WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS OVERT SEXUAL CONTENT, IMAGERY, AND DESCRIPTIONS! Please be aware that this is an M Rated Adult game with significant sexual content and as such, the content is discussed in this review. You have been duly warned.
Well, I wondered when I’d hit my limit for inappropriately sexual games and it looks like Omega Labyrinth Life may have put things over the edge! Omega Labyrinth Life is the sequel to Omega Labyrinth for the Vita, a roguelite RPG where your female characters grow in bust size as they level up. It was actually so questionable that it wasn’t released in English. Fast forward to now and we have the sequel in English in its fully flowered glory thanks to D3 Publishing. Nary a scene has been cut from the Switch version, while the PS4 is getting a ‘toned down’ version, whatever that means.
Anyway, Omega Labyrinth Life is here, its queer…wait. No, that’s correct too. All the characters are female and several of them are unquestionably gay in the Switch version, not that it ever gets too racy in that regard. You play Hinata Akatsuki, a schoolgirl who has always wanted to attend the Academy. Unfortunately, when she arrives, the Academy’s magical garden withers away and all the other girls blame her except for Berune Orenji, another overly friendly and cute girl. As Hinata meets and greets everyone, she charms her way into their hearts. Yeah, it’s all wholesome like that. Seriously, you’re planting and watering flowers, harvesting fruits, and exploring Holy Caves on the Academy grounds.
However, there’s a whole lot of subtext, and a heck of a lot of breasts. Every single character’s breasts bounce every time they talk. Every. Single. Time. And the menu lists all their cup sizes, which there’s a running tally of during the gameplay. Turns out in this magical Academy, breasts are filled with Omega power that allows you to magically affect the world around you. And you use the Omega power in your breasts for a variety of functions. It’s actually a weird dichotomy, being wholesome and innocent on one hand and wildly pervy on the other. I’ve seen some pervy games in the past, games like Hunie Pop, Moero Chronicle Hyper, and Date A Live: Rio Reincarnation, but this one manages to mostly be cleaner and still takes the cake too.
You see, Omega Labyrinth Life has a few um, special functions. One of these is Size up, in which you find unidentified items in dungeons and have to identify them…by titty-fucking them. Seriously. You place the item between your breasts and bounce them around with either the analog sticks or the touch screen and watch them grow and redden until they burst forth with sparkling white magic, revealing the object. This could be a sword, a book, whatever. Either way it looks pretty much like a penis. Also, I’m fairly certain you can’t actually fail at this.
In addition to Size Up, there’s possibly the most overtly sexual minigame I’ve ever seen. It’s called Skill Bloom, and you pretty much have to do it to progress in the game. Skill bloom reveals a mostly static image of whichever girl you’re ‘developing’ in a rather compromising position. You then spend nectar from the garden to help her ‘Bloom’. Blooming consists of touching her all over wherever heart icons appear: the neck, the breasts, between the legs, the ass, etc. As she blooms, a flower tattoo appears on her and she gets more and more excited. Then her clothes mostly burst off, leaving her scantily clad and you, um, touch her flower. This will eventually freeze time and all your touches hit her at once causing her to shudder, squeal, and, well, squirt all over. At this point, you bottle up her bodily fluids, which have literally soaked the screen and use them to water your flowers. I can’t make this stuff up.
Skilll Blooms are essential in the game as they give a variety of permanent bonuses and special abilities that you’ll need to survive the later dungeons. Enemies get tougher fast, and if you die, you lose all the equipment you had in the dungeon unless you have a bottle of Fairy Wings, which allows you to retain your items if you die. On top of the Skill Blooms and Size Ups, there are also Spas and Flower Spas in the game where you relax in the warm, inviting water and your boobs are touch screen enabled. Your breasts can also grow in size, sometimes to ridiculous proportions. Every couple of level ups in the dungeon raises your cup size. I got up to a G or H a few times, but in the unlimited dungeons, you can get all the way to Z, a size that makes no sense in terms of physics and is utterly ridiculous. Of course, all of this except for bosom growth can be completely bypassed if it’s too pervy for you or you just get tired of the same imagery. There’s a Skip option for every overtly sexual interactive section of the game, which within a few hours, I was happy to use.
Moving on from the rampant sexuality of the game, there’s actually a bit of meat to gameplay. You have to manage the Academy garden and plant flower seeds as you slowly revitalize segments of the garden by completing dungeons. These seeds are used to synthesize bonuses for weapons and fulfill requests from the students for various items. You’ll also generate nectar and Omega power, the two currencies in the game. You can modify the garden to suit your tastes, turning it from a flower garden to a graveyard to a hedge maze (to an extent) depending on the curios you select to fine-tune the look you want. It’s all optional, but it provides an interesting diversion.
Dungeons also require more strategy than you might expect. They’re turn-based but not menu-driven, so when you approach an enemy, you attack, then they get to and so forth (or vice versa), depending on the range and your agility versus theirs. It feels almost like real time combat, but it adds an interesting twist, as even using an item from your menu constitutes a move and when the enemies get more powerful, you can easily be overwhelmed or killed if you’re not focused on healing or didn’t bring the right items into the dungeon. By using the obstacles in the dungeon, you can manipulate your enemies into spots where you get the first attack and your partner hits before the enemy can, wiping them out. They do the same to you though, so don’t let your guard down!
In dungeons, one of the most irritating things I found, especially early on, is the item limit. You can only hold 30 items at a time and it’s ridiculously irritating as you’re constantly finding stuff. The game gives you several types of purses and you can store items in them or convert items into Omega Power with them, but you’re still constantly hitting that limit. Even when I upgraded my capacities at the store, I still found myself filling up my items and my storage locker (only at the Academy, not in dungeons) much more quickly than I’d have liked, leaving me with a rather frustrating amount of menu management as I had to continually decide what to keep, drop, sell, or convert to Omega.
By the time I really got the feel for the game, I was midway through the second set of Holy Caves. Dungeons are quite satisfying at this point, even if they’re not the most graphically intensive. In fact, most of the game looks pretty basic aside from the breast physics and anime-style artwork. Any 3D graphics are mid-range. Clean, but nothing special. The same goes for the musical choices. They’re limited and they get irritating fast. I really wish this game had a better soundtrack, but at the same time, there’s not really a whole lot happening. The story is pretty basic, simply rescue the garden with the help of the girls and some fairies, and make friends with everyone along the way. There’s very little immersion and the best part of the game is probably the dungeon-crawling, which does seem to take a while to get to now and again. All the dialogue is in Japanese with written English, not a surprise. It does seem particularly squeaky though, so if that bugs you, you can just turn voices off.
Now I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. While Omega Labyrinth life is undoubtedly perverted, it doesn’t show breasts or any other genitalia. Everything is covered by mysterious fog, steam, or bits of clothing in every single scene and as of yet, I have not seen a way to remove that. I’m not sure if that’s intentional on the part of the designers or if it was required to get publishing certification, but it’s definitely cleaner than it might seem at first glance. I’m leaving out plenty of other mini-games that will surprise you as well. The designers over at Matrix Software were rather creative with all the options they doled out. Ultimately though, this is definitely an overtly sexual game and it’s almost impossible to forget it.
It’s hard to really love or hate Omega Labyrinth Life. On the surface, it’s misogynistic, sexually charged, and so far over the top that it’s hard to stomach. But at the same time, it’s a simplistic, cute dungeon-crawling rogue-like RPG with a moderately complex garden management system and some cheeky dialogue. I found myself torn between loving and hating the game from moment to moment and ultimately it’s not only playable but fairly challenging if you aren’t paying close attention to your loadouts, skill settings, and companion choices. Sure it’s outrageous, but it’s also a rewarding game with a solid challenge curve…or curves, I suppose. As for which version to get, the game is unquestionably better on the Switch and honestly better undocked, which allows for use of the touch screen in all the *ahem* minigames. The game is pretty much designed for a touch screen and it just doesn’t look the greatest on a full size TV anyway, at least in the 3D segments. The drawn art looks fantastic no matter what.
At $60, this is one that you’ll have to be a pretty hard-core Otaku to pick up however. The price point is pretty high on this one and it puts into question whether you’ll get your money’s worth or not. Omega Labyrinth Life is a fully realized game with enough unique qualities to interest a certain niche market, but it definitely isn’t a game that should command a full retail price, especially digitally. Take a look, and if it’s your style, you might enjoy the spirited fun and spectacularly large mammaries that come with the second installment in the Omega Labyrinth series.
This review was based on a digital copy of Omega Labyrinth Life supplied by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes. Omega Labyrinth Life is also available for the Playstation 4 in a censored version. All images are screenshots taken from actual gameplay.