Video Game / Umineko: Golden Fantasia

Welcome to the Symphony of the Golden Dreams

There is a lone island named Rokkenjima where the events surrounding a legendary witch repeat endlessly. When will October 4th and 5th, 1986 finally come to an end? This tale of "Umineko" seems to be a little different than usual...

"Looks like I'll be joining forces with you this time!"
"How long can you keep that facade up? You should beg if you want to borrow my powers!"

Having the witch by your side is extremely reassuring. With her powers, weave a new tale on this mysterious island.

Umineko: Golden Fantasia (Released in Japan under the name Ougon Musoukyoku), is a PC fighting game in the vein of Melty Blood, developed and published by 07th Expansion, as a spin-off of the visual novel Umineko: When They Cry. It loosely follows the story of the visual novels about a series of mysterious deaths and disappearances that occur during October 4th and 5th, 1986, in the island of Rokkenjima.

The game features ten of the characters from the novels. An Xbox 360 port, Ougon Musoukyoku X, has also been released, featuring the ten characters, plus three more added to the roster. And an expansion to the PC version, Ougon Musoukyoku CROSS, has also been released, featuring all the characters from the original and the Xbox port, plus three more characters, and three others added as updates. Gameplay-wise, it uses four buttons: Three attacks (Weak, Medium and Strong), and a fourth button to switch characters. The game uses a Tag Team mechanic where you can pick a team of two characters and confront another team of two, however, both characters share the same life meter, so, if one of them is defeated, both of them lose the round. It also uses a mechanic called "Meta World", which turns the stage into a dark, macabre version of itself, and allows the characters to perform a unique Super Move.

The game was added to Steam in December 2017 under the name Umineko: Golden Fantasia, published by MangaGamer. It's basically a localized version of CROSS. And in January 2021, a download code for CROSS came with first press copies of the Symphony of Catbox and Dreams port for the PS4 and Nintendo Switch.

Playable characters:

• Debuted in Ougon Musoukyoku: Ange Ushiromiya, Battler Ushiromiya, Beatrice, Chiester 410, EVA-Beatrice, Lucifer, Kanon, Ronove, Shannon and Virgilia.
• Debuted in X: George Ushiromiya, Jessica Ushiromiya and Rosa Ushiromiya.
• Debuted in CROSS: Dlanor A. Knox, Erika Furudo and Black Battler (True Final Boss)
  • Debuted in the Spring 2012 patch: Bernkastel, Lambdadelta and Williard H. Wright

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The first movement is beginning! BLITZ!

• Alternate Continuity: The game is considered this for the original visual novel.
• Assist Character: Several of them.
  • Chiester 410 can call her partners 00 and 45 for some attacks.
  • Black Battler can summon Rudolf and Kyrie for his Special 2, where the two of them proceed to rapidly shoot the opponent.
  • Ange can summon Sakutarou, who follows her and only attacks following Ange's command.
  • Dlanor can summon Cornelia and Gertrude to shield her, or join together for a massive Shield Bash.
  • The Stakes of Purgatory can be summoned by two characters in particular: Beatrice use them as projectiles, and Ange can summon them for some special moves. Lucifer can also summon all of her sisters for her Meta-Super.
  • Virgilia can summon her Goat Butlers to slug the opponent around (including a whole crowd of them with the SP variant), and her Meta-Super has her summoning Odin.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Pretty much everyone. Special mention to Battler and George, who dress the most conservatively, suit and tie.
• Bizarrchitecture: The City of Books stage. The characters are standing on a transparent platform in front of a background eerily reminiscent of a M.C. Escher painting, more specifically, Relativity.
• Chess Motifs: The rounds open with "First Movement", "Second Movement", etc, and close with "Check Mate!"
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The AI has a bad habit of foregoing the directional sequence before a special attack, leading to potentially frustrating scenarios like AI!Battler invoking Meta-World and blowing you away with three Meta-Supers in a row, which would be downright impossible for a human player to do when taking stick movements into account.
• Dark World: This is what the Meta-World mechanic does, turning the locations into a more fantastic and macabre version of itself, enveloped in night.
• Developer's Foresight: In Ougon Musoukyoku, you can't choose teams composed of the same character (Battler/Battler or EVA/EVA, for example). However, if you hack the game to do it, you can find out that the developers added quotes for calling the characters (every time you change the active character by doing a Normal Touch, the active character will call the other). For example, in an Erika/Erika team, Erika will say "Witch of Truth!", her title, during a Normal Touch. Also, the characters sometimes have conversations with their partners in the Arcade mode. Guess what? Even same character teams have this. For example, if you play Arcade mode using a Lucifer/Lucifer team, during their conversation Lucifer will scold the other one for not being so effective in battle.
• Dragged into Drag: Kanon gets this by Jessica during their ending◊, where he's cosplaying as Reimu.
• The Dog Bites Back: In the trailers every time Rosa appears, she shoots and furiously beats the crap out of Eva-Beatrice and Beatrice (in the main series the 2 witches had particularly targeted her). Even in some of Rosa's storymodes, she has the possibility of making these 2 pass a very bad quarter of an hour.
• Enemy Mine: Bound to happen if you have two characters who are normally against each other fight alongside each other (like for instance, Battler and Beatrice).
• Eternal Engine: The Boiler Room stage.
• EX Special Attack: You can spend 1 SP to perform stronger special attacks.
• Gangplank Galleon: The Library Fleet stage.
• The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: In the story scenario of Rosa and Beatrice, EVA-Beatrice is the final boss.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Some of the stages have characters who'd normally be at each other's throats hang around with each other in the background spectating the battle. Special mention should go to the Witches' Smoking Room stage which, in a reference to Twilight of the Golden Witch, has Beatrice, Ronove, Virgilia and Battler (as the Endless Sorceror) sitting down watching the fight alongside EVA-Beatrice, Lambdadelta and Bernkastel.
  • In addition, some of the more comedic endings also have this going on.
• Gratuitous French: Almost all on-screen text that appears during battle is accompanied by a grammatically-dubious French translation. for example, "Guard" is translated as the verb "Garder", which means "Keep", rather than the noun "Garde", and "Dash" is translated as "Tiret" (the typographical sign).
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • Beatrice wields a long pipe, similar to an evil cigarette holder, and can also use it as a Magic Wand.
  • Bernkastel relies on weaponized fragments, her cat minions and blue serpent beams as part of her arsenal.
  • Lambdadelta with candies, and her Meta-Super is a giant present comet.
  • Virgilia with a Flying Broomstick and candlesticks.
• Improbably Female Cast: Out of 18 playable characters (Not counting Black Battler), 13 are female and only 5 are male.
• Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: All ladies to varying degrees, but Beatrice and Virgilia take the cake, as they wear long dresses that never get in the way.
• Leet Lingo: Lambdadelta's move list is named in such a fashion.
• Long Song, Short Scene: The game uses songs directly taken out of the visual novel, like goldenslaughterer or haze and worldend dominator, which usually last for about at least five minutes, on a game where the average match doesn't last more that 3 minutes, which means you won't hear all of the song unless you deliberately pause the game. The music that plays during the pre and post-match cutscenes in Arcade mode is even worse, since most of them only consist of two lines of dialogue.
• Magic Skirt: Everyone with a skirt is in violation of Knox's 2nd. The one exception is Chiester, but not because of the cut of her skirt; her midair splits would fully expose her crotch even if she wore a full skirt.
• Mythology Gag: Nearly 90% of the attacks are these, in fact, the game itself is full of this.
• No Ending: If you're not using specific pairings, you just get a picture of a gold bar with the words "WINNER" after beating all opponents.
• Power Floats: Bernkastel, Lambdadelta and Lucifer: They have no need to walk, instead floating across the field.
• Scenery Porn: The game has most possibly the most detailed and beautiful battle backgrounds EVER, especially the Meta World ones.
• School Festival: One of the stages is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: A School Festival with a band performing on the background, dressed like Touhou Project characters.
• Shotoclone:
  • Battler and his Palette Swap Black Battler are the closest this game has to this. Both have a projectile move, an anti-air move and a rushing move.
  • Beatrice counts as well, her specials not only resemble the Hadouken and Shoryuken, she also has a Rushing move as well.
• Shout-Out:
  • Erika's alternate color is Hatsune Miku, and one of her win poses mimics Iori Yagami's Evil Laugh.
  • Willard's alternate color is Kaito.
  • Battler's alternate color looks like Peter White without rabbit ears.
  • The kick attack that Ronove does with his Elegant Cutter counter looks an awful lot like Rugal's Genocide Cutter.
• Skyscraper City: The Skyscraper Rooftop stage.
• Some Dexterity Required: Meta-Supers are done by pressing forwards, and then doing a half-circle forwards motion. Going from forwards to back without accidentally doing back+up (which makes you jump backwards) takes a bit of practice. Especially bad for George's Meta-Super, which is a Counter-Attack that needs to be done with very precise timing for maximum efficiency.
• Tag Team: Gameplay is centered around this, you can pick two characters and switch them in the middle of battle. Several teams have "fixed events" that discuss some events of the plot.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: This is bound to happen since some characters aren't too keen on fighting alongside others. For instance:
  • In Rosa and Chiester 410's story, the latter clearly doesn't want to have anything to do with the former, which makes sense if you were to assume that Rosa's the "Black Witch" responsible for killing one of her sisters.
• True Final Boss: If you can complete the Arcade Mode in Hard without losing a single round, you will have a final battle "to end the game", where you have to fight two Black Battlers in the same team.
• Whole Costume Reference: In the School Festival stage, the band performing on the background are dressed as Touhou Project characters, with the lead singer, rhythm guitar and bass dressed as Reimu Hakurei, Marisa Kirisame and Sakuya Izayoi respectively. Jessica herself also does this for her Meta-Super: She changes her clothes to those of Marisa, and fires an upwards Master Spark. She also does it in one of her victory animations (minus the huge laser, of course). And in Jessica's ending along with Kanon, the latter is forced to dress as Reimu.
• World of Buxom: Just like in the visual novel, Ougon musoukyoku has shown that Lambdadelta is a lot more...stacked◊ than one would expect her to be. Not nearly as big as some of the other women in the series, but definitely not tiny.
• Yaoi Fangirl: Played for laughs In Virgilia and Ange's ending.

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CHECK MATE!

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