Too Long; Didn't Play: 100% Orange Juice

Sponsored By: Rybowl

Squeeze time: 0.6 hours

Pithy Review

Ladies and gentlemen, I have found my limit for Weird Japanese Stuff.

Juicy Review

I'd like to begin this review with a quote from Gomez Addams:

"I have seen evil! I have seen horror! I have seen the unholy maggots that feast in the dark recesses of the human soul! I have seen all this, but until today I have never, 100% Orange Juice, seen you!"

100% Orange Juice is the most impenetrable, bizarre thing I have played. And I played Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae, a game with no instructions, menu design from 1993, and a story involving demon-hunting Japanese schoolgirls fighting robots that are wearing business suits.

It's fun. You should try it.

100% Orange Juice is, from what I can tell, an RPG, collectible-card, board game that's a cross between Mario Party, Hearthstone and Final Fantasy.

I have absolutely nothing to add to that last sentence. Please save your questions for the end of the review.

When you first boot up 100% Orange Juice, you get a menu right out of an iPad, where you can pick whether you want the campaign or "free play." I chose campaign, because the campaign is where I always go first and it was on top. From there, you pick a superdeformed character, which include some girls with dog ears and one guy in a black shirt.

Each character has a description about their stats and a recommendation for whether you should use them based on your experience with the game. I chose one of the dog-eared girls – whom I wish was named Paige just for the dad-joke potential – because it said she was the easiest character for beginners.

Next I chose my difficulty. Not knowing what I was getting into, I chose the easiest setting.

Finally, the game presented me with a dozen cards with various stats, and a number of slots to put them in. I honestly don't remember which ones I picked, but I do remember they were the wrong ones, because I proceeded to play for half an hour with a big red "X" over one of them, indicating that it couldn't be used.

Before I got to play, the game made me watch a really long cutscene in which a little girl with dog ears escapes her caretaker and steals my character's pudding cups. Fueled by sugar and petty larceny, she bolts, and her caretaker implores me to help catch her.

From there, the game is an endless loop of clicking to roll dice, moving however many spaces the dice tell me to move, and suffering whatever consequences result from the space I landed on. Sometimes I land on a yellow space, which lets me roll the dice and awards me stars based loosely on the number that comes up. Sometimes I land on a purple space, which transports me to another purple space at random. Sometimes I land on a red space, which causes me to lose the card that I couldn't play anywhere.

Most of the time, however, I'm just watching the other AI players play out their turns. Because that's the most fun thing about board games, am I right?

The only thing in the game that's not completely random is the combat, which happens whenever I land on another character and say I want to fight them. Combat is turn-based, and the outcome is determined by dice rolls combined with three stats (attack, evade and block). So, like I said: not completely random. As the aggressor, I roll the dice and hope the game decides to deal damage to my opponent. Then I get to decide whether I want to dodge the retaliatory strike or block it, though I don't know why I'd ever choose to block an attack, since it doesn't actually prevent damage. After my opponent rolls to attack me, if my evade stat plus my dice roll is higher than her attack stat plus her dice roll, I dodge. Otherwise I take damage and am rendered unconscious until I roll a number higher than the number the computer chooses to set as my recovery threshold.

The only combat I've ever actually won was against the little girl who stole my pudding. I beat her unconscious, and I didn't feel great about it – especially since it didn't even win me the game. Victory is based on meeting goals, which are only assigned when you land on one of two spaces on the board. The goals are things like "collect 70 stars" or "defeat five enemies in combat." So far I've played the game twice, and both times I've managed to clear my first goal just after my opponents completed their second.

Considering I picked the character that the game called the beginner character, and chose the difficulty that the game said was the beginner difficulty, I was rather annoyed.

Will I keep trying to squeeze any fun out of this?

It’s rare that I encounter a game that I want to stop playing, but I think I’ve had my experience with 100% Orange Juice. I don’t think it’s just because I can’t seem to beat the first level. Even if I could, the game amounts to clicking a few times and then waiting a few minutes for the results of that clicking to play out. There just isn’t a lot of game there, and the inclusion of chibi dog-eared girls isn’t enough to make that interesting, even for me.

Is it the Bloodborne of vitamin-rich breakfast drinks?

I really want to say “yes” and leave it at that, but it really doesn’t compare to Bloodborne. For all of my complaints about Bloodborne, there was a lot of game there. There were mechanics to learn and controls to master. 100% Orange Juice has all of the difficult, frustrating parts of Bloodborne but none of the parts that make Bloodborne compelling.

I don’t mind a game based on dice rolls, but this one doesn’t even try to make the dice rolls interesting. You watch the dice, then you watch some cheap animations that sort of represent what happened in a way that’s not abstract enough to justify how spartan it is.

Maybe this game would be interesting to play with friends, but since it’s basically Sorry! with some light turn-based combat, I can name a half-dozen board games I’d rather play with people.

Comments

It's sort of amazing how varied games can be.

I think you should've concentrated more on the juice pun potential of this game, DT. You left a lot of pulpy material on the table.

danopian wrote:

I think you should've concentrated more on the juice pun potential of this game, DT. You left a lot of pulpy material on the table.

I may have lost my zest for puns on this one, but only because the game lacks appeal.

Orange-a glad you didn't have to keep playing?

I thought about joining the discussion, but I think I'd better citrus one out.

If you want a good board game meets rpg try Dokapon for the wii. The friendship breaking game. Great fun at a party.