Anime Girls Can't Fix Everything | -A- Review
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- Опубликовано: 29 июн 2024
- Welcome to Steam Sequence, a series where I attempt to play and review as many Steam games in alphabetical order as possible to sort the Trash from the Treasure.
This means that I'm playing through all the terrible games so that you don't have to. Please enjoy my suffering.
This episode features:
A
Store Page: store.steampowered.com/app/15...
In case you're wondering, Steam organizes games starting with punctuation first, then numbers, and then the actual alphabet. It may be some time before I reach the letter "A" on my journey!
00:00 Intro
00:28 The Review
12:07 The Verdict
13:43 Outro
Ratings for every game can be found here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
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Outro Music by Approaching Nirvana
/ approachingnirvana
Song: Steampowered
Listen to the song on Spotify: open.spotify.com/track/4OsSqY... 
Игры
Oh, its me, of course I have to get the scantily clad anime girl.
I'm sorry. But BlueFire does sound somewhat anime-ish 🤣
@@Graeldon fair enough, I mostly just go by blue though, so eh whatever
You're anime and have like an insectoid torax.
@@bluefirethewolf7921y
@@bluefirethewolf7921Blue sounds like a girl name so it still kinda fits lol
It's a coin flip between the game being horrificly unoptimised and it being a cryptominer. The latter would track pretty well with the schtick - throw in a bunch of random FPS elements, drag in some prefabs, add anime girl clickbait, and hope enough people download it to get you some revenue. This series is really proving that Steam has zero quality control.
Great video as always!
My money is on it being a cryptominer, it's definitely not someone's passion project and while shovelware, it feels lacking even for shovelware. The fact that you can even use computer games to sneakily mine crypto without anyone knowing is just beyond scummy
Cheer!
I'm personally leaning towards it just being poorly optimized. It's a Unity game, which generally doesn't handle large numbers of dense assets particularly well - especially if you're a novice developer. The FPS drops tended to only happen in certain areas, which supports this theory.
A cryptominer would likely have crazy resource usage at all times.
@Graeldon God, I could’ve sworn it wasn't a Unity game! I thought my senses were honed after slaving away in the editor. It reeked of an asset flip, but I didn’t put two and two together.
One of the games on Steam is literally a reskin of a free Yugioh simulator
@@hannahdawg6829could also just be an asset flip made to learn game development but it's hard to say
feels like the title shows how much effort was put into making the game: just the first letter of the alphabet with symbols around it so its at the top of the steam alphabetical library
which ironically has an effect on the overall progression of this review project: the higher up in the alphabetical order a game is, the greater its chances of only having been called that to get clicked on. and while every game kinda wants that, the ones to go so far as to use a name like "-A-" are the ones that really don't care about being good games. in other words, statistically, the games should progressively get better the further we get. on average, anyways. so we are really starting with the gems here.
Can we talk about how the main character has vaguely Slenderman-esque proportions? Seriously, there's more mass in her forearms than in her torso.
This. She's grotesquely deformed even for anime standards
I think -A- is the perfect name for it, because it would be the face I would make after playing it for an hour.
I had to play it twice to get footage for the review =/
@@Graeldon RobloxOof.mp4
When you said light survival elements, you weren't kidding.
It's a survival game for the player, not the player character :D
Inventory? Check. Crafting? Check. Health? Check. Stamina? Check.
-A- is officially a survival craft game.
I like how "Bluefire" fits her.
If the black eyes were intentional, it would ground her design as something alien. As is, it's a failed attempt at a human.
The person who created that anime girl asset is probably a billionaire judging by how many games on steam use it. (if they are using it legally)
Found it after about 5 minutes of digging:
assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/humans/aki-63928
Roughly $45 asset. The creator could have made a decent bit of money from it
@@Graeldonof course the model also includes nsfw options.
the CPU usage is probably an optimization issue. Something I notice in games that use asset packs is that not all devs understand that not all assets are optimized well. Sometimes assets have an insane amount of triangles, or have other things in them that could possibly cause optimization issues if you copy that object dozens or hundreds of times.
Or it could simply be an issue where everything is always loaded on the map. A pretty simple way to get a game to run smoother is to only make the things you're looking at render nicely. You can use low-poly versions of objects as well as worse animations since those kinds of assets take up less memory. Usually you'd do this for objects far away from the player, and behind them. (I think there's other ways to do this but you get the point)
I'm not sure if either of these were the issue but I can see how someone that doesn't know a lot about making a game could overlook something like this. But I at least don't think its crypto mining or anything like that.
Given that the FPS drops were in particular areas or when looking towards certain places in the map, I'm inclined to believe it was just incredibly poorly optimized.
to tell if a game is a cryptominer or just unoptimized, compare the resources used when nothing is happening and when there's a lot going on
if the usage ramps up then go down, it's unoptimized
if it doesn't, it's probably a cryptominer
tracking resource usage when your pc is idle also helps
Maybe you should keep track of how many games there are left for each starting character and maybe even have some random statistic that compares the diffrent starting characters to see which ones have the highest % of good games.
That is a research project worthy of a government grant.
Not a bad idea! Might implement that once we finish the punctuation section.
Remind me in about 14 videos?
Heh, I love how you pronounce the name...
Something that bothers me is how stiff all the hair is. I don't know if the models they got just didn't have bones or what, but it definitely feels super off. Though maybe that's for the best because her skirt would probably also move if her hair did, and that thing is already revealing enough lol
I love the way her arms sway when aiming down the sights of the rifle.
Definitely the best way to improve your accuracy
Ah yes, we've reached the point where anime girls are becoming cynical asset flip fodder. Sadly, this one is nowhere near the worst of the "genre", so good luck!
Funny enough, I couldn't search up this game directly. It's probably an accident, but I'll pretend it's Steam quality control. If only it existed for real...
I like anime girls. In fact I'm a bit of a pervert about it. Do you know what I like more?
Good art design.
A huge reason why you don't see anime girls everywhere (besides the stigmatization obviously) is because they don't work in every environment. This game has rather realistic terrain, brutalist architecture, and a violent overall theme. What does the player character look like?
A magical girl. A fucking magical girl.
Bluefire clashes *hard* with the game's artstyle. A magical girl belongs in an environment where the world is overall cutesy, with more grungy aesthetics used for impact. And even then, unless you're going for humor, you're going to put in work to make those more grungy places feel like they exist in the same universe.
This isn't even getting into how horribly designed Bluefire is overall. The least egregious are the breasts (dead serious here), or to be more specific, how her clothes perfectly warp around them. Clothing folds around people, and even tight clothing creates a slope returning to the stomach rather than perfectly wrapping around breasts. Put a blanket over your head and notice how the blanket doesn't show your exact outline; that's what clothing is supposed to do.
Now, those kind of breasts are very common. A lot of artists don't focus on realism either, so it may even be an intentional thing, but once you know it, looking at breasts in anime becomes a lot less "Hochi Mama!!" and more "oh god that's not how clothes work." These next two complaints are a lot less excusable.
Firstly, her body shape is straight-up horrific. Compare her to Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelical. Notice how Bluefire is *extremely* thin compared to Asuka, and Asuka is definitely a thin girl. Bluefire straight-up looks like she has anorexia, while also tight-lacing her corset.
Secondly, what the FUCK is going on with her neck?! Bluefire's neck has a strange lump on it. That's not how you make necks. That's not even a stylization of a neck. That lump is unnatural and is genuinely mystifying on how the developer (or god-forbid, the asset maker) thought it was good.
There's one more thing I want to mention about Bluefire that is a bit of a nitpick, but I feel it'd be worth mentioning. Her hair. It doesn't move, it doesn't bounce or flow or do anything that hair does. One aspect on why anime artstyles can be so nice to look at is hair. It flows, it bounces, it waves and reacts to your movements. I understand not having 100% accurate hair simulation, but please, *add some jigglebones to her hair!* It'd make her hair feel like it isn't just a plastic hat attached to her.
I'm just baffled at how poorly this gets art style. The world on its own is cohesive; why are there MAGICAL GIRLS here? Make something that is less formal or more military-like. A princess with clean clothing, waking up in the middle of the woods and taking missions from some sort of HQ, does not exist in the post-apocalypse.
Your analsys of the main character model and the artistic design is based on what is most likely a misconception: That it was created for the game.
Far more likely is that it's just a bunch of free or pirated assets a single person tossed together into a stock unity project, pressed "compile" and called it a game. With the main character simply chosen because "anime girl with tits and pantyshots"
Its so god damn funny to see my name in this whole thing
@@gimok2k5 Trust me part of the reason I put all this here was partially out of boredom.
I also focused on critiques and flaws on the player model specifically in the middle of the analysis; it isn't even a decent asset. The fact that the dev saw anime and went "YEP" despite it being terrible says so much about the care they put into the game.
Also, using pre-made assets does not mean you can't have a coherent artstyle. I helped playtest a game that relied heavily on a pre-made asset pack. Even though we didn't make a lot of the assets, we still managed to have a consistent style throughout the entire game.
Admittedly we used only one asset pack, so keeping the style consistent wasn't terribly difficult, but the point is using pre-made assets isn't an excuse for bad art direction, it's merely an explanation on why developers didn't try.
The analysis isn't for the developer, it's clear they didn't want to put in the effort. I made it for fun and I won't pretend otherwise; but it does still have value for other developers on what not to do.
@@sylvercritter You're also forgetting how awkward her arms look when she's holding that rifle of hers.
I aint reading all that but I'm sorry that that happened
“Today’s game is minus a minus… or just **ACK**”
What I love about your reviews here is that you still always take the time to comment on what could have been improved, even if the game is seemingly way out of the scope of salvation (nor does the developer want to, for that matter). It's very useful for up-and-coming game devs who might follow this series.
I don't want this to be a series where I'm constantly punching down. I know nothing about the devs or their level of experience when they made the game.
Sometimes you can tell what is a cash-grab, and it should be assessed as such. But outside of that...
I just want to encourage, not discourage.
@@Graeldon Pardon my english, but that's based.
I really appreciate how youre coming at these games with the assumption of good intent, actually critiquing each game as a game. It's very refreshing and wonderful to watch.
Counting all the asset flips and meme games to come may result in a depressingly large number.
Whatever, great vid as always!
It's cool how you're able to talk so much about the game despite it having barely any content in it whatsoever. One of my main fears about Steam Sequence is that some games are clearly just slapped together using pre-existing assets and mechanics at best, and cryptominers masquerading as actual games at worst. It's great that you're still able to make good content with more heart than the games you're reviewing. Great vid, good luck on your quest!
Oh man, I had kind of forcibly forgotten all the "anime tiddies shooter" games Steam kept trying to sell me for a while. They're literally all the same, anime girl protagonist vs. something meme-y like Hitler or other anime girls. They're so low effort and *kind of* makes me miss the days Steam had at least a little bit of quality control on it, when it wasn't just a constant glut of shovelware.
The shade at La Croix at the end there goes so hard! XD
I can't help but wonder is this is quite what bluefirethewolf expected to have their name eternally linked to. :)
Also, I have to know, did the moon ever come up? Or is it still down there, waiting for its chance to shine?
I never waited long enough to see. I reached the end at around 3PM in game, I think.
I'm dedicated to what I do, but not THAT dedicated.
Also, Bluefire will get a chance at redemption later haha
I'm fine with it, its pretty funny tbh. And most of the time I go by blue, so I can just pretend that it was never me if I end up hating it
I suspect it is genuinely the moon, it’s very common to have the moon and sun just rotate around the centre of the world map, it’s not an issue usually since you can’t look over the edge of the disc and see it’s missing. Even Minecraft does it.
just by saying you didnt do it intentionally makes me raise my eyebrow...
nah just kidding. even though i love watching anime and reading manga, i am put off by the abundance of games that just use a random anime girl model in hopes of getting some to buy it just to have a look (no pun intended)
Maybe the mechs copiously bleeding could be explained in the story by having them be piloted by multiple people, who are perhaps there unwillingly as a part of human experiments, forcing the player to consider whether they think they should put them out of their misery or try finding a way to save them, but that would require too much thought.
Of all things to make the main character in your run-down apocalyptic world, you pick a model that's built like noodles strapped to a bunch of toothpicks
trying to get out of bounds in every bad game sounds like a great goal
The way you pronounce -A- is definitely the best part of this video
I'm glad I decided to commit to the bit haha
Just wait until you get to “H”. You’re going to play a lot more games like this. Or when you get to the proper “A”s, but that has less scary implications.
I absolutely adore the way you do these videos.~ The jokes, naming the nameless characters, and even the silly review scores.~
You deserve a whole lot more than what you have here, but I think you've heard that a little too much from other people.~
I cant believe you finally reviewed my favorite game. I know it doesn't have the most in-depth gameplay but the backstory of Blue Fire is so deep and tragic that it brings me to tears every time i think about it :'( Also the overperformance on your PC is DEFINITELY NOT a bitcoin farm.
Racing bros is a notorious American asset flipper. He has a dozen sock puppet accounts and just throws out garbage. There is never any intention to make a good game with him.
I am so glad RUclips put your channel in my recs, I have a new series to binge watch!
Welcome to the channel!
The title of the game is like trying to say Gawr Gura's catchphrase but with a cold.
Does anybody still remember when Steam actually showed the ratio of up/downvotes for someone elses review? (I believe it was "x/z found this review helpful"). It's so evidently clear they do not have consumers in mind (anymore).
That info is still found on the Steam reviews - users can also give various awards to reviews to endorse them
@@Graeldon I meant as in fx "10 out of 20 people found this helpful", now it just shows "10 people found this helpful", not really showing if the views of the reviewer is overall supported
How many times is the answer to the opening question "because I'm making a video for this" these days, Graeldon? I hope you're playing some good stuff now and then as well as the random trash fires you tend to get.
Take a break and play some Snake 2 DX. You know you want to. :)
There's some good games on the horizon! Make sure you tune in for the one next week!
I've been watching this series more and more lately. Well done Grael.
Even the name, -A-, is half assed
Guess we now know what -A- stands for
I'm getting there, just give me time. Lots of it.
....got a time machine?
I guess it was a shuffled up version of a-, which could be a censored version ass.
That character model looks really freaky. I've seen anime girls with crazy proportions, like in One Piece, but this just looks bad.
Usually anime models in similar styles to that one have wider waists and rib cages. Compared to what it looks like on the store asset page, it also looks like they somehow made it even worse. It also doesn't match the environment at all. There are anime style games with bleak looking settings, like Code Vein, but their characters have less cartoony proportions and fewer "cheery" colors like bright yellow.
Yeah, it's pretty major stylistic clash. Who knows what the devs were going for, considering they had to pay for those assets
As someone who unironically enjoys la croix, that's a pretty apt description of it
😆
Sincerely hoping you come across more hidden gems on your journey, I can only imagine what trudging through these games can do to one's sanity.
Discord server just opened today! Feel free to drop in, say hello and meet fellow weird game enthusiasts!
discord.gg/yyTG2jHFzJ
doesnt work :(
@taisato2091 thanks for letting me know! I've updated the link and it should work now =)
@@Graeldon ty! I've already joined from the link in the next video, but it might help some other viewers stumbling across this video. Also, i have just finished the binge watch. I love the concept for this series and your execution of it is really elegant
It's such a delight to accompany you on this journey! I hope you make it to the end!
Unless we're both going to live for over 1000 years, we may have to be okay with not making it to the end - but we'll go as far as we can!
@@Graeldon Awesome!
Sketchy game? I recommend setting up a Virtual Machine, if possible.
Unrelated, I’ve noticed that you make extremely professional content. I like this kind of stuff, so I’ll contribute to your hopeful rise in popularity by subscribing!
Seeing a written review that you’ve left on a steam game is almost surreal.
Honestly the idea behind this channel alone was enough to make me subscribe, but this was surprisingly entertaining, def gonna binge these.
Welcome to the channel! I'm glad you're enjoying the content =)
really cool video, this channel is surprisingly high quality and the concept is really fun ! If it's your first try at doing youtube videos it's really impressive !
Thanks for the kind words!
Yeah, this is my first go at RUclips. I started the journey at the end of last year, just doing it as a hobby =)
Just caught up with your videos and I love them
Thanks for the kind words!
Finally got up with the whole playlist!
Here I can salute your bravery and your wallet!
I am all here for throwing shade on lacroix
For a moment I thought he said "La Choy" and I was going to object solely on the basis of the old commercials Jim Henson made with the Muppet dragon but then my brain caught up with my ears.
Sounds like something Nines from Vampire Bloodlines would say
So glad I found this channel. Your rating system is inspired by Josh Strife Hayes isn't it, you gloriously proud brit, you!
Welcome! Glad you found it and are enjoying the videos!
The rating system was partially inspired by JSH, and partially by ProJared
@@Graeldonoh I see, I havent watched ProJared so I saw it as mostly a JSH thing. Either way I've been binge watching this series. Cant wait to see what's in store.
The way you pronounce an emoticon is funny, I'm waiting for your review of >=3
It's kind of impressive how he actually talks about asset flips instead of just being like "yeah, that's an asset flip, moving on". Wonder how long this attitude will last. Probably not long, because otherwise he wouldn't get through the letter A this decade.
Still going strong!
It seems to me to that "-a-" is simply a project which was never finished (assuming it's not a data mining scam). Consequently, the developers just decided to dump this half-baked game onto to Steam to see if they could make a bit of extra money.
best game I've ever played in my life
Even the abrupt ending has me imagining what could have been. A zombie survival game, where “narrative” comes via calls from HQ, and then it just ends when you check a random supply crate? Sounds like a lead up to that ending being one last call from HQ, saying they’re about to be devastated, this is the last crate you’re getting, and that you might be the last human left.
You know this is going to be a long series when the 31st game in the list is a negative of the first letter in the English alphabet.
Wow. Anime girl is clickbait. Never would have guessed.
Half-way through the video, this has to be an asset-flip, right?
I've noticed a lot of shovelware have Anime-aesthetic protagonists (like Bluefire here), probably hoping it would be enough to sucker someone to purchase the game.
i figured out a pattern for the quality of a game. games that start with a weird punctuation are usually not that great. like before #, there's 11 games and 2 of them are recommended, then shortly after 8 not recommended games that didn't know how to make a good title, we get 9 out of 14 good games with . or - and since then, we have a surprisingly high amount of good games if this pattern repeats, letters will have more good games and you will lose subscribers because we want to see you getting tortured by bad games.
side note: i would really like more side quest videos because i don't want to watch 50 hours of streams i missed just to satisfy my curiosity
We're working on more side quest content!
Ok but why do the glitched eyes actually look cool? Like, if that was intentional, it'd be a positive, but it's not, so it's just baffling how they managed to do that. Lol.
(I say that, having never worked with 3D models before, but you get the point-)
13:00 Everything functions... except the enemy floor detection, out-of-bounds, unpassable terrain, the camera, the health bars the objective markers etc.
great vid
Thanks Klank!
Thanks for the video :)
Glad you enjoyed it!
I'm almost sure that the slow text crawl is to push the time played to 2 hours, therefore making it un-refundable.
The protagonist doesn't seem healthy. She should probably eat a cheeseburger.
Might need more than that to save her
The G.O.A.T. is back once again to grace us with his presence
Perfection
I remember this stream lol, terrible game
Perfectly Mediocre.
As a Palworld stan, I now realize this is what that game looks like to other people. Horrible asset flip, but with...a vision? Kinda.
With the dynamic weather and night/day cycle and all the animated foliage in such a trash game, I imagine this was probably made in Unreal.
The Unreal Engine absolutely loves to push devs, new or old, to enable ALL of the settings, ALL of the effects. This is because Unreal's devs are insecure and don't want amateur game developers to put out crappy-looking games with their engines. So hey, sure, force all the effects on, than all Unreal games 'look' good! ...It actually takes MORE effort to disable all of this stuff, I've heard, than to leave it/turn it on.
It somehow makes a lazily-made game look even more lazy with all these nonsense-details added in.
Interestingly, it was actually made in Unity. The player model is an asset that can be bought in the Unity store for around $45.
But yes, I think the game is just incredibly poorly optimized
I wonder if that's where some of the performance comes form.
@@Graeldon Huh! Fair enough. Unity isn't much better for optimization/performance unless you are a skilled dev, but it at least doesn't turn on 5 million effects by default like Unreal. I'm guessing the devs of this took the time to enable such effects, though.
I have to say I’m incredibly disappointed with your review. La croix is a delightful drink and I will not have you disparage it with a comparison to this game.
This is a safe space. You don't have to pretend. It's okay.
@@Graeldon Never! I will kill on this hill.
Looks like someone got bored halfway through making their game. Or Cryptominer that makes sense too.
There's roughly two thirds of the game map that goes completely unused. So yeah, quite likely they gave up part way through their project and figured it was good enough
Sex sometimes doesn’t sell
aaand back to the steam slop
-A- is an emote brother
That walking animation is so weird, it's like halfway between a walking animation and a swimming animation.
Is this the first time you haven't used something the game gave you in a rating? Well I mean, I don't really blame you because it didn't give you that much to work with.
It's not the first, but you are correct in that I normally use something from the game. The analogy seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up though!
The robots look nice at least
Only thing i love about the game is the way the characters run 💀
What a chaotic mess of a game. I like the anime aesthetic, but it's rather obvious this game was haphazardly assembled from various free assets and code snippets, hance the poor performance.
It's like someone created a plan of cutting a gemstone, readied all their tools and then forgot to do the actual gem cutting.
It is an asset flip
I am 99.9% sure this game was made as a quick buck joke.
....Wait, that's the name of the game, A? I thought you were doing some bizarre censoring editing or something. lol
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Surprised it took so long to these sorts of asset flip anime girl fps games tbh
Your telling me this ISN'T the best zombie third person shooter!?! I don't believe you! On a very slightly more serious note, this game reminds of a game called Hentai VS. Evil, which I've only seen through some not very positive reviews.
Graeldon saying - A - is already funny, but it's even funnier when you know there's a french meme that's just a guy saying "Ah !".
Seriously, making the ammo & the bandages infinite lowkey crippled the already broken game. It just seems largely unfinished, like a prototype of something bigger (and more playable). The only reason I could think of to recommend it to *some* people is the fanservice, as there are (probably) some people who value pantyshots more than the gameplay and/or the style itself for one reason or another, but even that really deosn't seem to be done well in this game. Nice.
I'm willing to bet you had a hard time deciding if you should post this or not due to the blatant anime upskirt and whatnot.
Bingo. Seems to be okay in RUclips's eyes though. They usually just don't like things that toe the line in the first 15 seconds or so
This reminds me of a game my friend got for $0.30 called The Last Of Anime. He played it for 20 minutes and there was no plot really anything to do from what I could tell.
Why can't people potray anime as something normal?!? If people keep portraying anime as garbage and being proud of it, then it will make Normal TRUE anime fans look bad!
Tbf at least that sounds a bit self aware 💀
Not a single asset original to the game either. Crazy
What no Gura or Shark jokes in a game called A.
Singular lack of Ayn Rand humor too. If anything associated with her can be said to be comedic, anyway.
Unfortunately I don't really follow streamers. I've heard of Gura, but don't know how she would relate to the letter A
I was going to, but I remembered what Rin said.
Boob socks. Only the most practical of fashion.
for the algorithm
Honestly? I don't think it's a cryptominer. I think there's a whole bunch of stuff that not even the developer knows what it does running constantly and no options on a huge terrain.
I"m starting to get really sick of these games that use these stock anime models. It's always the same models, and the games are always crap.
I'm wondering how long it will take before I find another game that uses the exact same model. I'm actually surprised by how much variety this method of gaming has had.
Is this in Unity?
Yep, all done in Unity
That gun model definitely doesn't fit with the anime girl aesthetic in my opinion? Then again it seems they just randomly used assets instead of trying to actually have an aesthetic. Looking at the dev page, they've been making games since 2015.
I was mainly struck by how misproportioned it looked in the firing animation and wondering if it came from another asset pack or was a default asset bundled with the engine.
So is the main character an original model or from an asset library? It seems very out of place.
It's from an asset library, costs around $45 to use it in a project.
Same goes for all the other anime characters, and probably the robots too
A
Thumbs up simply because I want the appropriate gesture when imagining that read in Henry Winkler's old Fonzie voice. "Ayyy" indeed.
Look it up if that's gibberish to you. It's where "jumping the shark" came from. Happy Days is made immortal through the unholy power of meme.
A
Crypto miner? What is that?
A program that mines cryptocurrency (like bitcoin) for someone else by using your computer's processing power.
Essentially, they are running a hidden program while the game distracts you in order to make the owner of the program some money.
today's game is minus a minus. or just *dies*
Proof that two minus don't make a plus.
0/10 game, not enough anime shark girls.