Tenkaichi * Sengoku Lovers [Limited Edition]

To start off with, the story to Sengoku Lovers is really pretty decent. The various samurai and daimyou are all quite interesting in their own ways, and their interactions frequently amusing. The art is average, but there's a decent amount of it, and the developers managed to pack a fair number of voice samples (albeit with poor sound quality) from excellent seiyuu into the DS card.

Sadly, this game's mechanics and design choices really diminish the enjoyment of the stories. This game unfortunately lacks many of the staple options of many visual novels, such as multiple save files, and the most alluring aspects of otome adventure games, such as the art and voice-acting, are hamstrung by both the DS' limitations and the developers' choices. While there is quite a bit of content, the system makes it very difficult to enjoy. Instead of one, unified, branching storyline, each guy has his own chronicle to beat, each with three different endings. However, as there is only one save slot per character, the player must beat the entire storyline over again for all of the epilogues, and skipping the text constantly can get very tiring. (Normally, this would be old hat to VN players, but the skipping in this game is very choppy, as are the menus.) The player also must clear the individual stories of the daimyou's various retainers before being allowed to go for the leaders themselves.

These relatively small faults all add up to a frustrating game to play. I can only really recommend this game to die-hard otome game fans who love the Sengoku era and historical figures, and even then it's a lukewarm suggestion at most.