Hi mina-san today I have a new post about the Sonicomi Game, after I already showed you the insides of the limited edition box, this time I will talk about the Game itself. I already finished one of the 16 Endings, so I can give you a few infos, pictures and whatever about the gameplay and the setting, even though I couldn’t understand everything so far.
Preperations
Sonicomi is a japanese game and these guys from there won’t make it too easy for Gaijin like us. Before installing the game you have to set the locale setting of your OS to japan first.
Under Windows 7 it should work like this
So now one last step in advance, install the SdActi authentification tool and type in the code written on the SdActi manual. Now the Game can be installed and should start without problems.
Menue
The menu has a nice design and allows a smooth navigation, at first there are three main options, after you cleared one ending two new options will be unlocked, Free Mode and Clear List.
In Free Mode you can take pictures of Sonikowithout time limit or blinking Hud signs, you can dress her the way you want and can use every set you’ve unlocked in the Game.
There is side menu which lets you choose between different posing options, they differ from set to set and you can also trigger certain reactions of Soniko. In this mode the pictures you take are stored on your pc in 560×420 pixels. Clear List is just an overview about the endings you’ve cleared, there are 16 possible endings you also get an overview about the cleared client requests.
Setting
The player takes the role of Cameraman-san, like Producer-san in Idolmaster ^^. The player first gets in contact with Soniko on a concert during a failed stage dive of her.We talk a bit with her and say goodbye. The next day we see Soniko again as our model for the shooting. After that her manager is impressed by our job and Cameraman-san end up as Soniko’s official photograph.
The character of Soniko which most of you might know as Nitro+ mascot or just as illustration is very well fleshed out in the Game; she is cute, kind, a bit shy, sometimes insecure, but she’s also a very happy person. Soniko isn’t portrayed as a dumb sex bomb, she seems to have a real personality. Her voice is given to her by Ayano Yamamoto, a quite unique and cute voice 🙂
There are also other characters like Soniko’s devilish manager, her hot idol rival, Angie Gravite, the clients and so on. There’s also a guest appearance of Danny Choo’s Mirai.
Unlike in most visual novels, the Soniko character is rendered in 3D, while other characters remain 2D. Thx to 3D Soniko can show emotions in a more detailed way, she has lots of different face expression, expressive gestics and a certain body language. The backgrounds are 2 and 3D.
The Game centers around gaining Soniko’s trust and maybe her love as well as supporting her in becoming a fully fledged gravure idol. On several ocassions you can talk with Soniko by choosing one sentences on the screen, you have to click one of the sentences within the time limit.
There are also rare occassion where you can touch Soniko, you can click the spot where you want to touch, I don’t think she would like it, if you suddenly touch her boobs, not that I’ve tried it ^^.
The routes in Sonicomi are decided by the answers, actions and decisions you choose,the style of the outfits you give to Soniko are very important as well as the succes in the photomissions.
Photomissions
The action part of Sonicomi are the photomissions, where you do shootings with Soniko for several clients, the missions are divided into selecting the location, choosing a matching outfit for the clients request and doing the shooting. There are many different clothes and accessoires you can choose from in many colors and designs and more stuff can be unlocked during the game.
example 01- photomission
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QdEfoMermU
example 02 – dressing up
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ7XdMjR5fQ
Soniko shows different reactions to your choice of outfits and helps you with choosing the right outfit, when she jumps in the air and raises her hands you did a good choice and can go straight to the shooting. The controls are similar to an egoshooter, you can move with the WASD keys and aim with the mouse, with the space key you can crouch and with X and C you can rotate the camera and a few more keys, in the mission you’ll probably be too busy too use all these keys.
The ENTER key is helpful when too many targets appear at the same time. It will clear all the targets at once, however you can use this key as long as camera symbols (D) remain in the bar.
You have to hit all the circles within the time limit, for getting better scores you should wait until the circles turn pink. When the stamina rows (A) turn pink you have to hit the right mouse button, a menue appears, where you can scroll with the mousewheel, motivating Soniko can be done by selecting the speech bubble, everytime you do this the motivation meter (B) goes up.
When it is full Soniko goes into action mode and strikes more dynamic poses which give you more chances to improve your score. You can even give her a short break to recharge her energy meter (C), which is neccesary during most shootings, without energy the shooting will be over. With another option you can let Soniko change her pose, from standing to sitting and lying down.
When the shooting is over you can see how you performed and how accurate your chosen oufit was, you can score SS, S, A, B, C, and D. D is pretty bad and will always give you a Bad Ending, it can be quite frustrating when you fail like this and it makes Soniko sad 🙁
Graphics & Sound
The visual appearance in this Game is a mix of 2D and 3D, during normal story Soniko is always 3D, the other characters are just 2D. In the photomissions everything is 3D. Soniko has some kind of cell shading and her motions are very refined, so she proably was rendered via motion capturing. The physix engine is responsible for the flow of her hair and the breast movement.
Sonicomi also makes use of effects like HDR, depth of field, soft focus and 8x anti aliasing. The effects are adjustable in different steps, surprisingly my machine can handle it at high quality.
The Game has a nice look, but there are a few flaws, the objects in the photomissions would look better with more detailed textures and also a few more polygons would have been nice, since some things appear quite chunky in the sets of the photomissions. Sometimes there are also a few clipping errors where Soniko’s body and her clothes intersect in a strange way.
The Soundtrack is cool, especially the theme song and the BGM, as I already said Soniko has a cute voice, but it’s a shame that the other characters have no voice.
Summary
Sonicomi is a nice Game and Nitro+ did a good job in giving their mascot a cute and likeable personality, in fact she is totally enchanting ^^. The story(at least what I understand from it) is nice and with 16 possible endings this Game offers a lot of playtime, even though I always ended with the same end so far, it’s quite tricky. The action part called photomission is fun and a curse at the same time, dressing Soniko in different fashion styles is fun even if you are restricted by the wishes of the clients and by Soniko’s reactions, quite a picky little girl ^^.
New clothes can be unlocked during the Game, there are a lot of different clothes and accesoires. The curse side is that the controls are not very precise during the photoshoot, maybe my mouse or I are at fault but sometimes it’s frustrating if you merely missed a target circle and the combo is corrupted, in my opinion the mouse aiming is a bit laggy. Another point of critic are the few save points in the Game, you can’t save before important decisions and you can’t save a certain outfit you’ve put on Soniko, the Game just allows you to save before a photomission and shortly after a photomission in most other visual novels you can save wherever you want.
I guess I couldn’t understand everything about the Game, because I can’t read a single japanese sign and AGTH won’t work so far, but that should be my impressions about Sonicomi from what I’ve understand, thx to years of watching anime I can at least understand some words Soniko says. Anyway the Game can be a lot of fun because of the interaction with the cute 3d Soniko.
If you have any questions about the Gameplay or the Game itself, feel free to ask me ^^
A trial version can be found here, for the 2.0 Version you also have to change your locale.
exilehero
Fun fact: triple core CPUs are quad core CPUs that had one malfunctioning core so they turn it off and sell it as a 3 core. But they should work perfectly ! But that has nothing to do with Sonico haha.
Man, Sonico is always so cute and smiling. I can’t help but to feel happy when I see a cute girl smile. I’m glad that she isn’t portrayed as a dumb sex bomb as you said. Sonico looks way too cute and innocent for that.
Oh neat videos. This has way more game than I thought. Has a lot of really nice mechanics. Sonico also seems to have a lot of delicious outfits. This game looks really fun.
wieselhead
@exilehero, Haha meanie, but yeah it’s nothing to brag about
Soniko is a lovely 3d girl, I didn’t expect that she would be that cute ^_^.
Thx, but they aren’t mine, I thought they were showing the parts better than mere words could do. The photomissions are very important and with some practise I got better at them ^^
dressing her up is especially great with all the accessoires. The whole Game is fun 😀
Zai
Woo, thanks for posting this! I was curious about what this game is like. I wanna play.. mostly because I want to dress Soniko in cute outfits. Can I do this or do I need to play the action part to unlock stuff? I’m no good if I can’t understand what’s going on but I want to be Cameraman-san..
Hehe, Soniko looks so adorable and I’m glad they didn’t turn her into some bimbo. It looks like you have a lot of fun playing it. 😀
wieselhead
@Zai,
Yeah I felt like I should puplish this post since I flooded twitter with Soniko related posts ^^
Yeah you have to play the Game to unlock more and more outfits, maybe a savegame would make it easier for you.
Her character turned out lovely, I want to date her 😀 I love it even though I can’t read the signs.
Tier
She looks so happy in those screenshots XD It’s pretty cool seeing her evolve from mascot pinup to an actual character. Though, uhh, I gotta say, having seen most of her figures and most of her official artwork, it’s kinda weird seeing her wearing clothes …
I’d like to know more about this Angie person, she looks cute.
wieselhead
I’ll try to make her happy XD
Well, you can’t expect her to walk around in the city with a slutty dress, I guess.
In the shootings there are more risky outfits, but so far I haven’t unlocked them, unfortunately ^^
Hehe yeah, she is, my first reaction as I saw her, was “Can I do a shooting with her as well?”
Nopy
Cel shading does give characters a bit more emotion than 2D versions. It looks like a lot of work went into making this game, and I’m impressed that you could get through it without knowing how to read Japanese.
wieselhead
They put some effort in it.
Thx 🙂 I really wanted to play it. The things Soniko says and the way she reacts also help a bit.
I guess I was lucky that there are so many possible endings, so running into a bad end was rare for me.
Yesterday I just found a helpful guide which will probably be quite helpful for the other endings
BioToxic
Some of the costumes you can dress Sonico in look pretty neat. As you say some of the graphical work leaves much to be desired. Low res textures, clipping and low polygon count are kind of expected for these types of game, although Sonico herself looks quite nice. If you enjoy the game and the characters these aren’t much of a hindrance.
How have you found navigating the menus? Is it easy enough to pick up patterns or do you find yourself constantly having to rediscover what’s going on? Looks like there’s tons of options.
The actual ‘game’ part sounds quite frustrating. The more relaxed dress-up part sounds more enjoyable.
wieselhead
Jup, I always try to unlock new costumes ^^
Yeah thats right , the environment appears a bit outdated.
Well, some locations look better than others, but at least the 3D Soniko is very pretty and cute and moves quite smooth.
Most of the menues are in english or self explainig, finding the right outfits for her is quite easy.
Im enjoying it a lot, if all the character would have a voice, it would easier to understand whats going on between Soniko and them.
It isn’t as bad as it sounds.
Actually I improved a lot in the photomission during last weekend,
I guess I just needed to practice a bit and buy a new mousepad.
Duqs
What sort of vidcard should i be running t play this game? XD
Advance merry christmas and a happy new year! =)
wieselhead
something like a GeForce 7600 or above, 256mb memory on it is recommended.
Ah thanks a lot, have a merry christmas as well ^-^
tsurugiarashix
You have triple core? I so jelly -_-
I just got new desktop for Christmas and glad I did since my old dual core laptop was trying to hard with it. I liked it so far too, but like yourself, I find trying to use the mouse sort of slow to react and that is playing on the minimal settings. Might fair better on my new system (or the site might have a patch fix). Best part of this game is the photo shoot and the outfits, which I have not unlocked half of the ones I want yet. Still on my first route though and only play it few times every other week. (Just started Kanojo wa Sora ni Inoranai -quantum girlfriend- for the time being) Although, I am tempted to see what the dead ends are like.
Oh and for the note, I tried touching the boob option on a separate state and yeah, did not go over too well when you meet with the word “Hentai” three times, lol.
wieselhead
Nothing to be jealous about, I got it for 40€ on ebay.
A nice to see another player of Sonicomi, you know a bit japanese, right?
Oh thats nice, I guess I also need something new this year ^^
The mouse controls feel a bit strange, one day its and another day it aimes like a mulish donkey.
Yeah that are very cool parts of the Game, but I also like to interact with Soniko, she’s so adorable.
I play it a bit more often, with a break of a few days after every attempt, so far I cleared 2 Endings, but the last two
attempts ended in a bad end, even though Im using a small fragmentary guide for the Game.
Haha I see, out of curiosity I tried it last time as well, but after seeing her reaction I felt bad for her.
Maybe there is a part in the Game where she likes that kind of touching XD