"I couldn't seem to find any sugar around here..."

But then, there's nothing about sugar in this game, besides the Japanese title. This game is based in a Japanese animation series which is (at the time of this review) still running in Japan, and in which two little witches, named Chocolat and Vanilla, try to become the next queen of their world. While they are also friends, apart from rivals, In order to do so they will need to collect hearts of guys.

While such story may seem eventually weird, that's exactly what this game is about: collecting hearts of guys. Such premise could seem way more fitting to another type of games (such as, for example, dating simulations), but by turning the main action of this game into a platform game, the producers also gave this game the power to be incredibly boring. You will be collecting hearts of guys, but that's all there is to it!

Or maybe not... you can unlock a very few mini-games, based in the levels, where you will need to perform tasks such as getting the hearts of 30 guys, and the likes of it. You can also unlock cut scenes (the ones seen in the middle of the game, with the same graphics seen during the levels), and even unlock items by performing in-level tasks, which can then be equipped to increase the 4-area based stats of your characters. Strangely, none of those equippable items seem to affect your game play in an important way, making the side quest of acquiring them all nothing else than worthless time.

By now, I may not have been able to convince you on how boring the game is. Therefore, I think you should think about it. Mostly, in in each game play session, you start at Chocolat and Vanilla's house (and you will always control the girl that you picked when the game first started), then you have to head to the main map (seen as a round world, where you simply pick your next location), pick as many levels as it takes to get a minimum amount of X points (a value which is shown in the main map) and then proceed to the stage you want to play at that time.

When reaching the inside of the stage, you will see some guys, girls and animals roaming around. While you can simply press a certain key to "seduce" the guys, having up to 5 of them follow your character for a while, whose hearts you can later acquire. However, if you are attacked by an animal, you will lose all of them, and the girls seem to take one of them away. Mostly, it turns out being a"get as many guys, get their hearts and head for the goal as late as possible" type of game, which is obviously boring, as you will be doing it across the same levels over and over again, until you complete the game. As an interesting bug, I would have to state that whatever the color of they guys' hearts are, the score acquired for them is fully random. Personally, I found times where a certain combination gave me more than 3000 points, only to give me a mere 35 of those a few moments later. Where's consistency? Not here, for sure.

To make things even less interesting, before entering each stage you even get to see the layout of that area, with the starting and ending points clearly shown. They even allow you to see the "secret" areas, where you can go to get more guys, awarding you even more points! Thanks for the surprises, or maybe not...

So, we could start to think if the graphics are go... which they aren't. Don't get me wrong, they aren't bad either, but they will mostly resemble ones seen in the previously released handheld console by Nintendo. The producers could have added a few sequences taken from the series or something like that, but besides the main screen (well, the usual one, where you are supposed to press start to continue), everything is seen with the same graphical quality as the level themselves.

The sound effects are interesting, with the player even being awarded the possibility to hear the voices of the characters, possibly voiced by the same people as in the series, but that's something I am not sure of. The musics are mostly uninteresting, the kind of ones which are always repeating themselves and which you may like to turn off a few minutes after starting to play. Quoting a friend of mine, "I can't understand how you, people, can stand it".

So, who should get this game? With a huge play time but really boring levels, this is probably one of those games which only the fans of the anime series may be wanting to get, even more since it requires no knowledge of the language.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 06/03/06