Notice Me Leena-senpai! – Review

Tower defense games come in all forms, but only a few ever reached the same popularity level as Plants vs. Zombies. Popcap’s beloved tower defense title took the world by storm and spawned several sequels and merchandise, but has seemingly faded into the background as well. Over the years, other developers have tried their hand at the genre, but often failed to create a truly memorable experience. This is why Notice Me Leena-senpai! piqued our interest, as it promised to offer an original experience by combining visual novel aspects with tower defense gameplay. We put the game to the test, and quite enjoyed what was on offer here.

Story

Even though the story does have some cute, but shallow, moments, the narrative isn’t really the highlight here. This is quite odd, as Notice Me Leena-senpai! presents itself as part visual novel, but the story is very basic. You’ll be following Leena’s adventure battling the demon army, which seemingly pops up out of nowhere. We didn’t really mind the very shallow and basic writing here, but we could easily see a lot of players skipping the dialogues to delve into the actual tower defense segments. We still quite enjoyed the tale that was being told here, but it certainly felt a bit too basic for an actual visual novel.

Graphics

What seems to be a mishmash of different graphical styles eventually does a fairly good job at blending together. On one hand, you’ll have a fairly basic 2D visual novel with no real animations, while on the other hand, you’ll have a pixelated tower defense game with a reasonable variety of different units, enemies, and combat animations. We appreciated the visual novel segments for what they were: a form of window dressing for the upcoming battles. We would have perhaps loved to see a bit more animation here, but we did enjoy the diverse characters introduced throughout the experience. For us, the retro visuals of the tower defense segments fared a lot better, as the characters have solid attack animations, and the overall unit diversity was fairly impressive for an indie title such as this. We sometimes struggled with the UI, as some of the menus appear a bit unclear at times.

Sound

As a whole, Notice Me Leena-senpai!’s sound design is pretty good. While the sound effects are fairly basic, and the visual novel segments are almost entirely voiceless, it’s the music that steals the show here. The retro-inspired tunes that play during the battles are quite catchy and had us bopping our head along for the most part. There are also more than enough tracks to make sure the game doesn’t grow stale during longer playing sessions.

Gameplay

Notice Me Leena-senpai! is a tower defense game with a visual novel component present in its campaign mode. This means that you’ll be going through short story segments, presented in a visual novel format, before diving into battles much akin to those in the original Plants vs. Zombies games. This means you’ll have to defend several lanes from incoming demon attackers, while choosing what units to place, which units to upgrade, and perhaps even what lanes to focus on first. The game clearly communicates which lanes will be attacked in each wave, making planning a lot easier. For the most part, things are fairly straightforward here. Outside of the campaign mode, there is also an endless mode, in which you can use the money earned in the campaign to unlock new units.

The game does suffer from a few difficulty spikes here and there in the campaign mode, but you’ll get the hang of things fairly quickly, and more often than not, the right strategy will come after a few tries on the harder stages. There are quite a few units to try out on the field, and you’ll have to take into account flying units and even the fact that the grid can expand. Even if a stage starts with only one lane being attacked, other lanes may open up after a few waves. Lanes themselves can even expand, allowing you to place even more units or hazards into said lane. It’s a fairly entertaining gameplay loop, and even the controls are rather intuitive.

Conclusion

Notice Me Leena-senpai! is surprisingly a very entertaining tower defense title, with an undercooked visual novel tacked to it. Don’t get us wrong, however, as we still enjoyed the visual novel portion for what it was, but it was the actual tower defense gameplay that got us hooked on this indie title. We personally liked the unit diversity, the retro visuals, the decent soundtrack, and the overall concept as a whole. While the game did remind us of the iconic gameplay of Plants vs. Zombies, Notice Me Leena-senpai! managed to create its own identity, and we were quite entertained.

Ibuki

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Aspiring ninja.

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