Briganty: The Roots of Darkness

Briganty is something of a unique animal on the PC-98 system. While the system is mostly known for Visual Novels and a few RPGs, Briganty is a cross-genre title that combines elements of Visual Novels, Action Platformer, Brawler, and RPG. And unlike many “H” games, Briganty is actually fun to play.

The player controls either Gady, a street-fighting wizard, or Sephina, a beautiful sword maiden, as they fight monsters, explore caves and ruins, and, in Gady's case, sleep with random women.

The story is presented through rather lengthy Visual Novel-style pages of text accompanying static images and is entirely in Japanese. Fortunately, no particularly game-play-relevant choices or actions rely on these sections.

Briganty offers a stage-select world map, which allows you play or replay stages in the order of your choosing, though completing a certain number of stages will unlock additional areas. Between levels, you go back to a hub town where you can rest at the Inn or Save/Load your game at the Temple.

The platform action sections are not particularly difficult, and only genuinely challenging in a few places. However despite some less-than-perfect controls, the action sections are fun and rewarding. The H scenes are censored but still very graphic, and with no sense of the story without mastery of Japanese, there's little parsing of who these women are or why you're sleeping with them. If anything, they, and the long walls of text you have to click through, are a distraction from an otherwise enjoyable action game.

Review By P. Alexander