Let The Shining Power Of Your Heart Bring You Victory As Your Theme Music Plays is a GMless game built by guessing what Naruto is probably like. And now that I've calibrated your expectations, here's the stinger: it's really good.
Shining Power is 10 pages, black and white, with no illustrations but an extremely easy to read layout.
It's also surprisingly mechanically intricate despite being lightweight. Combats are handled by a short flowchart. There's character classes. You have something called a Will token which you can spend to win fights, and which you recover by losing fights. It's tight design, and does a good job of replicating the back-and-forth movement from victory to defeat that's present in (most) battle anime.
The writing of the game is very conversational, and a little unsure of itself, and it could absolutely get away with being more confident. There's a lot of cool flavor implied in the rules text, and there's a bunch of neat gimmicks embedded in the rules too---for example, your character class also comes with a roleplaying hook for the person on your left. There's also optional flirty combat.
Length-wise, this game is more or less as long as you want it to be. It has a built-in mechanic to trigger the end-game when no one can think of any more scenes to frame, and that's extremely neat. I'd guess that in most situations it wraps up in 1--3 hours.
Overall, this is an excellent game. If you like story (and especially character-relationship) focused gameplay, and if you don't need crunchy mechanics in your combat, and if you like at least some of the tropes orbiting peripherally around Naruto, you will have a lot of fun with this.
Minor Issues:
-What happens if two people spend their Will simultaneously to trigger their theme music?
← Return to unplaytested game
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Let The Shining Power Of Your Heart Bring You Victory As Your Theme Music Plays is a GMless game built by guessing what Naruto is probably like. And now that I've calibrated your expectations, here's the stinger: it's really good.
Shining Power is 10 pages, black and white, with no illustrations but an extremely easy to read layout.
It's also surprisingly mechanically intricate despite being lightweight. Combats are handled by a short flowchart. There's character classes. You have something called a Will token which you can spend to win fights, and which you recover by losing fights. It's tight design, and does a good job of replicating the back-and-forth movement from victory to defeat that's present in (most) battle anime.
The writing of the game is very conversational, and a little unsure of itself, and it could absolutely get away with being more confident. There's a lot of cool flavor implied in the rules text, and there's a bunch of neat gimmicks embedded in the rules too---for example, your character class also comes with a roleplaying hook for the person on your left. There's also optional flirty combat.
Length-wise, this game is more or less as long as you want it to be. It has a built-in mechanic to trigger the end-game when no one can think of any more scenes to frame, and that's extremely neat. I'd guess that in most situations it wraps up in 1--3 hours.
Overall, this is an excellent game. If you like story (and especially character-relationship) focused gameplay, and if you don't need crunchy mechanics in your combat, and if you like at least some of the tropes orbiting peripherally around Naruto, you will have a lot of fun with this.
Minor Issues:
-What happens if two people spend their Will simultaneously to trigger their theme music?