The World Is Ending And I’m Choreographing A Dance Number

In the dark future of Omega Quintet the world is being overwhelmed by an evil force and the last vestiges of humanity — some 20,000 souls — huddle together for survival. Time for an idol group dance number!

The greatest weapon humanity has in Omega Quintet is hope, and what’s more hopeful than big-eyed anime girls dressing up in silly costumes and dancing around? Stirring speeches from figures of authority? Assurances from the scientific community? A way to escape the dying planet? These pale in the face of such innocent joy and wonder. Or something.

Honestly the whole idea of pausing a turn-based role-playing battle to the death against enemies out to wipe humanity from the face of the planet in order to take a premade scene like this:

And transform it through a complex editing process into something like this:

or this:

Well it’s all just extremely silly, isn’t it?

Then again it’s exactly what we expect from Galapagos RPG, an offshoot of Compile Heart. Having graduated from making PlayStation 3 role-playing games that look like PlayStation 2 games, the Japanese RPG makers are now making PlayStation 4 games that look like PlayStation 3 games, so it’s a definite stepping up, no pun intended.

Does all the dressing up and dancing really help? Not really. It’s the actual battling that makes a difference, and that bit is just lovely. Cool combo attacks, a complex battle order system that begs the player manipulate it to their advantage — it’s more standard fare, but it’s the good kind of standard fare. The sort that makes repetitive scenery and tons of backtracking more worthwhile. I’d have preferred they’d left out the feature that makes the girls’ costumes disintegrate when destroyed, but it’s all the more reason not to let that happen.

Omega Quintet is now available for the PlayStation 4 from publisher Idea Factory. Expect plenty of crazy fan-made dancing nonsense to follow.