrade your equipment. The story itself, basically of how Takt and the Verse Maidens known as Omega Quintet, eventually defeat all the Blare. It felt handwaved, as if the writers gave up and just said happily ever after without actually making it work.
If you don’t spend a lot of time grinding, then the game is thankfully not too long by JRPG standards. It takes around 30 hours to get through the story, that includes doing the quests required for the true ending, as well as exploring all the main story maps. Then there is a heap of postgame. Unfortunately, some of the postgame content is locked behind the hardest difficulty, and since you cannot change difficult after you have selected it upon starting a new game, you’ll need to play through it all again if you want that extra content. The postgame content is extremely grindy though, so it’s not much of a reward but can be addictive with its carrot and stick approach.
Overall, Omega Quintet is a surprisingly solid JRPG. It has a lot of flaws, from the overabundance of tutorials which ironically are very poor at explaining the game mechanics, to the excessive grinding required to overcome difficulty spikes. It has some addictive parts such as the big open dungeons that slowly unlock as you gain more abilities (Metroidvania style) and the combat system which has some deep mechanics. It can feel cheap though and repetitive, and the story, which is filled with anime cliches, isn’t told in the best way. Yet it is still an enjoyable experience and something about it keeps you coming back.
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