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).
10.06.10 / RPGs, atlus, nintendo ds, reviews, shin megami tensei, strange journey, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (1)
Tags: mem aleph, neutral ending, shin megami tensei, strange journey, summon night, zelenin
I didn’t finish this, I watched the ending on Youtube. But I was going down the neutral route so I was right outside Mem Aleph’s door when I got into Summon Night and forgot all about this. In fact I went in and fought her once, but she kicked my ass hard so I left to regroup and never did come back. IIRC I was level 78, so with a bit of grinding I should have been able to level up a bit and teach her who was who, but somehow the spirit just wasn’t in me.
Did I enjoy the game? Hmm, it’s complicated. Like most SMT games I’ve played, it went up and down regularly. Sometimes the story was fast-paced and the action was cracking and everything was really interesting, couldn’t wait to get back to it. Other times it was so dreary, slow and boring that I literally fell asleep behind the DS. The repetitive “fetch-questy” style of play didn’t help at all: go to this sector, explore it, kill this guy, get this item. Repeat for next sector. Repeat for next sector. I mean the details of who to beat and what the dungeon looked like differed quite a bit, but the core was exactly the same. So the story parts were good, but since each piece of plot progression was surrounded by 10 hours of only fairly-interesting dungeon-crawling it was hard going sometimes.
On the plus side I liked having tons of demons to fuse and summon, I really like the creepy soundtrack, the characters didn’t exactly piss me off (not even Zelenin, who I thought I’d hate), and I enjoyed making new items and weapons out of monster parts, Atelier-style. Not to mention my favorite fiends from Nocturne are back, and the difficulty of the game was just right so I didn’t die too often, and all around it’s a very solid game.
Would I play it again? …Uh…I dunno… Gee… I think i’d have to let some time pass between replays. And it really depends on what you get to carry over and what you don’t. I don’t mind if I don’t carry levels or items over, but I insist on my compedium, etc. etc. Then again I got the only ending worth getting, ‘cos chaos is stupid and law is downright insulting, so I don’t know exactly what I’d be playing for. Short answer, no, I won’t play it again. But it’s not a bad game at all.
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!
18.05.10 / RPGs, dragon quest 9, nintendo ds, reviews, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (6)
Tags: atelier lina, dragon quest 9, famitsu, nintendo ds, review, rpg, square-enix, tokimeki memorial
I’ve been playing this for a while, but after the example of Atelier Lina where I judged it too quickly, I decided to hold off on my opinion till I’d gotten a bit further. Well now I’m way further into it, in the last dungeon to be precise, and my judgment: BORING. (spoilers to follow)
The good things: Being able to control how your main character looks, being able to control skills and weapon growths, being able to change classes eventually, simple gameplay and controls, nice graphics for the Nintendo DS, seeing your equipment changes reflected on the field, nice sound track.
Everything else: I’m not finishing this game because I don’t care about the last boss. That’s because I didn’t care about the whole story. So you’re an angel who lost his powers, so bloody what? That’s the sad thing about having a silent protagonist: the other characters have to pick up the slack to make you care about the story and the game, and in this case they all failed miserably. First off, your other party members are generics so they never talk either. Everyone else is an NPC with minor roles to play in your quest-of-the-day, but nothing major to contribute. Sandy the fairy is a moron, so she’s out. The angels in “heaven” are bland so they’re out. And…nobody else counts.
And it’s not just that the story is plain (angels in this day and age? seriously) but that it plays out in a very traditional way with no unexpected twists or turns. If you’ve played more than a few RPGs, you’ll know from the start that making the tree bear fruit will only lead to disaster. After that you have to run around helping people (slay this monster, deliver this item, slay this other monster) in order to regain your angel powers. Then you have another series of fetchquests: find the 7 fruits. And then the last bit of the game is a bit interesting ‘cos first you get to ride on a dragon for a while, and then you get captured by the bad guys and have to break out of jail. That part was fun. And then after you defeat the ‘bad’ guy, ZOMG the real boss was an evil angel. Yeah, I saw that coming a while back as soon as you showed me Elgios in the flashback dudes, thanks a lot dudes. So now you know.
Gameplay, as I said, is nice and simple, but when you have a boring story and weak characters, you need to ramp *something* up to make it worth playing, so this would have been their chance to pour some effort into the battles, or maybe the sidequests. But no, fight-defend-item-special, you just buff, attack, heal, buff, attack, etc. Bleh. And it’s not challenging either, because I avoided a lot of the field battles and still never had any trouble with the bosses except one or two. Well, I guess being able to see the enemies on the field was a nice touch though.
The less said about the sidequests the better, it’s just a series of fetch quests and unreasonable demands thrown at you: go fight enemy X wearing a pink hat and using only attack Y so I can give you this crappy item as your reward. Oh, and forget about getting any good classes unless you do our stupid quests. Zzz…
One thing I was hoping to get into, given my love of Atelier games, was the alchemy system. Unlike in DQ8, you don’t have to run around for hours to get the item, the alchemy is instantaneous. BUT! The problem was ingredients. To get good materials to grind with, you’ll have to do a bit of grinding, both by fighting and by scrounging around on the world map. And then it seems like you won’t get most of the good raw materials and recipes until after the game is over, because – get this – YOU CAN’T FLY UNTIL AFTER THE GAME! No way. No flying for you, man, you’d better get in that boat and go to the few places the game will allow you. And be grateful for it. So anyway, I was only able to create a few items through alchemy, some of which were useful, many of which were not, so forgive me if I wasn’t exactly enthused by that part of the game.
So you see, it’s not a bad game. I mean, it was enough for me to make it to the end, but it’s not a good game either. The howls and bad reviews from 2chan were definitely exaggerated, but it DEFINITELY doesn’t deserve that 40/40 Famitsu gave it either. 20/40 (5/10) at most for being technically sound but completely lacking in charm and excitement. Square-Enix has been laying on the bribes thick at Famitsu lately, don’t you think? Anyway, that’s enough DQ for me, now to eagerly await the release of Tokimemo Girls’ Side 3 next month! Whee!
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!
28.03.10 / Japanese, RPGs, nintendo ds, reviews, saga 2, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
Tags: goddess of destiny, rpg, saga 2, square-enix
Saga 2 elves
Yippee, I finally finished this game! I hate leaving games unfinished, so even though I’ve started several other games in the meantime, it was nagging at the back of my mind that I still haven’t finished Saga 2: Goddess of Destiny.
The last boss was a pain in the ass, though. The first time I fought him I lost because I didn’t have enough healing items. You really need that “Healing Book” item, because the boss has attacks that hit your whole party and you can’t afford to heal them one by one. I had two magic-users, Momoko and Liruka, but it was still all I could do to stay alive. Work on your HP before you get to the boss. Have at least 900HP before you face him!
Actually, despite my best efforts, three of my party members got wiped out and the final showdown was between Liruka and the boss. Liruka has blazed through her Flare books and had only a Blizzard book with 1 use left when the boss croaked. What saved me is that right before he dies, he uses a very predictable pattern where he charges for two turns and unleashes a 700+ attack on the third. So I attacked, attacked, healed, repeated, and just when I was down to one last Blizzard, he croaked.
The ending? You, your mom and your dad jump out of the window to go have another adventure. Apparently it’s the same ending from the GBC edition. I was hoping for something a little more exciting after all the effort I went through, but whatever. I’m just glad it’s over, honestly. Will it ever get released in English? Hmm, on one hand it IS from Square-Enix. On the other hand, it’s not very user-friendly and the story is decidedly bland and out-of-date. The updated graphics are very blocky and the battle and levelling system will leave a lot of new users scratching their heads. I’m not even sure I’d recommend it to anyone I know. I enjoyed it but I won’t be playing this again. So…yeah.
