Excessively cute, quirky, and story rich is what best describes Torangi! a truly magical girl game about Beomi and Saya whom they have to transform into their magical girl counterpart during their vacation to save a city from a Kaiju attack. Its a well written visual novel with a few mini game in between sessions.
Magical Girl Concept:
The game features 3 magical girls namely, Torangi, Lyna, and Yungi where their designs represent their animal counterpart consisting of, a cat, a lion, and a dragon respectively. They have the ability to transform between their non-magical and magical forms, wears cute frilly dresses and magical accessories, and even have their own magical familiars. In short the character designs are basically overflowing with magical girl traits and tropes.
Mechanics:
The game implements some simple visual novel mechanics which consist of a readout dialog box and character sprite changes. Besides that the game has two types of mini game with the first part involves moving through a grid playing field and laying traps or saving civilians from danger while avoiding being touched by the enemy that moves linearly from one point to another. The second part is a bullet color matching mini game where the player character either needs to switch between the matching color of the incoming bullet or dodge by moving into a space that has the matching bullet color. The first mini game is pretty straight forward where the player has to move into a the adjacent grid not blocked by a building and dodge enemies patrolling along a straight line. The mini game has two sub parts, where in the early game the payer has to make their way around the play area to lay a limited number of traps in enemy path while in a later stage players are tasked into saving civilians, in which timing the character's movement takes precedence. In the second mini game, the player has to match the color of the current character selected with the incoming bullets (called spikes), the character consist of 3 colors, blue, yellow, and red which corresponds to the color of the bullets. One issue with the design is that the bullets spawn from a center and spreads out radially, making it difficult to determine which color bullet would take priority in the color matching mechanic. However this can be remedied by moving the character somewhere close to the center and match the color to one bullet that is sure to occupied the grid space. There should be some design consideration where instead of a radially spreading shot, it could have been design fall vertically down the screen so the player could either dodge or change characters with two gameplay styles. Anyway, as for the button control for the mini game, they consist of the arrow keys for moving the player character while the Space or Enter key act as either action for laying a trap or changing characters.
Visual:
The character art style and quality is really apparent with lot of effort put into its design. The cute mini game sprites and many prompts make the game visually appealing with some amount of animation. I would also want to note that the UI and CG art is quite polished. Basically the art style the developer went for is oriented towards the cute, pastel colored, and slice of life outlook which is a reasonable choice considering it source material is from a webtoon.
UI:
The main menu or title screen is really well made with lots of animated sprites with easy access to the main game and the credits screen. The mini game UI layout is clean and relevant information is displayed clearly. There doesn't appear to be a settings button so there is no way to adjust game settings anywhere in the game. There is also no in-game menu during game play.
Audio:
The music in the game is really well made and fits the genre really well with several scenes and events having their own music track. Every part of the game has a track of its own, from main menu to the visual novel segments, and the mini game featuring several different tracks as well. The game made use of some sound effects as well.
Theme:
The magical girl theme is obviously present in the game with the characters designs and the way the story is written. The developer picked three themes which are pretty much spot on with it being Nuclear Energy, Cat, and Duality. (Spoiler Alert! Start) Its clearly shown at the start of the story that energy is involved in producing the Kaiju that is rampaging the city at the later time but its not known whether the energy is magical or nuclear, however it still fits the theme directly with the use of energy (Spoiler Alert! End). It is quite obvious that the Cat and Duality theme represents their cat forms and duality for the transformation ability.
Challenge / Engagement:
The mini game is somewhat challenging especially for the last one since the design itself makes it difficult while the need to have good reaction time and accuracy add a little challenge. The story is engaging with its naturally fun and quirky dialog between Beomi and Saya.
Originality / Creativity:
Since the character is based off an existing source material, the originality and creativity shines from the new story line written for the game. The story is refreshing and has its own spin on the adventurers the three character have undergone.
Story (Spoiler Alert Section):
The story is really well written with no issues while a lot of thought and effort can be seen in the refreshing content it offers. I really like the fun and naturally written dialogs between Beomi/Torangi, Saya/Lyna and Yungi, the way they interact with each other while trying to figure a way to stop Spikey from destroying the city. Basically the story is about the two girls in their non-magical form are at the beach soon discovers sea pineapples invading the beach front. The sea pineapple cause a scene and soon manage to made its way to the city causing havoc and destruction. To put a stop to it, the two girls transform into their magical forms and later met another magical girl by the name of Yungi (a play on words with Torangi). Then with the three magical girls, they put an end to Spikey rampage and sent it to another world. The end is really nice with a level of light heartedness to it and I really that aspect of the magical girl genre.
Overall:
There is a lots of potential in developing more of the story aspect of the game while having mini games in between VN segments is good as it helps break the VN flow while acting as an intermission between lines of dialog. The developers do have a good plan in place when creating this game during the jam as it does not exceed the level of scope that they can handle. The best direction they should go towards is in developing small to medium series of VN based off the webtoon since the story and character art is well established.