Others - Completed - Shiny Cuty Excel Chiffon [v2.03] [mille-feuille]

This 3-star review is with a caveat: Play the game like a VN (I have tips below on how to do so) or just view the scenes out of the recollection room. The scenes themselves are kind of eh, but the sheer volume and variety of scenes and voice acting is actually kind of incredible and pretty worth, despite being mostly static CGs, and there is a lot of defeat animations + dialogue. But the combat segments gameplay is so so garbage and if you were to try to figure out unlocking everything on your own, you'd die of ligma first.

The way the game works, you lose the stage on the 4th defeat (with unique scenes for each defeat AND for each enemy, there's a LOT). There's 3 main "routes" that you can play to an ending, depending on certain (complete) defeats or missing a sub-objective, and a couple of somewhat hidden scenes with specific unlock requirements.

If you want to play through, use the 99% save and go into Options>Adjustments. Give yourself boosted damage and defense, infinite mana, Turbo Mode, and Stage Select 2. Set the game to Very Easy. Trust me. Otherwise, you can just read the short summary of the routes I have at the bottom, and use the "unlock hints" in the recollection room to just get context for the H-scenes.

This review is for v2.03

TLDR: Gameplay sucks, way too much of this is basically a visual novel that you can just skip right through, but the H scenes are fappable and the art in the scenes is up to Japanese VN standards, but it fails from being a lose to win game, so just go into the recollection area, jack off to mindless porn in the form of static images that change a little through each scene, and move along.

So the gameplay is your typical old school arcade brawler like Double Dragons where there are two allies on screen (the PC and a COM) and waves of enemies you have to defeat before moving to the right.
Nothing special really, it's just a lot of hitting one or two buttons before moving on to the next insanely long sets of dialogue.
If you ever lose a fight in an area, your storyline gets changed from then on because your secret identity gets revealed and you get publicly raped by people you know before eventually becoming an evil magical girl and proceeding down that storyline.
This wouldn't be a problem really if it weren't for the fact that trying to figure out where you are standing compared to literally every other actor on screen in a fight is buggy AF resulting in you punching nothing because you just happened to be a single pixel too high or low followed by you getting your shit kicked in a second later by that same opponent.
So the combat portion of the game is absolutely terrible, which is really bad because that determines the storyline you follow.

As for the plot itself, it's your typical magical girl plot where two normal school girls get magical powers, fight enemies, get raped, and so on, so once again, nothing special.
The problem is even though it is an extremely standard and typical plot, you will spend half your time just skipping through dialogue to get to the next combat section, but don't skip too much, otherwise you'll skip the instruction for the stage you're on which can result in you failing the stage!
Terrible design choice there really.

As for the H scenes, you only get to enjoy those if you lose.
That's right kids, it's a lose to win game, and we all absolutely "love" those kinds of games where you have to intentionally fail in order to be able to enjoy what you came here for in the first place!
If you don't lose, you will not see a single H scene the entire game really, with even the few transformation scenes being censored at the crotch to make the girls into barbie dolls for some reason.
So really they just lost the thread on what the point of an H game should be.
The H scenes ARE good though, at least as far as a few static images are concerned.

Overall, I would not recommend this game as it is trying too hard to be an actual arcade game from the 90s and a generic VN and not trying hard enough to be an H game worthy of the file size.