Y'know for a shitpost-y platformer based off of a romance/drama visual novel this kicks ass. The plot is dumb as hell and just an excuse to fight the heroines as boss fights, but also those boss fights weirdly go kinda crazy. I did them hitless on hard for the meme but actually ended up enjoying it a ton lmao. Like yeah they just repeat the same 3-4 attacks infinitely but also if you don't know what exactly to do they'll kick your ass immediately (on hard at least). I just really like da Ef characters and the boss fights r good representations of them :3, dey even got da Chihiro beam... The final boss is also cool as fuck and has a badass vocal track to back that up like what more do u need in this world. More devs should make low budget games based off of anime or visual novels, they're awesome.

You may see the 1/10 review and go "Damn this guy really hated this game" But let me assure this 1/10 represents the immeasurable amount of respect I have towards this beautiful piece of ancient kusoge.

I think the best way to describe Ancient Roman is it's a game that does everything wrong. Because of this it is an absolute blast due to the sheer levels of incompetence at play here. As someone who loves playing shit games this is the cream of the crop, a must play experience for kusoge enjoyers everywhere.

Now lemme go over some of the things that make this game the beautiful piece of kusoge that it is. The most obvious and probably most iconic thing about this game is the music. It sucks, and is easily the worst ost I've ever heard in a game which is further amplified by how long you'll have to endure some of these tracks. There are points, especially early on, where you will listen to the same song for at least an hour at a time, no breaks, only music that'll give you a headache after a few minutes. The ost also somehow progressively gets worse as the game goes on, it's crazy just how fast each terrible track gets topped. I also hold the firm belief that you have not truly played Ancient Roman until you've listened to a good bit of the Sanatori Village remixes on youtube (just copy paste サナトリ村 into the bar and you'll see) there's a staggering amount of these and the grand majority of them go hard. I'd also like to shoutout the leitmotif, it's present in most of the tracks and always funny when you notice it. (Also if anyone knows where to find the full ost please let me know I desperately need it)

The story is also pretty funny, there's a LOT of dialogue that REALLY tries to give these characters some honest to god characterization and build upon the overall cast dynamic, but if I'm being honest a lot of it comes off as yapping and youtube-naruto-fanfiction esque vague ik but here's an example they're pretty similar imo. The story itself is largely uninteresting and mostly just consists of guy telling you to go to x location and getting x item or powerup. My favorite part of the story was having to break a dam that would flood an "abandoned" village, but mc was like "ooo I got a bad feeling about this" so you go to said village to check if it's actually abandoned and find out that the villain group put some people there or smthn i fucking guess (this is near the end of the game and also the first time you see the villain group). Now instead of evacuating them the party decides to uh instead go get fruit that lets them breathe underwater i fucking guess. Then you give them the fruit and happily break the dam, flooding the village I fucking guess sure man. I'd also like to give a shoutout to the "People Becoming Monsters Disease", every time they mentioned it I lost my shit, it's also incredibly important to the plot. I'd like to give another shoutout to the FMVs which you're rewarded with after most boss fights, they look and sound terrible and that's awesome. My favorite one is when you put the hell gate key parts together and then watch them turn into a mermaid that does a backflip, bad ass stuff.

I guess I'll also talk about the combat, which is fucking awesome. The attack noise is probably the worst sound effect ever added to a game, you will hear it all the time and it is ALWAYS funny and REALLY loud. It's also comedically slow paced and magic animations especially will last for a hot second. The balancing is also hilarious as magic can one-shot most bosses in the game up until the final few bosses. But this is all a preamble, a setup for the greatest, most broken weapon that I've seen thus far in an RPG. The Sleep Axe. This baby puts ANY enemy to sleep for 3 turns. You cannot dodge this, you cannot resist this, any attacks afterward will not wake you up, there is no counterplay, you will sleep. Any enemy hit by The Glorious Sleep Axe is basically taken out of the combat for 3 turns, there can only be 3 enemies in a given combat, you do the math. Even the penultimate boss, a complete bullshit encounter by design, consisting of 3 enemies with a fuck ton of HP who are capable of one-shotting you with ease, is trivialized by The Unstoppable Sleep Axe. This encounter took out my other 2 units immediately leaving me with only Burke and his Beautiful Sleep Axe. This thing does dicks for damage so I sat there for a good 20 minutes rotating between every boss enemy in that encounter, slapping them with this Wonderous Sleep Axe as they could only sleep in horror until their HP hit 0. Thank you Sleep Axe.

TLDR you should play this it's really funny

This shmup asks the very important question of "what if we made enemy bullets basically invisible and also made them fast as fuck." Alongside this enemies will sometimes decide to instantly fly onto the screen and crash into you with no real way to react, it's kinda funny. It also has 7 stages with stage 7 having multiple bosses after a pretty lengthy stage segment.

Yet somehow, despite ALL of the bullshit, this game is still quite easy??? Let me explain, this game feels like you're playing a tug of war due to the upgrade system. It's a VERY unique system and honestly kinda neat (imagine Touhou 17's animal powerup system except those powerups are permanent). The problem with this system is that when you're weak, you're weak as fuck and when you're strong the game can't really fight back. Enemies will die before they can even attack most of the time because your bullets fill the screen and do ridiculous damage, it's really silly. You also lose your powerups when you get hit. Basically it's a power struggle between the game and the player seeing who can out-bullshit the other, which is really funny but doesn't make for a very entertaining game. You also have to dodge powerups when you have a da epic setup which is really annoying.

The bosses are also kinda trivial which is really funny. For example most of the first stage 7 boss' attacks can be dodged by either standing still or moving to the right or left with a LOT of room for error. If you have a da upgrades you can also easily destroy the only challenging phase of the fight due it just being a lot of different parts (they get destroyed almost instantly). I would comment on the actual final boss but I kinda cheesed most of it with the black hole thing that eats bullets (you can stand inside of it and it lasts a really long time), the parts I actually had to dodge still weren't bad tho so it's safe to assume it wasn't much harder.

Tldr funny bad game that's either bullshit or a steamroll