Review of Sumaga
| Subject | Sumaga |
| By | Helpfulness: 6 Vote: 6shiny on 2021-06-20 |
| Review | Sumaga's been on my mind recently, so here's a 10-year late review. I really, really wanted to like Sumaga. I was a fan of Nitro+ at the time and had a blast reading Gekkou no Carnevale by the same writer, so when I finished this game and went "...that's it?", I was perplexed rather than disappointed. Something just didn't click. I later hunted down the fanbook to see if the staff interview could enlighten me to the hidden depths of the scenario, but no dice. I saw everything there was to see in regards to this game and wasn't engaged. In the end, I mostly ascribe my disappointment to the fact that Sumaga is, at it's core, a character-oriented game, not a story-oriented one. Your enjoyment of it is 100% dependent on whether you like the heroines, and the story and worldbuilding is secondary. I found the girls mostly one-dimensional and uninteresting, so no wonder I spent the better part of the game watching them thinking "when does the fun stuff start?" when that was the intended fun stuff. Sidenote, the humor in this game is largely of the meta and referential variety, so your familiarity of classic mecha anime and the city of Sendai may or may not influence how funny you find the gags. I wasn't knowledgeable of either at the time, so a lot of that flew over my head. Lastly, the core of the plot is a sort-of deconstruction of the sekai-kei genre, which already felt kind of dated at the beginning of the 2010's. I feel like a lot of the concepts that made Sumaga novel and interesting at the time kind of became commonplace since its release, which further dimnishes its appeal. The emotional impact and surprise of the meta gimmicks isn't as effective when you've already experienced the same story device in other anime, manga etc already. Can't say a bad thing about the art or music tho, those were on point. (One last gripe: my girl Garnet got done dirty by the scenario and deserved to be in a game that treated her nicer.) |
| 6 points |