ASH – Archaic Sealed Heat

25.06.10 / Japanese, RPGs, impressions, nintendo ds, shining force feather, video game / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
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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.

Shining Force Feather review

13.07.09 / Japanese, RPGs, nintendo ds, shining force feather, videogames / Author: admin / Comments: (0)
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I loved Shining Force I and II on the Genesis all those years ago, so now I sit up and bark whenever I hear the word “Shining” in front of any game. But Shining Wind, Shining Tears, all those games weren’t really “it”. At last another Shining Force is out, is what I thought when this game was announced, so I bought it as soon as I could and now I just finished it.

Overall thoughts: It was really short, not more than 15 hours or so, but it was a good 15 hours. The action never stopped and the story moved at a brisk pace so there was never a dull moment. It was a worthy purchase, and I just might play it again in the near future.

Story: You play Jin, a treasure hunter who comes across a mysterious girl when he’s looting some ruins. The girl’s name is Alfin, and she leads Jin to an ancient airship, which he promptly decides to sell for cash. The earlier parts of the game are taken up by Jin’s attempts to fix the crash-prone ship up so he can flog it for mega-bucks, and then the later parts involve the usual “save the world” stuff. It’s nothing original, and since the game is so short nothing is fully developed, but it’s interesting enough while it lasts.

Characters: A total of 9 playable characters and a few interesting NPCs. Alfin is never able to join you in battle, despite what the cover might lead you to expect. There’s Jin, his best friend Bale (a centaur and the best battle character, period), Miriam the elf, Julius the snooty noble, Tida the half-beast (another excellent fighter), Rush the hotblooded treasure-hunter, Grizeria the magician, …some minotaur whose name I can’t recall and Cocotte, the angel with next-to-no relevance at all.

Their interactions throughout the game tend to be very funny indeed, especially Miriam’s dumb innocent ways. Jin’s airship has a lounge where he can talk to the characters and find out what’s on their mind. Make sure you don’t miss the one where Miriam asks Jin where babies come from ;-) . Unfortunately the endings aren’t character-dependent: there’s only one ending and you get it regardless of how you get along people. I really wish there had been 9 endings and more of a focus on relationships, because the characters were great!

Ooof, I’m tired from typing all this. >_< I’ll continue with the battle system, music and graphics tomorrow.