In Ultragirl Alters you are the new manager for Alters, an Idol group produced by one of Japan’s largest companies. It’s your first day on the job. You live in a store room, and it’s up to you to lead your team to the top! Can you handle balancing the interpersonal relationships of your stars? Can you raise their popularity, and can you handle the translation?
What’s Ultragirl Alters all about then?
Ultragirl Alters styles itself as a Strategy RPG where each night you battle monsters in VR while putting on an idol show. The twist? Your team is based on Tokusatsu, transforming heroes like Kamen Rider and Super Sentai (which you may know as Power Rangers). Between these livestreams, you will talk with your team to progress the story, boost their morale, and explore a little to understand more of the side stories told alongside. It’s certainly an interesting premise, and the theory behind it is pretty sound, but it does fumble in its execution.
Technically, the Ultragirl Alters is pretty sound. I only had one instance of a game crash and two in-game bugs. Other than that, stable frame rates and performance throughout. The main issue comes with the translations. While FutureInvention appears to be a Japanese company, the game itself is loaded in Chinese. I was able to eventually work my way through the settings menus, which are fortunately quite intuitive and find the language settings.
The script of the game itself seems like it has been AI-translated. Egregious grammatical errors and characters having up to three different names between sentences. What little of the story that drew me in these errors immediately dispelled, and it only got worse as I played.
Chess or checkers?
And speaking of playing, it’s an incredibly linear experience. For a game like this, you may expect to balance your time training your team or choosing who to spend time with, but instead, you’re constantly railroaded through all the characters’ personal stories. It’s an incredibly linear experience with only sparse times through the in-game week to do anything of your own choice and explore.
The story is very by the numbers, too, which is fine, but when it tries to cover some very serious and triggering topics, the juxtaposition of the cutesy chibi art style with the dialogue just feels wrong rather than disturbing or interesting. It’s pretty much half-visual novel and half strategy game. We’ve seen before that this can work incredibly well, a recent example being The Hundred Line: Last Defence Academy, but this just feels so confused by all the things it’s trying to be that it all comes across as half-baked.
The strategy itself isn’t really a strategy at all. It’s so basic and boring that I found myself zoning out and treating it as a second-screen game most of the time, and accidentally winning with an S-rank. You gain experience after every fight that you can allocate to team members to level up and gain skill points, which you can spend to upgrade their abilities. This is the most engaging part of the game, and it takes about 30 seconds.
What else is there to say?
There’s not a whole lot more I can say, really. The entire experience left me feeling so cold. There’s nothing outright awful about the game aside from the awful translation, but there’s nothing good either. It feels like the ambitious first project of a new studio with too many ideas and no clear supervision. Leading to a final product that’s so confused and underwhelming it’s hard to say anything about. This game would definitely have benefited from a producer to properly to tighten the focus. There’s definitely a foundation here for something interesting. But it needs a lot more time to bake before it can see results.
Developer: FutureInvention
Publisher: FutureInvention
Platform: PC (Steam, itch)
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