27.12.11 / Idea Factory, Japanese, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: review, wand of fortune portable
Nothing like a little romance for Christmas…
A little romance. Most of your relationships in this game are more like friendships, and the game ends when the real romance is about to begin. I liked all the guys on offer, but my first playthrough took so long and was so tedious that I have lost all the will to play any more of this game.
Story: Lulu, the protagonist, enrolls in Mils Clea Magic Academy to fulfill her dream of becoming a magician like her grandmother. In their world, everyone belongs to one of six elements, but preliminary tests show Lulu doesn’t have an element at all. Not to worry though, hanging out with someone long enough naturally dyes you in their colors. Now Lulu has six months to find an element while raising her INT, DEX and MP stats, or her magic will be sealed forever.
Characters: Six bishies, three teachers, one room mate, four classmates. A small cast for a game set in an academy, and the lack of people to interact with hurts the game in the long run. The bishies are Julius (wind), Noel (earth), Bilal (water), Lagi (Fire), Alvaro (Light) and Est (Dark). Studying with them raises your affiliation with that element, while talking to and going out of dates with them raises their affection for you. Lulu herself is like the reincarnation of Pollyanna with an added sweets fetish. She is relentlessly positive and never gets down for more than a little while. I thought I’d find her annoying, but she’s so unwavering in her positivity that she’s hard to dislike.
Y U mad tho
For this playthrough I decided to go after Lagi. Unlike the others, Lagi can’t use magic. He’s at the Academy as a research subject, because he turns into a baby dragon every time a girl bumps into him. This is because he’s half-dragon, and the time is fast approaching when he’ll have to pick whether to be a dragon or a human for life.
When he first meets Lulu he’s cranky and prickly, just the sort of guy that’s fun to tease. Slowly but surely she wears him down, but he’s still more tsun than dere towards her until the final confession. In the end it turns out his affliction was all in his mind, ‘cos he didn’t want to pick. In order to save Lulu from a salamander he turns into a dragon, but instead of leaving the academy, he decides to hang around a little longer and confesses to Lulu at the end. Aww.
Lagi’s route was fun enough. He was involved in some very comical events. And his baby dragon form is cute. However if I hadn’t picked him, I’d have gone for Est, the short sarcastic shota. He’s obviously suffering from some kind of existential angst, and Lulu’s just the girl to help him get over himself. I’ll be Ike to your Soren any day, Est baby!
I wants your body, Mr. Elbart. I don't care if you're still using it!
Truth be told, though, the guy I really wanted to get with was my clumsy awkward teacher Mr. Elbart. But you can’t go for the forbidden relationship right off the bat, it’s just not done. I mean, what will people say about my Lulu? I was going to save him for my next playthrough, but I haven’t got it in me any more. Lulu gets to stay unsullied… for now.
Gameplay: Take lessons to raise your stats. Study with guys to raise your affiliation. Talk with them to make them like you. Solve mysteries and help people on the weekend. Go out on dates with the guy you like. Go shopping when you get the chance. That’s…about it, really.
The good stuff first:
1) It’s a dating sim/visual novel hybrid. There’s more to it than just non-stop reading. Not much more, but it’s the thought that counts.
2) You can check affection levels and your parameters at any time
3) You can skip dialogue and events forcefully, unless you are required to make a choice. Unfortunately you have to make choices every single day, so skipping goes in fits and starts.
4) Affection, affiliation and magic stats are all very easy to raise. Just by playing normally, you can make a guy fall fully in love with you within 3 or 4 months.
5) The art is very nice and the few CGs you get are cool. Dunno why they ration out the CGs over the course of the game and then suddenly dump 5 on you in the last hours, but a CG is a CG so I’ll take ‘em.
6) The voice acting is okay. Est sounded suitably shota, Alvaro was appropriately smarmy, Julius could be nerdy and serious in turns, etc. Nobody really stood out, but nothing was bad either.
7) There’s an interesting card mini-game you can play. The guys have fixed patterns of play, so it’s easy enough to beat them. But it’s a nice diversion from the usual.
Lulu is hungry for Lagi's 'special' meat
The bad stuff.
1) This game is TEDIOUS. AS. HELL. Every single day you’re forced to watch Lulu wake up, talk to someone in the lobby, pick a class/guy to talk to, help someone, talk to someone on the way home, pick someone to talk to again, go to bed and fall asleep. 6 months x 28 days = 168 times! Every couple of weeks something interesting happens and shakes up the routine, but otherwise you have to watch the exact same scenes over and over again.
2) Not enough exploration or adventure. It’s set in a Magic Academy, but anyone expecting Mana Khemia-style adventures will be sorely disappointed. You rarely leave school even on weekends, so all your activities take place in the same few locations. You rarely interact with the townspeople and most other students are black silhouettes. It’s a very boring academy, and thus a very boring game.
3) The game is too long. I know I’ve put at least 15 hours into this game, possibly more, and I don’t think I’ve gotten enough out of it.
4) The final arc had waaaaaaay too much talking. I was okay until that point, because the scenes kept switching and things moved along quite quickly. But the last arc was just dull. Characters taking forever to figure out stuff I already knew. Having the same arguments. Saying the same things in different words.
5) Without a guide you might end up with the wrong stats for the guy you want to woo. A fortuneteller in town told me I need to raise MP for Lagi, but she didn’t tell me how much. I finished the game with 53 MP, 26 INT and 26 DEX and got the ending all right, but what if I had needed 60 or 65 MP instead? I’d have been screwed.
Conclusion: I liked the characters, I liked the art, I liked the setting, I liked the story. But I intensely disliked the gameplay. So much so that it overwhelmed all the positive parts of the game and left me exhausted and more than a little irritated by the end. I enjoyed my one playthrough of Wand of Fortune, but there’s no character I like enough to want to play the game again. Lagi end is canon! There are no other endings! On to the next game!
27.09.11 / Idea Factory, Japanese, Nintendo DS, Otome game, Romance game, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: will o' wisp
I finished my first ever visual novel!
Will O’ Wisp is about a girl named Hanna who finds a life-sized doll in her basement after her dollmaker grandfather dies. She winds him up and he introduces himself as Will, an elemental doll, which basically means he’s alive and belongs to her. As the game goes on, Hanna will discover more about the other elemental dolls, her own special powers, and the role she is destined to fulfill. You know, the usual twaddle. It’s cliched, but short enough to stay interesting.
Will O’ Wisp DS also comes with a sequel of sorts packaged in there, called “The Miracle of Easter”, but I was sick of the game by the time I finished the main story, so I passed on that. Plus it retcons the ending of the original game. In the ending I got, Gyl turned human, Hanna lost her powers and they lived happily ever after together. In “The Miracle of Easter”, all the dolls were rendered lifeless at the end. Work done = 0.
I’m pretty chuffed that I actually managed to finish Will O’ Wisp. I’ve tried many visual novels, but I’ve never actually made it all the way to the end of one before. To be honest I don’t even recognize visual novels as “games”, but on the other hand they’re often substandard as far as reading material goes, so it’s no-win situation any way I look at it. Will O’ Wisp was a little better, since the story was okay-ish, and things moved at a cracking pace – at first. By Chapter 3, though, every scene started dragging on, Hanna’s internal monologue grew longer and longer, and the characters went over the same things ad nauseam: “Alvin is crazy, Alvin is crazy, Alvin is crazy, do you want to be released, do you want to be released, do you want to be released” again and again and again. To tell the truth, I used the Skip option to fast-forward from middle of Chapter 3 all the way to the final showdown with Ignis, then read from there. But a finish is a finish, and I did watch the ending credits, so I count that as “completed.”
If I had to hazard a few guesses as to why I was able to finish Will O’ Wisp in particular, it would be:
1. The art is nice. I’m a sucker for nice character designs. The CGs were fine to look at as well, though I wouldn’t have minded more. There were relatively few backgrounds, but the story moved fast enough that you were always shuffling between them, so it wasn’t so bad.
2. The scenes moved fast. This is the biggest reason why I can’t play VNs. Each trivial scene drags on interminably. Up till chapter 3 Will o’ Wisp kept things flowing: make a point and move on. Make a point and move on. Then it fell apart, but that’s what the “Skip” option was for.
3. The story’s pretty interesting, for a Rozen Maiden rip-off. Dolls and owners and they were all made by the same person and they’ve been alive for hundreds of years and they’re dressed Victorian-style and they fight, etc. But stories about dolls coming to life are much older than Rozen Maiden, so I’ll give them a pass. And they’ve got nice bishies, that’s gotta count for something.
4. The story develops quickly. Something’s happening at almost every stage, and it all leads to a logical conclusion. Not much time is wasted on petty arguments or comic scenes. Until chapter 3 and onwards, of course.
5. It’s not that long. There’s no timer in the game, but I don’t think it would take more than 4 or 5 hours to finish a route, even without skipping all the dialogue. I don’t have a lot of patience for reading endlessly, so that’s about my limit anyway.
6. Feedback is almost instanteneous. Accidentally selecting the wrong option and dooming yourself to a bad end/locking yourself out of a certain route is another thing I hate about visual novels. “What do you want on your bread?” A: Butter B: Jam C: Nothing. YOU PICKED BUTTER? Welcome to BAD END. Yaahh…Will o’ Wisp has none of that. If you select the right thing, you get a blue glow. Wrong thing, no blue glow. And you can check the affection level of your chosen doll any time you want, so you know you’re on the right track. There’s no way to fail. Heck, even if you don’t speak Japanese you can play this pretty easily.
7. Gyl is hot, in a girly kind of way. I did his route, and he wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes. I liked it best when he stopped wearing drag at the end.
8. Ignis is voiced by Takehito Koyasu. Actually I keep mixing up Koyasu and Kenyuu Horiuchi, so I didn’t know which one of them it was until I read the credits at the end. It wasn’t a very passionate performance either, Mr. Koyasu was clearly phoning it in this time. But I knew it was a voice I liked, so that counted for something. Come to think of it, the only voice actors I can recognize without fail are Norio Wakamoto and Shuichi Ikeda (mitometakunai mono da na). They should do more games.
So you see, so it’s not that hard to make a visual novel even I will like. Just keep the story moving fast, make the bishies hot and tell me when I’m going wrong so I don’t need a FAQ to find my way around. If you do that, I’ll even ignore stuff like 60% of the cast being obnoxious and the main character being a weak-willed lily and the story getting bogged down in the middle and the music grating on the ears. I’m a generous soul, after all.
Now that I’m rapidly running out of actual games to play on my PSP and DS, I might be forced to try more of these in the future, so I hope I can find more stuff that meets these simple requirements.
22.07.11 / Idea Factory, Japanese, Romance game, RPG, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: motto nuga-cel, review
Months of playing games like Dragon Quest 9, Tactics Layer and Ar Tonelico have created in me a not-so-secret fancy for dressing-up games, so where else to go next but to the PSP remake of the classic “Grand Daddy of them All?” Motto Nuga-Cel goes way further than any of the games mentioned above, with an entire battle system based around dressing, stripping and being stripped. Gotta give credit to Idea Factory: they’ve got ideas all right!
I don’t quite know where to start with this review, so I’ll play it by the book.
Story
The 23 districts of Tokyo-23 are at war with each other. As the master of Minato District, you and your girls have to conquer the other 22 districts while searching for three legendary artifacts that will supposedly make you the ruler of the world. That is basically all the story you are ever going to get.
Characters
A total of seven playable girls to control, dress up and woo. As a very deliberate policy, no males show up in the game, not even as pictures. There’s also a cast of baddies and assorted mooks, monsters and maids, mostly shallow and mostly there just for comedy/fan-service.
Graphics
Terrible. The character designs range from “okay” to “worst I’ve ever seen”. So this is why the art in Tactics Layer was so bad. It was a tribute to Nuga-Cel, huh? The occasional CG you can get range from “Hmm, okay” to “WTF AM I LOOKING AT” in quality. The quantity of fanservice is pretty high, since the game was explicitly made to appeal to male players. A case in point:
Gameplay
Oh boy, where to start. *deep breath* Okay, clothes. You have your base stats and two weapons per girl, but everything else depends entirely on the clothes you dress your characters in. Enemy attacks weaken these clothes until they suddenly pop off entirely, reducing your stats to nearly nothing. Lose your clothes and your girl is probably a goner. She will also squeal, cover herself and miss a turn out of sheer embarrassment, forcing you to spend the next turn putting more on (if she survives the next hit), so don’t count on her to be any use in battle. Since this happens to enemies as well, stripping is a key battle mechanic, vital for taking down enemies with high HP.
Characters will appear in cutscenes with the outfits you dress them in, no matter how ridiculous. If they get stripped, they’ll walk around in bras and panties until you put clothes on them again. Bosses you manage to strip will also ride out the next scene in their underwear.
Clothes can be bought from the store as the story progresses, but using them as-is is a terrible idea. It is vital to improve clothing stats by adding all kinds of patches and appliques to it. When I first started I had no idea how important this was, so I found the battles incredibly difficult. I kept trying to level up and to use battle items, but it was no use. My girls were stripped repeatedly while barely doing scratch damage to stronger enemies, and even the simplest-seeming battle turned into a life-and-death struggle.
After a few hours I cottoned on to the fact that it’s not about the clothes’ base stats, it’s about how “pimpable” they are, and everything took a turn for the better after that. Instead of craving new clothes, I craved new upgrades. Apart from patches, you can also update most outfits at least once with special items. E.g. a modern swimsuit can be upgraded to an old-style school swimsuit. A maid outfit can be turned into a catgirl maid outfit, etc. The better the clothes, the higher the stat caps. If I had to give a single piece of advice to anyone who wanted to play this game it would be this: PIMP THOSE CLOTHES OUT!
The stronger I got, the easier the game got. The easier the game got, the more fun things got. Instead of dreading battles, I looked forward to them. I couldn’t wait to attack new areas and continue the story. The final boss wasn’t a complete walkover, but he was still easy as pie compared to the earlier bosses when I didn’t know what I was doing. Motto Nuga-Cel falls in the “Easy if you know what you’re doing, otherwise hard as hell” category of games.
The flow of the game generally goes like this:
1. Conquer area. You can only attack areas that are adjacent to your territory. Each territory takes several battles to conquer, and while they won’t attack you until you attack them first, once you do they’ll retaliate with gusto.
2. Once area is conquered, build some kind of facility on it. This doesn’t apply to areas that have important landmarks on them (e.g. Shibuya and the Hachiko statue) but facilities give you money/items every day.
3. Invest in conquered area so you can get more tribute every day. Maximizing investment will take several days.
4. Explore dungeons underneath the area, if available. Territory fights involve humans, but dungeons are populated by all sorts of interesting monsters, including rocket-propelled pencils, militant baby chicks and the adorable flaming puppy heads pictured.
5. When you’re ready, attack the next area and repeat the process all over again. Areas are ranked by difficulty, from one star to five, so if you follow the rankings, take your time and, most importantly, upgrade your clothing, you shouldn’t find it too hard.
When you’re not fighting, you get the occasional opportunity to woo your party members. This is important partly because it raises their base stats a little and also because you get a specific ending for whichever girl who loves you best at the end. It was obviously thrown in there as an afterthought, and has no real bearing on the plot or story development.
Battle System
Standard turn-based RPG system, characters move based on speed. In fact Speed is probably the most important stat in this Strip or Be Stripped world. Speed, speed, speed! It doesn’t matter how strong you are, the longer the battle goes the more likely you are to end up naked! This is because any enemy attack that hits will do clothing damage even if it hits for 0. You want to dodge at all costs. Plus the lower your speed is, the less accurate your attacks will be and you absolutely cannot have that.
In addition to stats, clothes convey different skills to characters, which are used with MP (called “Tiredness” in this game). Most clothes come with innate skills as well, sometimes negative. For example the powerful animal suits have a “Trip” skill that causes you to miss turns frequently. NOT cool. As an extra note, HP, Tiredness and Clothing Strength do not recover immediately after battle. You either have to wait a few days or take them to healing facilities to be healed.
My battle party for most of the game was Maya, Piyo and Serena. I made a brief effort to raise the other girls as well, but this is one of the few RPGs where EXP does not scale, so it was an exercise in frustration. 50 exp from a level 10 monster is the same as 50 exp from a level 100 
monster to all characters. Clothes make more difference than level anyway, so it’s better to have a few extra sets of maxed-out clothing for repeat battles than to have two full parties ready to go. You can also recruit extra party members, but I can’t for the life of me see any reason to do so.
Everything Else
I used the final save I had to get three different endings. The first was a standard ending with Maya where she tries to creep into your bed. Then I reloaded and made the “other” choice which resulted in a very interesting battle. I got two more endings by first losing then winning that battle. I can’t say much for the endings, though. They were…adequate. New Game Plus let me carry everything over except affection levels and conquered areas, which should make replays a breeze, but I’m not sure I want to replay this game. With no new story elements to uncover, easy battles and meh endings all around, Motto Nuga-Cel is worth only one playthrough.
11.04.11 / Atlus, Idea Factory, Nintendo DS, RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: Date ni Game Tsui Wake Jane!, Dungeon Maker Girls Type, master of the monster lair, my world my way, review
Another game I couldn’t get into. I was bored stiff within an hour. In Master of the Monster Lair, you play a jobless teen who finds a magical shovel that can be used to dig dungeons. Your local mayor appoints you dungeon digger and asks you to turn the local caves into a dungeon as a tourist attraction.
Well, I can’t say I was excited by the premise to begin with, but if the gameplay had been the least bit interesting, maybe I’d be making a completely different kind of post. Unfortunately, dull doesn’t even begin to describe it.
In the morning, you wake up, go to the dungeon, dig some holes. You put beds and fields and rooms in the dungeon so the monsters will move in. Do until you run out of HP, go home, eat and sleep. Next day, do the same, except you now have to fight the ungrateful monsters who moved into the rooms you so nicely prepared for them.
Each battle will play out the same as well. You either whack them to death slowly and methodically, or you use a magic bomb to wipe them out. Also fighting enemies one-on-one will rarely produce item drops. You have to group them together in twos or threes using dungeon design, take them all out, and then the last one will drop an item. This may be a weapon, a food item, or some other random junk that a townsperson may or may not be looking for. Fight some more enemies, dig, some more holes, go home and repeat the whole process all over again.
I managed to finish the first floor of the dungeon before giving up. Once I’d gotten enough monsters to move in, a boss showed up and I beat it. My reward was the ability to go down to a new floor which was even bigger and more yawn-inspiring than the first. At that point I started having doubts. Is this really what the whole game is about? I paused to do a little research and dammit, I was right. It’s just digging holes from morning to evening to house monsters who don’t even appreciate your efforts, ho-hum. As if that wasn’t bad enough, you have stay in the same town throughout the game, interacting with the same people throughout, and all they use you for is to run errands and get them new kinds of food from the dungeon. What would I have gotten if I’d kept digging down through 10 levels of dungeons…nothing? Dunno, don’t care.
To be honest, I only tried MoML because I’d heard it was similar to My World, My Way, and I liked that game. MWMW was repetitive in its own way, but at least you could move from place to place and it had the trappings of a story. When it was over, I felt good, having put that cocky adventurer in his place. And it was nice to trace my progress all over the map, looking at all the towns I’d been to and thinking of all the bosses I whooped. When MoML is over, I’m sure all I’ll feel is, “Gee, I just dug a bunch of holes! Yay, me!”
Or at least I imagine that’s how I’d feel, because I just decided that I’m not going to finish it. I have absolutely no motivation to do so and I’m already deep into playing Saga 3 anyway, so I’m not exactly starving for games. No proper story, no proper gameplay, same 5 or 6 characters, same enemies I already saw in MWMW? There’s nothing in this particular game for me.
On the other hand, the other day I saw the cover of a spin-off/sequel to this game, with an emotional-looking bishie on it. It was called Date ni Game Tsui Wake Jane! Dungeon Maker Girls Type. This version was developed by Idea Factory (I think?) and the premise sounded a little more interesting: a grumpy, money-hungry mercenary named Hugo stumbles upon a strange village and is roped into becoming a dungeon maker by a half-human white mouse bishie (<–feel free to reread that till it makes sense) so I was tempted to hold out hope for it. I’m still tempted, because it’s got some seriously nice looking bishies:
…even though your main character is male, uh-oh. I’m a sucker for nice character designs anyway [The one with red hair in the middle. The one with red hair in the middle!!!] And it looks like there might be some good character interaction in this game. However, screenshots of the actual gameplay make it look like the same old crap I just suffered through. The gameplay description on the official site is what I was dreading: accept an item request, make a dungeon that has monsters that will drop that item, beat those monsters, get the drop, fill the request. On the other hand, it could be something like Rune Factory, where carrying out quests leads to character development and romantic relationships. Wait, not “it could be”, that is how it works! That sounds great!
I’ll have to think about this for a while longer, while I try to finish Saga 3, which has finally gotten interesting. If I do try Dungeon Maker Girls Type, I’ll write about it eventually. Until then, goodbye to Master of the Monster Lair.
01.11.10 / Idea Factory, Japanese, Otome game, PS2, Romance game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: idea factory, L2 Love x Loop, tokimeki memorial
I’ve been so caught up actually playing games I haven’t been following game news as much as I used to. Nothing too big going on right now, but an upcoming PS2 otome game caught my eye on Famitsu just now. It’s called L2 Love x Loop. If I tend to focus on PS2 and DS games in this blog it’s because those are the two main things I play on, though I also own a PS1 and a Wii.
Anyway, Love x Loop’s premise is like this: the heroine Nanami lives with her older sister in a futuristic setting where robots are at war with mankind and humans have been reduced to living in ruins. On Nanami’s birthday her sister is kidnapped in a robot attack, and she finds a mysterious robot just lying around. Now through the powers of this special robot she resolves to go back in time and change the past so that the future won’t have to be so crappy any more.
I remember someone with a plan like that, I think his name was Trunks and it didn’t work out quite as planned. Then again it did work out for someone else named Crono so we’ll see how things turn out 
Anyway, this wouldn’t be a real otome game without bishies, would it? Yup, so somehow Nanami finds time out of her very busy time-travelling sister-saving world-changing schedule to romance a few cute guys. What I’m really worried about, though, is that old guy in there.
See him? Right in the top right corner with the beard. He’s creeping me out. I can’t 
imagine…you know…even though I did hook up with the headmaster in Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side, but that’s different! Really! *ahem* According to the official blog he’s the man who gave the robot to the main character, so maybe we’ll be spared the geriatric kissy face.
Old guy worries aside (or maybe because of them) I’m really looking forward to this game. The story sounds fresh, the bishies look fresh and different and screenshots I’m seeing look lovely.
L2 Love x Loop from Idea Factory comes out August 20th in Japan. I’ll probably get it a month or two afterwards, based on the reviews.
