Your uncle Keiji Inafune, the creator of Mega Man, has opened a new amusement park and you go to check it out. But lo and behold some giant ugly pig with a grudge has blown up a part of the park and has taken people hostage! It is up to you and six random men to save everyone in only seven days. Welcome to Sweet Fuse: At Your Side.
I basically gave you all the cliff notes version of the story in my witty opening. You have seven days, or stages as the game calls them, to save everyone. You “play” through seven sections of the park to beat the villain’s game of the day. There are six routes to do in the game plus a seventh with a mysterious someone you meet on your second run-through of the game. Stages 1-3 are the same, give or take which route you are going on, and Stage 4 and onward is where the routes start to differ. During my time with the game, I started getting bored during the end of my third route. If you do Shidou’s route as your first route (which I recommended doing), you will understand how the game’s story is supposed to go and everyone’s role in why they were picked to play the villain’s games. Because you know all this information the first time, the routes get repetitive. It gets to the point that you just get so bored with the story because there really isn’t any variety to be had.
The gameplay of Sweet Fuse is your standard visual novel. You are given choices in order to progress the story and develop your relationship with the man of your choice. The things that make this game its own are the Explosive Insight and whether or not to get mad at someone and yell at him. Explosive Insight is this VN’s game mechanic of analyzing the situation that the characters are in. The protagonist gives a small summary of what is going on and you can choose up to three responses but only one is the right answer. What is the point of being allowed to pick three then? Just pick one…
The other mechanic… Is it a mechanic? Not really. The “get mad” dialogue choice is what makes Sweet Fuse… Well Sweet Fuse. This option is like any other dialogue option but it is funny to see the men in the game freak out when the protagonist calls them out on whatever stupid or dumb thing they are doing. But there are times when getting mad ends up hurting the relationship, not helping it.
And because this is a visual novel, there are misspellings and grammatical errors all around. They weren’t too bad but I did snapped a few pictures with my phone. And because this is a PSP game, there wasn’t and won’t be any fixes.
I can’t say that I can really recommend Sweet Fuse: At Your Side. It was a good game in the beginning but after a while, the repetitiveness just eats at you. There are other visual novels out there that offer more substance than this one.
Here is a link to all the pictures of errors I took while playing: https://imgur.com/a/QVyMTY7
Could it kill any company that is working on the translating aspect of visual novels to hire a proofreader? Hire me please as a freelancer. I have a BA in English and I worked as a writing tutor while in university. I will work for a free copy of the game and depending on the length, I asked to be paid for $5-10 per page. Aksys and Idea Factory, I’m looking at you guys.
