Welcome to Teatime Doujin, the feature on this blog where we take a quick look at Doujin Games! Today, we'll be snacking on:
Title: Grief Syndrome / Based on: Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Developer: Tasogare Frontier / Download Link
Review
Grief Syndrome is a doujin game by Twilight Frontier (黄昏フロンティア, Tasogare Frontier) or Tasofro for short, based on anime series Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Tasofro are pretty well known as far as doujin circles go, especially for making high-quality games.
Grief Syndrome was released quite a while ago, but I could never get it to work. Mind you, I was using Windows 7 back then. But seeing it surface again, I decided to give it another go.
The game is pretty much completely in English (apart from the runic witch language). All five magical girls, Homura Akemi, Kyouko Sakura, Madoka Kanane, Mami Tomoe, and Sayaka Miki are playable characters.
Each girl's attacks are exact to the anime. The game is a shooting side-scroller, rather reminscent of Codename Sailor V. They all have seven attacks, a quick attack, standing strong, left/right strong, down strong, up strong, strong mid-air, and Special.
There is basically a time limit on each level, counting down to the soul gem becoming sullied. The more magic, special attacks and healing you use, the faster the gem dirties. If you die when it's black or the counter hits 0, that character becomes a witch an can no longer be selected. There are different endings depending on which characters survive.
Mami is supposedly one of the hardest characters to use, but I found her by far the easiest, while I found Homura the most difficult. Madoka is a strong all-rounder, Sayaka is fast and mobile but lacks a strong Special attack like Tiro Finale or Madoka's arrow rain, Kyoko is strong with great AoE but her movement is limited, and Homura's time stop ability and rocket launcher is really useful, but her soul gem turns black way too easily.
Overall Grief Syndrome is a great game by a very solid developer, and the accuracy of the attacks ot the anime is something I love. The game can be downloaded at the Madoka Magica wiki, so I highly recommend playing it, and of course buying it from Twilight Frontier if possible.
