Match 3+ puzzle battlers aren’t exactly where I’d normally start my usual search when looking for exciting JRPG narratives, but maybe that’s about to change. It’s a subgenre that is slowly trickling onto home consoles after previously dominating IOS and Android devices for quite some time. It’s hardly a new subgenre, yet when playing on the big screen, there’s something captivatingly unique about it.
Fresh off the back of my Love Island review, I was keen to see more of what this style of game could deliver if given a narrative overhaul. Pardoning a few bugs, I had no complaints about Love Island’s simple yet incredibly addictive gameplay, we just needed an actual plot to make the game feel like the dating sim it needed to be. It’s time to find a better example of this subgenre; Fortunately, I didn’t have to try too hard to find one.
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Introduction
Mirror 2 is a match 3+ puzzle battler with RPG and dating sim mechanics. The game was released as Mirror 2: Project X in early access as an episodic game on Steam back in 2022 where it was met by a series of boycotts and negative reviews following the decision to remove hentai elements, including full nudity, from the game. The game’s predecessor, Mirror, was an adults-only hentai game featuring the same mechanics.
While the decision to downgrade the game from a hardcore ‘hentai’ title to a softcore ‘ecchi’ game may have given a poor first impression, it also means the game is suitable for home console release, potentially bringing in a new wave of players. Mirror 2: Console Edition features a collection of episodes previously available individually for the Steam release along with a plethora of performance enhancements, fixes and bonus content. This version released on both PS4 and PS5 on 23rd June, 2023.
Story
Mirror 2 expands on the overarching theme introduced in the first game. Thankfully, you won’t need to play the first game to immerse yourself in Mirror 2. Like the original, the game is delivered as a collection of short stories, all independent chapters set in different times and at different locations, with their only connections being the appearance of one or more ‘monster girls’ living in the human world.
There are countless types of monster girls, all of whom originally came from the mythical Demon World and have since found ways to discreetly slip into the human world via momentary breaches throughout the space-time continuum. These girls are as varied in nature and appearance as humans, if not more so, and so their desires and intentions could be benevolent, self-serving or even malevolent.
The first chapter (also featured in the demo) features Naoto as the protagonist, a young researcher in the employ of the military and also the lover and subordinate of his stoic senior officer, Rita. Their goal is to assess the threat and abilities of a captured entity believed to be a succubus, a beautiful girl named Leah. Through his regular meetings with the captive Leah, Naoto will have to determine whether she is friend or foe.
The second chapter is set in the distant future. A post-apocalyptic wasteland stretches across the continent. The land was once repopulated by animal-like ‘beastfolk’, who have now almost died out due to drought and starvation. Our protagonist, a tech-savvy scavenger named Norman finds a survivor, the erratic and violent cat-girl Lani, a former villager turned wanderer, struggling to survive. Norman has the means to grant Lani a new life elsewhere, but she’ll have to cooperate with him and put aside her mistrust of outsiders. The last four chapters will be for you to discover for yourselves.
Gameplay
The game is a match 3+ puzzle game containing combat-like situations where you’ll be placed against a girl in a conflict scenario. Move the on-screen gems with the right stick to line up three of a kind and trigger their matching effect once per line. Line up four of a kind to trigger their matching effect twice and generate a skill gem. Aligning more gems will trigger exponentially more powerful effects. Matching patterns of gems in a ‘T’ or ‘L’ formation will generate three basic gem effects and a ‘skill’ gem of that type.
Skill gems are a more powerful type of basic gem. Matching it with other basic gems will trigger the equipped skills at twice its power for every one of these enhanced gems in a four-gem match, and triple the power if they are in a ‘T’ or ‘L’-shaped formation. These act as your multipliers, meaning an example of a ‘T’-shaped matching formation containing two skill gems will unleash your skill a total of six times.
When five matching gems are lined up, they will trigger the relevant effect four times and generate a powerful Radiant Gem. Hovering over a Radiant Gem and clicking R3 will unleash a one-time special attack. When a Radiant Gem is triggered, it will also trigger any other Radiant Gems in its close proximity, creating a chain reaction.
Every Radiant Gem triggered in sequence will trigger its effect one more time than the last one triggered. For example, if three Radiant Gems are triggered simultaneously, the first will apply once, the second will apply twice, and the third three times, meaning a total of six strikes delivered in total for catastrophic damage.
Abnormal gems may appear on the board when your opponent makes their move. Some of these gems have their own HP which can be damaged by matching their surrounding gems, while others may require you to move them down to the bottom of the board. Each abnormal gem has its own timer; if it reaches zero, some form of penalty is triggered, usually in the form of additional damage to the player’s HP on top of regular damage received from standard enemy attacks. You can hover over these abnormal gems for more details.
Completing battle scenarios will also award you with coins, with more earned depending on your efficiency grade. After purchasing items and skills from the menu screen, you can find and put them to use on their corresponding menu pages, boosting your stats and arsenal ready for the next confrontation, however upgrades, skills and items will not follow you from one character scenario to another, meaning they’re best used as soon as possible.
Graphics/Sound
Immediately I’m blown away with a visual masterclass in anime character models, with beautiful HD cel-shading utilised to bring the fully 3D models to life, each radiant with extravagant detail and emotional fidelity reminiscent of the outstanding characters present throughout the HoYoverse game series. All characters (including the player’s off-screen character) are fully voiced in subtitled Japanese.
Environments also make the effort to absorb the player in their respective surroundings, particularly with outdoor locations where the camera often pans out to provide scenic shots of beautiful locations, while indoor locations feature particularly realistic light sources. An issue I did notice a number of times was cutscenes running before the texture packs had loaded in, resulting in environmental details ‘popping’ into focus after a couple of seconds, which was a minor distraction.
Arguably the weakest component of the presentation was the music. While the voice acting is superb throughout, the music is limited to just a handful of frequently reused tracks which vary in quality and really add to the repetition of some of the longer battles. Hardly a game-breaker, but enough of a negative to mention.
Replayability/Trophies
You’ll likely want to revisit certain chapters of the story to explore other options. You can check your progress on the ‘Flowchart’ page of the menu. You can also use this as a checkpoint selection screen, allowing you to jump back and forth to certain parts of the story. This is immensely useful for hunting down alternative endings which are triggered by choosing different story routes or dialogue options.
There are six chapters, each requiring at least one full playthrough, plus fifteen other endings to unlock. Don’t worry, most of the endings only take a few minutes to complete and scenes you’ve seen before can be skipped up to points where player choice is required. Story mode will likely take around eight hours to complete in full. You’ll need to view every possible ending to earn their respective trophies.
Once you’re done with the story, ‘Challenge Mode’ will likely be your next stop. Challenge mode omits the game’s story elements and its 3D character models, replacing them with mostly static 2D characters. You’ll travel along a board called a ‘Synopsis’, where you’ll have to take part in battles, find treasure chests, and answer questions which result in buffs or debuffs depending on your outcome. You’ll grab another set of trophies here which will put you on the final stretch to the platinum.
Your final stop is ‘Home Mode’ where you’ll get to play around with a few new exploratory mechanics which should finish off your trophy hunt. Here, you can explore a small tropical island, playing as any girl whose story chapter has been completed. It’s here where the fan service factor peaks as your chosen hottie can change into a multitude of sexy outfits for your viewing pleasure, and will even pose for raunchy photos.
Conclusion
As much as I want to shout Mirror 2’s praises from the rooftops, I fear such an effort will make little difference, if any. You see, Mirror 2’s adaptation for a larger audience that now includes console gamers, was not well-received at launch and was such a disaster that Japanese indie game developer Kagami Works was plunged into financial turmoil and was soon dissolved post bankruptcy, ruining any hope of a follow-up.
Critique of Mirror 2 actually found little to complain about as a standalone game, though a backlash was unleashed about undesirable changes to the franchise. 2018’s original Mirror game received overwhelmingly positive reviews on Steam for its use of relevant yet uncensored adult content, including full frontal nudity. However, Mirror 2: Project X backtracked on this core component of the original game, and despite a moderate level of fan service, left many gamers feeling like the game had been miss-sold, resulting in highly negative reviews and refund demands.
Despite the previous criticism, I’m a firm believer that “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure”, the same way that Resident Evil 6 was considered a failure as a survival horror game, but at the same time, a spectacular 3rd person narrative shooter. Mirror 2 may be a failure as a hentai game (H-Game) but as a narrative-focused puzzle game with light RPG mechanics, it’s truly in a league of its own.
The game makes a bold statement about the price of censorship by its willingness to disappoint its fan base by complying with console market standards. This is a sign of the times; the fault of prudish standards committees rather than the developers themselves who have clearly put the work into making what remains of Mirror 2 the best that it can be. I may be too late to support the troubled developer, but the game itself is something of a work of art, one that doesn’t deserve to be overlooked or forgotten.
Joys
- Beautiful visuals and gorgeous characters
- Simple gameplay with RPG mechanics to give players an added edge
- Captivating storylines with surprising twists along the way
Cons
- Some texture-loading problems
- Repetitive music
- Some folks won’t appreciate the removal of nudity
