Imadoki no Vampire: Bloody Bride

"Interesting Dating-Sim RPG with vampires; now also in English"

Bloody Bride is somewhat uncharted territory for me. I've seen many dating-sims before, but most of them happen to be hentai games. That is, crappy storybook-type games where the reward is to see naked anime women and have sex with them. This is not one of those games. It is, in fact, a lot more involving, with actual clever dialogue, different things to do, RPG elements, and plenty of replay value. It is, however, NOT a hentai game.

So, you might ask, what is the point of playing a dating-sim if there's no hentai reward? That's hard to say. The only other non-hentai dating-sim I've played is the Love Hina game for GBA, and I believe Bloody Bride ends up being a much better game than that.

Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of the Bloody Bride Translation Project (Google for it, you can't miss it), this game can now be played in ENGLISH. So boobs like me who can't be bothered to learn Japanese can enjoy such a game.

Like all dating-sims, the focus of the game is hooking up with women. There are five potential mates for your manly self, and if you devote enough energy into courting one of them, you will fall in love and get to see that girl's ending of the game. In addition, you'll also unlock that girl's various costumes so you can dress her up to gaze at for whatever reason you would like.

The story centers around a vampire prince. The prince is starting to come of age so that he might become a fully-fledged vampire, but in order to complete his training, his father makes him spend three years on Earth disguised as a human. It gets a lot more complicated with plots and subplots, but needless to say you have to balance your duty to vampirehood with pleasures of the heart.

Bloody Bride is very stat-intensive. In between scheduling dates, you will have to manage your stats and try to increase them. Stats serve both to make you more effective in combat like all RPGs, as well as to make you a more ideal mate. Each of the girls has different parameters for what they see as the "perfect man," so you might need to increase your intelligence, your charm, your strength, etc, accordingly to make yourself the man of her dreams. You will spend a lot of your time increasing those stats either by scheduling stat-increasing exercises at your house or by gaining experience levels. Levels can be gained either through combat, or through sucking the blood of random women you meet on the street.

So there is combat. there is scheduling and time-management. There is money and items to buy. It's fairly intricate compared to most dating-sims, yet extremely rudimentary compared to most RPGs.

Another thing is that Bloody Bride is a very LONG game compared to other dating-sims. It will take you about a minimum of 15-20 hours to complete your three year stay on Earth. And that's just to get one ending. If you want to get all five, it might take you up to 100 hours. That might sound scary, but honestly, the game mixes it up enough with the dialogue, and the battling, and the events that pop up like summer vacation trips and winter vacation trips, that you will feel COMPELLED to continue for as long as it takes. Once I played the game for about 30 minutes, it hooked me. Then I only put the game down to sleep and eat until I finished. The quality is just absolutely no comparison to a hentai-brand dating-sim, where you just click through the horrible dialogue until the game is over. It's good.

In fact, despite the overwhelming flaw with dating-sims as a whole, this is a pretty damn good game. Unlike other dating-sims, the characters are actually interesting. The dialogue is actually funny. The women don't just throw themselves at you the second you compliment them. You actually have to get to know them over the process of three years. The plot is actually interesting, and it has plot twists to boot. There's an RPG in the middle to offer variety of gameplay. The dating aspect is such a natural process instead of just a rushed sequence of events that you actually begin to feel romantically involved with your would-be girlfriend. Bloody Bride is everything that a dating-sim should be.

I'll say that again to drive home the point. Bloody Bride is everything that a dating-sim should be.

However, there is a downside.

First, this is a dating-sim. Dating-sims in general, aren't that great. As long as they take the same format of still-frames being recycled and limited interactivity, the dating-sim genre is going to have a glass ceiling in terms of quality. Bloody Bride or any other dating-sim is never going to be Final Fantasy or Halo. No dating-sim can reach that high, in my opinion.

Secondly, the ending... eh... is a letdown. I mean, with most dating-sims, I know I'm getting a reward at the end. I'm getting to see some naughty pictures. In non-hentai dating-sims, I tried to adjust my expectations, but they still let me down. In the ending that I got for the girl that I chased, I don't feel it was worth all the work I did to get there. It wasn't even as romantic as I thought it could've been. They should've put a lot more effort into making a suitable ending.

If it weren't for the ending, I would've given Bloody Bride an 8, because I really enjoyed the journey. I felt driven to keep playing the game, and I enjoyed everything up until the ending about as much as I could possibly enjoy a dating-sim. It was great. However, the ending really did piss me off enough to knock down the score to a 6. It's possible that the other 4 endings are a lot better, so take that into account. I may go back and try to get some of those other endings. However, it is still a game that is worth playing, and I encourage all dating-sim fans to do so. You owe it to yourself.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/03/06