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X-Change
You are Takuya, a student who is a member of the school's chemistry club. Whilst cleaning up the chemistry room after classes, you spill an unknown chemical on yourself and upon returning home, you find that you have become a girl. And this is where the problems begin.
This sort of concept may sound familiar to fans of the anime Ranma 1/2, but other than changing into a girl, this is the only similarity. X-Change features a story in which, playing as Takuya, you have to make decisions throughout the game, which will determine the way in which the game ends. Some endings will see your character returning to normal whilst in others, Takuya will remain as a girl. It will all depend on how you play the game. The concept of X-Change really does sound like an interesting one, particularly for an adult game such as this one. X-Change features plenty of adult and non-adult anime-style CG artwork and much of this can be viewed in the game's CG gallery, once you have viewed it in the game itself.
For those of you who have never played a bishoujo adventure game before, they play very much like a ''choose your own adventure'' book and X-Change is no different. You read through the story in a text window at the bottom of the screen and you will see the events on the screen, such as characters that you are talking to, what the characters are doing and the background of the location that you are at in the game. Although there is no animation, the characters poses will change to indicate how they are feeling, whether they are happy, nervous, embarrassed, etc. At several points, you will be presented with a list of options, for example, asking you where you would like to go or what you want to do. X-Change, being a multi-ending bishoujo game, has seven different endings and which one you see will depend on the choices that you make.
In order to play X-Change, you must select the correct options in order to find your way to one of the happy endings in the game. In comparison with other games of this type, X-Change is certainly one of the easier multi-ending bishoujo games that have been translated to English. That said, X-Change is also one of the shorter multi-ending bishoujo games and depending on how long it takes you to figure out the correct choices (or how lucky you are), it may only take a couple of hours to reach the happy endings. On the other hand, it could take several hours if you don't make the right choices, as you will have to play again or load a saved game from further back. You can use the games fast-forward feature to skip parts of the text if you don't wish to read something that you've seen before.
As mentioned earlier, X-Change is an adult game and features lots of sexually explicit artwork. There are plenty of characters to interact with, though there are only five main female characters including yourself. The characters do vary though and the artwork, while quite simplistic in style, is excellent and could be considered some of the best amongst English adult bishoujo games. I personally felt that there were too many sex scenes considering how close together they occur in the game.
I can't help feeling that there is a lot missing from X-Change. Whilst the game does have an interesting concept, I feel that there are many areas that needed more story development and also many areas in which characters reactions seemed to me to be somewhat unrealistic. It seems that much of the emphasis in X-Change went on the adult artwork. This may please some, but for anyone who's looking for a bishoujo game that has any type of in-depth involvement with a story or characters, I would recommend trying one of Peach Princess' newer releases. The translation of X-Change is quite good, though there are some spelling, grammatical and text repetitions errors in some areas, nothing serious though.
The graphics in X-Change are quite good. I felt that the background could use a little improvement, as many of them didn't seem to have much colour variation. For example, a whole room may be coloured using many shades of green, or in Takuya's room, the background objects such as the bed and furniture are all in greyscale. The character artwork is somewhat better. The style is relatively simple, but it's also very effective. The character artwork has a type of ''solid'' look to it and it works well for this game. The audio aspect of this game is nothing too special. Unlike Peach Princess' other games, X-Change doesn't feature any voices and there are no sound effects either. It does have eight tracks of CD audio music though. The music itself however can get a little repetitive as only five of the tracks are used regularly throughout the game - the others are ending themes and the Crowd (intro) theme. The style throughout the music always stays similar, though some tracks are upbeat whilst others sound quite depressing, particularly one of the tracks used in many of the sex-scenes.
X-Change does have the additions of a CG gallery and a music room. The CG gallery will allow you to view all of the sex-CG artwork that you have seen in the game itself and will tell you how much you have seen in total as a percentage. The music room allows you to listen to any of the music tracks in the game, but you can also listen to these on any regular audio CD player if you wish.
Overall, X-Change isn't something that you will spend a long time playing or getting into. It is a good game in the bishoujo genre and I would recommend it to anyone looking for an adult bishoujo game who isn't too interested in an in-depth story, otherwise I would recommend one of Peach Princess' other games over X-Change.
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