Thank you Aksys Games for sending us a review code!

Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Burst Forth!! Choro-gon Breath is based on the hit anime series.  If you’re not familiar with it, Miss Kobayashi is a twenty-five-year-old single female who is both a workaholic and an alcoholic.  Miss Kobayashi is fascinated with maids and when a shape shifting dragon named Tohru offers to be her personal maid, she accepts her offer.  Tohru has a crush on Miss Kobayashi, but Miss Kobayashi is straight and not interested in her in that way.  

Another character worth talking about is Quetzalcoatl, who is very busty and has an inappropriate attraction to a young boy who summoned her, named Shouta.  On the character information card about Quetzalcoatl, it says that she enjoys eating Shouta.  I’m not sure what that entails, but it sounds weird.  

With some of the back-story out of the way, let’s talk about the game.  The premise of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Burst Forth!! Choro-gon Breath isn’t original and the game jokes about that.  Basically, the characters get sucked into Fafnir’s computer and must survive multiple video game genre-themed levels in order to escape.  

Initially, only three of the six stages are available.  You have to unlock the remaining levels by completing the original three levels in any order during the same play-through.  During the story mode, you have three characters (Elma, Kanna, and Tohru) with different shooting patterns.  You can switch between them as often as you like and their health will regenerate while they are not in use.  However, if they are KO’d, they will remain in that state for the rest of your playthrough.  Health meter levels carry over to the next stage.  

Other than the Story mode, you can focus on just the bosses in the Boss Rush mode, or see how long you can survive against Lucoa in the Lucoa Challenge mode.  If you just want to play a specific level, you’ll want to check out the Stage Exploration mode.  Each of these modes has an online leaderboard you can compare your scores against.  

In the Options menu under Game Settings, you’ll have the capability to increase your HP to 200% and make the game easier or lower down to 1% for an extreme challenge.  There are five difficulty levels and so far, I’ve only managed to complete the game on the Practice level, which is the lowest setting below Easy.  During my stream, I tried Normal and the amount of bullets the bosses spewed out were insane! 

If you play the story mode at a suitable difficulty, it will take less than an hour.   This is a little disappointing for a $40 game.  I have seen it on sale for less than $30, which is more reasonable.  While the shoot ‘em up gameplay is mediocre, the biggest draw and replay-ability is collecting all of the possible treasure items and puzzle pieces in each of the stages.  You can increase the item drop rate in exchange for taking more damage from enemy attacks.  

The puzzle pieces reveal character art pictures which can be a little seductive at times.  Many of the characters are busty and some of them are showing some skin or are positioned provocatively.  Like many shoot ‘em ups, the violence is pretty tame.  My guess is that the Teen rating from the ESRB is because of the character art.  

If you’re a fan of the anime series Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid and enjoy shoot ‘em up games like Castle of Shikigami, you may enjoy Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: Burst Forth!! Choro-gon Breath.  Because of the short amount of gameplay, I only recommend picking it up on sale.