Opening sequence and Intro Sequence: WTF? What a waste of space!!! The FMV hardly shows anything worth the time... i mean, it has credits and everything but I would have opted for a standard Credits screen rather than wasting 5-10 minutes of boring FMV for it. Not only that but the quality is pretty bad... it's not only pixellated(it's not even full-screen either), but it's horribly jumpy/choppy.

With that aside, let's go on to the game.

*sigh* More waste of FMV... title screens for the episodes... only about 4-5 seconds, but still.. It makes me wonder as the quality of the ending.

1st Episode is quite weird. It's pretty much... no, it IS all talking. One very nice feature is the use of voice. Every word in the game is spoken. The only exception is 1)in battles where there's some dialog going on, and 2)with ordinary town folk. But everywhere else, there's a ton of spoken dialog. Anyway, it starts off with you picking one of the 5 girls. Of course I picked Domina, voiced by Hidaka Noriko(Tendo Akane[Ranma], Fiina[Grandia]). Anyway, it's pretty much a bunch of dialog. One thing I liked is the on-screen animation. There's a part where you're in bed and in this case, Domina is feeding you. You see her spoon-feed you. You turn away as if to refuse. She goes, "Come on, you've gotta eat." So she tries again. You then turn toward her and open your mouth and eat it.

Anyway, there comes to a point where you're on your own. This was a bit disappointing to me cuz I was expecting an RPG-like game. You can't move your character around(ie walk from place to place) like an RPG. Instead, you get a fixed 3/4 view of your house/town and move the cursor around. When the cursor highlights something you can interact with, you can go ahead and press the "C" button to see what's up. In the house, there are several mini games, books to read(i guess to better understand B/M's story), stuff like that. Then you can go to town. Just move the cursor over the townpeople to talk. So while I'm not against this type of point and click interaction, it caught me off guard because I didn't expect it. It totally looked like I could move my character around like an RPG. One thing of note is that if you don't want to scroll to highlight the possible things to interact with, you can push "L" or "R" to scroll through all of the things.

When you return from town stuff happens. 2nd episode starts.(another waste of FMV title screen..) 40-50 minutes into the game(dang Raymond, you said you skimmed the text to play the battles? 45 mins is a long time :P ), you fight your first battle. As Raymond said, it's an isometric perspective. It "looks" like a Kartia type game. I say "looks" because I have never played Kartia nor even seen Kartia other than pics. Basically, you have a party. Opening part you kinda position all your people the way you want them to. Then battle begins. It's turn based. I think you always get first initiative. All your members move, then the enemy.

It's kinda Sakura Taisen style where you have two moves. Move, attack. Move, cast magic. Unlike Shining Force series, you don't have to move first. If you're next to an enemy to begin with, you can hit the enemy, then move away. If you use items, it doesn't waste one of your moves. You can also equip stuff during battle. This is kinda important as when you kill certain enemies, they drop weapons/armor on the spot, so you can immediately take advantage of it.

Anyway, it's standard Strategy/Sim battles. Move along a grid that pops up. Kill enemy. One thing of note is the blood points. When you kill an enemy, their corpse just lays there. Later on in ep 2 when you get a necromancer, you can cast a zombie spell on that corpse and the thing will become part of your party. Otherwise, the corpse lays there. If there is a corpose in the way, it may restrict your movement. But, you can(and I think you have to...) kill the dead corpse... Why? Not only will this allow you more freedom in moving, but it gives you blood points. Blood points are pretty much like magic points. I don't believe you have any bp to start with, but when you acquire them, you must distribute them among your party members any way you choose. This is important because you only have a limited supply of bp, so you can't just keep on casting and casting spells each battle.

What else... hmm.. when you complete a battle, you are scored. I don't know what the criteria is... my first battle i got a "B" rating. my 2nd battle, received a "C". Here you also acquire your exp points, blood points, gold, and stuff like that. After this, you can choose to distribute the exp points to whoever you want. So if you want one huge powerful guy in your party, you can have one. Or you can spread them out among your members, up to you. You also have control as to which stats to raise(a la Guardian Heroes) so B/M really allows you to do what you want with your characters.

The battles are quite difficult. You get knocked around pretty hard sometimes and you only have a limited amount of potions(for healing). Having a party member die doesn't seem to have any huge consequences other than losing another person to kill the enemy with. Though I'm sure your losses are taken into account in the rating of your battles.

Kinda "sneek-peaked" into episode 3. You start off in a town. Again, just talk to people. There's also a store you can go to to buy weapons and armor.

Anyway, onto the categories:

Graphics: They're good, I guess. Not really THAT special, but they're not ugly. Nice sprite drawn graphics and you can actually see all the details with the on-screen animation. The FMV on the other hand... I can honestly say that this is one case where FMV shouldn't have been used at all.

Sound: Hidaka Noriko? a 10 out of 10!!! No, i'm kidding. The sound is pretty good. I'm pretty amazed they had space enough to fit all the spoken dialog as well as the crappy FMV. I don't recall the thumps and slashes being that special but I don't think they were bad either.

Music: I... don't like the music at all. I really can't describe the style of music used in B/M. It's just downright... weird. The first battle, for instance, has this Rap-like music. And it's underground-rap-like to boot. You hear record-mixing and stuff like that. I just think it's totally weird to have in a strategy-rpg. The other types of music aren't the same type, but equally out of place...

Gameplay: After I got used to the idea of point and click instead of moving my character around, I don't really have much of a complaint. I still miss not being able to walk around, but i guess it's not that big of a deal. Plus battles are challenging and fun. Glancing at my Saturn Fan, there's a ton of battle features I'm overlooking...

Overall: I think it's a decent game. I haven't played enough of it to praise it like crazy but it's enjoyable. One thing of note is that the 5 girls probably give 5 different endings to the game. Not only that but when you first start the game under "new game", you have a choice- normal or advanced. So maybe this will give the game 10 different experiences? I'm not sure as to the difference. My kanji skills aren't so good so the instruction booklet isn't very useful to me...
- MoonPrince