18.07.10 / Japanese, RPGs, impressions, nintendo ds, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (1)
Tags: gibson, mimoza, nintendo ds, strategy rpg, summon night, triss
I played and finished this long ago, right after I finished Summon Night, but I jumped right into several other games, so I never got round to writing about it. Well, there wasn’t much to write because SN2 is very much a direct sequel to SN1. The storyline is different, but a lot of the characters show up again, the battle system is exactly the same, almost all the summon creatures are carried over from the previous ones, the music sounds the same, etc.
The first thing I noticed when the game started was the improved character designs. Not vastly improved, they’re still rather ugly, but much, much, much better than the horrible things in SN1DS. It’s especially noticeable when you see characters like Mimoza and Gibson from the previous game (they play a big role in this one too but aren’t playable), and even the newer characters are cuter to look at, particularly the girls.
The other thing different, obviously, is the story and the main characters. I chose the girl named Triss. She’s a member of the Blue-something [I keep forgetting the name, but it's the same Gibson & co. belong to] Summoning Guild but they treat her like trash for no good reason. The story starts with Triss qualifying as a full-fledged summoner and then immediately being cast out of the guild to “make a name for herself”, i.e. “GTFO and don’t come back.” But on her way out of town, she gets involved in an attempt to heal a girl with amnesia and finds herself in a village with a girl who can supposedly work miracles. This village is immediately attacked by mysterious Black Knights, and the story begins: Who are they? What do they want? Why does this girl have special powers? Why do Triss & co. throw everything away to protect a girl they only met five seconds ago? And will the girl with amnesia ever get her memory back?! (Shockingly enough, the answer is no.)
And…that was about it. It was pretty boring, to be honest. Fight random people, fight black knights, fight random people, fight black knights, long talking sequence, meet new characters and immediately bench them, etc. I bench every character after the first 8 or so because after every level up you get points to assign to stats. That means your homegrown characters are almost always stronger then new, pre-levelled ones, even if they’re the same level. While we’re at it, I should warn you not to bother trying to boost your MC’s magic. If she’s anything like my Triss, she will always be a crappy summoner in a party with three other better, stronger magicians. Her physical stats will be great through, so if I had to do it again, I’d make her a mighty warrior and call it a day.
The nice thing about SN2 is that the shops are slightly less expensive than those in SN1, or maybe you get more money from battles, I forget which. Either way it was easier to outfit your party properly without too much fuss as long as you didn’t get greedy. I still had to go for every other upgrade in order not to break the bank, but I managed quite well. The new mini-games are also more fun than those in the first one, especially the cake delivery and scratch card games, which I could play all those.
Since I was used to the system already, I blazed through the game with ease. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t really stick in my mind all that much. It’s not a bad game at all, in fact in many ways it’s much better than SN1. So I don’t know why I felt so bleh after finishing it, but somehow it’s put a damper on my Summon Night fever for now. Just for now. One day I’ll get SN3 and 4 for the PS2, and then we’ll talk again.
02.07.10 / Japanese, dating sim, impressions, konami, nintendo ds, otome game, romance, tokimeki memorial, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (6)
Tags: dating sim, fujiyama arashi, girl's side 3rd story, karen, miyo, nintendo ds, oosako chikara, otome game, ruka, sakurai kouichi, tokimeki memorial
Bwahahaha! All your Fujiyama Arashi are belong to me! Mwaha!
He was a piece of cake. Since there were no guides or wikis out when I started, I had to go with my gut, and my gut told me that the sporty guys are always the easiest to get. You just work your sports stat up as high as it will go, keep the rest of your stats up (everything was at least 130 by the end) and date him regularly until he’s all over you. Oh, and join the judo club when he asks you to. I also chose to work at the Habataki Pool where he also works, which was kind of fun.
Sad thing is, unlike Shiba from TMGS2, Arashi didn’t do it for me at all. I don’t like his stupid hair or his dorky face, his voice is blah, almost nothing happens with the sports club, you almost never get to see him blush, his sense of fashion is boring and repetitive, etc, etc, over and over again. I got him because he was easy, but I’m not satisfied!
Unfortunately I’m also not satisfied with most of the rest of the game. Most of it is because I replayed TMGS1 extensively last year, so a lot of the locations and events in the game are very familiar to me. I should have let at least two years pass between replays, because after the first year the whole thing was one giant snoozefest.
Much has been made of the two princes you get to woo in this game, but in my humble opinion…they’re both dicks. When I compare their assholish lines and behaviors to dear, sweet Kei Hazuki in the first game, ahh, what a difference. He was a little cold in the beginning, but he was a really cool, decent character. Saeki Teru was a serious dick too, but at least he wasn’t a borderline crook like Kouichi and Ruka in this game. These guys are slimeballs.
Having said that, I can kind of see myself going for Kou. He reminds me a lot of Shiba in terms of being mean-looking 
but probably sweet when you soften him up. Near the end of my game I somehow found him liking me (gotta pinpoint the stats he’s attracted to and go for him), plus I know his tastes are rock-and-roll and motorbikes, so it shouldn’t be too hard to date him. He showed up three whole times at my workplace to sneer at me and by the end I was thinking “Oooh, just wait till I get my hands on you!!” Ruka’s just a creep though, so forget about him. Sakuraaaaaiiii!
Other last impressions: I really like what they did with the girl friends in this game. I hated the two-faced, backstabbing bitches in the previous two installments. “Hey, we’re friends, right?” “Right, until I want to get my sticky hands on your man that is.” I really hated them. In my game I got to be friends with Miyo and Karen, who is totally a lesbian, and you get to hang out with them and have sleepovers and stuff, call them on the phone, make Valentine’s chocolate together, etc, etc. It’s a lot of fun and they seem to genuinely like you, which is really cool. I just wish there was a second pair of friends you could get, that would be even better. Btw, Room #6 is really cool, I want it.
Last thought: Your class teacher is GROSS. Even his name is gross, Oosako Chikara. Sounds like a fish or something. He looks all of 12 years old, his voice is weird and you don’t even get to date him so I don’t know what he’s in the story for. What were the Japanese thinking?! I can’t wrap my mind around this one.
Gotta go, I’m going to play something else for a while and then come back to get Kou later on. He WILL be mine!
25.06.10 / Japanese, RPGs, impressions, nintendo ds, shining force feather, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
Tags: aishya, archaic sealed heat, bullneq, millinear, mistwalker, nintendo ds, rpg, shining force feather, stella deus
More like Archaic Shit Heat. I only made it through an hour or so of this game before giving up, a new record for me. It’s sad because I really wanted to like this game, based on who made it (Mistwalker). But the controls are just, just too clunky and annoying.
Everything has to be done with the stylus control, no using any of the buttons. I’ve never played a game where this was comfortable and ASH wasn’t the game to buck the trend.
The character portraits are tiny, tiny, tiny.
The story is…hmm. From what little I played, you’re Aishya, the Princess of Millinear, and your whole kingdom is levelled by a firey dragon on your 17th birthday. But then your retainers, who had been turned to ash, start coming back to life and fighting with you. Creepy… so anyway, your mission is to figure out WTF is going on, stop the fire dragon from killing any more people, and generally just run away in the worst battle outfit since Lusso in FFTA2.
The gameplay is hard to describe. I’ve seen something Shining Force Feather and Stella Deus: it takes a certain number of points to do anything, whether to move or to attack. In this game it’s called AP. So if you start the battle with 40 AP, you can either hold still and gather more AP, move (reducing AP), or Battle, which takes a whopping 50 AP to commence. Apart from your loyal retainer Bullneq, all the other characters appear to be generics: white mage, black mage, fighter, etc. I presume you’ll learn some new classes as you go along.
See, it doesn’t look so bad on paper, but when it comes to actual execution on the field, it’s sloooow, clunky and boring, and the first few stages being made up of nothing but tutorials does NOT help. Furthermore, you attack in teams, right? So if they had made it like in Revenant Wings or something, where, say, Aishya can have a team of black mages under her, and Bullneq can have a team of fighters under him, etc, etc, that would be okay. But it doesn’t seem to work that way, it’s just…messed up. Well, after 1 hour anyway. I don’t know if I’m ever going to continue this game because it’s really dull, but we’ll see.
02.06.10 / ace attorney, impressions, nintendo ds, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (1)
Tags: ace attorney, agent lang, investigations, kay faraday, miles ed, quercus alba
Or, in short, “Quercus Alba is an idiot.” Obviously, endgame spoilers follow. Nothing wrong with the game itself. Just like all the previous game, the last two cases dragged on tremendously, but the bad guy was gotten in the end and there was much rejoicing. This is much better than Apollo Justice and the third PW game, at any rate. Kay >>>> Trucy > Maya, Agent Lang >>> Klavier (especially since you get to put paid to him in a most satisfying manner). And of course Edgeworth = Phoenix (ooh, it’s a real toss-up) >>>>>>>>>>> Apollo, so it’s all good.
But more than any of the other bosses before him, if this last boss had just kept his head down, stood his ground and DENIED EVERYTHING, he would have walked away a free man. There was no reason for him to cooperate with them at all once they’d caught Shih-na, ‘cos he was in plenty of trouble at that point. Deny, deny, deny, man.
Huh? My plant sticks were used as crossbows? Oh, how horrible, who would do such a thing to my poor flowers? Please find the real killer at once!
Huh? Mask Demasque II? It wasn’t me.
Huh? Loading a pushcart with a body? If someone did that, shouldn’t the suspicion be on the Steel Samurai and his staff? Anyway, it wasn’t me.
Huh? Putting the cart in the reservoir, etc, etc, etc? Shih-na and her mystery accomplice must have done that by themselves, I’m just a weak old man. Anyway, it wasn’t me.
Huh? A knife in my bouquet? Why, so it is! Or the handle, anyway. Please have the florist and my staff investigated at once, or maybe the Steel Samurai snuck it in when I wasn’t looking. Anyway, it wasn’t me.
Huh? Me and Manny in the car together? Okay, you’ve got me, I was there. But that doesn’t mean I knew anything about a so-called smuggling ring or the murder of that poor, poor girl. I was just hitching a ride with Manny to go to the doctor, what with my bad back and all. Anyway, it wasn’t me.
Huh? The fake Primidux statue somehow found its way into my office? What would that have to do with me? I have no motive, and you can’t prove I knew the counterfeit plate was inside. Seeing as Manny was the smuggling boss, maybe he or Ambassador Palaeno did it to make Allebast look bad! Anyway, it wasn’t me.
Huh? “Early Summer Rain Jab”? What can I say, I snuck a peek in the dressing room because I’m such a big fan of the Steel Samurai. Big deal.
Huh? My blood on a box of samurai dogs? Well, you can prove it was my blood, but you can’t prove it got on the box while it was in the dressing room, or that it wasn’t planted there. You say you got this from the Pink Princess? I suggest you investigate her and the Samurai one more time, their timing is especially suspicious. Anyway, it wasn’t me.
Basically you guys have got nothing on me except a bunch of wild guesses and random speculation. You can’t detain me because I’m not going to stick around long enough for you to get my diplomatic immunity revoked. See ya, suckers!
Oh, and by the way: It wasn’t me!
10.02.10 / RPGs, atlus, impressions, persona 3, shin megami tensei, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
Tags: demon, digital devil saga, fire emblem, lina no atelier, nocturne, path of radiance, persona, ps2, rpg, shin megami tensei
I finally finished Digital Devil Saga 2, and it was a complete disappointment (more on the whole game if and when I can ever be bothered). Also finished one round of Lina no Atelier, though I didn’t get a good ending it wasn’t that bad after all. More on that as well later.
However, I just picked up SMT: Nocturne, I’m only 2 hours in and I’m having a great time! I missed fusing personas/demons from the later games, and the Magatama system looks remarkably fun. It’s not that hard either, so far anyway. I’m guessing part of the legendary difficulty comes from the fact that it was the first SMT game for a lot of people. That, and if you throw a skill away it’s gone forever. I’ll have to be careful of that, but Fire Emblem Path of Radiance was kinda like that and I managed it just fine, so I think I’ll be okay.
But I like the post-apocalyptic landscape so far, and the relative lack of NPCs is fun too, especially the lack of dumbass party members slowing you down, whining, bitching, moaning, leaving your party at the worst time. This game is awesome! Well, 2 hours of it is awesome anyway. So if you don’t see any posts for a while, you know what I’m getting up to.
26.12.09 / RPGs, impressions, ps2, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
Tags: also sprach zarathustra, labyrinthos, ps2, rpg, shion, xenosaga iii
Security in all the installations in this series has been bad, but I think Labyrinthos takes the cake for WORST ever in video game history. It’s a very important building handling all kind of top-secret experiments and materials, and they’re expecting an attack from the Federation at any moment! They even said there were Federation moles around, didn’t they?
So from the second we took those guards out on the first floor, every single door, lock, window, everything in the building should have been locked down tight and a non-stop flood of security should have poured in. Labyrinthos shouldn’t have keycards just lying around for people to pick up, and every elevator should be guarded tightly, especially in an emergency. And haven’t they heard of fingerprint and retina scanners? Well actually they have, because Kevin had some in his room, so why don’t they bloody use them!!!? Haven’t they heard of encryption? How can I just stroll casually up to the Vessels of Anima, enter a few commands and have full access to the system? And when I do that, they still wait till I’ve stolen 3 of them and outfitted the E.S. before having any sort of reaction to my intrusion. Ridiculous.
I was flabbergasted, all the way through the dungeon. I was expecting some sort of trap or ambush at the end, like “We saw you coming all along, now die!” ‘cos they have to have security cameras in a place like this, right? I know they do because I saw the footage, but somehow they’re incapable of tracking us on the cameras and blocking us off, or setting traps for us? Who runs this installation, a bunch of muppets? No wonder they got wiped out, with intelligence like that.
Anyway, I’m having fun finally finishing this series off. It would help if Shion wasn’t such a stubborn, whiny bitch, but that’s what the Mute button is for. What an annoying bitch.
This game needs more chaos!!
