Cultures and religions around the world have vastly different ideas of what Hell is, who goes there, and what it looks like. Adding to its extensive mythos requires enough familiar elements that players recognize Hell but enough new twists to warrant yet another reimagining. Tengoku Struggle -Strayside- approaches this task with lore that is both serious and silly and characters who are at times both savage and soft. These juxtapositions stand upon a foundation of heart and ambition, and while the game consistently delivers on the former, it isn’t as steady with the latter.
Tengoku Struggle combines elements from Japanese folklore with unique twists that modernize the concept of Hell, treating it as an otherworldly correctional facility connected to Japan. Prisoners who have displayed good behavior can spend the rest of their sentence working a job in Asakusa among the living. The most heinous of sinners, however, continue to be punished until their soul disappears—unless they have unfinished business when they were alive to keep their soul firmly intact. As expected from the same team that delivered the lore-intensive Olympia Soirée, Tengoku Struggle spares no expense in establishing how its version of Hell functions. Details about Hell’s conventional mythology and the game’s own additions are explored in the story and helpfully cataloged in the menu’s Library. The effortless blend of traditional elements and modern twists lets players easily believe in this version of Hell, even with its goofier, blatantly modernized aspects, like how King Enma, the ruler of Hell, sells merch of himself in Asakusa’s stores to raise additional funding.
The game isn’t entirely silly, however: when five of Hell’s criminals escape, King Enma sends his adopted daughter—default name Rin—and a not-so-merry band of four prisoners to stake out Asakusa and drag the escapees back to Hell. As a provisional Hell Guardian, it’s Rin’s job to lead and keep the prisoners in line. However, the hardened criminals naturally see her provisional status—and gender—as a weakness to exploit. While this setup unsurprisingly paints the sinners in a negative light, it lays down one of Tengoku Struggle’s major expectations: watching the prisoners grow to respect and, eventually, love Rin. This setup neatly comes to fruition at the end of each love interest’s route, but at the cost of a different story expectation: Rin and the prisoners must defeat the escapees in battle and bring them back to Hell, but they can’t just train to get stronger and challenge their adversaries. The story quickly establishes the escapees as impossible to defeat—unless the route’s love interest can unlock the true potential of their Desire.
Desires are magical skills developed from the host’s lingering desires from their time among the living. These skills range from ice powers to shooting a gun without running out of bullets. The nature of the characters’ Desires, combined with battling the escapees, suggests Tengoku Struggle is an action-oriented otome game, with romance serving as a supporting pillar, which isn’t the case in practice. The only way for each love interest to power up their Desire is for them and Rin to trust each other completely. The result is Rin spends most of each route on dates and doing other mundane activities with the route’s love interest to raise their trust. Rin gets to see the unexpected side of each guy, and some scenarios are incredibly heartfelt, like how Yona, a pirate samurai who took lives when he was alive, has a soft spot for children.
While these ordinary encounters seem like a reasonable way to intermingle the game’s action with its romance, the mundane leaves no room for the extraordinary. Tengoku Struggle emphasizes the need for the love interests and villains to battle but focuses too much on being a slice-of-life story with supernatural elements—to the point where some characters even comment on the surprising lack of action. The few existing battles aren’t as nicely choreographed as other action-focused otome titles like Hakuoki: Demon of the Fleeting Blossom or Birushana: Rising Flower of Genpei. Once Rin and the love interest have complete trust in each other, they face that route’s target escapee in a final bout, using their maxed-out Desire as little more than a makeshift deus ex machina to save the day. The game struggles to balance its innate desire for stylish action scenes peppered with unique bits of lore with its push for a more homely romance story featuring fantastical, supernatural elements.
Each route also feels surprisingly disconnected from the others. Although Rin and love interests must round up five escapees, each love interest only targets one of them. The final, “true” route involves a massive clean-up of the entire enemy operation that has been built up over the course of the story. Otherwise, each route focuses on one love interest and tries to focus on one escapee. But because Rin spends most of her time on cute dates with the prisoners, there isn’t much of an opportunity to explore the intriguing philosophical ideas the escapees present, such as what causes people to sin and when and if sin can be justified.
At the start, you choose to develop Rin’s relationship with one of three of the prisoners: Sharaku, who wants to defeat the executioner Asaemon; Yona, who has his sights set on the samurai Sansaburo and his partner Izumo no Okuni; and Kikunosuke, who wants to convince his sister Azami to come back to Hell peacefully. Although each route successfully concludes each love interest’s quarrels with their specified escapee, they all have a lingering sense of incompleteness as the remaining escapees remain free in Asakusa.
After completing the initial three routes, you unlock JacK’s, a human who is allied with the escapees. As an initial adversary, his route feels much more balanced between romance and the story’s overarching conflict, since getting close to him is innately tied to getting closer to the escapees. The final route of Tengoku Struggle is the great thief Goemon’s. As the “true” route, his has the most relevant narrative depth—specifically about Rin, who has no recollection of her time alive—but it doesn’t necessarily pick up the slack from the previous storylines. Because certain details aren’t introduced or explored thoroughly in previous routes, some characters’ sudden relevance in Goemon’s route feels almost spur-of-the-moment, as if every illustrated character has to be important in some way, so they become pertinent only when the story needs them to be. Tengoku Struggle isn’t nearly as masterful at weaving together twists and turns as a game like Virche Evermore -ErroR: Salvation- or even Olympia Soirée. The resulting finale does tie up all the loose ends and is satisfying, but it’s not enough to make the game one of the otome genre’s best.
Tengoku Struggle is a good, but not outstanding, game. It plays with all manner of expectations, with some successes and missteps, resulting in an above-average experience. Its memorable high points don’t reach the same heights as other otome titles, so it doesn’t feel quite like a must-play game. But it’s a good enough experience for those interested in its core concepts, which feature a fun blend of lightheartedness and earnestness with modernity and tradition. Playing with expectations and mixing together unlike elements can have a great payoff when done right, but Tengoku Struggle -Strayside- falls just short of greatness. It doesn’t leave you disappointed so much as it leaves you wishing the story had followed its own inclinations a little more. If it had either balanced out the romance and action or went all-in on the romance, it could have risen above the sum of its parts. Despite its shortcomings, it’s still an enjoyable experience as unique as the disparate elements it tries to unify.
