Ending spoilers first: This game ends with you losing to the final boss. That’s it. So long, see ya, have fun wherever! The credits roll, the game is over. If you’ve ever run a marathon just to have someone kick you in the teeth and piss in your face when you reached the finish line, then you know what it’s like to finish Blade Dancer.
First Dragoneer’s Aria, now this? To steal a line from pro wrestling, if you put an S in front of Hitmaker, you’ll know exactly what I think of the company that made this game. Don’t play it. Not even for free. It’s not worth your time.
And the sad thing is, right until that final battle against the Dark Lord, I was all set to write, well, not a glowing review, but at least a few cautiously positive lines about how Blade Dancer is not as bad as people make it out to be. The game isn’t, anyway. But that ending? Who can I sue for this?
The story goes like this: There’s this Dark Lord who was sealed away 1000 years ago. Lance is the reincarnation of the only guy who could fight against that Dark Lord. Along the way, Lance picks up a girl named Tess who used to be the Dark Lord’s slave and who, for various reasons, cannot disobey his commands. So we go up against him at the end, she leaves the party, and then we layeth the smacketh down on his ass. At the end of the battle he uses his boss hax powers to leave us all with 1HP, then flounces off laughing with Tess in tow. Okay then, now we’ll just go through the final dungeon and rescue Tess and then– Huh? Wait. Why are the credits rolling? No. You can’t mean… This can’t be… NOOOOOOO!
Gwahaha. The end.
Nippon Ichi Software. Hitmaker. Would it have killed you to have added just ONE more dungeon to the game? Or heck, scrap that. Just add one more scene where Tess shakes off his mind control, then we all beat him down, then roll the credits. An extra 15 to 20 minutes, that’s all. Is that so hard? Is that really so much to ask for in exchange for 25 hours and 58 minutes of my life?
That was your one chance to make things right, because it’s not like the game is all that good anyway. Most people probably don’t even get that far, because the game is chockful of flaws from start to finish. The biggest one is having to walk everywhere because warp points are few and far between. Another one is the long loading times. A third one is the high random failure rate of crafting. Then there’s the low-quality graphics and the cartoony character designs. Plus the story is as shallow as a plate of air. And we haven’t even gotten into the highly breakable weapons or the great number of non-stackable items when space in your pack is severely limited.
None of that stuff was enough to deter me. In fact I was almost enjoying myself. I liked the characters. Gozen and Felis were likeable filler, and Lance’s irreverent attitude to his mighty destiny was a nice change from the usual. “I’m the Blade Dancer? Ya don’t say. So when’s the next fight?” I liked that the NPCs changed their lines as the game went along. I didn’t mind the breakable weapons at all, since it just meant you had to do extra preparation before setting out, and I got the chance to refashion nearly worn-out weapons as newer, stronger ones. All the makers had to do was end the game well and I would have been satisfied.
What hurts all the more is that this isn’t even sequel material. There’s nothing to make a sequel about. You can compare this to Trails in the Sky, which also ended on a cliffhanger. There they evidently took the decision to milk the game early on, so they introduced mysteries right from the start and left some plotlines unresolved at the end. To be honest I still don’t think they have enough material for a sequel, but at least it didn’t come out of nowhere. Blade Dancer has nothing left to achieve (that the player cares to do anyway).
Plus let’s not forget, necessary or not, a sequel to Trails in the Skydid come out. Sure it’s not localized yet, but if you start learning Japanese this very second, you’ll be good enough to import and play it long before it ever comes out in the West. I do hope no one’s holding their breath. Meanwhile, in the almost 6 years since Blade Dancer came out, Nippon Ichi hasn’t even released a post-game drama CD or comic to tell us how it ended. And there’s a “Comics” section on the official site, so it’s not like they didn’t have the chance. Not even a few lines on the game website saying “And this is what happened after that.”
You know what, I’m not going to waste my energy talking about this any more. It’s too early in the year to get riled up like this. Those 25 hours aren’t going to come back just because I whine about them. And Criminal Girls was admittedly excellent, so maybe NIS learned a lesson or two from this fiasco. *sigh* Yeah, all right. Moving on.
Finished the game for real this time, at 29:43h. That includes the regular ending, true ending and extra dungeon. It was like a full-course meal with a hearty dessert at the end of it. I’m very satisfied right now. The true ending wasn’t much better than the regular one, except the girls all end up in the same school somehow, with you as their teacher. Realistic ending this is not, but I’ll let them off lightly just this once.
Final thoughts? It was an excellent game. Not perfect by any means, but with no major deal-breaking flaws. 30 hours is just right for a game with a story this shallow, and you have the chance to quit at 20 hours with the girl of your choice if you’ve had enough. Imageepoch and NIS score extra points with me by making it blatantly clear that this is not the final ending, and by making both the true ending and extra dungeon easy to access without a FAQ.
The game maintained a healthy level of challenge throughout – not too easy for veterans and not too hard for newcomers either. You’ll always be the right level if you just progress normally and run from a minimum of battles. And if you feel you need that extra boost, there are a number of grind-friendly skills like Sako’s “Yell” that summons enemies and Tomoe’s “Return” that warps you back to camp. The Escape command is fairly reliable, the Encounter rate is reasonable and Ran has a command that repels enemies for a while. The game balance is just right.
As a dungeon crawler, repetitive levels are part of the deal, but for once I didn’t have to deal with stupid puzzles. Even when you’re send to do X or fetch Y, the game helpfully tells you exactly where to get it and even marks it for you on the map with an exclamation point or a heart. While such hand-holding might piss off more experienced players, you know and I know that needless puzzles only serve to slow down gameplay, reduce enjoyment and clog up gaming forums with duplicate “I’m stuck, how do I do XXX” threads. Playing Criminal Girls is a quick, smooth, pain-free experience because all the unnecessary dross has been cut away, leaving you free to focus on the important things: your characters.
Happily enough, my worries about anything going wrong the longer the game dragged on turned out to be completely unfounded. By the end of the game not only did I still like them all, but I’d even befriended the last boss and my nasty abusive supervisor. The only thing that maybe (very maybe) should have been done differently would be to space out the introduction of the girls a little bit. I started with four and got the last three shortly afterwards, which left little room for future surprises.
For the superficial stuff (music, graphics, sfx), nothing much to say. I thought the “sexy” CGs ended up more awkward than erotic half the time, and whoever did the final CGs was clearly slacking. The OP and ED themes were bad. Scraping the bottom of the barrel of low-budget j-pop kinda bad. The in-game music was good. Each girl had her own theme, and apart from one stage, all the dungeons had good tunes. The voice-acting was top-notch. I’ve never heard of any of these actresses before, but they did a great job conveying the girls’ gradually-changing emotions very convincingly.
But like I said, it’s not a perfect game. Since Imageepoch has struck out on its own now, the chances of ever getting a Criminal Girls 2 are as slim as the chances of getting a Luminous Arc 4. Nippon Ichi might commission a new one (gimme Criminal Boys, gimme gimme), but it just won’t be the same with another developer. Still, if they ever do make another, here are a couple of things they might want to fix:
1. Dat Walking Speed. The game badly needed a Dash command. If the dungeons hadn’t been as small and straightforward as they were, things would have been really painful.
Good heavens, Yuko, what happened to your crotch?
2. Dat Lack of equipment. I suppose it’s refreshing not to have to fiddle with weapons and armor and accessories. Dragoneer’s Aria‘s confusing system is enough to put one off equipment for good, honestly. But I do like buying stuff for my party members and seeing their sprites change accordingly, so I hope they include that next time.
3. Dat Backtracking. I like optional backtracking, where you can choose to return to previous levels to explore/grind/pick up treasure. I hate forced backtracking. Done once or twice it’s okay, but I really, really prefer new dungeons instead.
4. Dem Minigames. “Punishment” takes the form of minigames, some of which are okay and some of which are arduous chores. Especially considering you have to do each one at least 8 times per girl x 7 girls = 56 times each to max it out. More games and fewer reps would have been better. Also that Tickling game just has to go.
5. Dem Cheap Status Effects. Common to all RPGs, not just Criminal Girls. In fact this game was more generous than others in that most bosses could be poisoned, debuffed and paralyzed. It was just far easier for them to do it to you than to them. Paralyze prevents your party member from acting 90% of the time, versus 30% for the enemies. Poison hurts you more than it hurts them. Etc, etc, no fair.
6. Dem Endings. All the endings are good and happy, but they don’t make much sense. If the girls were dead and just came back to life, how could they just resume their lives so easily? Even assuming the whole adventure took place in a special dimension so only a few seconds passed between death and resurrection (which we’re not told, I’m just guessing), a dead girl magically popping back to life is bound to cause some shock. And then they all went to the same school and the player somehow started teaching there? When did he pass his Teacher’s Cert anyway? Plus, if you finish the true end dungeon, that means you essentially broke the system. Isn’t that unfair to any bad girls who die in future?
7. Dem Origins. How did those girls die anyway? Healthy-looking teenagers do very occasionally drop dead suddenly, but you mean to tell me all of them died cleanly and suddenly at the same time? It wouldn’t have been that hard to make up appropriate deaths (uhhh, as appropriate as death can be anyway) for each girl, but I guess then they’d have had to take the “How can they just come back to life so easily” question more seriously. Next time they might want to avoid the “Hell” premise entirely and just make it a juvenile facility or something.
Anyway, yay, it’s over! Good game was good! Moving on, I’m doing Fumiko Yanagi’s route in Tokimeki Memorial 4 so I can put that game to rest for good. After that I want to take a shot at finishing Dragoneer’s Aria. I’ve decided to make Persona 2 my first game of 2012 (God-willing), so if I still have time after that, I might play an SRPG or something.
Beat the final boss and cleared the game at 22:26h. Which girl you end up with depends on a choice you make near the end of the game, so evidently all the other choices you pick throughout don’t make much of a difference. I chose Ran firstly because she’s my favorite and secondly because I suspected, quite rightly, that she would make the last fight easy-mode. Once armed with Ran’s Null-Attack skill that makes a mockery of the boss’s ultimate attack, the rest of the game was a foregone conclusion.
But wait, what’s with this mediocre, perfunctory ending? Is that all I get? Beat the boss, walk out the door, all the other girls except Ran vanish forever without a farewell? What happened to “staying friends for life?” I wasn’t happy at all, so I hunted down a FAQ and phew, there’s a second ending after all. You get the regular ending for beating the boss the first time. Then once the credits roll and you save, you get to beat the boss again, and this time you get the choice to continue the game.
That’s where I am right now, so I have no idea what’s going to happen next. I also don’t know how much longer this will take (not too long I hope), but I’m willing to sit through one or two more dungeons if it means I’ll get a proper ending for my girls in the end. This game is so much fun. After 20 hours I can only think of a few things here and there to criticize, and most of them are story-, not gameplay-related. If only NIS and imageepoch had made the gimmick a little more palatable so it could be released in the West. *sigh*
Anyway, I collected the Knight transformations of all the girls and I have no use for them, so I might as well post them here.
I’ve hit the 21-hour mark and hit the “Needs to end soon” point. The game is still as fun as ever, but I just went through a stage where each of the girls confronted their pasts and resolved to work through it and turn over a new leaf. My job is done here, and I’m worried that if I keep going, they’ll ruin the game somehow.
This is a good time to go over my characters. They all love me now, and they’ve all changed so much! I tend to look down on “character development” in video games, because 90% of the time they boil down to “Rawwrr, I don’t need anyone —> Wow, friends are the best!” or “I’m a bitch —> I’m not a bitch any more.” If you were expecting me to say Criminal Girls is any different, sorry to disappoint you but it’s not. It’s just that the change is really well done this time. Even though all the girls have great epiphanies in the fourth dungeon, there are signs that they are changing in the way they relate to you and to each other at every step along the way. And it’s all done so gradually and casually that before you notice it, you the player have warmed up to them just as they’ve warmed up to you(r character). Aww.
I don’t even want to punish them any more, the sweet things. I just hope things end well before anything else goes wrong. Anyway, without any further ado, my students:
Tomoe: Acts as the laidback voice of reason for most of the game. For once the Kansai dialect character is not a rash loudmouthed joke character, how refreshing! As the game goes on you’ll discover that she’s not quite as pure and innocent as she first appears to be. Well, assuming the outfit wasn’t a dead give away, that is.
Class: Samurai(ish). Excellent for random battles because of her screen-clearing All-attacks, especially once she gets Instant Death ones. She focuses purely on attacking, so she has almost no support skills. Her Field Skill that warps that party back to the nearest camp is a lifesaver. Her HP, MP and Def are all abysmal, which is probably the only thing that stops her from becoming a game-breaker. Unfortunately I can’t get as much use out of her as I would like because of those flaws.
Ran: I did a complete 180 on Ran, and she did one on me. She started out as one of the angriest, most bitter characters I had ever encountered. Nothing I said or did could make her happy and my attempts to be nice just met with greater rejection. But now that she’s chilled the hell out and I understand her better, she’s my favorite character. *virtual hug* Hang in there, luv.
Class: Paladin. High phys def, middling mag def and attack power. Easily the most useful party member, and indispensable for boss battles because of her All-Guard skill. The one time I decided to take a Boss-hits-all attack without guarding is also the one time I saw the Game Over Screen. Ran also has a skill where she draws in enemy fire and retaliates. With buffed defence, the enemy hits Ran for 1HP and she counters for 1000. The best part is her Revive-and-Heal skill which in its ultimate form allows her to raise any and all dead party members and heal their HP to full. I’m contemplating skipping healing altogether and just letting people die so I can raise them now, Ran’s just that good.
Kisaragi: A classic tsundere, in the original sense of being prickly at first and melting down slowly as the game progresses. Comes across as high-maintenance at first, but is surprisingly down-to-earth once you get to know her. She’s sweet now that she’s reformed, and it was interesting to watch her faux-bitter friendship with Shin develop from mutual dislike to genuine like and admiration.
Class: Thief(ish). One of my less-used party members, though I do bring her in from time to time to poison bosses and steal OP. She’s not very strong and her HP and defence aren’t that good either. That poison stuff comes in hella handy sometimes though and she does have one or two very powerful straight attacks.
Shin: Bossy, self-proclaimed genius. She’s hiding something, but what could it possibly be? Probably the quickest to warm up to the protagonist, since her doubts were purely about whether he was competent or not. O ye of little faith…
Class: ??? No idea. My most useful and used character after Ran. Her moves, called Operations, consist mostly of bossing the other characters about. What makes this so useful is that normally only one character can act per turn, but under Ran’s direction up to 4 of them can act. Even better, apart from Shin, the other characters’ moves won’t consume MP. So with Operation Assist, for example, you can buff everyone’s MAT, MDEF, ATK and DEF using Shin, Ran and Sako, all for only 16 MP. Did I mention she also has an extra skill that frequently tops up her MP and that she also has an All-Heal Skill? And that her Field Skill is Full Heal? What would I do without her?
Sako: Tough, simple, rebellious tomboy. Wildly overprotective of her younger twin sister Yuko, for whose sake she can accomplish even superhuman feats of strengths. Almost as prickly as Ran at first, but so cute she’s impossible to hate.
Class: Monk. Probably the character who has dished out the most damage over the course of the game. Enemies have gotten progressively stronger against physical attacks now, so she’s not as useful as she used to be, but she still participates in some good Operations with Shin and has powerful fire attacks. She can also heal, purify and cast regen on herself, so she generally holds her own.
Yuko: Sako’s sweet but extremely lazy twin sister. There’s a tendency to give girls like her a secret nasty side these days, but Yuko is sugar and spice to the core. She’s just highly dependent and more than a little bit spoiled. As someone with older siblings who want to be relied upon and want to help all the time, I found her character easiest to understand.
Class: White Mage. Outside of boss battles I almost never use her. She has healing skills, cure skills, regen and more than a few debuffs, but nowadays they’ve been diluted by a number of weak magic attacks when tend to keep popping up instead. She’s seriously fragile as well, and her MP pool isn’t as high as you might expect so she spends most of her time on the bench.
Alice: I felt horrible spanking her. She’s a little spacey, but basically harmless. And she protests in such a cute little voice. She seemed so innocent that I didn’t believe she had done anything bad, but after playing the fourth dungeon, she was probably the most likely character, after Ran, to end up in jail if she had stayed on the same path. I’m glad I was able to rehabilitate her.
Class: Black Mage. Boss-killer extraordinaire. Even more fragile than Yuko with a small fairly mana pool, which she can compensate for by absorbing MP from enemies. But man, yikes, those magic attacks should be illegal. Alice has both all-attacks for random battles and super-powerful single ones for boss battles. Once she hits that Magic Charge, you can be reasonably certain the battle will be over in the next turn… if she survives long enough to get it off, that is.
Right-ho, time for the final push. I really hope this fifth dungeon will be the last. Criminal Girls is a character game, so quite frankly all this “story” stuff is just getting in my way now. Here’s hoping for a happy ending!
I racked my brain for a while and still couldn’t figure out why I was playing Dragoneer’s Aria, so *toss* it went back on the shelf and I started Criminal Girls instead. Criminal Girls is a dungeon crawler brought to us by the developer-publisher team of imageepoch and Nippon Ichi Software. My experience with Final Promise Story was so horrific that it rewrote history and plum wiped out my memory, but now I finally remember why Imageepoch used to be one of my favorite game developers. This game is GREAT!
The story is simple, as dungeon crawler stories tend to be. You play a nameless protagonist who shows up for his first day of work at a prison only to find out that this prison is actually in Hell. Instead of regular prisoners, your charges are “half-criminals”, bad girls who died before they could turn into full criminals. Your mission is to reform them by leading them through four separate dungeons, after which they’ll be given the chance to resurrect.
Unfortunately things start going wrong almost immediately: the girls won’t listen to a word you say, oddly strong enemies start popping up all over the place, your supervisor can’t get in touch with headquarters and to top it all off, she goes missing herself while badly injured. It’s up to you now to carry out your job while looking for clues about what’s really going on in the prison.
So your first point of order: getting those girls to do what you say. The way you go about this is what has led to Criminal Girls‘ unfortunate (but totally justified) designation as “That game where you torture girls.” Yup, you’ve gotta torture them into submission, using a variety of implements ranging from whips to cattle prods to feather dusters.
What happens is that you earn OP (oshioki points) in battle or in chests (they also function as currency). When you get back to camp, you can select the “Punish” command to play a little mini-game. As you abuse them and block your ears to their cries and screams of pain and dismay, you also get to enjoy glimpses of the girls in all kinds of compromising positions. How well you do determines how quickly the girl learns the attack/skill you’re trying to teach her as well as how much of the “sexy” CG you get to see. For the spanking minigame you have to press O at the right moment. For the cattle prod, you have to mash buttons in order, etc.
But you’re not just doing this for fun, oh no, perish the thought. You’re only doing this because it’s the only way to get the girls to learn new moves in battle. You see, in Criminal Girls, you don’t command the girls. Instead they give you suggestions each turn based on their skillsets and you select the one skill/move/ability that you think is best for that turn. One suggestion per girl = four suggestions per turn, from which you pick one. It follows that if you choose to heal, you can’t attack that turn, and so on, making each choice strategic. You also get to use items and switch out party members once per turn, and all surviving party members get equal EXP regardless of participation.
In a sense it’s the perfect dungeon crawler for me. What I hated in the ones I played most recently (UBR, Wizman’s World, Final Promise Story) is the long, drawn out dungeons and the dungeons I’ve been through so far have had 4 floors at most, all of them quite small. I also hated having to solve stupid puzzles to progress, but there’s none of that here. I also appreciate the chance to try out different party members and switch them in as I need them. Normally you’re either stuck with a set party or you have to stick with one voluntarily while the others fall behind.
The cherry on top of the cake is the reasonable game difficulty. With the right strategy and right decisions you can make your way through each dungeon with a minimum of hurt, but can never just relax and press buttons blindly either. They got the challenge level just right. Plus when you have so many characters with so many skills, most of them turn out to be useless. But here they all have their role to play and you can always find a suitable move to use every turn. Even items aren’t completely worthless yet. I’m only halfway through, of course, but at this point I think it’s a fantastic game.
So you see, Criminal Girls isn’t all about the non-stop Abu Ghraib-ing of innocent girls. That’s just a gimmick they added to get perverts to buy the game. At its core Criminal Girls is an interesting, involving and moderately challenging dungeon RPG with a very charming cast. I can understand why they had to add the titillating content, though. When you release a game this late in a console/handheld’s lifespan, there’s the sense that gamers have already “seen it all.” You need something “extra” to market the game, especially when it’s a dungeon crawler, a genre populated largely by very tedious games. That’s why UnchainBlades Rexx went all out with an all-star illustrator cast and added the monster-capturing mechanic, for example. And so some deviant at imageepoch or Nippon Ichi came up with the “punishment” idea and congratulations, they got the publicity they wanted.
Having said all that though, there’s no denying the truth. This is a game structured around the regular and forceful molestation of young teenagers. Whatever your reasons are, you’re still a dirtbag, and the game makes sure you know it by throwing in characters that don’t deserve to be maltreated. You’re not going to get away with claiming they were all bad girls. ‘Cos you know, any RPG gamer has got at least one party member they’d love to punch in the kisser. I can think of several off the top of my head: Rinoa, Garnet, Junpei when he was being an ass, that harridan from Final Promise Story… Of the 7 girls I’ve gotten so far, 4 of them fall into that category, what with their bad attitudes and rude language. But the other three are so sweet! I really don’t wanna hurt them. There should at least be a reward system for the good ones. *sigh*
Not that I’m going to stop playing just because a few pixels lay a guilt trip on me or anything. Between yesterday when I started writing this and now, I’ve gone through most of the third dungeon as well, meaning things should come to a climax soon. In for a penny, in for a pound, I’m going to see this all the way through to the end.
What I asked for: A short, English RPG to act as a rest stop between UnchainBlades Rexx and Persona 2
What I got: Dragoneer’s Aria. Well, it’s in English all right. And it’s definitely an RPG. But at 89 hours and counting, it is hands down the longest RPG I’ve played this year. And it’s not just long, it’s slow. In fact it’s long because it’s slow. When the hell will this thing ever end? [EDIT: I just found out that there's an error with the PSP clock in this game: it keeps track of time even when the PSP is asleep, meaning I probably played only about 20-30 hours. Disregard future references to 89 hours.]
The Story: An evil black dragon who was sealed away has broken free and is going to destroy the world. But he can wait a couple of hours while the heroes tramp over the world trying to stop him. I’ve only seen ol’ Nidhogg twice in the whole game, and both times he wasn’t that scary. I only have the game’s word for it at this point that he’s trouble, but that’s how RPGs usually go. Aaaaanyway, our protagonist, a ladyboy named Valen, has to team up with a healer named Euphe, a loli pirate named Mary and an asshole elf named Ruslan to find the secret to Nidhogg’s powers so they can stop him once and for all.
The Slowass Battle System: Make it stop. Please. Somebody. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I estimate a full 80 of those 89 hours so far have either been spent running around fields or wasted on the most sluggish battle system I’ve ever faced in my life. It’s hard to describe length verbally, so I looked around Youtube to see if I could find an average battle. i found this minor battle which takes 10 minutes to complete:
It was only that short because there was one enemy. Take note of how every single move by every single character is sllooowly animated, how it takes 15 seconds for each magical attack to be charged up, executed and to hit its target. How each character has to recite a spell “Magic Shot Aspersion! Sicken!” before finally releasing the magic. How much time is wasted by the camera showing each character attacking/defending/being hit individually instead of showing them all together.
The Mana/Energy bar at the top acts as your MP bar. Regular attacks and successful Guards fill it up and Mana (magic, special skill, dragon skill) attacks drain it. The guy in the video plays a lot more defensively than I do and spends a lot of time on guarding and using buffs/debuffs. Level ups are plentiful and refill your HP to full, so I prefer to attack wherever possible.
Using Mary’s Mana Boost skill means I never have to guard to build up Mana either. I don’t think I’ve ever guarded in the entire game. But even with my Attacking mentality, the average field battle takes upwards of 5 minutes to complete and most boss battles take between 15 and 60 minutes (rrgh, Great Spirit). And there are plenty of both in Dragoneer’s Aria. The enemies have high HP, high defence and high attack power, and sometimes they’ll even heal themselves just to mess with you. It’s only in the last few hours or so, now that my characters have hit level 60-ish, that battles are “only” taking 2 or 3 minutes each, and even then I still have to sit through the same slow animations. This sucks.
The Slowass Everything Else: Everyone talks like the player is hard of hearing: slowly, carefully, pronouncing every word, with long pauses between each sentence. Even when something “dramatic” is happening, they take sweet time getting it out. And each line must be punctuated by some kind of look, or gesture, or head toss, which also takes a while to play out. Half the time they aren’t even saying anything worthwhile, just bickering among each other or making snide comments. *sigh*
The story is slow too. I thought T.I.T.S. was bad, but now I bow before the true masters of long drawn-out storytelling. I was very happy when the evil black dragon showed up and laid waste to the city within 5 minutes of the game starting. I thought for sure I’d make a few rounds, find out a few secrets and then kill the boss and that’d be it. More fool me, I am making a few rounds and I have found out a few secrets, but because of the slow battles and long treks, that’s taken me 89 hours. And what I’ve found out isn’t that interesting either. Why am I still doing this?
Hmm. Why am I still playing this game? Hmmmmmmmmm… I’ll have to think on that one.
My throat hurts, and my nose is all stuffy. I feel the flu coming on, so if I don’t post this now I probably won’t be able to for the next couple of days. I just finished Alicia’s route on Blue Roses and got the Claire (oh sorry, “Crea”) end. It’s not a very happy ending, since everyone ends up separated, working on different things, while Alicia leaves on a long trip with her dad. Oh, and several characters die, I won’t tell you which ones.
The final boss was the same one they told you you’d be fighting in the first hour, the evil fairy Grendain. Grendain’s motivation: human hatred feeds phantoms. Even if you kill me, a new evil fairy will just be born. Alicia: Yah whatever, tell it to someone who cares *slash* The end. That’s pretty much all there is to the story, since it’s pretty clear that this is Roche’s story (the other protagonist’s), and Alicia was probably just added at the last minute to give the game a bit of variety.
I know this because 1. Everyone talks non-stop about Roche towards the end of the game, even though he doesn’t appear at all. 2. It turns out he’s the son of the hero Londario who supposedly passed away 17 years ago, while Alicia is a relative nobody and 3. I started Roche’s route now and it seems far more “natural” and “logical” than Alicia’s. Latrice belongs to him like she’s never belonged to anyone else, Claire is his best buddy right from the start and Jack shows up right away and lets him join the team.
Roche is an obnoxious twerp though, just as I thought he would be. If I’d started with his route first there’s no way I would have been able to finish this game. I didn’t get to carry anything over to his route, but things are going faster this time because I’m more confident than I was before. In Alicia’s route, I tried at all times to limit the number of enemy teams I was fighting to one at a time, while hanging on tight to my healing items and magic, but this time I’m going all out. I’m not sure I have the stamina to finish Roche’s route as well, but I’ll give it my best shot.
It appears you’ll only get the “full” story after you play both routes, and there are a few things I want to know. First off, what’s up with Berry? He’s my favorite party member, but he knows too much about certain things. And he’s the only Blue Roses member apart from Jack to not have blue eyes. While there’s an explanation for Jack’s lack, no one has commented about Berry’s green eyes yet. It doesn’t seem like he’s a noble either. He’s hiding something for sure.
I also want to know what happened to Charlotte and Hamilton, Londario’s lackeys who almost killed me so many times. They just up and disappeared after a certain point in time, when it turned out they were phantoms that had taken human form. This little point is dropped on the player and then never brought up again. But how? Why? And who else could be a phantom in disguise? Hmm, Berrrrrryyy?
Oh, and there’s the whole issue of a new evil fairy rising up even if Grendain is killed. The final route will involve solving this problem once and for all so that humans can live in peace. I’m going to look into finding spoilers online/a youtube video of the true ending, but if I don’t then I’ll finish Roche’s route and tell you about it.
And now my head is really starting to hurt, so I’m going to quit here.
One day many years ago, my aunt was really hungry so she came home with a couple of burgers. She wolfed down the first one in 5 seconds flat, then chowed down the second one with gusto. Halfway through the third one she suddenly stopped and went “Hang on… These burgers are undercooked!” The obvious moral of this story is: Even shitty food tastes great when you’re starving.
And even shitty games play great when you’re starving, I guess? Okay “shitty” is far too strong a word for Blue Roses, it’s not really bad at all. It’s just that after playing through the first 14 hours like a maniac, it dawned on me in a flash: This game isn’t actually all that good.
It’s an easy thing to miss, because at first glance there’s plenty to love about Blue Roses. The character designs are fine, the fairies are cute, both your party members and the NPCs have their own personalities, relationships and personal issues, the music does nothing wrong, the game has bright, colorful graphics and a cheery atmosphere, etc, etc…
Best of all, it reminds me a lot of the Summon Night games. So much so, in fact, that I paused and did a bit of research and discovered that Blue Roses was developed by Apollosoft, formed by ex-employees of Flight-Plan, the ill-fated developer of the Summon Night games. The similarities are numerous, but the key telling factors were 1) Walking around town talking to people/party members after battles 2) Not earning EXP during battle 3) Only being able to assign EXP after battle 4) Everything being stupidly expensive.
There’s a branching story (I think?) depending on whether you pick Roche or Alicia as your main character, which should make for some replay value. When I played Mana Khemia 2, I picked Raze first and he turned out to be such an asshole that he put me off not only MK2 but the whole Mana Khemia franchise for good. So I started out with Alicia. Eh, she’s okay, in a dumb, rash airhead kinda way. I prefer that type of protagonist to the glum, moody, ‘leave me alone’ type anyway.
So what woke me up from this pleasant reverie? It was a slow process of realization that culminated in a moment of epiphany, but the main source of my discontent was the tedious battles. Unlike normal SRPGs, battles don’t necessarily take place one-on-one in Blue Roses. Any character that’s attacked/attacking can choose up to two other nearby characters to assist them in battle. One character initiates the fight and up to 6 characters (3 vs 3) take part in it. A character that has already attacked can still take part in team battles. And, a character can move after attacking if it hasn’t moved already. You can attack, move the character, move another character up to attack while the first character assists, etc etc. It’s a very interesting system with a lot of potential, but then a few pesky flies got in the ointment and spoiled everything:
1. To prevent the game from becoming too easy (I presume), enemies are extremelystrong. A single turn can take off half of your HP if you’re not careful. Even weak, lower-level enemies can’t be killed easily, making the free battles a pain to slog through. And there are a lot of enemies on every map. Every time I start a battle I just groan.
2. You can field up to 8 characters on the field, but you only have 5 fairies to pair them up with. The three fairy-less characters will be weak and grow poorly, making them annoying to use. Since the enemies are so strong, the most effective way to beat them is to either smack them with status effects or hit them with the magic they’re weak to, and for the most part only characters paired with fairies can do so. I don’t know how far along I am, but I’m already using the same favored characters with the same favored attacks repeatedly, so the excitement factor has taken a huge nosedive.
3. They added a little gimmick where you have to tap correct buttons to power up your attacks or defense. Each attacking animation takes long enough as it is, so this did not help at all. Also having a character go from healthy to half-dead because of one missed press is most unfair.
4. I hate fighting the same bosses over and over again. I’ve fought Charlotte and Hamilton about three times now and hated every minute. There’s not much variety in normal enemies either.
Blue Roses is an SRPG, and 90% of the time in an SRPG is spent battling. If the battles are slow, frustrating and unfair, then the game itself becomes the same. Once the novelty of the team battles wore off, the pretty veneer quickly flaked away and Blue Roses‘s true nature as a rather mediocre game were rapidly exposed.
But wait, what about the story? Yeah, that was stupid too. Stupid, obvious, cliched and predictable. That’s probably the worst part of this game and the main reason why I haven’t played it in over a week. Should I spoil or not? Hmm… Okay, not this time. And there’s still the possibility that it could salvage itself, so it’s too soon to go on a rampage.
Damn.
What hurts all the more is that this isn’t even sequel material. There’s nothing to make a sequel about. You can compare this to Trails in the Sky, which also ended on a cliffhanger. There they evidently took the decision to milk the game early on, so they introduced mysteries right from the start and left some plotlines unresolved at the end. To be honest I still don’t think they have enough material for a sequel, but at least it didn’t come out of nowhere. Blade Dancer has nothing left to achieve (that the player cares to do anyway).
