11.02.12 / Japanese, Namco, Nintendo DS, Simulation game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (6)
Tags: Dearly Stars, music game, The Idolm@ster
I wanted something with absolutely no random battles in it, and I haven’t started a new raising sim in a while so… here we are.
Dearly Stars has you playing as a wannabe idol singer who grows from a nobody into a famous id0l. I picked Hidaka Ai, the one in the middle, and I’ve currently got her up to a Rank D idol (over 100,000 fans).
The gameplay is simple enough. You have three stats, Vocal, Dance and Visual (looks), and you raise them through lessons that take the form of annoying touchscreen mini-games. Additionally you pick a song and an outfit depending on which one of the three stats is trending that week, then you carry out promotions that help you build up “memories.” After a few of these, you qualify to take part in an audition where you use those “memories” to hold the judges’ interest long enough to pass. Pass, rank up, next audition, pass rank up, etc.
I haven’t watched the Idolm@ster anime, and this is the first game I’m playing but I hear they’re all quite similar. While this isn’t quite the experience I was hoping for, I can (sort of) see what the attraction of this game would be. It’s like the anti-Princess Maker, made for people who find “regular” raising sims long, tiring and/or confusing. They just want to play with a cute girl and they already know what they want her to be. No need to mess with all those stats and jobs and lessons and multiple endings and stress and time limits and stuff like that. Just a linear story, simple mini-games and lots of anime girls to ogle. Makes sense.
It’s not really for me though. I’m going to finish it and everything, but it’s not really doing anything for me. The foregone conclusion (Ai wins “Idol Ultimate” and becomes a top star like her bitchy mother) is painful enough without adding the repetitive gameplay and the vaguely irritating story to the mix. At each stage they try to throw an obstacle in Ai’s way, but with the player at the helm and the auditions so easy to win, they just end up looking ridiculous. For example right now I have to beat an idol named Hoshii Miki in an audition. There’s no way I’m going to lose as long as I take lessons and follow the trends, but the game is acting like it’s this insurmountable obstacle that I could never overcome in a million years, blah blah blah. Pathetic.
Anyway, I’m going to finish it. Apart from being piss-easy and highly repetitive, it’s not exactly bad, and it shouldn’t take too long at the rate I’m going. After this I still won’t be ready to take on any random battles, so… hmm… I’ll probably pick up an otome game.
14.01.12 / Nintendo DS, Simulation game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (6)
Tags: review, virtual villagers
Your villagers look nothing like these
Since Konami won’t release another Lost in Blue game, I’ve been forced to look for acceptable substitutes. Candidate number one: Virtual Villagers: A New Home for the Nintendo DS.
A group of villagers from an island destroyed by a volcano settle on a new island. It’s up to you to make sure they can survive.
Controls are usually done via the touchscreen+stylus. Drag and drop villagers next to an item and they’ll carry out a related item. E.g. drop them next to the ocean and they’ll start fishing. Drop them next to a hut that needs repair and they’ll start fixing it. And drop a male and female on top of each other (under the right conditions) and they’ll head off to a hut to make babies.
It’s a simple game, with two major flaws that made me quit after two days. The first one is its very simplicity. There simply aren’t that many actions your characters can take. Fish, farm, build, research, breed, worship, take care of kids, that’s pretty much it. While they require “food”, they don’t actually eat or sleep.
That lying cover on the right shows a guy offering a girl a fish. That doesn’t happen. It shows a boy lighting a fire. That hasn’t happened in my game so far. Nobody has picked up a monkey either. Nobody’s blonde or red-haired or tanned either. About the only accurate thing in that picture is the woman carrying a basket of berries. That’s what my villagers have subsisted on for 53 years: berries and fish. Nutrition? Wat dat?
Almost all the things you’d need to worry about on a desert island are ignored in this game.
A Safe source of water? Your villagers don’t drink.
A Balanced diet? Safe sources of food? Like I said, berries and fish and later bananas. Presumably eaten raw.
Shelter? They build huts, but they don’t live in them, even in bad weather. Sunstroke? Wat dat?
Fire? Light? They hang around outside even through the middle of the night. Presumably they can see in the dark.
Dangerous animals? None.
Sanitation? Nobody poops or pees. Or showers, for that matter.
Inbreeding? You start out with 6 villagers. It’s a necessary evil. They’re prudish enough not to mate before 18, but fathers, mothers, brothers, uncles, everything that moves is fair game.
Seriously, my villagers have got things good. Which is good for them and bad for me, because they’re not very exciting to manage.
The second, and main flaw of the game is the time lapse system coupled with the sheer stupidity of the AI. Building huts, making babies, researching technology all takes so long that it’s pointless to just sit there and watch them. Since time passes even when the game is turned off, in an ideal world you could set everyone a task, leave for a bit and come back to find them completed. That’s in the ideal world. On Planet Earth, when you turn Virtual Villagers on the next morning, you’re far more likely discover half your villagers dead and the other half deadly sick. Anyone who isn’t sick will either be goofing off or doing a task you never asked them to do anyway. Even if you train a couple of healers, they’ll just stand by and let the others die. Builders will hang around while the huts fall into disrepair. Men and women will laze about when they should be breeding. So that’s where all the challenge went: keeping your moronic populace from dying of idiotus nobrainus syndrome.
The killing blow for me was the arbitrary set of “puzzles” you had to solve to progress. If “progress” is indeed the word. For one of them, I needed an expert builder to knock down a door so I could explore the rest of the island. Btw, the game never tells you this. You have to drag characters of various occupations all over the island until somebody triggers something somehow. Or, more sensibly, read a FAQ. So I set my adept builder to work on a hut, turned the game off, and then I came back he’d reached expert builder and died almost immediately after just to spite me.
Anyway, I stuck it out for a little longer. Got that door open eventually, explored a bit, got 16 villagers now, but all the fun is gone. In fact it was never there to begin with, and I was just deceiving myself. I have a lot of other games to play this year, and there are some great games coming out on PSP in the next few weeks (Suikoden Hyakunen, Atelier Elkrone(!!), Tales of the Heroes, Shining Blade) so I can’t afford to waste time here. Good luck on the island, folks!
10.01.12 / Japanese, Konami, Nintendo DS, Simulation game, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: anime, Gokujou!! Mecha Mote Iinchou: Mecha Mote Days, review
Konami is the company responsible for some of my favorite games on the DS: Tokimemo GS 1-3, Lost in Blue 1-3 (moaaarr), and more. Even monkeys fall from trees, as the Japanese saying goes. And even good companies make bad games every once in a while. It’s when it’s every time that it becomes a problem (*cough* Nippon Ichi *cough*).
That being the case, I see no need to go on at length about Gokujou! Mecha Iinchou, the dress up game based on the popular shoujo manga/anime of the same name. It’s aimed at pre- and early teen girls, and I’m old enough to have kids that fit that description, so I’m not even the target demographic in the first place.
Plus the general rule of anime-based games is that they’re not for people who aren’t fans of the original. I couldn’t be arsed to check out the show, and even if I had I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it. It’s only natural that I couldn’t follow along, then.
The game: Your character is the class rep, and at the end of the year there’s a beauty contest of sorts for class reps. Your job is to shape her up over the course of the year so she can win that competition. I’ve been playing this on and off since around August, waiting for the big payoff, but when I think of all the other games I could be playing instead, it’s hard to justify spending time on this silliness. *toss*
It could have been good, if the game had given you a certain amount of freedom to shape your character as you saw fit. Since what we got in the end is a kiddy, pedestrian affair where you spend 90% of your time playing mini-games and listening to heavy-handed beauty lectures from your so-called rival while trying to fulfill easy monthly objectives, it’s barely even worth writing about.
A typical month goes like this: you have a trip to the beach planned. You go to school in the mornings (nothing much happens there). You do a few mini-games to earn cash, buy some beach-appropriate clothes, everyone gushes over how lovely you look, the end. Repeat with a different challenge the next month. If the graphics were any good, maaaaybe dressing up the main character would have been fun, but since everything is jagged,small and garishly colored, and the outfit designs are uniformly hideous… *toss*.
The description of the anime also says something about a “bad boy trio” your character has to deal with, but either they don’t exist in the game or they were all given lobotomies, because everyone fawns slavishly over you no matter what you do or wear. Your rival wants to, nay, insists on helping you achieve your goals every month, so you don’t even have the joy of sticking it to the usual snooty rival.
Summary: Good premise poorly executed. Story only fans care about. Dull gameplay. No autonomy. Servile characters. Awful graphics.
Conclusion: Bad game. Avoid like cancer. If you want to play a dress-up game on the DS, try something like the Oshare Princess games instead.
05.10.11 / Harvest Moon, Japanese, Marvelous, Simulation game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: hajimari no daichi, harvest moon
Harvest Moon for the 3DS, coming out early 2012, blah blah blah. If I know my Marvelous, there’ll be at least one delay before it comes out, so Summer 2012 is a safer bet.
Is it just me or are those some huge-ass vegetables? How are you going to harvest those? And would anyone seriously eat those monsters?
The stuff I’m hearing about the game isn’t setting my world on fire, though. Lay out your farm however you want? Design your own character? Change your hairstyle? This isn’t Animal Crossing, but fine. But what I really want to hear about is the farming system. Those neat rows from Two Towns seems to be missing now, and your farm looks a little plain. And I’ve been planting those same cabbages and eggplants and sweet potatoes since…since. What’s new this time? I’m seeing something about a “field levels” (段々畑) system that takes advantage of the 3D gimmick, but I’m not clear on how that works yet.
Until any really exciting news comes out about this one (or about Rune Factory 4!! Do want!), I won’t be shopping for a 3DS just yet.
I want a new Shepherd’s Crossing… ‘_’
17.09.11 / Japanese, Romance game, Simulation game, Sony PSP, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: dream c club portable
A game for idiots by idiots, starring an idiot as the main character. You play an idiot who spends his weekdays either working or gambling and his weekends blowing wads of cash on idiotic girls who don’t even put out. Work, blow, work, blow, work, blow, game blows.
It would be one thing if the MC was a rich executive, but he works at a convenience store, making about ¥20,000 (~$260 USD) a week. Since all that money is at his disposal, I’m guessing he lives at home, sponging off mommy and daddy. And yet he’s not ashamed to go out every weekend and waste that money on overpriced drinks and inane conversations with brainless bimbos. What a disgrace to the human species.
Let’s see, $260 a week. All work and no play and all that, let’s give him $60 a week to play around with. That’s $200 a week left over. Excluding sick days and public holidays, let’s assume he works 50 weeks a year. If he saved that $200, he’d save $10,000 every year. In 10 years he’d have $100,000 in the bank. Now that’s hardly Bill Gates material, but how many 30-35 year olds do you know with $100,000 at their ready disposal? And that’s assuming he just tosses it in an account with no interest, makes no investments, buys no bonds, nothing. Not bad for a bumming mooch, yeah?
But nooo, instead he goes out every weekend to a hostess bar. A hostess bar that’s all about pretty girls ripping you off with $15 glasses of beer while chattering pointlessly away. There are 8 different girls in the game that you can have attend to you, and they’re all working in the bar for different reasons. You know, like how strippers always have some “reason” for stripping, they never go “‘Cos I’m a skanky ho”. Yeah baby, whatever you say. But I digress.
It’s not real money, so I wouldn’t be getting worked up if MC was squandering it on something fun. But Dream Club Portable isn’t even any good! As you can see from the chart on the left, the girls aren’t much to look at. Conversations with them consist of the MC macking on them with the cheesiest pickup lines ever while they struggle valiantly to conceal their utter disdain for him. I know exactly how they feel.
Apart from chatting, you’re also forced to buy drinks for yourself and your chosen hostess, and the more you can get her to drink, the greater her affection for you grows. The game even measures your capacity for alcohol. Now at 35 you’ll be broke and have a wonky liver. Wonderful.
So anyway, you work all week, then at the weekend you go to the hostess bar, chat with a girl, waste money on drinks, maybe get her to sing you a song on karaoke, then you leave. Repeat the cycle the next week. And again the next week. And again the next week. And again and again and again for one whole in-game year. It would be quite the formidable feat if DCP managed to keep the chat topics fresh and new from beginning to end, but since I quit after one month, I will never know.
Apparently you can learn more about a girl and help her work through her troubles. For example one of the floozies claims she’s training to be a pro bowler (yeah right), so you’ll probably support her till she fulfills her dream. So there’s a story mode of sorts, but the MC is a pervert and a loser, and the girls can’t be that bright if hostessing is the only way they can pay their bills, so I’m giving it a miss anyway. Next please!
04.09.11 / Japanese, Romance game, Simulation game, Sony PSP, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: neo angelique special, ranshima monogatari, rare land story
This should have been a post about Neo Angelique Special, but that game was so slow and tedious that it drove me back into the loving arms of Ranshima Monogatari, where I finally paired Hiro with both Somarina AND Guana and married Chilia to Rui like she’d always wanted.
Be careful what you wish for, the saying goes. I wanted Somarina’s ending, I got it, and now I’m sorry I ever saved her bitchy ass from the clutches of that slimy duke. I really thought she’d stop being so rude and condescending as she got closer and closer to Hiro, but it was not to be. She may love him, but she clearly doesn’t have a shred of respect for him, and it shows. The ending states that she went on to become a master painter and a master chef while Hiro was reduced to the role of her lowly assistant who probably doesn’t even get laid for his trouble. The look on his face says it all.
Even the wedding ceremony was ominous. At all the other weddings in this game the other characters come up and give you cheerful words of congratulations. With Somarina, Hiro got “You don’t know what you’re doing, man” and “Oh no, you poor thing” responses instead. Even from Somarina’s own brother!
Come to think of it, I know someone in real life who had an experience like that. Nobody dared to come out and say that her fiance was a dirtbag, so it was more like: “Are you sure about this? I mean, really sure?” and “Maybe you should postpone the wedding…for like a million years?” Luckily for her, the marriage lasted. 7 whole months, that is.
At least Chilia and Rui got a happier ending. She’d been going on about how cool he was since they first met, so it was only fitting that they end up together. Unfortunately, since Rui spent most of the game either out of sight or on the lam their romance didn’t get much development. And he outright states that part of his reason for marrying her is because as a new king in a weak position he needs to marry someone popular to get the citizens on his side.
But still, there’s no denying they have some chemistry, and they’re both really into each other. I didn’t raise Chilia all those years just to have her scrubbing toilets or marrying deadbeats like Milo, so this is just perfect. And if she throws the occasional kickback or government contract my way, hey, I ain’t complaining.
Back to the Somarina-Hiro ending, though. There’s a lot of down time in Somarina’s route as well, so I was wooing Guana on the side. I had a save two years in that I was keeping for later, but I was so disgusted with the way Somarina treated my boy that I loaded it up immediately afterwards and got Guana instead.
Again, I can see the chemistry in this pairing in a way I couldn’t with Somarina-Hiro. Guana respects and loves Hiro, and he loves her back. Sure, she has some daddy issues, but what girl doesn’t? Without her helmet she’s probably the best-looking girl in the game, so yay Hiro! The description of their wedding ceremony was very sweet, I even “awww’d” a little bit.
Their ending states that Guana continues her work for a while after they get married, then gets injured and retires, whereupon she becomes a bit of a shrew, it seems. Still, Hiro is still happy and he still loves her, so it’s all good for me.
Having gotten three wedding endings for Hiro, though, I must complain about one thing: the weddings are too sudden! Chilia gets a proper proposal every time someone wants her hand in marriage, but with Hiro it’s like he’s getting closer and closer to the girl… then there’s a sudden time leap and bam, wedding ending! Where’s the proposal? The bended knee? The ring? How many carats? These things are important!
What’s also missing and even more important: BABIES! There’s no mention of kids in these three endings! Where are my babies?! Or did Hiro’s trusty gun run out of bullets? Now granted, there were enough babies in the last round to fuel half a dozen endings, but that’s not the point here. I’ve played enough Harvest Moon games to know the drill: you woo the girl, you get married and you have a baby! Not having babies is not an option. It is not negotiable!
*huff huff* Phew… Had a bit of a mother-in-law turn there. *deep breath* Okay. All better now. What’s weird is that I don’t even like kids in real life, but when it comes to video games marriage and babies are inseparable. Marvelous Entertainment has a lot to answer for.
What’s next on the gaming front? My list of unfinished games grows by the day. I’m playing Will O’ Wisp and Wizman’s World for the DS, and Persona, Blue Roses and Neo Angelique Special for the PSP. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I just started Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky a few hours ago. If nothing else it’s more promising than the previous two LoH games, but both the story and the system so far are a little too “normal” for me, so it’s going back on the shelf for now.
I’ll try not to start anything else until I’ve finished at least one of the above games, but I can’t promise anything.
26.08.11 / Atlus, Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Simulation game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (6)
Tags: atelier series, nora to toki no koubou, review, true ending
I went back and read over the last post I made about Nora. It wasn’t exactly inaccurate, but I realized I’d done the equivalent of calling a girl “Gorgeous” and then quickly adding, “But her nose is too big, and her teeth are a bit crooked, and her face is kinda spotty, and she smells funny, and OMG, that hair!…” etc. By the end of it nobody remembers I said she was beautiful in the first place.
So in the interest of fairness I wanted my very final post about Nora to Toki no Koubou to be a little more upbeat, which is why I went back and did a final run that netted me the true ending. The playthroughs really do all feel the same, but I mixed things up by trying a few recipes (mainly the ‘kerari’ wines) that I hadn’t made in previous rounds. This bumped my alchemy level up to level 18 and qualified me for the true ending.
Said true ending is identical to the normal one until the part where you fix the statue. This time Nora succeeds in fixing it. However she was supposed to keep her powers secret, so she assumes she’s failed her training, even though the townspeople kindly try to pretend they didn’t see anything. That’s where Keke steps in and informs us all that the true purpose of the training was to learn to trust people and be trusted, so Nora has passed after all. *cough* BULLSHIT *cough* And everything works out in the end. Yeah, that totally wasn’t worth the effort, thought at least this round only took 6 hours.
Back to my initial point, I went over my criticisms in the previous post, and to be honest, most of them were fair.The only thing I’d like to take back is the replay value part, because Nora to Toki no Koubou is no different from the other DS Atelier games in that respect. Sure, every run of Nora feels the same. If you want to avoid the worst endings you have to play nice with the townspeople and you have to please Aira, which severely limits your freedom to just explore or fool around. Without getting lucky or checking a FAQ, the player has no way of knowing that either befriending Aira or traveling constantly with one adventurer are the only ways to avoid a bad ending. Anything and everything else you do makes absolutely no difference.
Plus the game feels really short. Just when you’re starting to get into the groove of things, it ends. I’m going to liken this to a completely unrelated game called Recettear. In that game you can go sell things in a store, go adventuring, fuse items, make friends in town, etc., but the first few weeks are consumed by a hectic debt repayment program that makes everything about money, money, money. It’s only after you pass this that you get the freedom to either restart the game with your money and items or continue to play forever – which is the only time you’ll have the freedom to explore, fuse and sell at leisure. If you’ve played Recettear, imagine a Recettear where the game ended automatically after repaying your debt and you’ll know exactly what I’m complaining about (and if you haven’t you should totally try it).
BUT in spite of all that, I played it three times in a row, and that’s the same number of times I’ve played Ateliers Lise, Annie and Lina. So for better or worse, it has the same amount of replayability as the other games do, and shouldn’t be knocked down solely for that.
Another thing I said was that I wouldn’t be looking back fondly on the game in years to come, but there’s no way for me to judge that accurately until those years have passed, so I take that particular line back as well.
All the other things I wrote still apply, but some are a little on the petty side. For example, only being able to save in your room and only being able to sell specific items to specific places. It’s really inconvenient, but hardly a deal breaker. The messy room was irritating, but I resolved that in my final run by putting almost all the tools upstairs and doing my alchemy from the main station. I’m used to messy rooms from Shepherd’s Crossing 2 anyway.
Everything else I wrote? Yeah, it still holds. The items need better sorting. The characters are cliched. The bad ends are unforgivable. I hate being forced to play a certain way every time. Time moves too fast when foraging. New Game+ is more like Same Old Game+. However a sequel that fixes these things and adds a story worth caring about should be a real treat to play. With a little plastic surgery, that “gorgeous” girl will be Miss World in no time.
20.08.11 / Atlus, Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Simulation game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: alchemy, atelier series, nora to toki no koubou, review, true ending
Where “Finished!” means I’ve played all I’m going to play of it. I got another ending this time, the normal ending. I was trying to get Ruttz’s ending, which involves killing two dragons, but I guess I started it so late that I was already locked out of it by the time I finally defeated the second dragon.
It took me three attempts to defeat the blighted creature, but with a bit of luck and a lot of healing items I was able to power my way through. Even with stacked defense buffs Nora still got herself killed on the third turn or so, but Karuna stayed alive and kept pounding him with her Fighting Spirit attack that hits for x3. Ruttz played healer and attacked occasionally. I also discovered that the dragon could be poisoned, but I didn’t have any strong poison items so that didn’t help.
The Normal ending starts out like the Witch Hunt bad ending, but you get the choice to stay and explain yourself instead of running away. Your friends (except Octaja, Karuna and Kitt) will cover for you, and the shopkeepers and Aira will come to your defense. In the end you’ll attempt to fix the Pauly statue that got broken and fail, but the attempt will cheer Timos up a little bit and you’ll be able to stay and complete your training. Better than being chased out with torches and pitchforks, I suppose.
Now that that’s over with, I think I’m done here. Character endings might be nice, but I’d probably only be able to to maximum two per playthrough. With 8 possible character endings, that’s at least 4 near-identical runs, blargh.
I also found out from a FAQ that the ending I got before was not the bad ending but in fact the ‘Witch Hunt’ ending. There’s a real bad ending as well, gotten by being friendly with Aira but not doing anything else. To get the ‘True’ ending, I have to see all of Aira’s events, max my friendship with the townspeople and have Lv. 18 or more skill in time alchemy. Having Alchemy Lv. 18 without maxed friendship will give you the ‘Traveler’ ending, said the FAQ. I only had level 16, and my last save is only 7 days before the end so yeah, I’m out. The ‘True’ ending sounds similar to the Normal ending, only you get to fix the Pauly statue, which reveals your background to the townspeople, etc etc. Whatevs.
Final thoughts about Nora to Toki no Koubou? It’s good. I don’t feel lied to or disappointed by the hype now that it’s finally out. It gave as good as it promised, it just didn’t go above and beyond that. The music fits the mood and is relaxing, the character designs, while a little too “cutesy” are fine, the game satisfied my usual craving for bright colours, I got to synthesize lots of items, the random battles were tough but rewarding, etc, etc.
Battling was especially good, except for the part where they sometimes won’t let you run away. Your 9 party members all have different attacks, different things they do well or do poorly – though I doubt there’s a better party than Nora, Karuna and Ruttz. Enemy drops are plentiful, and leveling becomes a cinch once you use the leveling up and leveling down items on a monster, (a fact I discovered only just now by reading a FAQ. Darn, wish I’d thought of it earlier) you get to buy or trade for all kinds of weapons and armor and you can create a wealth of battle items: bombs, healing items, buffs, status items and more. I found plenty to like in this game.
Most of the things I didn’t like are niggling little issues that could be fixed in a sequel to make a fantastic game.
- Time passes too quickly when you’re foraging. Every single item you grab makes a whole day pass. A whole day to grab a bunch of flowers? I feel the hand of Success behind this one. At least time doesn’t pass when you go from town to town, strangely enough.
- You can only save and load in your room. Whut?
- You can only sell and buy specific items from specific places. Some items can’t be sold at all, which is a PITA when you’re trying to liquidate your assets to prepare for the next playthrough. Some item exchange can be done, but it’s highly limited.
- Your room and your garden tend to get very messy and hard to organize. You could move tools and furniture with the L/R and direction keys, but the room is so small it gets cluttered regardless. I also felt that the gardening and pet-keeping concept was under-developed and that far more could have been done with it.
- There was no proper item sorting. If you wanted to see only items of a particular type, e.g. cloth, you had to go stand in front of the sewing kit. If you want to see only food, you have to go stand in front of the cooking range, etc. Again, a little more organization would have gone a long way.
- The number of items you can hold at one time is severely limited unless you buy other items to raise the limit.
- The lack of success rates in synthesis was a bit of a letdown, especially for an Atelier veteran like me. So long as you have the proper ingredients, there’s no way you can fail, even at the most complex jobs. You have a time alchemist ranking that goes up as you make more things. It affects a number of things (recipes sold, chrono fluids used, certain endings) but has no effect on your success rate.
- Neither the story nor the designs nor the characters are particularly memorable. It’s good for a playthrough or two, but this isn’t a game I’ll be pining for in a couple of years.
- There aren’t enough endings to satisfy different kinds of gamers. Most Atelier games at least have Hero endings for beating all the bosses or a special ending for making a philosophers’ stone and more. Here the first 5 endings need very similar requirements to obtain so you’ll be doing the same thing on each run regardless of which ending you’re aiming for. Not good enough.
- DAT BAD END. It’s really unfair.
- The carryovers to New Game+ are almost non-existent. I could understand if they chose to do away with carryovers altogether, but once you’re doing them at least be a little more generous. As it is all you can take is money, your pets and your unlocked CGs. You can’t even keep meaningless little things like your tools or the wallpaper you bought. Throw me a bone here, Atlus.
- The stingy carryovers and lack of ending variety make for low replay value. Since you’re essentially starting from scratch every single time, you’re basically playing the exact same game over and over again. Oh, joy.
So really, just a few things hold Nora to Toki no Koubou back from being great. It’s better than Atelier Lise or Atelier Annie, at least. Lina >>>>> Nora >> Annie > Lise. Something like that. I don’t usually do number ratings but I’d give Nora a solid 3 or 3.5 over 5.
Next time, I really need to finish either Persona or Arms’ Heart.
17.08.11 / Atlus, Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Simulation game, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (2)
Tags: alchemy, nora to toki no koubou, shepherd's crossing
Tch. Finished my first run yesterday at the 9 hour mark. Got an ending where the townspeople run Nora out of town because they blame her for a storm that wrecked the place. Ungrateful wretches, after all the quests I’ve done for them. Since Nora was run out of her hut and didn’t complete her training, she can’t become a time mage, and the game states that neither she nor her friends were ever heard from again.
Hmm. That is pretty bad, as far as endings go. Normally I’m used to getting a bad end on my first FAQ-less attempt at this sort of game (in fact I got three bad endings in a row in Atelier Lise and never did pay off my debt), but somehow this one really got my goat. The whole premise is just so unreasonable. Nora looks nothing like the so-called Mist Witch, she’s never done anything remotely harmful and she’s lived in peace with the townspeople for 2 and a half years, then all of a sudden she’s to blame for a random storm? That’s so unfair.
I’ve started another playthrough which I’ll probably finish, but I don’t like that aspect of the game. I’m thinking I won’t even bother trying to chat up the townspeople, I’ll just hole myself up in my studio and work on alchemy all game long. Screw good endings, screw making nice with the plebs, screw everything else, I’ll just do what I got this game to do.
Hanging around the homestead is fun anyway. Apart from synthesis you get to decorate the place with new walls and floors, you can mature cheeses and hang meat and fish out to dry and plant seeds in your garden. Oh! And when I started the second run, Koko sold me a duck that looks exactly like Brammy from Shepherd’s Crossing. Heck, it doesn’t just look like him, it is him. He’s even called Brammy! I told you I was getting Shepherd’s Crossing vibes from this game. So Success was involved huh? So that’s why your seeds go all over the place in the garden and your house is so messy and you can accidentally end up uprooting crops without meaning to, etc etc. Even some of the items look straight out of SC, especially the wooden fence, hay and the cheese. Heheh, that makes me happy. My love for this game went up +5 when I realized that, but I’m still mad about the ending.
I need to buckle down and finish Persona and some other games, though. I’m slipping yet again into my habit of starting new games before finishing old ones, and right now I have about 4 90%-complete games waiting for my attention. I might delay the completion of this second playthrough of Nora to Toki no Koubou until at least one of them is done.
15.08.11 / Atlus, Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Simulation game, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: alchemy, atelier series, nora to toki no koubou
tl;dr: I love it. So far.
I’m 4 hour 59 minutes in, and it’s been a great ride so far. I just reached October of the 2nd year and the game lasts 3 years so I should be finishing up my first playthrough pretty quickly. I’m not using any kind of FAQ or guide yet, so we’ll see what kind of ending I get.
Nora to Toki no Koubou (Nora and the Time Studio) is about Nora Brandor, an apprentice time mage/alchemist, who has to live and work in a little forest hut for three years as part of her training. Somehow the people in a neighboring town mistake her for the Mist Witch that tormented them years ago, so in addition to her training she also has to carry out quests to increase their trust in her while preventing anyone from finding out what she really is.
That’s pretty much it for the story. There was a lot of “go here and do that” in the first few months, and there are certain items you have to make to progress (and a pesky dragon I still can’t beat) but apart from that the game is fairly non-linear. Whether you want to spend your time holed up in the studio, go out there and forage or go to town and do quests all year round is entirely up to you. I’ve been keeping a balance between the three so far, with an emphasis on synthesis. I’m not sure what’s carried over into the next game so I’ll stock up on money and items in the last year.
Being a time alchemist sounds complicated, but it boils down to using the fast-forward or rewind button on an item. You can turn a fruit back into a flower and the flower back into a seed, you can turn salted fish into dried fish, you can speed-age cheese, etc. It’s pretty interesting, but not exactly “zomg best innovation evar” material. Which is perfectly fine with me. I like gameplay that’s simple and fun without being stale and unoriginal.
Time alchemy isn’t the only form of synthesis though. There’s also “dismantling”, where you split an item into smaller parts (e.g. you split a hunk of meat into ‘delicious meat’ and ‘bone’) and processing, which is the usual synthesis we’re all familiar with. As with most other Atelier games (yes I know it’s not an actually an Atelier game, but it plays almost exactly like one) you have to buy tons of books and tools to make all the things you want to. In fact my only (tiny) beef with this game is that you have to place all the tools and items personally, which makes my room messy and leads to uncomfortable Shepherd’s Crossing flashbacks.
Those are my first impressions anyway, subject to change. The only cloud on the horizon is that I’m a little worried I probably won’t be able to do many replays because the story and characters are weak. Yah okay, the townspeople think Nora is a witch, but I already know she’s not one and I don’t really care about proving them wrong.
Then there’s the little mystery about what really happened between the Mist Witch and the hero Pauly who supposedly vanquished her, but again, ehhh, I dunno. And this might be a bit of a spoiler but… I’ve got this mysterious character named Mellow who has amnesia and doesn’t seem to eat. You think she could have something to do with the witch and hero? Gee, I wonder. Nah, actually I don’t. I don’t really care one way or another.
The characters are okay, but they’re all types I’ve seen before in other games. Your tiny advisor, the young adventurer who wants to make it big, the little girl who’s trying to prove herself, the beautiful and extremely strong swordswoman, the ditzy amnesiac, I’ve seen them all before somewhere.
Of course all that is just going to affect the replay value, but I haven’t even played it completely once, so it’s a little early for me to worry about that sort of thing. “Become the best X you can be within XX years” has been a staple of the Atelier series for years and I’ve always enjoyed the freedom that gave me. It should be no different this time round, as long as they have enough endings to account for different playing styles. I picked this game up for the alchemy anyway, and there’s a lot I still haven’t made so I’m in very good spirits right now. 
Now I just have to figure out how to beat that dragon at the springs and then my game can move forward again. Battles in Nora to Toki no Koubou are the usual 3×3 turn-based affairs Atelier games always use, but the enemies hit HARD and your HP is low so you can’t relax too much. That’s another plus, btw. I complain when games are too hard, but I don’t like it when they’re too easy either. With the right equipment, synthesized items and a little training I should be able to get the dragon before the game is out. I might need to revise my party a bit as well. I was using Nora, Keke and …I forgot his name. The red-haired guy who wants to make it big. I’m going to switch them out for Karuna and either Mellow or Sirkka ‘cos I need more attack and more magic. I’ll report back once I’ve beaten the darned thing.