[RHDNBot]

Update By: PhantomandGhost

Ore ga Omae o Mamoru is an action-adventure dungeon crawler, created by the short-lived brand  Otomate Forte, who specialised in games targeted at girls outside of the typical visual-novel genre.

Originally developed by Vingt et un Systems as an action RPG, several big names in the Otome field such as character artist Kazuki Yone were brought in to create a game that would appeal to a wider audience.

The result? You’ll have to decide for yourself! Noted by Japanese fans for being surprisingly challenging, English speakers now have a chance to play this interesting piece of history thanks to the release of a fully playable English patch!

Defeat ancient beasts as you navigate your way through a labyrinth of ancient ruins, searching for the place where the mysterious stone known as Magicite lies…

View an English trailer made for the patch here!

RHDN Project Page

Relevant Link

[soulfunkdjx]

Thank you very much. It's working great on my flashcard on NEW 3DS XL!!!

[mikeprado30]

Never is a bad moment to get some overlooked games translated

Congrats and thanks a lot to the team involved on this project!

[Special]

...who specialised in games targeted at girls outside of the typical visual-novel genre.

So what's the story/this about?

[PresidentLeever]

Are boys still allowed to play?

[PhantomandGhost]

@mikeprado30 Thank you for your kind comments! I hope you enjoy 

@Special The game follows elite knight Ren, who together with his best friend Veres, are sent to explore recently-discovered ruins dating back to the ancient civilisation of Edenbar. They are tasked with determining the existence of a mysterious stone known as Magicite, said to be imbued with mythical powers.

At it's heart, it's a dungeon-explorer with RPG-like stat boosting, side-quests, and a plot that gradually unfolds through cutscenes as you delve deeper into the ruins. It's definitely not as story-heavy as your typical otome game and there's only one ending so it's questionable whether it deserves to be classed as such, but I think that's something that's best to decide for yourself!

@PresidentLeever Yes, of course! I didn't want to say too much about my opinion because I thought it'd be really intresting to find out who other people felt the target audience was, but I think it's a game which can appeal to people of any gender. Certainly at least, I don't think it's something that should be avoided for fears that it's "too girly" or "too easy"!

[Tyrantnyx]

What other games were part of this plan to get otome gamers into other games? I searched for this game and found another was the DS Dungeon Maker, which I found pretty simplified from the PSP game, but had it's own style that was fun.

[PhantomandGhost]

Just those two, unfortunately! The Otomate Forte initative was very short-lived, and only lasted for a little over a year.

The second game they released (Date ni Game Tsui Wake Jane) was never translated, but you'd be right in thinking that it was related to Dungeon Maker DS, as it's actually a reskin of that game with added 'otome' elements such as new characters and art (sometimes also known as Dungeon Maker Girls Type)!

[killias2]

"Magicite"

Translation of maseki? Interesting to go with Magicite. Big FF6 fans?
I only bring it up because I was -just- reading the Legend of Localization discussion on the numerous ways to translate maseki, haha.

[PhantomandGhost]

Haha, ooh I love LoL! I didn't know he'd written about this specifically, but that's really intresting. The actual term used in the game is not "魔石" (magic stone), but "魔晶石" which is more 'magic crystal', but it seems like both have been translated as "Magicite" in various FF games.

Being such a key term in the game, I didn't think it would really sound right to translate it literally "the mysterious stone known as the 'Magic Crystal'", so I did what I often do when I'm stumped, which is to Google around and see how it was translated elsewhere. You wouldn't believe the number of refrences this game has to seemingly unrelated things such as the Hobbit and Norse mythology

[killias2]

Nice nice, that's a very reasonable approach, of course. Thank you for your work, I just couldn't help to mention it given that I was just reading it, haha. Have a good one!

[treos]

ok, been playing it using desmume for over an hour now and while it's not a bad game, it does have some seriously bad performance problems. whenever there's 2 or 1 large enemy on-screen or i enter a large room with multiple enemies off-screen the frame rate tanks and things get REAL sluggish.

combine that with the fact you're locked into attack animations vs already difficult to dodge enemies (a slime could kill you if you're not careful in this game) and the difficulty is WAY higher than it should be.

pause menu is a steady 60/00fps... i'm currently in the room with the hellhound and with that + 1 skeleton on-screen it's...~60/30 fps which is significantly slower. oddly this doesn't affect the music, only animation speed.

[Karmina]

Why is this for girls if the main characters are men?

[thr]

ok, been playing it using desmume for over an hour now and while it's not a bad game, it does have some seriously bad performance problems. whenever there's 2 or 1 large enemy on-screen or i enter a large room with multiple enemies off-screen the frame rate tanks and things get REAL sluggish.

stable 60 FPS here. are you using the latest desmume autobuild?

[KumikoFuji]

Anybody else have an issue with getting to the first boss in the second layer? I know the second switch must be changed to pink, but the game doesn't let me do it. It allows me to switch between yellow, green, and blue just fine, but it keeps blinking between colours when I try to switch to pink and the door doesn't open. I am playing on a DS Lite. Could this be a glitch?

EDIT: Tried it on PC, same issue. Am I just missing something? Here's a GIF showing the issue. I can also confirm I used the correct dump before patching.

Spoiler:

EDIT2: The colours are still glitched, but I managed to get past it. For those who are having this same graphical glitch, here's how you do it: change the first switch from the left to green, don't touch the second switch, change the third one to the blinking colours as shown in the gif, and change the fourth one to blue. From what I can understand, the switches should all the pink at the start but the game shows them as yellow instead, and the supposed yellow as the glitch shown. This is why the third switch in the gif also looks a little odd.

[kaiisen]

Maybe I'm rushing, but are you supposed to pick up quests right after you do the 1st one?

The other quests are there but they're gray so I can't pick them.

EDIT: OMG, I didn't know that number in front is the fee I have to pay for taking the respective quests lol I thought that was the amount I would receive from them. So far, the game is definitely interesting but difficult. I'm not sure if it's hard because it's meant to be hard, it just feels unbalanced. The Green Gel's behavior... I don't think it should stop right on your foot like that. Also the movements are quite sluggish to avoid attacks. Let's see how it develops as I get more skills and stuff.

Thank you!

[PhantomandGhost]

Whoops, I apologise for the delayed response!

@treos Slowdown when there are multiple enemies on screen is a known issue, unfortunately. It happens on real hardware even with the original cartridge, though there might be ways to alleviate it a bit as @thr suggests. Personally, I don't remember the slowdown being too much of an issue, but there definitely is a steep difficulty curve to begin with! I'm not ashamed to admit to relying on the cheats to get through playtesting with my DS still in one piece

@Karmina Perhaps they thought girls would prefer to stare at pretty boys as opposed to another girl? Alternatively, this could come from the fact that the game was in development as a typical action RPG before Otomate stepped in- there's actually an unused 3d model in the game with the same filename as the protagonist whose existence is a complete mystery! It might be that enough of the earlier work had been prepared that they thought it would be too challenging to reframe the whole story. Well, this is all speculation though!


@KumikoFuji I remember having this issue, actually. To be honest, I thought I was just doing something wrong, but it probably would have been a good idea to check if it happened with the unmodified game. I will look into it! Thank you for sharing the workaround, though!

@kaiisen I'm glad you got it working! The game does have its share of issues, that's for sure. But, I hope you can still get some fun out of it

[KumikoFuji]

Finished the game (minus grinding all the recipes and weapon upgrades), and I can confirm that outside that graphics glitch and the slowdown that is present in all versions, that there are no further issues.

The game is very enjoyable despite its flaws. I really liked the quest system and how you got a letter back. Trying to find a new save point when you reach a new layer is the hardest part, once you do that you can sit back and grind materials and quests to upgrade Ren. Somehow I missed 9% of skills despite getting all the treasure and finishing all the quests, but it's not like any of those skills could matter that much.

As a girl, I can confirm I prefer playing as a female protagonist (and then filling the rest of my party with male characters), and given how bishie Castlevania's protagonists already are, I don't really get what Otomate Forte was trying to do here. Still, I appreciate that a 'girly' game is good for once and allowed to be challenging instead of some dull party/mini games compilation. I wish they hadn't closed after this game, but given the glitches both this and their dungeon maker game had, I can't really fault japanese consumers for that.

Thank you for the patch. I've been wanting to play this game for seven years now, and it was worth the wait.

[PhantomandGhost]

@KumikoFuji Congratulations on finishing the game! I'm glad you enjoyed it And thank you for writing such a lovely message(!!) Hearing that makes working on it feel all the more worthwhile ^^