Lattice SOS!～Happening＆Panic～

 

Another RPGMaker eroge, that seems to be all I ever review, but whatever.  This one has some charm to it.  For the most part its lighthearted, but does get darker in some areas depending on choices you make.

Gameplay is typical RPGMaker fare.  Fortunately there is very little grinding.  The enemies are on screen so you can just avoid them.  The boss battle can get a little rough, particularly the ones where you only have Lattice, because she is not a very good fighter.  The majority of the gameplay is just interacting with townspeople, with battles thrown in to progress an actual story.

The story is pretty simple.  Lattice is basically a type of elf that can hear spirits.  The local spirit has gone silent, and Lattice visits the spirit to see that its very lethargic, so Lattice sets on a quest to get the ingredients to make a legendary elixir to heal the spirit.  For the most part, each town has one of the ingredients, and they give a quest to complete before handing it over. 

Of course, this being an eroge, most of the quests involve sex.  There's actually only a few sex scenes in the game.  The game is mostly light hearted, and I wouldn't say the sex scenes are non-con, but for the most part Lattice and Enao are usually somewhat aggressively coerced into having sex (apart from one straight up rape scene, but you can avoid it if you make the right choices).  The sex scenes can seem a little mean-spirited, and I feel they take away from the overall feel the game is trying to convey during the happy-go-lucky non-sex related scenes.  Its a very stark contrast.  Additionally, the developer seems to have a pee fetish, as there are a handful of peeing scenes, for mostly no reason.  Most of the scenes have choices of going all the way or just foreplay.  I don't believe the choices affect the rest of the story.

The characters have their personalities, and they mainly stick to them to a fault.  Lattice is an airhead, and Enao is hot-headed.  The majority of sex scenes involve Lattice, but Enao get a number of cut-in CGs that don't really count as scenes.  Whats kind of amusing is the NPC will focus on the characters boobs and mention that they aren't interested in Enao because her boobs are too small, but the art doesn't really show that, she is pretty decent sized, but next to Lattice she is smaller.  Lattice being the airhead, is relatively easily coerced into sexual situations, and Enao often tries to protect her but will end up doing the perverted things instead.  If you take away all the sex, the game is just a light hearted adventure between two friends.

The art is decent enough.  its definitely got a cartoon-ish feel, which fits well with the story.  The characters have very animated facial expressions, depending on the scene.  The stand-ins can be somewhat chibi.  Sex scenes are one-time only, so you can't repeat them.  After finishing the game, there's a pretty short side quest to unlock the CG room.  The CG room has all the sex scenes even the ones you did not trigger, so you don't need to play the game multiple times.  A brief note:  there is a swimsuit competition in one town, where you get to choose between 3 swimsuits, you can wear the swimsuit in town, and NPCs will comment on it, so the only reason I see to replay the game would be to see the reactions to the different style swimsuits.

In the end, this is a solid little RPG Maker eroge.  The sex scenes can take little away from the overall positive atmosphere of the game, but the art and characters can make up for it.  Took a little under 10 hours to finish the game, but I did a lot of back tracking to see NPC reactions to different outfits.  You can probably beeline and get the game done in about 6 or 7 hours.  I really liked this one, so I can definitely recommend it.  The developer has a few other games, and based on how I enjoyed this game, I wouldn't mind checking out their other stuff.