encubed

An English version of Project Navel’s sci-fi survival game Soul Link is now available for purchase from MangaGamer. The download comes in at roughly 800 megabytes and requires the usual activation process via the Internet using a serial number. The images included with the game are unmosaiced and as announced earlier, all of the images of Nanami are intact in the game data.

Soul Link is Project Navel’s second game release; it contains substantially much more text than its predecessor, SHUFFLE!, and is divided into three chapters, one for each main character. The game takes place on a space station in the near future and follows the protagonists as they deal with an attack made upon the station. There are many choices to be made in the game, and many end badly with the main character dying.

MangaGamer had once considered removing images of Nanami, one of the characters in the game, because she appeared under-aged and was nude in several scenes. However, they decided in the end to release the game with the images intact.

The translation in this release has an occasional spelling/grammar error here and there; for the most part, the quality of the translation is pretty decent and reads naturally. The font, however, is the usual Courier New font, which makes it sometimes a bit hard to read. As with MangaGamer’s previous releases, the game has been ported to BGI/Ethornell. However, this time, the opening movie has also been re-encoded for use with a DivX 5.0 video decoder and ADPCM audio encoder, reducing its size to around 40% of the MPEG-1 file from the Japanese release. It does not seem that Windows XP comes with DX50 support out of the box, so perhaps some users may have to download a DivX codec in order to play the opening movie. As usual, the opening movie has no subtitles.

UPDATE: A new version is available for download that addresses issues with activation. (2009/12/29)