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This time I played Lucky Star Moe Drill, a quiz game for the Nintendo DS! I ended up playing this because I rewatched a bit of the anime recently and they referenced this game in an episode. The quickest way to describe this would be Brain Age with a Lucky Star skin.

There are two modes, Hitasura Drill and Drama Mode. Hitasura Drill is a straight run through of a battle with each character in the main game mode, solving addition/subtraction/multiplication/division problems, and maybe an extra bonus stage in-between. Drama mode is essentially the same thing with only 5 fights, except you go through a character's story who changes slightly depending on who you choose as their partner. The stories also somewhat overlap. You only start with Konata's story, about her trying to figure out who made a gal game with her as the heroine.

The way the fights work is that you and your opponent have a health bar that goes down with each answer the other person gets right. Your last five correct answers are stored on the bottom screen, and if they fill any criteria like sets, sequences, etc, you can unleash a special attack for more damage, with even more if you've gotten 10, 15, or 20 correct in a row. Some fights you can only cause damage with these special attacks. There's also the occasional harder question that pops up, and whoever gets it right blocks their opponent from answering the next three questions. If you die sometimes your partner in Drama mode will apparently unleash a desperation attack, but since I just reloaded save states when I lost, I only saw it once. There's also a parameter screen that fills the more fights you win with a partner, but I never figured out if/how it affected gameplay.

As for the story, there's a decent amount here, but it's not particularly interesting. There's also cameos from mascots of various doujin/anime shops throughout, but I know nothing about them so it did little for me. Characters are voiced during fights, but what's interesting is that since this was released before the anime, they're the voices from the drama CD, which I've never heard before, so it was a bit jarring.

The game served as a decent podcast game for a bit, but it has two major problems. First is that while solving basic math problems is kind of fun, the game's ability to recognize your writing is terrible! It's very specific on how to write numbers in ways that make no sense. The worst was 5, where it couldn't recognize any way for me to write it, until I figured out a half circle and horizontal line above it worked, no line connecting them. 2s are mixed up with 7s, 3s mixed up with 7s, 1s mixed up with 0s, 9s mixed up with 8s. It can make the game much harder even when you know the answer, especially with how fast it expects you to write answers.

Second is how repetitive it is to unlock anything. Completing a character's story once is not enough to unlock the next character. You have to play all the way through Hitasura Drill, which gets longer the more you unlock, where at the end it tells you what character's story you have to complete along with each partner you have to finish it with. So you end up playing the stories over and over with very little variation. The minigames other than the math problems are very basic memorization or DS touch gimmicks which are more annoying than anything. I didn't even unlock the last story since it required playing every character/partner combo, which was not worth going through.

There's a sequel, if I play it hopefully it won't be as repetitive.