24.08.10 / Japanese, dating sim, nintendo ds, otome game, tokimeki memorial, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (1)
Tags: amanohashi, girl's side 3rd story, kouichi, oosako, shitara seiji, tokimeki memorial
Got my fourth ending last night. If I had to rate all the character routes I’ve gotten so far, it’d be Konno > Kouichi > Shitara > Arashi.
I wasn’t moved by Shitara’s route half as much as I thought he’d be. He’s not a bad person by any means, and he warms up to you very quickly, but apart from that there’s not much to him. Okay, so he’s a genius pianist. That’s nice. He’s from a rich family. That’s nice. He’s…got nothing else but piano. That’s nice. He likes tea. That’s nice. And? That’s…IT? Geez, how dull.
For every plus about him, there’s a minus somewhere. Some people have praised his “tsundere” attitude, but as far as I can see he’s more “dere” than “tsun” once you get past his first stage. After that he’s pretty much all over you, with a few prickly moments. I enjoyed some of the funny answers you get when you ask him questions (Like when you ask if he likes classical music and he answers “Do you like food?”), but I was so looking forward to softening him up slowly and surely over time. Kouichi was a much tougher prospect than him.
Second plus, he looks nice on the normal screen, but in my opinion he looks ordinary, weird or outright bad in most CGs. On a related note, his route is stingy with the CGs, and the few ones you get are very boring. Oh look, it’s Shitara standing by the piano…Okay? Oh look, it’s Shitara playing the piano…Okay? Oh look, it’s Shitara standing there with his hand outstretched…Okay?
Third plus, he’s from a wealthy family. He’s got the snooty, childish attitude to match, but that’s still a plus in my eyes because I’ve never dated a rich kid in any of these games before (Amano-pervert doesn’t count). He’s got a fancy house and a bedroom so big it’s got a grand piano in it and you can’t even see the bed. Thanks to that he’s able to take you to formal dance event (once) and invite you to join him in Paris at the end which you waffle on because you’re an idiot.
The flip side of that, though, is that dating him is pretty much like dating all the other guys. There’s no difference between dating Kouichi, who lives in an abandoned restaurant, and dating Seiji with all his money. Where are the fine restaurants? Where’s the hobnobbing with the rich and famous? The cool clothes instead of wearing the same shirt three dates in a row? How about he takes you shopping and buys you something? Where are the cool presents? Not even a Christmas present?! The wine? The trips? The roses? More wine? What’s the point dating a rich guy if he’s just like everybody else?! “Love”? What is this “love” you speak of, is it tasty? :-p
I kid, I kid…sorta. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s rich or not, Seiji’s a decent guy. But it’s true I had expectations that Shitara’s route would be “special” somehow so in that respect it fell way short. As a perfectly normal route to try, thought, it’s worth a playthrough.
And now, since I deliberately failed my first exam and got remedials, it’s time to try for Oosako-sensei’s ending! Who knows, it might surprise me.
18.08.10 / Japanese, nintendo ds, raising sim, reviews, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
Tags: brownie brown, livly garden, neopets
Front cover
I played this every day for several months in a row, but I still don’t know what to make of it. Maybe if I was 12 years old or part of the Neopets crowd this would be awesome but as an adult, it’s just not…hmm.
First off, what is Livly Garden all about? A livly, according to this game, is a special mini-creature developed by a mysterious bearded Professor. They come in many different types, live in tiny gardens, eat bugs and poop tiny jewels called “doo doo”, which also function as money in this game.
The whole point of this game is to adopt a livly, plop him down in a barren garden and then try to turn this garden into a lush, blooming paradise. Livlies have special powers, one of which is fertility, so that just letting the Livly walks around makes the garden healthier. The player buys seeds from a shop (paying with doo doo) and plants all kinds of flowers and trees to raise the “greenness” of the garden.
Every kind of plant you grow attracts a kind of bug: beetles, caterpillars, grasshoppers, butterflies, etc. By catching and feeding these bugs to your livly, you can teach it new and useful abilities. For example you can make it water the whole garden in one go, or give your plants extra sun so they grow faster, or drive the occasional monster away with rocks, etc.
The first objective you get in the game is to grow a golden beanstalk in the corner of your garden, so if you see any promotional material with a beanstalk in it (it’s right there on the front cover, in fact), that’s what it’s about. Once you do that, the game opens up and you get to adopt more livlies and get more gardens. By eating the right kind of bugs, your livlies learn to transform the terrain of your garden so you can have jungle terrain, for example, to grow coconuts and corn on, or a pond for waterlilies and mangroves, or a swamp for bamboo, etc. I quit after my third garden and third livly, but apparently there are about 12 different kinds of terrain you can get and over a hundred bugs to catch and crops to grow.
The other thing you can do, and this wasn’t very interesting to me because I’m not a collection-freak, is to harvest items from your garden and turn them into items. You could make lavender flowers into potpourri, for starters, but that’s just the beginning. Before too long you’ll be able to make a stunning array of items from the things you grow: plushies, cakes, gates, furniture, etc. As you can see in the picture, you can use them (along with buyable decorations) to give your garden a nice, homey feel. …Or that’s the theory anyway, but I found that the gardens looked busy and colorful enough on their own so I restricted myself to a few tasteful items per garden. As a side note, I hear your livly can interact with certain items, and react to them with fright or delight, etc. My just ignored them and ran around though.
So anyway… all this stuff I’ve talked about: feeding your livly, catching bugs, harvesting crops, etc, all only takes a few minutes of time each day. The game works with the real-world clock just like Animal Crossing does, so when it’s night-time here, it’s night-time in game. This affects the bugs that show up, but not much else. So what I did was turn the DS on in the mornings, feed my livly and do whatever there was to do, then turn it off. Same thing at night before I went to bed.
It’s a low-commitment, low-guilt (your livlies are very hardy) kind of game that anyone can play without feeling the same pressure you’d get from, say, a Tamagotchi. That lack of pressure makes it possible to play for months on inertia alone. But on the other hand, it also makes the game very slow and dull once you achieve your first few objectives. After a while, new crops stop showing up unless you play the scratchcard mini-game, new bugs stop appearing and the whole game just sloooows down to an unbearable crawl, which is your sign that it’s time to get out. But I can see someone keeping this game for years and just playing for a few minutes every day, it’s that kind of game.
Since some of the livlies are pretty cute, if I had a younger sister or cousin or something under 12, this is the kind of game I’d get for them in front of their parents (while slipping Tokimeki Memorial under the table).
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.
14.07.10 / Japanese, dating sim, harvest moon, nintendo ds, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (8)
Tags: bluebell, bokujou monogatari, farming, futago no mura, harvest moon, konohana, nintendo ds, twin villages
I’ve shelved TMGS3 for the time being while I decide which guy to go for next. I’m very satisfied after dating Konno-senpai, so to throw myself back in the dating game for an inferior guy is like, hmm… But I get the feeling Shitara’s route will be all kinds of awesome, so maybe I’ll do that. Thanks to all who wrote about how to change the picture on my desk. I thought for sure Fujiyama was stalking me, *brrr!*
Right now I’m playing Harvest Moon: Twin Villages (a.k.a Bokujou Monogatari: Futago no Mura)! I used to really love Harvest Moon games, but most of the recent ones have been iffy-to-okay, not great. Sunshine Islands would have been great if I hadn’t played it right after Island of Happiness. The similarities between the two made SI feel very stale and unoriginal. In the same way there are a lot of similarities between Twin Villages and Grand Bazaar, particularly in terms of the art style and controls, so it lacks a bit of freshness.
As far as the story goes, there are two villages you can live in: Bluebell Village and Konohana Village. Hundreds of years ago the two mayors had a falling out and the two villages have theoretically been on bad terms ever since. Theoretically. I came into the game expecting some real rivalry and hostility between the two villages, but everyone’s actually really friendly. Even the two mayors have more of a friendly rivalry, they say the funniest things when they compete in the cooking contest (taking part in which is the only way to reunite the villages, go figure). Plus you can go to any of the villages any time you want, shop there all you want, do quests for the other villages, talk to people, you might even be able to woo the girls on the other side with no real consequences, and basically have a good time with no restrictions.
Futhermore, Bluebell is supposed to be the “ranching” village and Konohana the “farming” village, but you can start 
keeping cows and chickens in Konohana right away (mine keep falling sick, though), and I’m pretty sure you can grow crops in Bluebell too. What that means is that apart from the decor, there’s not much to choose between the two. Even better, you can up and move to the other village between the 23rd and the 30th of every season if you want. I’m yet to figure out why this would be a good idea when you can travel there any time, but this is more evidence that the rivalry is practically non-existent.
As far as the game itself goes, I’m only on Year 1 Spring 26, so I don’t want to come down too hard on it just yet. I’ll limit myself to two complaints for now: One, the map is rubbish. Remember the map from Sunshine Islands, how you could see where everyone was with one glance? In Rune Factory 3 the map even tracked movements, which was really convenient. Yeah, well, say goodbye to all that. Twin Villages’ map is awful and lacks a lot of detail. You can only see where your character is at any point in time, nobody else. You get a slightly more indepth map when you’re in town, but when you’re exploring the mountains and other places, tough luck. It wasn’t so bad in Grand Bazaar because there weren’t that many places to go, but in Twin Villages it’s extremely annoying.
Second complaint, time still moves way too slowly. They brought back that system from Grand Bazaar where if you water the crops twice a day they grow faster, but the minutes pass so slowly that you’ll be done with all your watering, foraging and quests with game-hours to spare. Luckily I learned my lesson in the last game, so I don’t chase those extra days, I just go to bed. Unfortunately the time affects other things, particularly festivals. Most of them start in the afternoon, so you might have to wait up to five real-time minutes to progress with the game if you’re taking part in one. It sounds short, but there’s nothing to DO while you’re waiting, so you’re just sitting there staring at the screen…staring…staring…starinZzZzZz…
But still, I just started. After having to eat crow on my initial Atelier Lina review, I’m going to be as optimistic as possible about this game until I’ve finished at least one year. I’ll write a second post on the game then.
11.07.10 / Japanese, dating sim, konami, nintendo ds, otome game, romance, tokimeki memorial, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (8)
Tags: junpei, karen, konno tamao, kouichi, miyo, ruka, tokimeki memorial
Konno-sempai is mine at last, tra la la la! I thought he would be harder than that, but I just went by my usual method and it worked out fine. I identified Academics as his most important stat and raised it like crazy, and then I raised all the other stats normally and got him in the end. I had something like Ac – 238, Sp – 160, Soc – 260 etc, etc by the end, but since I didn’t raise my Charm that high, I wasn’t elected Rose Queen. Doesn’t matter though, ‘cos I got to be in the school play twice, first with Konno as my prince and then with Miyo and Karen (who looks spiffy as a prince, TMGS4 really needs a girl-girl option).
My verdict on Konno? His route actually blew me away. The guy himself is on the dull side, but he’s a kind, decent, hardworking and respectful character without being a complete milquetoast like Sakuya in GS1. Even on the worst of dates he never gets nasty or snippy with you or tries to order you around. I mean, this is a guy who spends his Christmas Eve playing Santa for little kids in hospital! He’s like the model boyfriend, right?
Even better, his route appeals to the overachiever in me because even in games I hate getting bad results in exams. On Konno’s route you can study like crazy and get praised for it. Remember how Madoka in GS1 would get all cool towards you if you were too smart? I hated that. Konno’s end is good too: you both go to a first class university and keep dating, and with a stable guy like that, you might as well vote this “Ending most likely to end in a Wedding and Four Kids.” It’s an ending with a future, catch my drift?
More importantly, for some reason all his CGs are really easy to unlock. I mean, really easy, you just walk around town, bump into and bam, new CG. Or you go on a date, pick a certain store and bam, new CG. For most other guys you often need a FAQ: “Spring, Year 2, Affection must be XYZ, Go to store X and do YYY while holding ZZZ and singing AAA”, obscure stuff like that. I got all his school CGs except one, all his love CGs except one and all his (that other one) CGs, again except one. And I love getting CGs, so Konno’s path was the most satisfying for me so far.
On the minus side, he really is a bit of a bore. I mean, just a bit. They went a little overboard on the Mr. Perfect Guy thing (did I mention he’s totally hot without the glasses?), so even his attempts at angst and depth – the whole “nobody really sees me for who I really am” bit – come across as a bit shallow and empty. And since he’s your senior you don’t get to compete with him on grades and you don’t get to go on the school trip with him, which is a bit sad. But he’s still a breath of fresh air from gruff old Kouichi or weird Ruka or playboy Junpei so I’ll take him any day.
What’s next? I’m trying to find some detailed FAQs or walkthroughs because I want those secret characters! I ran into one at the bookstore, some old-looking guy, I’m sure there’s at least one or two others. And I hear you can date your teacher, which I do NOT want to do. I mean, that’s just wrong on so many levels! And he’s not even cute. Anyway, the search continues!
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.
07.06.10 / Japanese, RPGs, nintendo ds, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
Tags: Aya, nintendo ds, rpg, strategy, summon night
I’m on a Summon Night roll! Since I liked Tears Crown so much, I went out and downloaded the remake of the first Summon Night for the DS. I like isometric strategy RPGs anyway, so this was right up my alley. But then I loaded it up and UGH! The character designs are FUGLY! Right from the main character you select, everyone in the game looks like they were drawn by a third-grader! And the battles are slow, you spend half the game walking towards the enemy because they’re standing on the other end of the field and usually won’t move unless you come into their range.
And the story is YYY and the music is XXX and this and that…and before I knew it, 26 hours had gone by and I had finished the game. Just like that. Definitely one of the most painless game progressions I’ve ever experienced in my life. Long before I had time to start getting bored or start wondering where the story was going and who did what, it was over. On one hand, that’s called a shallow, simplistic story, on the other hand after several “deep” storylines in a row, it was a real breath of fresh air. If I had to summarize,
Pros:
- Very easy after the first few battles. Keeping everyone alive is kinda hard in the beginning after that it gets way easier
- But not too easy: you have to do free battles if you want to keep everyone equipped ‘cos they’re stingy with money.
- Lots of characters join your party and most of them are pretty useful
- Characters are automatically healed and revived after battle
- “Brave” system rewards you for not being overlevelled, by giving you special party abilities.
- Game isn’t too long and isn’t too short. You can finish a first playthrough in 20-30 hours even if you grind
- Lots of different beasts to summon, some very powerful, some very useful. Experimenting is fun!
Cons
- Fugly character designs. The cover art is a lie!
- Boring, cliched story. The original is over 10 years old, so that explains some things.
- Music is nothing remarkable
- Battles are really slow and take forever to finish.
- Battles are very repetitive, the same thing every single time: kill the boss/kill everyone, game over if your MC dies. Every single story battle, all the time.
- Trying to get new summons using summon stones is a crapshoot, and virtually useless in battle.
- No items to refill MP with makes using summons inconvenient in the first half of the game.
- Too many characters means you’ll be at a loss who to use and who to toss aside in the latter half. I just picked a party and stuck to it, since the game is easy enough.
So anyway, that was actually pretty fun, as far as strategy RPGs go. I was thinking of playing again with a different MC instead of Aya, but since I like it so much the decent thing would be to go out and buy it this time before playing some more. In the meantime I’m playing Summon Night 2 DS!
25.05.10 / Japanese, RPGs, ace attorney, nintendo ds, reviews, tears, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (1)
Tags: ace attorney investigations, dragon quest 9, dylan, elnardita, fara, miles edgeworth, muumuu, reviews, rpg, summon night x, tears crown
I’ve gotten into a bad habit of starting a new game right as I’m about to finish an old one, and then getting into it so much that I forget to finish the previous one. In fact I started the Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth game right before I reached the final boss in this game, but luckily the last dungeon was so pain-free that I ended up finishing it anyway.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. This was my very first game in the Summon Night series, as well as the only traditional turn-based RPG in the whole series, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going on. What I expected: just an ordinary RPG to kill the time. What I got: just an ordinary RPG to kill the time, but with a fun battle system and really charming characters, well worth the time I spent playing it.
I don’t know if I want to write a full review of this. I mean, it really was ordinary. The twist at the beginning where the main character [spoiler ahead, stop now] ‘s dad [stop now, really] turns out to be evil and sends the brainwashed Prince Noin to kill the king was unexpected because I hadn’t read a synopsis, but after that everything followed automatically with almost no other surprises. Fight, conquer X place, take it back from the Evil Empire, move on to the next place, fight Empire over macguffin, lose somehow, fight some more…you get the drift. It’s a very linear game with your hand held every step of the way: Go to Tower X, it’s north of the Y plains, after that go to Cave V, it’s north of plains Z, etc. But I wasn’t looking for surprises, so I just relaxed and enjoyed the trip. The trick to enjoying this game is low expectations, after all.
Low expectations should also apply to the music, which is rather bland, and the graphics, which are quite hideous by DS standards. Don’t get me wrong, the characters designs and character portraits are cute and lovely (a little baby-faced, but in a good way), but the actual sprites on the screen are horrible. Muddled, blurry messes with obscured features. They’re almost SNES-level bad, but not quite. It took a lot of getting used to, but as I said, I wasn’t looking for anything special, so I took it in stride.
So, ordinary cliched story, bland movie, bad sprites…what haven’t I mentioned? Oh yeah, the battle system. This wasn’t quite so ordinary. I mean, it’s definitely turn-based, active time battle system where the faster person goes first (this will almost always be the enemy, especially in the case of bosses). Some of your party members can fly, so they’ll be on the top screen, the others will be standing on land on the bottom screen. Same with enemies, though the number of flying bosses is disappointingly small. What’s the point of that? Well a lot of attacks target a specific group of enemies/members, so if you have at least one member in the sky, you can survive a lot of things that would wipe out the party. Also the one in the sky can score critical hits on flying enemies, which most land-based party members can’t do. On the minus side, a lot of buffs will hit only those in the buffer’s zone, something to take into account. Overall I liked that the battle system used the whole DS, it made the same-old system feel a little fresh and different.
See that red-yellow-green gauge near the top? It’s a burst-gauge of sorts, and for each bar that fills up, the main character (Dylan or Fara) gets to unleash a co-op attack with one of your party-members. One attack for one bar and an ultimate attack for the full three bars. Maybe this is just me but I think Elnardita’s is the most useful because at just level one it heals all party members for huge amount and raises attack, all without using MP. That’s probably only on Dylan’s path though (you can choose one of two mains). Your choice of fighting characters will probably depend to an extent on what co-ops they offer, so do some research before you start blowing too much money on equipment.
Last thing about the battle system, you see that big yellow creature on the right of the top-screen? That’s a summon beast (duh, it’s called Summon Night), and you get them by…usually by finding them in chests. You equip them to a character much like you did with GFs in FF8, and they provide all your magic attacks in the form of buffs, debuffs, healing and offensive magic. As you use them, they “level up” and learn new skills. And to power up these skills, you need special red Mana stones which are really (annoyingly) rare and must be used with care because they can’t be reused. A tip: don’t power up any offensive magic or debuffs, pour your stones into buffing and support magic. And be stingy with those stones until the latter half of the game when you get the good summons.
Phew…I said I wasn’t going to review it, but I got carried away. I really did enjoy it, much more than I liked DQ9, at least. As proof, I actually finished it. And I did all the “parliament” sidequests too, as soon as I unlocked them. What’s “parliament”, you ask? It’s a really whack system where your party members propose quests to do, e.g. a little boy’s gone missing, let’s go find him, then you and your party members debate over it, then in the end they vote on whether to do it or not. Sorry, I actually made that sound like fun, but it’s not. Because the debate consists of them throwing questions at you that you have no idea how to answer, and they don’t give you any hints/ideas, and if they vote you down you can’t do that quest for the rest of the game. Hit restart and start all over again. The worst offender is Muumuu ‘cos all he says is “Muu muu!” then you have to pick
-You want to boil the fish, huh?
-You want to fry the fish, huh?
How the hell would I know!? What’s worse, apart from the last few ones, most of them give you crappy items as rewards, stuff you don’t want or need and won’t ever use. Crap! But I did it anyway! And I liked it! Because despite everything, I really did care about the characters and I really did enjoy spending more time with them during those quests. Some of them were really funny, and a few gave really good experience.
Okay, that’s enough for one day. I wanted to talk about the “Brave” part of the battles, or about the great voice-acting, but all you really need to know is that it’s a pretty good game, in an ordinary way. It won’t be the best game you ever played, but you won’t regret getting it if it ever comes out in English. I hope they make more in the same vein!
07.04.10 / Japanese, RPGs, nintendo ds, reviews, shin megami tensei, strange journey, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
Tags: alchemy, atelier lina, atelier series, felsen, gust, hengst, jrpg, lina no atelier, nintendo ds, pesca, ryuon, strange journey, synthesis
Yeah, I know I made a post a while back calling it terrible, but that was long ago when I hadn’t played very far into it. Having played it some more and, in fact finished it 4 times for 4 different endings, I must say it’s far and away the best DS Atelier so far.
Let’s take my complaints again one at a time. First off, the money requirement isn’t as high this time as it was in Lise. Somehow I misread “hyakuman” as 100 million instead of 1 million, which is why I flew off the handle. And in fact I was more than halfway there when I realized my error.
More than halfway, you ask? You mean it’s that easy to earn 50 million cole in this game? Yup! Remember my second complaint that buying and selling is more important that alchemy in this game? Well it’s true if you want to make money, though you won’t need that much. The fastest way is to buy and sell weapons between Hengst and Felsen and Pesca, buying what isn’t sold in one town and selling it in another, back and forth. Weapons sell for most in summer, but you can spend spring, fall and winter buying and then sell in one swoop. Once you unlock the higher level weapons you can apparently make 500,000 in one trip! So yeah, you probably still need to spend one playthrough getting enough money and enough synthesis raw materials, and then you can spend the following runs getting a proper ending.
I also complained about the talking, didn’t I? Well it’s not half as bad in this one as in Atelier Annie. I think I was still traumatized by all the blabbing there and ended up overreacting. There’s still a bit of talk, but apart from Ryuon your party members don’t waylay you inside your atelier, in fact they never show up there. Even when your friendship with them is at maximum they don’t talk too much, and they don’t bug you endlessly with requests like they did in Annie. Plus they’re really likeable too, each and every one of them. Even the storekeepers!
What else did I say? Oh yeah, I said something about alchemy taking forever to produce even simple items. Unfortunately that’s true, but only in the beginning when the level of your alchemy tools is low. Once you have the right tool for the job and have levelled it up enough, you can make massive quantities of items in very little time, some of which sell like crazy (but not as much as the right weapons). Also almost all drops are fairly easy to come by, which means you can make just about every item you have a recipe for instead of grinding for hours for an item with a 1 in 2000 chance of dropping. Cool, right?
Oh, oh, and they brought back the fairy hiring system from early Atelier games, though you’ll need to fix the forest a bit more before that option becomes available. In the beginning you can only hire incompetent black fairies (come on Gust, why is black still the worst?) but by the end of the game you’ll get fairies that might be even better than you at alchemy. Sweet! They cost a pretty penny, but what’s a little money to a multi-millionaire like me?
And even better, all six endings are quite easy to get, including the best one. I’ll do a post about how to get each ending if you’d like. But that’ll have to be later because right now I’ve got some SMT: Strange Journey (oh god it’s boring, but I just learned not to judge a game by the first 2 hours) to play. Yay!
