Angelos Armas

Read through all the endings on Angelos Armas, it’s a game that came into my radar with the 20th anniversary videos (warning end game spoilers CGs in the MV) NitroPlus did a few years ago since it has some of the best vocal songs I’ve seen, the opening “Samenai Netsu” and “Kesshou” have been in my playlist since then. Also I was curious since it is the one N+ game I’ve never seen anyone actually play; seems like it is one of their less popular VNs in general. Not entirely sure how well it did back in the day but looking at EGS vote number seems pretty much under everything else N+ did. and after playing it I feel like it is kind of going a bit under the radar, it is certainly an interesting title to say the least.

The first impression I got is that it seemed one of those weird SF works that got inspired by Matrix since the setting gave very much Not Real World vibes, cool dudes with guns and maybe it’s just me but the color palette gave a similar impression too. Well, I wasn’t right with the real world part, but I still think it has somewhat similar atmosphere, and hey both of them have viruses and a “chosen one” in the plot, so it’s something.
The storyline revolves around Wim, a young new born Tenshi whose job is going around shooting at humans corpses to clean their remorses. He, as any other Tenshi, can’t interact with any human just observe them until they die and then do the cleaning. Early enough he starts following some weird gang of crazy guys that go around raping and killing women for seemingly no reason, until he realizes the leader of that gang is somewhat similar to him and he is the key piece to know the questions he wants to know about what is goind on in the world, and how is it linked to the Tenshis and him in specific as the special Dual Wield Chosen One?

The plot feels like a mix of old eroge edginess + a bunch of biology terms thrown around to conceive the setting, and surprisingly it kinda works, I mean it’s not very credible but it’s fun and cool. The protagonist is a bit on the passive side, I feel eroge readers would have appreciated it more with a cooler one but I think they were going for the Neo kind of guy, I also feel like this way fits more with the tone doomer and mysterious tone of the game. The three girls are all pretty good though, you have 1 human, 1 ghost and 1 adorable tsundere Tenshi.

The structure is simple but also a bit strange. It is an almost linear way branching except for the last 3 hours or so where it branches into three different routes/endings, the Tenshi route feels like the closest to the True Route, but the most complete route is Komaki’s, the human one. The plot is basically only fully explained in Komaki’s branch, and you have to read it first or you probably wouldn’t understand very well whats going on in the other routes, I thought it would be more of a setup route at first, but it turned out to be the longest one with the the best conclusion too. Compared to the other two don’t really add that much to the setting after it, and it’s more to see different resolutions that could have happened, that said Tenshi route somehow still feels like the most climax finale with the cooler fights and more bizarre ending so it is still probably best left for last even if it is somewhat underdeveloped story wise. In general the routes represent the theme of the game where humans have hope and angels/god do not, so it kinda depends on how you want to go about it, I guess you could still do Tenshi first and end with Komaki too if you prefer to end on a happy ending, but it may not be the easiest to follow. To be honest I think Tenshi route ending is so nuts that’s worth to leave for last lol.

Now the most attractive thing about the game is the presentation, N+ has always hit in this department but Angelos Armas does feel like a big step to almost anything released at that time. The manga textbox presentation is cool, I’ve took so many screenshots just because of how unique and cool shit they do with it, basically every screen displays the textboxs continuosly in auto read mode and you only click to go the next page, so it does require some fiddling with the settings to set it to your reading speed to go along with it, but once I got used to it it was pretty nice and immersive. The CG and all the art usage in the game is over the top too, it has a shitton of CGs and reuses the assets in clever ways to make it very vivid with tons of movement, the director/scripters did an insane job it is seriously impressive. The OST is also some of the best from N+, from the vocal to the normal tracks all are top tier stuff. The only bad side here is that it still uses the old busted engine so expect some crashes and sluggishness.

I feel like I should also say something about the antagonists but not really sure what to say… what I can say despite everything I found them kinda charming by the end, just like the game In general, for better or worse it feels very much like a product of its time, if you like the goold old N+ and 00s eroge edgy plots you should have a good time, it’s more of a high concept than good execution, I mean the entire plot is randomly infodumped in an one hour long scene so you can probably make an idea, don’t expect something overly complex or exceptionally good writting, althought it does have some neat details and hard hitting scenes at points, it’s a pretty decent game overall for sure it deserves to be read by more people.