Soukoku no Arterial: It’s smt but with cards

So I technically didn’t complete Soukoko no Arterial since the dragon quest spoof section just crashes on me. Either it’s my pc though it’s most likely that I installed it incorrectly. Honestly I was kind of glad that happened since I was tired of playing this vn and I’ll get to why later. I did finish the main stuff and it took awhile considering you have to play the whole damn thing for every character.
It’s edited mtl, generally something you wouldn’t want but also you’re either going to make time to learn the language or never getting the chance to play it when it comes to Eushully. I’d say the same for softhousechara but one did come out by Shiravune but I don’t know if it sold well.

Premise:

The plot is basically og smt-lite, just not that interesting overall.
Your guy, Shuuya, is in a random town that’s relatively run by MHI. MHI has the leading advances in most fields though mainly medical, base materials and weaponry. And they used most of their new advancements towards their new plane that singlehandedly compete with another country’s army, it’s super op and thus it’s a plot device. Shuuya goes to one of the MHI schools and wants to be a doctor since he and his sister were saved by their medical breakthroughs. You meet most of the cast but more importantly his two best friends Kaito and Akari. Hijinks happen, Shuuya and posse get warped to a distorted world and what you’re basically going to see for the majority of the game. Shuuya finds his friends, find a cube. The cube is dumb and a temporary mcguffin. Finds a boss and gets his ass handed to him and learns he has the power of blood manipulation. They win and they want to leave since it’s pretty dangerous over there, gets a way out but regularly come back until more of the town gets warped and you have to find a new exit.
Soon enough they see angels and demons and by chapter 3, you choose what side to be on: angel, devil or human. Unlike other games where you actually take a mentality of your chosen faction, you just side with them and try to find a way to get back to your normal world.
The angel route is probably the easiest but if you know what you’re doing then the human route is probably easier since you can cheese the final boss. The devil route didn’t feel all that hard outside of a specific custom deck but this could also be because I already had functional decks at this point.

Battle System

It does have a more unique battle system for Eushully where it’s no longer an srpg, but a card game. It’s kind of neat but also really boring for a long time. For the most part of your first playthrough, you’ll maybe have one grade 4 card, and the rest are grade 1&2 and a few 3s. The problem is most of the grade 1 and 2 cards either have no ability/passive, or a shit ability. Also the grade 1 and 2 cards will generally get oneshot. There’s outliers and you’ll use some of them but most of those are also based events with your party. There are specific builds you can make but that’s also something you only do in your 2nd or 3rd playthrough because you need really specific cards and I’ll get to that shortly.
You have a leader card, and for the most part that’s going to be Shuuya outside of a few events in every route and also the rest get unlocked after you beat the postgame scenario that eushully either does a lot or always does. The exchange is that they have unique effects but lower hp and lower control unless they get an extra control from capping their level. And that control is more useful than anything they can give since control is needed to summon higher grade cards. Grade 1&2 give 1 control each. You generally want to do a triangle formation for most of the game since it’d give at minimum 3 control to the bottom center card. Then you move shit around so bottom center gets 6 control and you have most of the cards available. There’s grade 7 and 8 but it’s not really feasible until ng+. Technically, there’s a way but I’ll mention it after I go through that crap.
So now that cost and control are over, the last piece is your FA. It’s your finisher move and overall you can use it twice per boss fight since the charge rate is kind of long. Unless you use an attrition build, then you can use it for more. They all have different abilities: some do decent unit damage, some do lower aoe damage, some heal. There’s a lot of niche ones that can be useful for a fight or two, and some I see no purpose for. They also use the exp gauge and a lot of them are kind of shit until levelled highly. Honestly you can ignore the FA most of the time outside of specific ng+ fights and maybe the last chapter of each route. It’s dependent on who you’re partnered with in the menu, it’s under the spoiler, you can click on it.

FA info

Generally speaking you’d always want Madoka on for the majority of your fights. Not because her particular FA is great, which it kind of is since it can give you a few more turns before you die. And eventually it’ll cap out to healing 100 hp though it’s rarely needed. But because she increases the exp gained per fight so she’s responsible for levelling up the other FAs.
Narumi does aoe damage, it’s rather low and you most likely have a strong deck once it’s strong enough to wipe the enemy field. At most it’s to kill the grade 1&2 in the back to lower the amount of control they have.
Kaito lowers the enemy FA gauge but also has the same issue where it’d only be decent in a few fights and it’d only delay it slightly until you’re so high levelled that your deck won’t need it.
Unless it’s just translated badly, Akari’s FA is total garbage and there’s a better version of it on one of the demons you can get.
Shuuya caps out at 30 damage and isn’t worth it.
Mirai has uses for specific fights but it’s not like those cards would be free anyway. It basically copies the last X units you destroyed on the enemy side. So you can summon some crazy shit on very specific fights.
Arisa’s FA sounds whatever but it’s actually one of the more op ones. Even at level 1, just having a turn where you can use three grade 1 cards will grant you a 6 grade control spot instead of the 3. It’s the only time it’s possible to get your 8 grade outside of consumables or specific accessories which I think you can only get in the ng+ scenario. And it doesn’t end on being useful. By the end, I believe you get 9 turns of control+1. Technically you can make a build of around 6 cards or so. Two grade 3 cards, have a specific card that fully heals your team ready, get your couple of 6 and 7 grade card and your one 8 card
Shanelle’s FA is kind of shit. It heals your normal cards but overall you wouldn’t waste an FA for it. She does have a great passive if you build a deck around the three friends.
Sayane’s whole thing including her FA is about fucking both you and the enemy. You can make some pretty cool builds with it but are risky.
Atori’s FA is used for builds that revolve around discarding cards for buffs and damage. At level 9, you get your whole deck back.
The append 01 characters have pretty good FAs but I never used them, one of them is especially broken because it heals, the FA charge rate is tripled and also makes the opponent discard some cards.

Each has a cost and it’s equivalent to their grade. Going through the plot lets you get new versions of the leader card and you’re never going back to the old versions.
There’s some pretty good cards but most of it is fluff.

Decent cards

So I’m dropping out the devil decks and some of the discarding decks, they weren’t my style.
-The easiest deck is the attrition deck, but you’re either going to need to finish devil route or the dream palace ng+ content. It’s a generic angel deck that can be put a lot of random shit but you need two or three elmir cards. It just returns all discarded cards back into the deck once summoned. Once it dies, another copy will bring that one back, it’s hard to lose. Really that card is meant to be used in conjunction with more solely a rufadiel deck. You discard a card to do direct damage even from the backline. The damage is shit so I’d go against it. You can couple it with some of other cards that discard any card to summon a grade 3 monster. They’re not great but there’s uses for it, especially when your cards on hand are too high grade to be used.
-The easiest card is just about completing Shanelle’s route. You get a card that fully heals anything as long as she’s in the back. It’s the one card that makes a deck full of high grade monsters viable. The grade 8 is basically unstoppable and it removes the need for some other cards where their passive is basically healing 10 hp for themselves or healing based on their damage. There’s also specific cards that reduce an ally’s hp for an attack buff and you can use it as a combo but it might be risky.
-The dream palace route card is decent in the sense that you can keep her in the back and get an extra free 5 damage with no conditions. Generally you’d need the position infront to be empty which also leads the leader card to take more damage than necessary.
-The SR Arisa that has the passive to remove an enemy card back to their hand or deck. Useful for niche fights. I think you can also combo with certain FAs to then remove it, lol.
-Some Madoka cards have a passive to not take indirect damage. Useful for like two unique fights where the boss does like 5 indirect damage a turn to the whole frontline
-Specific Mirai cards that cause blood control, it lowers boss damage by 1. The card can die after its use.
-Sayane’s cards has this whole thing about lowering enemy cost but having certain units ignore damage if cost is down to 0. It’s a ballsy setup
-The bath cards, though especially Atori/Narumi/Mehisha. They’re put in the back and have a control of 2 like normal, basically gives certain card types an hp or attack buff.
-Basic Kaito cards that can equip a type of pistol that instantly kills off grade 3 and under units. Basically you send it as an inverse triangle formation and have your dumb 3 hp units to kill off something that can have 10~12hp. It’s more for the control to summon your grade 3 monsters while also slightly cleaning the enemy deck. A good example of this is you can use that instead of a unit that has that passive built in but has a cost of 3 instead of 1. Especially useful in niche fights where the enemy takes half health and your deck doesn’t have the counter type or sniper to deal full damage.
-Basic bitch MSC Soldier, it’s like the opposite of the small Kaitos. They’re there to die and make it draw a new card. So you used it to get a grade 3 and then have it get removed by blocking damage for the leader.
-There’s a grade 1 card for Narumi where she blocks all damage if their attack power is at an odd value. You can add a Mirai to cause blood control to force an odd. More often than not it’s useful for a turn or two. Technically speaking you can have 3 mirai cards and then 3 of this card and only hit the leader repeatedly but the fight will take awhile.
-Narumi’s route end card is situationally op. You’d need Shanelle’s card and have the leader in the back since her damage to the enemy leader is 25% of your Leader’s current hp, and without using the cheat dungeon, that like 160hp with an item, so something around 40 damage, higher than a grade 8. Though there’s another card of hers that messes this one up, where she doesn’t take damage but the Leader takes 10hp. Thus messing up this card.

The issues that it has

Now that I got those things out of the way, there’s going to be some spoilers here and there but overall should be fine even if you want to play it. The largest issue is that the character routes themselves suck for the most part. And that’s because the 3 paths barely change at all. I think the only time it actually happens is during the human route if you choose Mirai, Shuuya’s sister. Basically the game doesn’t take almost any consideration of your choices. So for example, the first route I did was Arisa, she and Shanelle are Mirai’s friends, they’re generally together. I was trying to hit Madoka’s route but Arisa’s quest line is a collectathon and I didn’t want to bother doing it again. Then one of her scenes sold me and in retrospect, I think it’s probably the best route out of the bunch outside of the ng+ content and possibly Mehisha. Anyways, you’re by the end of the angel route and the groups are doing their pep talks and the one with the sister group is both Arisa and Mirai scheming on how to make Shuuya fall for Shanelle. But why would that happen? This dialogue happens if you pick Shanelle or any other character too. It’d just be a flag check. This is also the case for Akari in the same angel route. And also the case for Madoka where she jokes that she knows Shuuya is fooling around and he gets surprised. And that would’ve been the case in the first route since I was pretty far in Arisa’s route, but not in this playthrough where he did nothing outside of the one time in chapter 1 or 2. The devil route also has that issue just in a different sense. In this path, the harem is a forced default unlike the other two. You can get Akari or Sayane’s ending, but the harem ending plays after that’s done.

So the gist is that if you want to finish every character route and collect their cards, you have to beat the game from the start a total of nine times alongside finishing the ng+ content in one of those runs and getting some missable scenes in the devil route.
And that’s also assuming you didn’t pick Narumi as the first route, I’m not sure if you’d have the cards to win the fight that’s required before her last scene.
Also some characters are locked to specific paths, which isn’t a bad idea but also has a lot of favoritism. There’s no real unique heroine for the human route, the best you get is a different hscene for Narumi because she’s also still available in the angel route. Madoka and Mehisa are locked in Angel, Sayane is locked in devil. It’s mainly in the sense that some routes have more events for certain characters or they arrive earlier. I’ll cover parts of who I’d personally restrict to what route in the spoiler section.

The worst part of it all is that you can’t skip any fight with the custom deck, they should be skippable after you finish that route once. I feel like the angel route had the most shit going on in terms of combat and minigames. Even speeding through all of it will take you like 3 or 4 hours. The third chapter is the worst, there’s a mini game where you have to prevent the devils from going upstairs. And there’s 3 sets of units to beat then in 3 locations. But who wins is random,  sometimes you barely have to fight, one time they all died and I fought like 12 rounds before the boss showed up. It’s another one where a qol update to skip it after you beat it once would be nice.

So you’re going to want to enter the cheat dungeon to get the extra leader hp so you can auto the random encounters. You might also want to do that in the first run just to save yourself some frustration. I remember I was malding in a few boss fights because overall they’re not playing with the same rules. It feels like they draw more cards but that might be an innate passive some of them had. They start with multiple units on the field. Sometimes it’s a full roster and you can consider it like, oh the enemy gets the first turn to setup but can’t attack. But nope, they always start with the same units and they’re generally impossible mathematically when some of these bosses have a control of 1 or 2 but all the surrounding units are grade 4 and above.

The main routes themselves are kind of boring. Especially the human route where it felt like nothing was happening until the last chapter and then it felt somewhat rushed even though it was still cool. This is also where they give a peak to the ng+ content, it was probably my favorite part until I saw the new content. Because you don’t know what it was, the unknown being could’ve been the player treated as a different species, it could’ve just been a higher being or even a 4th wall break from the company itself. Anyways, it’s not like nothing was happening, it’s more that it would seem like big deals but they’re confronted and dealt with faster than the time you spent traversing through other areas in the angel route.

The devil route is kind of generic and it’s more of the horny section but it introduce a few decent ideas. It covers things that the other routes alluded to and also explained how the mc was getting stat boosts of that magnitude. And you can say it’s bullshit and they just added that to explain the hscenes away. That’s mainly true, but it was also covered partly in Shanelle’s route, and explains away what was happening in Arisa’s route. This happened in the other routes in lesser degrees, like Akari’s power up and possibly that angel ritual is kind of bullshit and they’re just covering it up. And that was a theme that was in the background for quite a bit throughout the routes. Where yeah the devils are assholes but you know what you’re getting out of them. The angels are just being cordial since humans are useful tools. Sure the cast befriends them, but this also when they’re already invaluable. If they randomly lost their powers, they’d probably just be dumped in the city and forgotten about.
Part of me saw the human section as the true route, since it’s combining ideas from the other two. But then again the background image when loading the game up is a cg from the devil’s route. But it was all pushed aside with the dream palace/ng+ content. Basically all routes have happened, so they’re all technically the true route.

My favorite was Gillezel, too bad he’s only really enjoyable in the human route but that could just be the case of being enjoyable in small doses. There’s also not much going on with him in the devil route anyway, I assumed there’d be more. My favorite of the normal cast is Madoka, and then maybe Mehisha. Though Sayane is overall the more interesting character where her alliances and what’s she’s doing is determined on what Shuuya chose to side with and I’ll cover that in the spoilers.

Overall

All in all, I give this a 6. If you only do the 3 routes and not also all the character routes, then I’d put it as a 7. The bgm The deck building is fun but only after a whole run or two. And the first run will take the majority of your whole playtime, so basically you’re stuck with a boring build longer than not. The ng+ content is fun, honestly it was pretty easy compared to the other title’s ng+ stuff. It needs a few qol updates to speed up the process, otherwise it was a pretty fun ride. You should pick whatever character you like the most but if you want one of the better cards, then do Shanelle’s first. She was the second to last for me and it was a pretty big kick in the balls.

Spoilers

So I mentioned that some characters are locked behind different paths. And part of that is because depending on the scenario you just don’t interact as much with certain characters and the prime example is Sayane and Madoka. Madoka gets her arm blown off and Shuuya becomes her assistant for awhile, most of her cards come from this route too. In the other routes, she’s more of a scout and that’s it. Arisa doesn’t get her route in the devil section because I think there’s one or two locations are blocked off and they contain required items. Shanelle is blocked off because her ending mentions her grieving over the creature she bonded with in the warped world. In the devil route, they keep their powers, Shiro might come along. I don’t think Narumi or Mirai have any reason to have their route blocked off in the devil faction.

Personally, I think it’d be better having Arisa, Mirai and Narumi locked to human route. Having Shanelle, Mehisha and Madoka being locked in the angel path. Akari being either human or devil. The only reason for that is one of the scenarios near the end is Kaito getting mad and also confesses to Akari even though he knows she likes Shuuya. And that’d be fine unless you’re actually doing her route since Kaito is super chill and wouldn’t do that. Honestly it’s more likely for him to go after Narumi or one of the angels
There’s also the dream palace/ng+ content route and I’m not sure if it’s available in every path. I did it in angel and it made a lot of sense. I think it’d be pretty laughable in the devil route. And that’s because the dream palace states that each path has happened and Shuuya gets it all through his memories. And he notices that Atori never ends up with him so he chooses to continue through the palace and deepen their relationship with the time they have since they’re going to forget once it’s over. Only for her to remember and drops it at that whilst Shuuya has an uncanny feeling and doesn’t know why he feels empty and sad but doesn’t have the bandwidth to pursue it. And it works, and it kind of can’t in devil for a few reasons. She wants to kill him since her dad/creator is dead because of him and constantly wants to fight. Except she loses and they bang to give her energy, we’ll come back to that. Anyways, in the harem ending, there’s orgies and I’m not sure the limitations because I think Shuuya restricts some from participating. But Mehisha and Atori get moved around and that’s just kind of fucked up if you follow the dream palace in that route, lol.

And since I’m mentioning the devil route, I’ll just skip to Sayane. She’s one of the more interesting characters, her shit is kind of inconsistent but how it happens is pretty cool. So for the angel route, you see her with Gillezel. In the human route, she’s at Gillezel’s area and nukes the place and figures out that he’s not there. She waits and he eventually shows up and has the convo that Shuuya didn’t join the angels or the devils. She’s like oh shit hardcore I should do that too and goes off to MHI. And that points to why she was with Gillezel in the angel route, since Shuuya went along with the angels and she didn’t get inspired. In the devil route, she’s raiding an area but really still trying to get on with Selberg but figures out that the humans and especially Shuuya can be useful. The funny thing is she has more plot going on in the human route and it helps with character and her relationship in the devil route. Otherwise some parts just lose impact without it.