19.02.12 / Atlus, Game Boy Advance, Romance game, RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (3)
Tags: riviera the promised land
I got nostalgic for Riviera, so I’ve been playing it on and off for the past couple of months. I just finished my third and a half playthrough of this game and got Serene’s ending for the second time.
Since I’ve played it so often, I don’t have much to say about it. I first picked this up in… 2005-ish? Summer of 2005, I believe. It was my first “dating sim-ish” kind of game, the first time my atttitude towards my party members had actually affected the ending I got. I had no idea things would turn out that way, but I just went along being nice to Lina and before I knew it, I’d gotten a treasure hunter ending with her. I was hooked!
I immediately started a new game, which also makes Riviera the first game I ever did back-to-back playthroughs for. This time I went for Serene because, like, who doesn’t go for Serene? Got her, yippee, then right away I started another playthrough! I was going for Cierra this time, but then I stopped myself halfway though like, “WTF are you doing? How can you play the same game three times in a row like this? Stop touching that game. Stop it!”
You’ve gotta understand, that was the first time a game had ever had that effect on me, I thought I was going crazy or something. So, believe it or not, I forced myself to stop playing and lent the game to a friend I knew wouldn’t return it. And that was it for Riviera and me until now. Looking back, WTF was wrong with me?
Anyway, so I got a little wistful late last year and got a rom and played it. It was surprisingly hard to get through, for an unexpected reason: I remember just about everything that ever happened in the game. It’s been almost 7 years, but I still remembered most of the dungeons, most of the skits, the soundtracks, even which way to go and which way not to go. I guess I did play it 2.5 times, it’s only to be expected. The nostalgia trip was fun, though. And now I know I wasn’t crazy. It’s not the best game in the world, the story is cheesy as hell, the Practice Battle system makes things a little too easy and that 15-item limit just has to go. But even after all these years I had a blast with the characters and their interactions, the soundtrack, all the hidden items and traps… All still fun for me to explore after all this time.
I also got to reminisce about the days when I thought Sting was a great developer, based on just this game. That was before I went on to play Yggdra Union… Stupidly confusing stupidly complicated randomly hard battle system… no, we won’t talk about that game today. It’s like the same way Imageepoch publicly soiled themselves with Final Promise Story, except I forgave them once I played Criminal Girls while Sting has yet to be saved. They’ve got other things like Blaze Union and Gloria Union, but I’m not touching them. A while ago I was downloading random ISOs and came across an SRPG called Gungnir. Oh, a new SRPG, downloaded, fired it up… Sting. *florporplorpl* my gaming boner wilted on the spot.
Yes, I Mad. Although I suppose 6 years is a rather long time to hold a grudge… And maybe I just sucked at YU… No, forget it, I Still Mad. …Yeah, definitely still mad.
Well, that was a nice trip down Memory Lane, but I can’t stay in the past forever. Next up, I’ve been exploring the Wand of Fortune fandisc, Mirai e no Prologue. More about that once I’ve fooled around with it a little more.
05.02.12 / Atlus, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (2)
Tags: innocent sin, persona 2, review
Thanks. I heard you the first 2000 times too.
I held out as long as I could, but the absurdly high encounter rate finally did me in. I’m supposed to visit a couple of temples and take back the crystal skulls, but I just got out of grueling crawls at Mt. Katatsumuri and Caracol. I don’t know how long any of these temples are or if I’ll be any closer to finally, finally finishing this game.
I’ve played a number of dungeon crawlers in the past couple of months (UnchainBlades Rexx, Criminal Girls, WiZman’s World, etc.), and Innocent Sin is easily the most unpleasant of the lot. Piss-poor variety of enemies, piss-poor variety of conversation options, no way to change personas until you finish the dungeon, no way to warp out before you’re done, same old horrible battle music from start to finish… At some point I started to contemplate throwing the PSP at the wall, and that was when I knew I needed help.
There’s a spell called Estoma that was supposed to help, but it only drives away enemies lower than your party’s level. Since I’ve been spending most of the game 9-12 levels behind the enemies, it does diddly-squat. So back on the shelf with Innocent Sin while I play something that has few to no random battles in it. If I never have to see another attacking screen again, it will be too soon.
Ah, right. Before I forget. Following on from the previous post, I did go to Alaya Shrine and from there to Mt. Iwato, where my party did finally tell me “everything.” As I’d feared, it turned out to be “some FF8-style bullshit about how they all played together as kids but then they all got *gasp* amnesia.” I don’t know why something like that is (rightfully) considered a crappy plot device when FF8 does it, but when IS does the same thing, somehow it’s “ZOMG BEST STORY EVER!!!” *spit* Well, whatever. Shit is shit. Come to think of it, it’s around that point that I started to find the game unbearable.
[As promised, I did murder something small and fluffy. Fear of prosecution prevents me from posting pictures of the actual victim, but this is a representative shot (contents may offend sensitive viewers). May its soul rest in peace.]
Just in case it wasn't clear from the game, we've prepared this whole dungeon to really hammer the point in.
The thing that made the other dungeon crawlers easier to bear was that the story was usually just a framing device for your dungeon adventures. In Innocent Sin the makers have an actual story they want to tell, they just don’t want to tell it too quickly, so they use the dungeons as a stumbling block to slow things down. “Newsflash, rumors come true! Now why don’t you go into this 3-hour dungeon and mull that over while we think up the next development?” It works about as well as you might expect.
And when I think about it, they don’t really have that much story to tell, so they just stretch each development out until you’re sick of it, then throw something else into the mix.
“Rumors come true, rumors come true!” Example 1, example 2, examples 3-500, okay okay, I get it!
“Dreams are meant to be achieved, not given. Dreams are meant to be achieved, not given.” Example 1, example 2, examples 3-infinity. No, no, you don’t have to go that far, I get it already.
“There’s an arsonist on the loose! There’s an arsonist on the loose!” Example, example 2… OKAY I GET IT!
How wonderfully convenient.
“Jun is our friend! Jun is our friend! Jun is our friend! Jun is our friend! Jun is our friend!” AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGHH, I get it I get it, really I do! Just… enough!
At least it turns out that I was wrong and the story was about all their pasts, not just Tatsuya and Maya’s. Only it’s kinda stupid how much they go on about Jun. I mean, just how good a friend was he if they all forgot about him so easily? Pure total memory wipeout on command.
“Amnesia due to trauma, and the bad guy made us forget” is Maya, Eikichi and Lisa’s flimsy-ass excuse (on the same level as “GFs made us forget” tbh), but what about Tatsuya? He didn’t take part in the “sin” of locking Maya in the shrine that burned down, he doesn’t show any sign of trauma and an early flashback shows that he does remember Jun. In fact, I’m entertaining a pet theory that says he knew everything that was going on from the start and kept quiet just to be a dick. Now there’s a sin if there ever was one.
Anyway, the game is only on hold, not dropped. I’m going to play a couple of other things, do some non-game activities and come back in a couple of weeks to finish this off. I thought of quitting entirely, but apart from Strange Journey, I’ve finished every SMT/spin-off game I’ve played so far, and even in SJ I made it to the last boss, so my gamer’s pride is kinda on the line here. I’ll finish this…someday.
02.02.12 / Atlus, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: innocent sin, persona 2
I thought I’d be done by now, but this game is longer than I’d thought. I checked the time and I’m 19 hours in, but it feels like 190.
Part of it is my fault for just not having the time, and for spending what little time I got on the theater missions.
This shit. Cut it out.
Some of it is also just Innocent Sin taking for-f’ing-ever to get to the point. And they’ve been doing that thing I hate: “Is she…no, don’t tell me…” “It must be… no, it couldn’t be… could it?” WTF JUST SPIT IT OUT ALREADY, DAMMIT! I hate cryptic hints. If IS were a book or a movie I would have skipped to the end by now.
Not that I’m not enjoying myself or anything, now that the story has finally gotten going. Just finished the Aerospace Museum (with Pegasus Strike taking 415HP per round off the boss’s life, that didn’t take long), about to head off to the Alaya Shrine, where Lisa promises to tell me “everything”. If it turns out to be some FF8-style bullshit about how they all played together as kids but then they all got *gasp* amnesia, I swear I’ll murder something small and fluffy.
In any case, I think the game wasted far too much time in the beginning with Eikichi and Ginko’s stories. As far as I can tell, the bulk of the story revolves around Tatsuya and Maya and whatever relationship they had or didn’t have in the past. The other party members are just bit players, so it’s annoying that I had to spend the first 15 or so hours on them.
SPOILERS
Turns out "dependant" is the bastardized American spelling of "dependent." What are journalism schools teaching their students these days?
Ginko’s was especially bad because she’s such an idiot. “I don’t want to be an idol, I don’t want to be an idol” but she ended up debuting anyway. And she was supposed to root out information about the Masked Circle in the process, but instead she nearly got taken in by them. I thought it would turn out that she was just pretending to be going along with the whole thing, but she acted genuinely shocked when the producer turned out to be bad. Just how stupid can one be?
Then with her friends she was all like “They’re not really my friends, they’re just using me” but then when the dumb cows get turned into shadowmen, she goes “Oh no, if only I’d believed in them!” If only you’d believed in them, then what? Newsflash, they may be your friends, but they were just using you. Plus! On top of all her other sins, she also helped the bad guys get one step closer to their evil goal by singing their “foreign song.” Girl, iz you crazy? Guess what they say about dumb blondes was true all along.
SPOILERS OVER
Anyway, so far so good. I think I finally “paid my dues” by slogging through the dross, so soon I should be rewarded with that “wonderful story” that everyone keeps going on about. To be honest I care a lot when stories turn out to be bad but otherwise *shrug*. Just don’t piss me off in the end, that’s all I ask.
28.01.12 / Atlus, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (15)
Tags: innocent sin, persona 2
Back to my roots~ Back to my roo-woo-woo-woo-woots~ It’s time to go back to… wait, where was I going again?
I totally forgot what I was supposed to do after beating the headmaster, and I didn’t want to check a FAQ. So I just spent several hours playing poker in the casino and doing a sidequest in the movie theater.
The sidequest was a little on the long drawn-out side, but the Demon Headmaster-like scenario was several shades more interesting than what’s currently going on in the game. I’m getting dizzy trying to keep up with all the rumors in the main story, plus all that whining about which school badmouthed which is childish and trivial beyond words. I’ll go back and play “part two” of the sidequest once I clear the dungeon I’m currently in.
The quest confirmed one thing for me though: Innocent Sin is the easiest jRPG ever made. Not the easiest Persona, not the easiest Atlus game. It’s the easiest RPG on Planet Earth. Ar Tonelico and Rhapsody DS are like The 7th Saga compared to this game. I’d challenge you to find an easier game, but then the universe would explode and I’d never be able to get this done.
In what other RPG can you go into a dungeon at level 6 armed only with your starting armor and personae, with 6 medicines and 1 antidote to your name, and curb-stomp enemies 3 or 4 times your level wit da greatest of ease? On the Hard setting, no less? Sure I was using the shockingly overpowered fusion spells, but in a normal RPG I wouldn’t even survive long enough to get one of those off. In IS, when an enemy manages to hit me for 10 damage I’m like “Whoa, he’s a strong one,” it’s that bad.
I’m kinda happy about this though, since it means I won’t have to grind. I just have to look into enemy repelling items so I can focus on where the story is going/not going. See you all in a couple of days.
19.10.11 / Atlus, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (4)
Tags: digital devil saga, innocent sin, nocturne, persona 2, shin megami tensei
Every once in a while, you should do something you don’t usually do, just to remind yourself why you don’t usually do it. I started Persona 2: Innocent Sin several days ago, and now I remember exactly why I don’t play games in a series too quickly after each other: it’s boring! Especially when they’re very similar in terms of settings and gameplay.
I’m sure P1 and P2 will have very different stories, but at the beginning it’s the same high school setting, same “demons from out of nowhere” thing, same-ish kind of city and many of the same stores. I fought the first boss (Principal Hanya) right before stopping, and at about two hours in P2 is just P1 with more annoying party members and much, much easier battles. I seriously can’t believe how easy, I’m thinking of switching to the Hard setting, which I have never done in an Atlus game before.
Well, I guess it’s not the whole party that’s annoying. Just this ditzy reporter girl named Maya and this American girl with a kung fu fetish in my party named Lisa. Oh gawd, Lisa. And she keeps spouting out this bad Cantonese. Like “Kaumenna” instead of “Gaau meng a” or “Holeen” instead of “Ho lin”, it is so painful to read. It’s probably meant to be, and it’s working like a charm. Do I have a fixed party in this game or can I get rid of her? *fingers crossed*
P2 has also brought back the crazy number of options for contacting demons so I’m going to need a FAQ again before too long. =_= It’s much funnier this time round though, because when it says “Sing” or “Dance”, they actually do sing and dance. Even when “Sing” doesn’t work I keep picking that option just to see Michel’s act. Man, I thought it would be bad, but this is just incredible. If there’s one video game character who cannot afford to drop out of school, it’s him.
Dang, talking about this made me want to continue the game. But I know I’d just end up frustrated and bored so I’m going to wait at least another month.
Besides, you know how in Persona the town just went crazy out of the blue through no fault of yours? In Innocent Sin the main character Tatsuya seems like a bit of twat. I wouldn’t be surprised if he really did do something bad, with that attitude. I won’t be amused if I put in all that effort just to find out he was asking for it </understatement>.
What I’m even more worried about is that the “Sin” will turn out to be some ambiguous bullshit that doesn’t make any sense at all. I haven’t had that problem with the other Persona games so far, but I can’t say that of some of the SMT games. Nocturne for example, all I know is the world went kablooey, then I went around killing lots of demons as well as some of my friends, then at some point Dante from Devil May Cry joined me because of my ravishing shirtless torso (there can be no other reason), and then the last thing I remember was sinking down into some depths Terminator 2-style. Awesome game, but I still don’t know what it was all about. Digital Devil Saga wasn’t much better. The first game was good, the second game was doing well until suddenly, fwoop, we flew into the sun. And then Serph was a hermaphrodite.
So I’ll play something else and come back later. Prepare myself mentally, and all that. For better or for worse, Persona 2 isn’t going anywhere.
12.09.11 / Atlus, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: persona, review, shin megami tensei
I beat Pandora. As far as SMT/spin-off bosses go, she was by far the easiest I’ve ever faced. The only reason she killed me the first time was because I didn’t know the fight was coming up, so I didn’t have enough Balms of Life and most of my personae were weak to magic. All I had to do was regroup, buy about 50 BoLs and Beads and give Armaiti to Maki so she could have Mediarahan. Everything after that was a mere formality.
Aside: Speaking of buying Beads, I had about ¥3 million at the end of the game. I’ve always wondered what game characters do with their massive piles of cash once it’s all over. Let’s see, that’s about $35,000 USD… If they split it equally that’s about $7,000 each. Pfft, puny. I should’ve wasted a few more demons and bought me a nice condo or two.
But I digress. So I beat Pandora in a long but relatively simple battle and restored Mikage-cho to normal. We gave her the usual “Loners are losers” speech and and she was like “Oh. Okay.” Then Maki kissed me on the cheek and some old guy turned into butterflies. *roll credits*
Yeah, that was a totally…uh…great ending. W-wait, why is my nose growing? Stop that! …I kid, I kid. It was a fairly straightforward, easily understood and well wrapped-up story. That’s rare for an Atlus game. At the end the only question I had was, “How the heck did this ever get a sequel?”
You know, when people ask me which game in a series to play, I almost always advice them to start with the very first one and work their way up. I formed this theory after beating the Breath of Fire II before I and doing the same with Shining Force I and II. In both cases I was able to finish the original, but I know I would have fully enjoyed and appreciated both games if I’d done them the other way round.
Going later-to-earlier is so much harder, because while earlier games may have their own charm, they are usually far less polished and thus much harder to enjoy for fans of the later installments. For example I urge people to play Persona 3 before 4 (even though I honestly think P3 >>>> P4 and I liked it that your party wouldn’t always do what you wanted) simply because the interface and the gameplay are seriously improved.
So, looong story short, I’m not going to ascribe any of my lack of enjoyment to Persona itself. Heck, to be honest I did enjoy much of the game. Uhh, the, uhh, music…was too poppy and annoying. In fact I had the music turned off 90% of the time, so that can’t have been it. The graphics…were okay. The CG bits were nice. The characters were memorable, in their own way. I thought the MC this time was particularly colorless, but he was the first so it’s understandable. The story? As near as I can gather, the message was: “Be true to yourself,” and “If you turn your city into a monster-filled hell, you’ll turn into a penis-monster and your friends will come and kick the crap out of you.” Words to live by.
Holy typo, Atlus!
But seriously, I know I enjoyed something, I just can’t remember what right now. It must have been the dungeon crawling, since that’s what 90% of the game consisted of. I like dungeon crawling, especially if the maps are fixed and just need exploring, i.e. not random. It was easy to go down the wrong path, but hard to get permanently lost, and apart from one puzzle and a few switches to pull, Persona‘s dungeon crawling was largely pain-free.
What’s more, I almost never had to do the same dungeon twice. I hate backtracking. It smacks of lack of imagination on the developers’ part. Where it’s present, I prefer it to be largely optional. So I’m grateful that apart from the Lost Forest and the subway, progress in Persona is all about the new. The game even records the paths you take, so you can withdraw, restock and then come back and proceed faster than ever. Bliss.
Battles were fairly good too. I think ALL games should have an auto-battle system, no exceptions. At the same time there was enough variety in the enemies that you couldn’t blindly select Auto for every single fight. You have to use your Personas as much as possible so they rank up, and there’s EXP (determined by damage dealt) to consider, so it’s never a “Mash X to win” fest.
It’s not all good news, though. There were a number of clumsy and inconvenient elements as well. For one thing you could only stock 3 personae per party member, and you couldn’t switch personae between party members except in the Velvet Room. Recruiting most of the later demons without a FAQ or a very, very, very good memory is an exercise in futility. The five second pause before the game decides not to allow you to escape a battle was adding insult to (inevitable) injury. Weapon shops are few and far between, and most of the stuff they sell is crappy anyway. “Gather three compacts” to unlock the final dungeon door was dumb, but understandable for a 1996 game, etc etc.
As for why it took me a while to finish it after my last post, it’s because I was suffering from the Sunken Cost Fallacy. I thought I’d spent almost 200 hours on it, so I was all like, “OMG, I have to finish this thing, I can’t let all that time go to waste!” Once anon informed me that wasn’t actually the case, finishing it took a massive backseat to all manner of other games. If I hadn’t already been in the final dungeon, it might never have gotten finished. But finished it is, and it was a decent experience, all things considered. Now I’m looking forward to the Persona 2 PSP English remake, which should be out next week on September 20th.
26.08.11 / Atlus, Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Simulation game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (6)
Tags: atelier series, nora to toki no koubou, review, true ending
I went back and read over the last post I made about Nora. It wasn’t exactly inaccurate, but I realized I’d done the equivalent of calling a girl “Gorgeous” and then quickly adding, “But her nose is too big, and her teeth are a bit crooked, and her face is kinda spotty, and she smells funny, and OMG, that hair!…” etc. By the end of it nobody remembers I said she was beautiful in the first place.
So in the interest of fairness I wanted my very final post about Nora to Toki no Koubou to be a little more upbeat, which is why I went back and did a final run that netted me the true ending. The playthroughs really do all feel the same, but I mixed things up by trying a few recipes (mainly the ‘kerari’ wines) that I hadn’t made in previous rounds. This bumped my alchemy level up to level 18 and qualified me for the true ending.
Said true ending is identical to the normal one until the part where you fix the statue. This time Nora succeeds in fixing it. However she was supposed to keep her powers secret, so she assumes she’s failed her training, even though the townspeople kindly try to pretend they didn’t see anything. That’s where Keke steps in and informs us all that the true purpose of the training was to learn to trust people and be trusted, so Nora has passed after all. *cough* BULLSHIT *cough* And everything works out in the end. Yeah, that totally wasn’t worth the effort, thought at least this round only took 6 hours.
Back to my initial point, I went over my criticisms in the previous post, and to be honest, most of them were fair.The only thing I’d like to take back is the replay value part, because Nora to Toki no Koubou is no different from the other DS Atelier games in that respect. Sure, every run of Nora feels the same. If you want to avoid the worst endings you have to play nice with the townspeople and you have to please Aira, which severely limits your freedom to just explore or fool around. Without getting lucky or checking a FAQ, the player has no way of knowing that either befriending Aira or traveling constantly with one adventurer are the only ways to avoid a bad ending. Anything and everything else you do makes absolutely no difference.
Plus the game feels really short. Just when you’re starting to get into the groove of things, it ends. I’m going to liken this to a completely unrelated game called Recettear. In that game you can go sell things in a store, go adventuring, fuse items, make friends in town, etc., but the first few weeks are consumed by a hectic debt repayment program that makes everything about money, money, money. It’s only after you pass this that you get the freedom to either restart the game with your money and items or continue to play forever – which is the only time you’ll have the freedom to explore, fuse and sell at leisure. If you’ve played Recettear, imagine a Recettear where the game ended automatically after repaying your debt and you’ll know exactly what I’m complaining about (and if you haven’t you should totally try it).
BUT in spite of all that, I played it three times in a row, and that’s the same number of times I’ve played Ateliers Lise, Annie and Lina. So for better or worse, it has the same amount of replayability as the other games do, and shouldn’t be knocked down solely for that.
Another thing I said was that I wouldn’t be looking back fondly on the game in years to come, but there’s no way for me to judge that accurately until those years have passed, so I take that particular line back as well.
All the other things I wrote still apply, but some are a little on the petty side. For example, only being able to save in your room and only being able to sell specific items to specific places. It’s really inconvenient, but hardly a deal breaker. The messy room was irritating, but I resolved that in my final run by putting almost all the tools upstairs and doing my alchemy from the main station. I’m used to messy rooms from Shepherd’s Crossing 2 anyway.
Everything else I wrote? Yeah, it still holds. The items need better sorting. The characters are cliched. The bad ends are unforgivable. I hate being forced to play a certain way every time. Time moves too fast when foraging. New Game+ is more like Same Old Game+. However a sequel that fixes these things and adds a story worth caring about should be a real treat to play. With a little plastic surgery, that “gorgeous” girl will be Miss World in no time.
20.08.11 / Atlus, Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Simulation game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: alchemy, atelier series, nora to toki no koubou, review, true ending
Where “Finished!” means I’ve played all I’m going to play of it. I got another ending this time, the normal ending. I was trying to get Ruttz’s ending, which involves killing two dragons, but I guess I started it so late that I was already locked out of it by the time I finally defeated the second dragon.
It took me three attempts to defeat the blighted creature, but with a bit of luck and a lot of healing items I was able to power my way through. Even with stacked defense buffs Nora still got herself killed on the third turn or so, but Karuna stayed alive and kept pounding him with her Fighting Spirit attack that hits for x3. Ruttz played healer and attacked occasionally. I also discovered that the dragon could be poisoned, but I didn’t have any strong poison items so that didn’t help.
The Normal ending starts out like the Witch Hunt bad ending, but you get the choice to stay and explain yourself instead of running away. Your friends (except Octaja, Karuna and Kitt) will cover for you, and the shopkeepers and Aira will come to your defense. In the end you’ll attempt to fix the Pauly statue that got broken and fail, but the attempt will cheer Timos up a little bit and you’ll be able to stay and complete your training. Better than being chased out with torches and pitchforks, I suppose.
Now that that’s over with, I think I’m done here. Character endings might be nice, but I’d probably only be able to to maximum two per playthrough. With 8 possible character endings, that’s at least 4 near-identical runs, blargh.
I also found out from a FAQ that the ending I got before was not the bad ending but in fact the ‘Witch Hunt’ ending. There’s a real bad ending as well, gotten by being friendly with Aira but not doing anything else. To get the ‘True’ ending, I have to see all of Aira’s events, max my friendship with the townspeople and have Lv. 18 or more skill in time alchemy. Having Alchemy Lv. 18 without maxed friendship will give you the ‘Traveler’ ending, said the FAQ. I only had level 16, and my last save is only 7 days before the end so yeah, I’m out. The ‘True’ ending sounds similar to the Normal ending, only you get to fix the Pauly statue, which reveals your background to the townspeople, etc etc. Whatevs.
Final thoughts about Nora to Toki no Koubou? It’s good. I don’t feel lied to or disappointed by the hype now that it’s finally out. It gave as good as it promised, it just didn’t go above and beyond that. The music fits the mood and is relaxing, the character designs, while a little too “cutesy” are fine, the game satisfied my usual craving for bright colours, I got to synthesize lots of items, the random battles were tough but rewarding, etc, etc.
Battling was especially good, except for the part where they sometimes won’t let you run away. Your 9 party members all have different attacks, different things they do well or do poorly – though I doubt there’s a better party than Nora, Karuna and Ruttz. Enemy drops are plentiful, and leveling becomes a cinch once you use the leveling up and leveling down items on a monster, (a fact I discovered only just now by reading a FAQ. Darn, wish I’d thought of it earlier) you get to buy or trade for all kinds of weapons and armor and you can create a wealth of battle items: bombs, healing items, buffs, status items and more. I found plenty to like in this game.
Most of the things I didn’t like are niggling little issues that could be fixed in a sequel to make a fantastic game.
- Time passes too quickly when you’re foraging. Every single item you grab makes a whole day pass. A whole day to grab a bunch of flowers? I feel the hand of Success behind this one. At least time doesn’t pass when you go from town to town, strangely enough.
- You can only save and load in your room. Whut?
- You can only sell and buy specific items from specific places. Some items can’t be sold at all, which is a PITA when you’re trying to liquidate your assets to prepare for the next playthrough. Some item exchange can be done, but it’s highly limited.
- Your room and your garden tend to get very messy and hard to organize. You could move tools and furniture with the L/R and direction keys, but the room is so small it gets cluttered regardless. I also felt that the gardening and pet-keeping concept was under-developed and that far more could have been done with it.
- There was no proper item sorting. If you wanted to see only items of a particular type, e.g. cloth, you had to go stand in front of the sewing kit. If you want to see only food, you have to go stand in front of the cooking range, etc. Again, a little more organization would have gone a long way.
- The number of items you can hold at one time is severely limited unless you buy other items to raise the limit.
- The lack of success rates in synthesis was a bit of a letdown, especially for an Atelier veteran like me. So long as you have the proper ingredients, there’s no way you can fail, even at the most complex jobs. You have a time alchemist ranking that goes up as you make more things. It affects a number of things (recipes sold, chrono fluids used, certain endings) but has no effect on your success rate.
- Neither the story nor the designs nor the characters are particularly memorable. It’s good for a playthrough or two, but this isn’t a game I’ll be pining for in a couple of years.
- There aren’t enough endings to satisfy different kinds of gamers. Most Atelier games at least have Hero endings for beating all the bosses or a special ending for making a philosophers’ stone and more. Here the first 5 endings need very similar requirements to obtain so you’ll be doing the same thing on each run regardless of which ending you’re aiming for. Not good enough.
- DAT BAD END. It’s really unfair.
- The carryovers to New Game+ are almost non-existent. I could understand if they chose to do away with carryovers altogether, but once you’re doing them at least be a little more generous. As it is all you can take is money, your pets and your unlocked CGs. You can’t even keep meaningless little things like your tools or the wallpaper you bought. Throw me a bone here, Atlus.
- The stingy carryovers and lack of ending variety make for low replay value. Since you’re essentially starting from scratch every single time, you’re basically playing the exact same game over and over again. Oh, joy.
So really, just a few things hold Nora to Toki no Koubou back from being great. It’s better than Atelier Lise or Atelier Annie, at least. Lina >>>>> Nora >> Annie > Lise. Something like that. I don’t usually do number ratings but I’d give Nora a solid 3 or 3.5 over 5.
Next time, I really need to finish either Persona or Arms’ Heart.
17.08.11 / Atlus, Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Simulation game, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (2)
Tags: alchemy, nora to toki no koubou, shepherd's crossing
Tch. Finished my first run yesterday at the 9 hour mark. Got an ending where the townspeople run Nora out of town because they blame her for a storm that wrecked the place. Ungrateful wretches, after all the quests I’ve done for them. Since Nora was run out of her hut and didn’t complete her training, she can’t become a time mage, and the game states that neither she nor her friends were ever heard from again.
Hmm. That is pretty bad, as far as endings go. Normally I’m used to getting a bad end on my first FAQ-less attempt at this sort of game (in fact I got three bad endings in a row in Atelier Lise and never did pay off my debt), but somehow this one really got my goat. The whole premise is just so unreasonable. Nora looks nothing like the so-called Mist Witch, she’s never done anything remotely harmful and she’s lived in peace with the townspeople for 2 and a half years, then all of a sudden she’s to blame for a random storm? That’s so unfair.
I’ve started another playthrough which I’ll probably finish, but I don’t like that aspect of the game. I’m thinking I won’t even bother trying to chat up the townspeople, I’ll just hole myself up in my studio and work on alchemy all game long. Screw good endings, screw making nice with the plebs, screw everything else, I’ll just do what I got this game to do.
Hanging around the homestead is fun anyway. Apart from synthesis you get to decorate the place with new walls and floors, you can mature cheeses and hang meat and fish out to dry and plant seeds in your garden. Oh! And when I started the second run, Koko sold me a duck that looks exactly like Brammy from Shepherd’s Crossing. Heck, it doesn’t just look like him, it is him. He’s even called Brammy! I told you I was getting Shepherd’s Crossing vibes from this game. So Success was involved huh? So that’s why your seeds go all over the place in the garden and your house is so messy and you can accidentally end up uprooting crops without meaning to, etc etc. Even some of the items look straight out of SC, especially the wooden fence, hay and the cheese. Heheh, that makes me happy. My love for this game went up +5 when I realized that, but I’m still mad about the ending.
I need to buckle down and finish Persona and some other games, though. I’m slipping yet again into my habit of starting new games before finishing old ones, and right now I have about 4 90%-complete games waiting for my attention. I might delay the completion of this second playthrough of Nora to Toki no Koubou until at least one of them is done.
15.08.11 / Atlus, Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Simulation game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: alchemy, atelier series, nora to toki no koubou
tl;dr: I love it. So far.
I’m 4 hour 59 minutes in, and it’s been a great ride so far. I just reached October of the 2nd year and the game lasts 3 years so I should be finishing up my first playthrough pretty quickly. I’m not using any kind of FAQ or guide yet, so we’ll see what kind of ending I get.
Nora to Toki no Koubou (Nora and the Time Studio) is about Nora Brandor, an apprentice time mage/alchemist, who has to live and work in a little forest hut for three years as part of her training. Somehow the people in a neighboring town mistake her for the Mist Witch that tormented them years ago, so in addition to her training she also has to carry out quests to increase their trust in her while preventing anyone from finding out what she really is.
That’s pretty much it for the story. There was a lot of “go here and do that” in the first few months, and there are certain items you have to make to progress (and a pesky dragon I still can’t beat) but apart from that the game is fairly non-linear. Whether you want to spend your time holed up in the studio, go out there and forage or go to town and do quests all year round is entirely up to you. I’ve been keeping a balance between the three so far, with an emphasis on synthesis. I’m not sure what’s carried over into the next game so I’ll stock up on money and items in the last year.
Being a time alchemist sounds complicated, but it boils down to using the fast-forward or rewind button on an item. You can turn a fruit back into a flower and the flower back into a seed, you can turn salted fish into dried fish, you can speed-age cheese, etc. It’s pretty interesting, but not exactly “zomg best innovation evar” material. Which is perfectly fine with me. I like gameplay that’s simple and fun without being stale and unoriginal.
Time alchemy isn’t the only form of synthesis though. There’s also “dismantling”, where you split an item into smaller parts (e.g. you split a hunk of meat into ‘delicious meat’ and ‘bone’) and processing, which is the usual synthesis we’re all familiar with. As with most other Atelier games (yes I know it’s not an actually an Atelier game, but it plays almost exactly like one) you have to buy tons of books and tools to make all the things you want to. In fact my only (tiny) beef with this game is that you have to place all the tools and items personally, which makes my room messy and leads to uncomfortable Shepherd’s Crossing flashbacks.
Those are my first impressions anyway, subject to change. The only cloud on the horizon is that I’m a little worried I probably won’t be able to do many replays because the story and characters are weak. Yah okay, the townspeople think Nora is a witch, but I already know she’s not one and I don’t really care about proving them wrong.
Then there’s the little mystery about what really happened between the Mist Witch and the hero Pauly who supposedly vanquished her, but again, ehhh, I dunno. And this might be a bit of a spoiler but… I’ve got this mysterious character named Mellow who has amnesia and doesn’t seem to eat. You think she could have something to do with the witch and hero? Gee, I wonder. Nah, actually I don’t. I don’t really care one way or another.
The characters are okay, but they’re all types I’ve seen before in other games. Your tiny advisor, the young adventurer who wants to make it big, the little girl who’s trying to prove herself, the beautiful and extremely strong swordswoman, the ditzy amnesiac, I’ve seen them all before somewhere.
Of course all that is just going to affect the replay value, but I haven’t even played it completely once, so it’s a little early for me to worry about that sort of thing. “Become the best X you can be within XX years” has been a staple of the Atelier series for years and I’ve always enjoyed the freedom that gave me. It should be no different this time round, as long as they have enough endings to account for different playing styles. I picked this game up for the alchemy anyway, and there’s a lot I still haven’t made so I’m in very good spirits right now. 
Now I just have to figure out how to beat that dragon at the springs and then my game can move forward again. Battles in Nora to Toki no Koubou are the usual 3×3 turn-based affairs Atelier games always use, but the enemies hit HARD and your HP is low so you can’t relax too much. That’s another plus, btw. I complain when games are too hard, but I don’t like it when they’re too easy either. With the right equipment, synthesized items and a little training I should be able to get the dragon before the game is out. I might need to revise my party a bit as well. I was using Nora, Keke and …I forgot his name. The red-haired guy who wants to make it big. I’m going to switch them out for Karuna and either Mellow or Sirkka ‘cos I need more attack and more magic. I’ll report back once I’ve beaten the darned thing.