Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (3)

23.12.11 / Sony PSP, Square-Enix, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (3)
Tags: review, tactics ogre let us cling together

Bwahahahahaha!

Finally finished what is apparently the “Law” route.

I had a bad feeling! This is not the way!

I started out liking this game, but now I’m just glad it’s over. By the end of the game everything was tedious beyond belief. I finally got a few challenging story battles where I was supposed to wipe out all the enemies or where the enemy commander hung back like he was supposed to, but those were few and far between.

- Angelo had the personality of a wet sack of sand till the end. Except it’s not just him, everyone else in the game is wooden and stoic. Their motivations frequently make no sense. Catiua is shrill and crazy about her brother, but why? Evil Lanselot wants to conquer the world, but why? MC is going along with everything, but why? He doesn’t think about his family unless anyone reminds him. In Chapter 3 he finds out his father is still alive, but in Chapter 4 he’s more concerned with rescuing Good Lanselot. At some point someone mentioned his dad was there and his reaction was close to, “Who? My father? O-oh, right, that guy!”

- Anyone with character who joins your party will immediately lose any and all of it. During one battle Vyce piped up, “That guy killed my dad!” and I was like, “WTF, you’re still here?”

Heeeheeehahahaha, stop it, you're killing me!

- The story is a rather trivial tale of continent liberation which is meant to be grand and interesting, but is instead bogged down by the flat, emotionless characters with their static portraits and highfalutin’ fancy speeches. Of course the few times Angelo tried to show emotion, I laughed so hard I nearly peed myself, so it’s just as well. Come to think of it, most SRPG stories boil down to one form of liberation or another, so maybe I shouldn’t come down too hard on TOLUCT for that. But they could at least have made it a little more interesting.

- Half the story is told through the Warren Report. Whatever happened to Show, not Tell? I appreciate a bit of extra information but it’s far more interesting to let me discover things for myself as I play the game than to just tell me. And yet the WR still failed to explain to me exactly what all the factions are and what they represent. What’s Lodis? Where’s Xenobia? Where’d the Dark Knight organization come from?

- Ah, Square-Enix and their ridiculous “When we were kids we all played together but then you forgot but now you magically remember” plot twists.

- Ah, Square-Enix and their final bosses that come out of nowhere. TOLUCT is a little better in that there’s some foreshadowing done through flashbacks and the Warren Report, but I hadn’t read the Warren Report it would have been like huh, what? Ogre? Huh? Btw, what did Martym and Barbas want to do with Dorgalua anyway?

- Every battle has you climbing up- or downhill. I know Japan is mountainous. I know it makes tactical sense. I also know it makes for boring one-pattern gameplay. In most battles the real enemy is the terrain, not the people on it.

- The class system making leveling up new classes a pain. Characters don’t level up in TOLUCT, classes do. If you get a new archer when your other archers are level 20, he’ll be level 20 automatically. But if you switch him to, say, dragoon, and you have no other dragoons, he’ll be level 1. And he’ll grow so slowly that after 10 battles or so, he’ll probably be only level 11. I’m saying this from experience, after trying to level up Hobyrim and Vyce, and after foolishly switching Angelo’s class to Lord near the end of the game. You spend 30 minutes in a battle with LV.22 mobs, finish it, and your LV.4 Lord goes up to LV.5. Rrrggghhh… And how come my level 12 Ranger gets more EXP than my level 7 Lord in the screenshot on the right?

- That final dungeon. I lost track of how many consecutive battles I had to fight, what a fricking pain.

- That ending. Well, I should have expected that I’d be assassinated after all the bad things I did…n’t even do. See, that’s why I wanted to do all the murdering and looting and raping myself, but the game wouldn’t let me!

- Non-story battles near the end of the game take forever. It’s a shame because a lot of interesting-sounding sidequests opened up near the end, but each fight was taking upwards of 30 minutes each. I didn’t have that much patience left by Chapter 4.

Blah blah blah blah blah

- Speaking of chapters, were 4 really necessary? Quite a number of the battles in this game were filler battles against unimportant mooks that could have been taken out with ease. They could have done it in 3 short chapters; one to free Walister from the Galgastani, one to take over Galgastan and one to finally turn your claws on the Bakram and the Black Knights, which is what the story was about from the beginning.

- Too many items. I always groan when I have to use anything more than healing items in a battle.

- Too many worthless skills. You’ve only got 10 slots to spare. Every time I save up enough SP to learn something I have to scroll through a ton of dross to get to the few good ones. All the Resist, Augment, Attenuate, Damage and Recruitment skills could have and should have been pared down to one each for greater efficiency.

- Too many specialized skills. If you want to do proper damage you have to equip the right skill for it. Draconology for Dragons, Herpetology for reptiles, Anatomy for humans, etc.

- At the same time, the game doesn’t tell you which enemies you’ll be facing or how they’ll be placed until after you start the battle. If you get to the field and find it’s full of golems, your only choice is to retreat, reload or try to tough it out. Proper preparation is part of strategy too, Squeenix!

- Crafting in this game is, to put it nicely, a piece of shit. This isn’t Atelier Tactics, why do you have to start from scratch when you’re just modifying standard items? And why can’t you synthesize in bulk? Wouldn’t any sensible storekeeper just pre-make the ingots and sell them to you at premium? Why do you have to watch the little animation every single time? And what’s with the cheering audience, is making an iron ingot really that wonderful? And the whole point of having success rates so that they can be modified or improved with experience or with items. Here they can’t be changed, so obviously their only purpose to make you save and reload and save and reload just for kicks.

- When buying equipment I can’t tell whether one item is better than another or not. I can’t even know without memorizing or without leaving the store what my characters are currently wearing. I can’t tell whether the character I’m buying the armor for can even wear it or not. It’s like Tactical Guild all over again, except TG didn’t pretend to be a good game.

- Crafting complicates things because while I can compare a Buckler to a Pelta shield, I have no way of telling whether a Buckler+1 shield is better than a Pelta or whether an Aspis+1 shield is better than a Tower Shield+1.

- You can’t equip certain items till you get to certain levels. When you buy, you’re told this upfront. When you craft, you’re on your own. You might spend 10 minutes improving your Wakizashi only to find that you can’t use it any more. The crafting system just sucks, period.

- The user interface relies too heavily on icons. It’s hard to figure out what does what at a glance.

- Etc, etc, etc.

I don’t usually come down this harshly on SRPGs. Even when the story and characters are lacking I still find a way to enjoy it (Tactics Layer, Tactical Guild, Jeanne d’Arc, Rondo of Swords, heck most SRPGS), and if the gameplay is that terrible I simply stop playing (Hoshigami Remix). TOLUCT had the distinct position of being bad and yet not quite bad enough to give up. The music was okay, the sprites were cute even when they were killing each other, and the pace of battle was much faster than in other S-E offerings like FFT, TA and TA2. As a result I probably played more than I should have, and now I’m madder than I should be. I have only myself to blame.

Anyway, it’s over. I’m not going to spend even one more minute dwelling on it. On to the next game!

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (2)

17.12.11 / Sony PSP, Square-Enix, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: tactics ogre let us cling together

21:39 hours in and no end in sight. I just started Chapter 4, “Let Us Cling Together,” so that’s probably the last one. I’m tired.

I’m going to say this as gently as I can: This game is a massive joke.

After my last post, I got tired of killing all my enemies just to hear them scream and started aiming for the leader instead. I never noticed until I started gunning for them just how weak, incompetent and STUPID the leaders are.

Call me crazy, but if their death would mean an automatic loss for their side, wouldn’t any sensible leader try to hide or cower a bit to make my task harder? Or hang out at the back and let their troops wear my side down first? Or at the very least, if they had to come out fighting, shouldn’t they’d have higher defense and HP to make them harder to bump off?

None of these things happen. For knights and other fighting types it might make a liiiiittle bit of sense for them to move. But you’re a wizard. Or a cleric. Or a bowman. Why would you want to saunter down in front in Canopus singing “Hit me with your Rhythm Stick”?

Still, that makes the story move that much faster. I have no idea which path I’m going down, but Galgastan is no more now, so I must be doing something right. Only the strong survive. The choices in this game are kinda weird: they all look the same but produce very different results. For example I conquered this castle place and they asked me if I thought they were enemies. Choice A: “Of course not.” Choice B: “How could you be?” Hang on, what’s the difference? They’re almost the same thing. But I chose A, went on my way, and next thing I knew the guy in the castle had committed suicide. Wait, what? But I just said you weren’t– Geez.

By the way, even at this late point of the game, my MC (default name Denam, but renamed ‘Angelo’ to suit his pansy nature) STILL has no policy or ideology of his own. He just parrots what others tell him or reacts to what others say, but from the start he never had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve. And he probably doesn’t have the faintest idea of how to rule a country. Which is fine enough since there are almost no peasants to rule anywhere. The only people you ever get to see are your allies and your enemies, and the occasional dead body when a town is torched, so I don’t even know who I’m doing all this for. Until an enemy mentioned him, Angelo had even forgotten all about his dad he was supposed to be getting revenge for. Geez.

For all that, I’m still enjoying mowing down troops with my party and staying alive against fields of dragons. The random battles and sidequests are the best part of the game IMHO. I should be done fairly soon, and then I can decide whether to try and get another ending or to just call it a day.

On a final, happy note, my sister Catiua has parted ways with my company to become the princess of another country. I wish her all the best in her future endeavors. If I get the chance to face her in battle I will not immediately shoot her in the face. I will let a few turns pass first.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (1)

13.12.11 / Sony PSP, Square-Enix, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (5)
Tags: review, tactics ogre let us cling together

Ah, I love a good SRPG. Heck, I even love a bad one, but Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together is definitely one of the good ones. It can cling to me any day!

Beyond “it’s good,” though, there’s not much to say about it. It doesn’t do anything too different from other games in the genre, and it looks, feels and plays a lot like the original Final Fantasy Tactics. So it’s fun, but not particularly world-changing. And that’s just fine with me.

I’ve played for 14 hours, a few battles into Chapter 3. It is really easy so for, but then again I thought FFT was easy too, until I met Wiegraf and he… he… *snf* N-no, it’s okay. I’m over that now. It…it’s all in the past.

So maybe the real battles are yet to come, and maybe TOLUCT has some funky special battle mechanics I haven’t explored yet because I haven’t been forced to. Otherwise the only really “new” thing about it is that you can learn magic by using scrolls in battle. And that when enemies die and drop loot, other enemies can take them instead. I used to try and scurry ahead and grab them for myself, but now it doesn’t matter. I’m going to kill them anyway, they might as well have one last moment of pleasure.

I’m used to doing sick amounts of damage with mages, so I’m a little bummed at how useless they are here. Archers are easily the most useful class in this game, as was also the case in Jeanne d’Arc, Stella Deus and Path of Radiance to name a few, so it must be an SRPG thing. I’ve got three of them, Canopus, Sara and Asha, and I never leave home without them. In fact, my other units just get in the way, because most of the time they don’t even get to see any action.

Battle starts, C S and A smack everything within reach while heading for higher ground, supported by the rest of the troops. If I already occupy higher ground, I just wait for the enemies to come in range and smack them to the ground. Once they get a hit or two in, they’re able to fire critical hits with a skill called Tremendous Shot, which usually OHKOs enemy wizards, clerics and bowmen and does serious damage to everything except monsters. I hate monsters. I went into a random battle in the woods with nothing but dragons in it, and I just turned around and backed away slooowly.

Random battles are where the real challenge is at, seriously. In the story, most battles can be ended early by vanquishing your objective. If your Victory Condition is “Vanquish Wynoa”, you can end the battle in a turn or two by marching straight up to her and shooting her in the face. On the (very) few occasions that I have dutifully obliged them, I seem (?) to have gotten the same EXP I would have earned otherwise, so this is probably the “ideal” way to play the game. In fact the game is keeping a running tally of all the people I’ve killed and where they came from, so my Kill Everything approach might just come bite me in the gluteus maximus one of these days. Heh, bring it on.

So in short, fighting is so straightforward I haven’t had to bring out my full power yet. There’s things like Recruitment where you can get enemies to join your side, and a “Chariot” system where you can rewind turns (basically cheating. No true SRPG fan would ever touch such a thing), but when the game is this simple, what’s the point?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining at all. I like a good easy game, and if a game comes pre-broken like TOLUCT does, all the better. It’s just that it makes all other features of the game next to useless because you don’t need them to survive. Storyline-wise my resistance is allegedly at a major disadvantage, but you’d never know it by the way I crush my enemies and ravish their womenfolk.

Come to think of it, maybe the game is that easy because Square-Enix wants you to focus on the story instead. Well, if that’s the case then that’s too bad, because the story is the part I’m enjoying the least. First off, I don’t like intricate political intrigue storylines to begin with. The game starts out with so many different terms and factions it just makes my head swim. There’s these kids, and these knights torch their village, so instead of getting revenge on those knights, they start fighting this other kingdom, and at some point they even toady up to the same village-toasting baddies, and then to get back at the other kingdom who didn’t burn their village, they burn another village and…Huh?

Secondly, I don’t like the language. It’s a little too “I spent a lot of money on this English major dammit, and I’m going to prove it!” It does a good job of setting the mood, if the mood you’re looking for is Washed Up Shakespearan Actor. Thirdly, and this is really petty, I don’t like the uppercase font they use. All-Caps flies in the face of every readability guide known to man. In short, the story’s hard to follow, hard to understand and hard to read. It’s only now in Chapter 3 that I’m kiiiiiinda getting an idea of who all the different factions represent and who belongs to what, where, why. Kiiiiinda.

Worse than the story, though, is the main character. He hasn’t made a single real decision in the whole game. He’s always just going along with someone else’s plan, whether it’s Vyce’s or the Duke’s or Leonar’s, he doesn’t have a single original idea. Then to make things even more pathetic, he manages to convince himself and tries to convince others that he thinks it’s a good idea and it’s what he would have done anyway, even though he knows, and we know, that whatever it is is a stupid plan. He’s like the middle manager that gets all his ideas from the higher ups then tries to pass them off as his own. Dude we know you’re just a lackey, so do us a favor cut the BS.

… All right fine, you got me. That’s not what I’m really mad about at all. A little self-delusion never hurt anyone, anyway. And I’m sure the rest of the game will be about him growing a pair and learning to take charge of his own destiny. No, what’s really getting my goat is that I haven’t been allowed to actually carry out any of those tremendously bad ideas myself.

For example, I choose a massacre at the end of Chapter 1 just for shits and giggles. Imagine my shock when I was denied the chance to slaughter civilians myself and instead forced watch it in a cutscene. And then I got blamed for it anyway! All the pain and none of the enjoyment, WTF? Again there was an assassination plot in Chapter 2 and again I had to watch, even though I was itching to do it myself. Tch. “There is Blood on my Hands” my bottom, this is a scam! I long for a character like Serdic in Rondo of Swords Path B, who can do the nasty deed himself and then go on to say, “Yeah I killed her, so what?” Massive props. Too bad they softened him up after a bit, I was loving that Cold Emperor gimmick.

Aaaaaannyyyywaaaaaaay. The game isn’t over yet. Still plenty of time to commit more atrocities and make more bad decisions. I hear there are 3 different routes in this game, so depending on how things go, I might play the game again and take the road not taken. Good game so far, though.

I quit TWEWY

25.07.11 / Action RPG, Nintendo DS, Square-Enix, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: the world ends with you

I’m a casual RPG gamer. I can’t deal with all this mindless dashing about, running all over the screen with one hand, using pins to slash and stab enemies with the other hand, controlling your partner on the top screen with your third hand, reaching for a rope to hang yourself with your fourth hand…

1. I don’t like Action RPGs. And this has an exceptionally hectic and confusing battle system. I just poked and slashed at random until something died, which worked for Days 1 and 2 but would have caught up to me eventually.

2. Every mission seemingly consists of “Erase the Noise.” Wanna walk through the park? Erase the Noise. Wanna scratch your nose? Erase the Noise. Wanna take a shit? Erase the Noise.

3. Amnesia protagonist. Seriously. He doesn’t help his case by being an unpleasant little twerp.

4. Characters I don’t care about. “We’re trapped in Shibuya and we have to fight to get out!” Yeah, uhh, good luck with that.

5. Story I don’t care about. Reapers, Noise, battles, sulky teenagers… what part of this am I supposed to give a damn about? The game is all “funky” and “cool”, I get that, I just don’t get the “likeable” and “relatable” part.

6. I spoke to the friend who recommended the game so strongly and it turns out…he hasn’t finished it either! And what he liked about it the most was not the story or the gameplay, but…the SOUNDTRACK. As a matter of fact TWEWY been on his “Keep meaning to finish” list for almost 3 years, he can’t even remember where he got to, and yet he keeps pushing it on other people. Why am I friends with him again?

Phew, that’s a weight off my chest. I was on the verge of repeating my Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari mistake, where I kept plugging away at a game that was making me suffer, even as other games were waiting to be played. Not saying it’s a bad game – for the right kind of gamer – but it’s definitely not for me.

So, that’s a third item struck off my Half-year resolution list. Unfortunately I probably won’t be able to play Summon Night 3 this year because my PS2 is, uhh, indisposed. I need to have it fixed, but things are, uhh, complicated so I can’t do that for a while. As for last two items on that list, Nora to Toki no Koubou is out! I’m struggling with whether to buy it or just pirate it, which is why I haven’t said anything so far. I’ll wait and see a couple of reviews first. I started Persona on the PSP the other day. Whew, old school is OLD. But not bad, I guess.

I’ve also been testing various other games and gotten pretty far in some of them, but that’s all stuff for another post, another day.

Saga 3 Finished! What I didn’t like

23.04.11 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Square-Enix, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: review, saga 2, saga 3, time travel

1. It starts off really slowly. The first third or so of the game was really boring. It was all about finding parts for the time-traveling ship. Go here, do this, go there, do that.  Zzzz… I literally fell asleep behind the DS more than once. Things pick up a bit once you go to the past and visit a few places, but it’s still a bit of a snoozefest. Saga 3 only really got off the ground right when I went to the South Tower to kick Ashera’s behind, then topped it off with Chaos’s carcass before proceeding to the future. It was all smooth sailing from there.

2. Sidequests are a pain. The majority of them require a certain number of Time Gear points in order to unlock certain solutions. If, for example, you want to go back in time and fight a certain boss, you might need anything between 1 and 4 Time Gear points to unlock that option. Time Gear points can only be accumulated by fighting battles, so you may very well have to walk away and fight a little before coming back to finish the quest. Some quests also require time travel, sometimes more than once. At least one of them also disappears without warning when you pass a certain point in the game. All this suffering would be somewhat bearable if the quest rewards were worth it but sadly they almost never were. Easily acquirable items or paltry sums of money? Thanks for nothing.

3. I missed the true ending because of three stupid sidequests. I’ve ranted enough about this. I won’t go over it again. Unlocking the True Ending doesn’t just depend on those sidequests, though. You also have to pick the “right” answers in certain sidequests in order to raise the friendship points of your party to a certain level. However, these answers aren’t always intuitive. Sometimes doing the sensible, logical thing is the wrong choice and you were supposed to pick the stupid option instead. To worsen things, you can’t even see those points you’re accumulating, so you won’t even know that you’ve failed until you finish the game and get…nothing. *sigh*

4. Traveling back and forth through time gets old. I did it a lot because I was trying to do sidequests. Massive pain in the buttocks. Never again. Next time I’ll… wait, there won’t be a next time. Forget it.

5. The game is a little too easy on Normal. If you know what you’re doing (which stats grow best with which class, which weapon raises which stat, etc), you can break the game pretty quickly with judicious raising of your stats, which rise much more readily than they did in Saga 2.

What’s worse than that, though, is that you can recharge your weapons. In Saga 2 (or think Fire Emblem, which has a similar mechanic), when your weapons ran out of uses, that was it. You couldn’t whack away with your best swords and expect to have plenty left over for the final boss. In Saga 3, it’s no problem at all. Recharging weapons just costs a bit of money and can be done at any inn. I had 500,000G cash by the end of the game so you can tell the costs didn’t hold me back at all.

Status effects were a joke as well. They almost never hit, and when they did they didn’t hurt much. I was poisoned occasionally and cursed a few times and that was it. Around the 25 hour mark, I managed to mass-produce an item that blocked all stat effects, which sealed the deal for good. And as if all that wasn’t enough, the game also threw several powerful guest party members my way. Or more like they would be powerful if I ever used them for more than healing. Can’t have the enemies dying too quickly, can we?

6. Bosses are pushovers. They were so wimpy, in fact, that I had to hit them with my weakest weapons and attacks so they could stay alive longer for more stats-leveling. The only one who made me sweat briefly was Ashera, and even he went down pretty quickly. Wusses.

7. There are a lot of useless gameplay features. Passwords, for example. You’re taught to enter passwords at the beginning, but you will almost never have to. Passwords you find will be automatically entered and the useless item you get will be delivered to you in your ship. Battle Drives were “awesome but impractical,” to borrow a term. To their credit, they would be useful in battle if a) everyone you fight wasn’t a wuss and b) Time Gear points weren’t so precious. Those points take time to accumulate and I used them frequently so wasting a whole node of them on some walking-dead boss was out of the question. Thus Battle Drives went into the unused bag as well.

8. Your airship (Stethros) was useless in battle, especially considering the amount of game-time I devoted to beefing it up. In theory, you could scout monsters to strengthen your airship’s laser attack. Well, I scouted a ton just to get them off the screen and found out it takes tons and tons of them to make even a slight difference to your weaksauce laser. And you know what? You don’t want to make it strong, because then it’ll kill the enemies too fast and you don’t gain any skill levels or stat levels from using it. On some of the later battles, I used the “strengthening” beam to buff my party, but as far as I can tell it didn’t make a lick of difference. Waste of time. Nice ship, though.

9. Transforming into mecha and monsters was worthless. Mecha are weak against magic and can’t gain any stats. Unless you intend to keep that character as a mecha for the rest of the game, you’ll be hurting yourself. Monsters are too limited in what they can do. Getting a useful monster transformation in the first place is luck of the draw. Then you can’t use magic that isn’t yours innately, you can’t wear armor and you can’t use weapons. When you switch forms, you can’t carry over attacks, whereas if you stay a cyborg/human/esper/beast, you get to keep and use attacks you’ve learned. The special attacks are even unlocked on weapons you haven’t used yet, as long as you have learned them. It’s a no-brainer, really.

10. I liked being able to skip battle animations, but having to reenter commands every round was a pain. An auto-battle feature would have been great. I also didn’t like that running away from battle would leave you standing right by the enemy, ready for it to attack you again. Gimme some space, man.

11. The time travel plot didn’t make any sense at the end. After Dune and his friends save the world in the future, they leave the future and go back 15 years to live there. Doesn’t that mean, first, that they’ll change Dior and Nemesis’s futures and personalities just by growing up with them? Second, that in 15 years time there’ll be two of them in New Dam village when the originals who were originally from the future but came back to the present and then later went into the future catch up with the ones who beat the boss then came back to the present to live and have naturally grown into the future? (It makes sense in context…I think)

Thirdly, are they then going to sit back and let the rest of the resistance handle everything just because “It’s up to our childhood selves to handle it?” Does this mean that even as I play this game, future-present-grownup Dune, Milfy, Polnareff and Shiryu are chilling on a beach somewhere sipping piña coladas because they already know I’m going to succeed? If not, what happened to them? Finally, where did Jupiter (Dune’s dad) come from? He’s not in Dam village in the present, but the present is only 15 years from the future where he’s a married adult, so he can’t not have been born then. I went to every town/village on the planet in the past and present and never ran into him. Speaking of which, where’s Boraju as well? Few time travel plots resolve issues like this, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give Saga 3 a free pass for it.

So there were a couple of things I didn’t enjoy. It was a long journey from start to finish, and I don’t think I have it in me to replay it any time soon. But I had a fine time while it lasted, flaws notwithstanding. Not that it’s ever going to come out in North America, but if you ever learn Japanese (you should, anyway), give it a shot. Now back to Arabians Lost, which is finally starting to pick up.

Saga 3 Finished! What I liked

20.04.11 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Square-Enix, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: review, saga 2, saga 3, shadow or light, time travel

Yay! Finished! I ran roughshod over Laguna last night. I was half-asleep doing it, actually, because the fight was such a snoozefest. He only had three forms, and none of his attacks were ever enough to kill me. Not to mention I had a guest party member who would cure my life to full at the end of every turn and I made good use of him. Whenever the boss summoned extra troops, I had everyone use the ridiculously-overpowered Flare to wipe the field clean in one turn. The only challenge was staying awake long enough to kill him, seriously.

The ending was okay. Everyone’s alive, including your dad you’d never met. Well actually he wasn’t, but they somehow brought him back to life by turning him into a cyborg. Square-Enix, biology doesn’t work that way!!! As for that guest party member who I would have fought in the true ending to discover all kinds of truths, he disappears without a trace and presumably gets away with whatever evil scheme he was planning. And I never got to find out who Wanderer was or what he wanted either. Grr, I’m still mad.

Apart from the lack of difficulty and my loss of the true ending though, I had a great time with Saga 3. It would take hours to write down everything that was so great about it, but I will at least put down the main points I appreciated, particularly in comparison to Saga 2. In the interest of fairness I’ll eventually write another post about what wasn’t so great, but for now I’m just going to feel good about this. Those 33 hours of my life weren’t for nothing!

First things first, the characters were great. Saga 2 had a main character and a bunch of no-personality self-created party members. This game has Dune, Shiryu, Polnareff and Milfy, each with their little quirks and character traits. Dune is just Dune, a little dense, a little silly, a little stubborn sometimes, but generally a cheerful, likable guy. As far as RPG protagonists go, he’s exactly my type. Shiryu is his girlfriend/childhood friend. Sweet, strong romantic streak, always wants to help other people, awful cook, not annoying at all. I like her. And I like how she’s in a romantic relationship with Dune but the issue is rarely referred to and is never allowed to take over the game. They didn’t even have the obligatory “Your girlfriend is in trouble, throw everything away to save her!” scene (Nemesis and Dior did, but they’re idiots and don’t count). Polnareff is your brash, cocky violent friend who acts first and thinks later. I love Polnareff. And Milfy, dear Milfy. Rough, cranky, take-no-prisoners girl who teases and argues with Shiryu non-stop. Where Shiryu is the nurturing, mothering type, Milfy is the type to give you a swift kick in the pants when you start moping too much. They make a great combo.

I loved my party. I wish they’d have even more interaction, just so I could get to see them bicker more. They gave off a genuine “childhood friends” feel by not going too far in one direction or another. By that I mean they didn’t argue all the time, but at the same time they didn’t slavishly agree with everything Dune said either. He may have been the main character, but he was more like a primus inter pares than like the typical Messianic hero you tend to get in jRPGs. There was nothing special about him at all, and his friends certainly didn’t treat him that way. Awesome.

Most of my 33 hours were spent playing and fighting, not interacting, so it’s just as well that the gameplay was fun too. They kept introducing new features and new gameplay elements right until very late in the game. You start with a normal battle system, then you get a Time Gear that lets you stock points in battle. This unlocks the Past, Present and Future battle drive options in battle. You also get different upgrades to your ship that let you, for example, dig up buried treasure, or see all the treasures on the map, or see where all the enemies are (very useful), you get the ability to “scout” enemies and add them to your ship’s laser, etc. There was always some new feature cropping up, which kept the gameplay fresh. Saga 2 was like this as well, but I appreciated it more in Saga 3, probably because my mind wasn’t consumed with trying to stay alive.

You can also spark abilities on the fly and use them the very next turn!

The real-time level up system was cool as well. In Saga 2, and presumably in Saga 1, your stats leveled up randomly at the end of a battle. In Saga 3 it happens right as you’re fighting. Which stats level up and the probability of leveling up depends on your class (human, esper, beast, monster), the weapon you’re using and the difficulty of the battle. You’re way more likely to level up against a boss than against some random weakling, and it happens on the spot. You hit the boss with your sword at 45 strength and *ping* now you have 46 strength. In longer boss battles you can level each stat three or four times and take advantage of them right away! No more of that “Gee, this extra HP would’ve been really helpful if you’d given it to me before the battle” nonsense. This is the way!

It’s possible that I was just used to the way Saga games work now, but this time I found it much, much easier to level up my stats. The game seemed way more generous with the level ups and I didn’t have to grind each weapon to death just to get a few bonuses. Armor and protective equipment was more powerful as well, sparing me the pain of wasting turns using shields in order to level up my defence. DF was around the 85 point at the end without me ever gaining a single point in it. HP also grew much faster, even for Espers. My Esper Polnareff had 974 HP going into the final boss battle, which is really high for Espers. Plus unlike Saga 2, your HP isn’t capped around 1024, so my beast Dune and beast Shiryu had around 1540 HP (they made a sweet furry couple at the end) while my human Milfy had about 1225 HP. All this made the game far easier and far less frustrating.

Also I liked the way the enemies went easier on me this time. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it was much easier to run away from them. Perhaps it’s because the map controls were easier to navigate, or I’d just gotten used to the 3D environment. Later on in the game I got the ability to freeze time. I could stop enemies in their tracks and then “scout” them, or avoid them, or even whip around and attack them from behind! Speaking of which, I almost never got back-attacked even when I deserved it, as opposed to Saga 2 where every other attack was a back attack.

Saga 2 could be nightmarish

The number of attacking enemies was also far more reasonable, at most six or seven on the field at once. In fact, that many was rare, it was usually four or five. Even in chain attacks, only one enemy team would show up at a time. The rest would wait patiently in a stack for their turn. How considerate. Especially since I still get horrible flashbacks about being attacked by over thirty enemies (30!!) at once in Saga 2. Thirty enemies in front, around and behind my team! And their speed was so much faster that they’d all go first before I could get a hit in, it was murder! I’m so happy my speed growths were better this time (beast + physical skill = crazy speed lvl up) and the enemies were much fewer so the playing field was a lot more level.

Let’s see, what else. Oh, I liked the optional overworld. You can choose to explore the overworld map, or you can skip it entirely and go straight to your destination. Not always, but in many cases, just by following the Yellow Dotted Line. It’s like there’s an over-overworld and a regular overworld, depending on how fast you want to get somewhere and how many battles you want to face. It’s not like Radiant Historia where you have to pass through the same Lazvil Hills and the same Granorg Plain every time you want to go somewhere, or Saga 2 where just stepping out of your village is asking for trouble. I still chose to explore every place at least once so I could pick up chests and dig up treasure. The point is, most of the time it’s optional.

Oh, you know how you can eat meat in the Saga games to turn into a monster? Your characters stay transformed even in town. Even during cutscenes and storyline events, they’re still monsters and nobody on the planet has a problem with it. They can even tell at first glance that the ghost floating over there is Dune, even if he looks like every other monster in the game. I just found that funny.

Tra la la! No battles for me!

While I’m on the topic, I liked being able to change my party members’ classes. A human could become an esper by eating meat/a gear of the opposite element, and vice versa. And any of them could shift from robot->cyborg->human/esper->beast->monster just by eating meat (moves you to the right of the scale) or a gear (moves you towards the left) that an enemy dropped. This helped tremendously in growths, which is probably why my characters ended up so terrifically strong by the end. And again, it helped keep the game and the battles fresh.

Let’s see, what else did I like… Flying around on my awesome ship was cool. Being able to skip battle animations to make battles go faster was cool. The music was decent. I liked the “action” theme they played every time something dramatic happened. And there were no soppy events, so there was no silly soppy music, it was all upbeat and inspiring. Good job!

Now then, so much for Saga 3. Next up I’ve almost finished the terrible Nanatsuiro Drops DS game, which doesn’t really deserve a writeup. I also started Remindelight, another horrible game, which I’m not going to continue. Tactical Guild has filled my bad game quota for the year. I also tried to start Arabians Lost, but I’m about three hours in and they haven’t stopped talking so my desire is wilting by the second. Luckily, just today I downloaded the free demo of Territoire, from EasyGameStation, the makers of Recettear, so I think that’s going to be my next game. So many games, so little time…

Saga 3 – I’m mad

16.04.11 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Square-Enix, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: dimension travel, saga 3, shadow or light, time travel, true ending

I’m almost finished with Saga 3. I just have to go to the final mountain, hack my way through the weaklings and wipe out the final boss, who should be a pushover like all the other bosses before him. This game is way, way easier than Saga 2, at least on the Normal setting. It’s got an Easy setting as well, which must be on the Ar Tonelico-level of easiness because nothing could be easier than this so-called Normal. Come to think of it, Saga 3 would be a good game for Square-Enix to bring over. Not too hard for Westerners, fun gameplay, lots of sidequests, story is decent (and time travel is all the rage these days), and the party interactions are awesome. Some of their snide comments actually made me laugh out loud.

I’m mad at the game, though, because I had no idea that doing certain sidequests “correctly” would unlock the “True Ending,” with a true boss fight after the last one. Not knowing this, I just did the sidequests anyhow I wanted to without checking a FAQ. That’s how I usually roll. Then right before the final dungeon I thought I’d take a quick look and make sure I hadn’t missed anything. There were, and still are, a number of gaps in my Free Scenario (sidequest) notes, but since most of the sidequests weren’t that rewarding, I wasn’t going to bother. But I took a quick peek at a Japanese FAQ just in case and WTF?! True Ending?! And if you choose the wrong option in three particular quests, you won’t get it?! You mean I’m screwed?! Whaaaaaat?!

Looking back, maybe I should have seen it coming. I started this game shortly after Radiant Historia, after all, which may have been some cosmic warning “Watch out for the sidequests!” But at least in RH you could go back and fix your mistakes. In Saga 3, once the quest is cleared, there’s no turning back. Even if you go back into the past, it will always be right after you finished the quest, and somehow you can’t use the Time Gear to go back in time and stop yourself from making the wrong choice. Btw, I won’t spoil the sidequests you need to get right, but they involve Dior, Nemesis and Freya so be careful when doing any quest involving them.

Man, I’m so mad. I’m mad at myself for not doing enough research and I’m mad at the game for being a time traveling game that doesn’t let you fix your own mistake. Most of all I’m mad that I’d have to spend another 30 hours replaying this game, fighting all the battles, killing all the bosses, doing all the random stat level ups, if I want to see the true ending now. Fu… err, fornicate with that excrement, I’ll just wait for it to pop up on Youtube. (EDIT: New Game+ lets you carry over your levels and items, but you still have to play again from the start. F that)

Right now I have lost any and all will to do the other sidequests so I’m just going to stomp a mudhole in the last boss and call it a day. Most of the bosses are so weak, they barely survive long enough for me to take my anger out on them. Don’t disappoint me, Laguna!

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time

08.04.11 / Action RPG, Nintendo DS, Square-Enix, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: echoes of time, final fantasy crystal chronicles, review

I mentioned that I had started Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time earlier. Well I didn’t get very far before I quit, just about two or three hours into it. I was on Fire Mountain, for those of you familiar with the game.

Why did I quit?

1. Action RPGs are usually not my thing. When I do play them, I like them to be simple affairs like Rune Factory. The minute I start having to think and plan, I get stressed out and frustrated. FFCC:ET was easy enough that I didn’t get wiped out even once, but it was no fun at all.

2. Magic was next to unusable. First you have to select a particular type of magic on the bottom screen, then press a button and align the circle with the enemy, then let go to cast the magic. What if the enemy won’t stay still? What about all the other enemies whaling away at you at the same time? So it’s much faster to just hack away at random.

3. Your allies are confusing and just get in the way. Jumping all over the place like jackrabbits, falling in the water at random, failing to come to your rescue when you need them the most, doing the same thing over and over regardless of which AI strategy you pick, etc, etc. When I tried to pick stuff up, I’d end up picking them up instead. Sometimes enemy drops would end up on their heads and they’d run all over the room with them. Not to mention your allies are characters you create, so they have no personality or relevance to the story at all. I have no idea why they are with you, unless the final boss sent them to sabotage you. I considered ditching them all, but I didn’t have the confidence to go it alone.

4. Story? What story? It’s been a bunch of fetch quests and dungeon crawls so far. This is my first FFCC so far (apart from My Life as a King), so maybe that’s how they all play out. I don’t know, but I don’t like it. I like it even less when the main character has a dream about an evil character, then meets said evil character, then proceeds to do his bidding without stopping to look at the huge, flashing signs saying “VILLAIN ALERT!” “VILLAIN ALERT!” “VILLAIN ALERT!”

5. I hate the dungeon puzzles. In fact, I hate dungeon puzzles in general, especially ones that involve any form of running or jumping or platforming. This is why I can only love Zelda games from afar, i.e. I get other people to play them while I watch. There were all those crate puzzles and block puzzles and set-this-pot-on-fire puzzles in this game, all the things I hate in one convenient package. It’s a wonder I even got as far as Fire Mountain.

6. I don’t know whether it’s an FFCC:ET flaw, or whether it’s more of me just sucking, but the camera is impossible. I kept falling into holes and crevasses because I couldn’t see properly and the camera wouldn’t let me change the view to a more amenable one.

7. The game world is bland and insipid. I was attracted by the cute characters, but once I got in there, it had no content. One village, one city, massive wasteland and no room for new cities as far as I could see. Having the NPCs change their lines from time to time was a nice touch, but they didn’t have anything interesting to say to begin with, so it makes no difference. Plus you can’t enter their houses and plunder their goods either. What, you don’t trust me? I’m hurt.

8. The quests suck, plain and simple.

9. I couldn’t get the hang of the armor and weapon system. Let’s see, you buy them, then you equip them for a while, then they level up, then you take them off and turn them into jewels and equip those jewels on your new weapons and armor and repeat the whole process. It sounded complicated and off-putting. Don’t fiddle with the basics too much.

10.You can’t save at any time. There isn’t even a Quick Save function. Once you enter a dungeon, you have to keep going until you’re right before the boss. If you have to save, then you have to go back to town and do so. When you come back, you have to do aalllll those puzzles all over again. That’s close to a dealbreaker for me. I do most of my gaming late at night before bed, and sometimes I get really sleepy. If you won’t let me save anywhere, then either keep my progress in the dungeon or dole out the save points more generously.

In short, it just wasn’t my kind of game. I’m just glad I didn’t end up wasting more time on a game I wouldn’t have liked anyway.

Dragon Quest V – Hand of the Heavenly Bride

14.02.11 / Nintendo DS, RPG, Square-Enix, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: dragon quest v, hand of the heavenly bride, review, shiren the wanderer

Just finished Dragon Quest V after 34-ish hours. That includes lots of time spent playing T’n'T and an hour or two spent finishing Estark off in his labyrinth. I still haven’t managed to beat the final T’n'T board, but no matter what reward there is at the end I have no use for it so I’m not exactly shedding tears over it.

Overall impression, it was a very good game. Unfortunately I played it too soon after DQIV, so I couldn’t get the full enjoyment out of it. They were just too similar, both looks and content-wise. I felt more like I was playing some extension to DQIV than like I was playing a completely new game. It’s a bit sad, because I was trying to get DQV out of the way so I can enjoy DQVI when it comes out next week, but now I don’t dare buy it. I know for sure I’ll be bored stiff.

I guess part of the reason Dragon Quest games sell so well in Japan is because they don’t come out so often. So you play one, enjoy it, and then when after a year or two you feel like playing it again, a new one comes out and you play that too. Similar character designs, similar storylines, similar soundtracks, almost identical gameplay, rinse, repeat. Of course you might get unlucky and hit a clunker like DQIX, but if you’re a fan you might get some enjoyment out of that anyway.

So anyway, I had a pretty good time with DQV. I would have had an even better time if I’d waited a while to play it, but there’s no use crying over spilled milk. Or at least I want to think I would have, because I was rather dissatisfied with the way the story played out this time. I spent the whole game just doing what I was told, over and over again. Silent protagonists almost always come across as laidback pushovers, but even among them I have never met a hero as sheep-like and as passive as DQV’s protagonist. I named him Mouse on a whim, little knowing how completely right I would be.

Fine, in the beginning he’s a kid and he doesn’t have much say as his dad drags him from place to place. Bianca says let’s go beat some ghosts, he follows. His dad goes to Coburg, he follows. He ends up as a slave for 10 years. Someone sets him free. Harry wants to go to Coburg, so he goes to Coburg. Then I completely forget what happens until I landed in Mostroferrato. Some guy wants me to marry his daughter and gives me fetch quests. Like a sheep I run off and do them, then I have my pick of three girls I don’t like and don’t want to marry. When I heard “Hand of the Heavenly Bride”, I thought for a second I might get to actually woo somebody. In any case a slug like Mouse would have just messed things up anyway. So I married the fat, bossy, bitchy Debora and had twins (named Micki and Free, thus betraying my age). Uncle says he’s the new king, Mouse is like “okay”. Uncle tells him to go do a quest, he’s like “Okay.” Debora gets kidnapped. At that point I really, really wanted to leave her kidnapped. I mean, the babies were saved, and I don’t believe for a second that they’re in love or anything. Screw that bitch. But the game says go save her, so I go save her. Then I spend 8 years as a stone statue and somehow manage to have more personality doing so than in the entire game up to that point, etc, etc etc…

As you can tell from the summary, I wasn’t excited for a second over anything I had to do in the game because it didn’t feel like I was doing it of my own volition. I mean, you never do anything of your own volition in jRPGs anyway, but the better ones manage to convince you that this is what you’d want to be doing if you really were in the game. That you’d do it anyway even if no NPC told you to. Throughout DQV, however, it’s clear that you’re always following other people’s wishes and orders. You don’t have any desires of your own. I don’t even think you have a mind, you’re an automaton. I can’t get into a story like that, especially when bad things just keep happening to you at every step of the way. Not to mention some parts of the game were things I’d done already, like finding and protecting the legendary hero, collecting the Zenithian equipment and working my way over to Zenithia.

Hmm? But I said I enjoyed the game, didn’t I? I did, I did, but it was despite the story, not because of it. The localization team left the team conversations in, so I had a good time talking things over with my children every time I spoke to an NPC or went to a new location. It helped flesh out the characters and the game world. I actually feel cheated now that they took those things out of DQIV. The team also they toned the accents down quite a bit as well. Every characters and NPC was intelligible, even though Sancho got really tiresome with all his “ees” and “eet”. If I had to complain, I’d say that I still don’t agree with their policy of making the villains speak in broken English. I don’t know how they spoke in the original Japanese, but I do know for a fact that it’s impossible to take a bad guy seriously when he’s speaking like a “token foreigner” comedy show reject. They don’t sound intelligent, and usually the less intelligent a villain is, the less threatening you find him.

Apart from all that, I also enjoyed having lots of money for the first time in any DQ game ever (okay I’ve only ever played three of them, but my point stands). You see, I lucked out really early at the casino in Fortuna and got a number of Metal King Swords. After that I just made sure I used monsters that could equip that sword (a slime knight and a slime for most of the game, later got a golem) and I didn’t have to spend a single penny on weapons for the entire game. Plus since the best defense is a good offense, I rarely bothered to upgrade my armor. I had 130,000 in the bank with nothing to spend it on at the end of the game, lol. And I had a ton of unsold armor in my bag, including two Flowing Dresses, two Magical Shields and two sets of Flame Armour. Of course, having the most powerful sword in the game on three of your characters just a few hours in means that most enemies aren’t going to put up a fight. I even beat the bonus boss in 28 turns on my first try. Broken game was broken, bwahahaha!

I thought I would enjoy recruiting monsters a little more, but it turned out you don’t really “recruit” them, per se. You just beat the tar out of enough of them until one of them decides to join you. It might have been better if they’d included ways of increasing the likelihood of them joining you, maybe with special items or abilities. As it was, getting one of every recruitable monster would have been an incredible waste of time. Most of them are pretty useless and take forever to level up. Besides, you can only take 8 party members with you, so most of the monsters will spend their time locked up in Monty’s pen anyway. A cute addition to the game, but not that useful.

The addition I did enjoy was T’n'T, a gigantic board game that really pulled me in. It’s a bit like snake and ladders mixed with a little D&D and a little Monopoly (the way you keep getting fined) mixed with a little blood from a very sadistic devil. I haven’t been so into a minigame since I played Triple Triad all those years ago. I was actually disappointed whenI got lucky on two of those boards and finished them in one try. There’s still the Estark board to try and finish, though. That’ll probably take me weeks, at the rate I’m going.

I also enjoyed the knick-knackatory, which is just a museum where you put special items on display. I’m not much of a collector, but there are only about 30 of those things and they are pretty easy to find as you play through the game, so I had a good time collecting, cleaning and displaying them. No rewards except bragging rights and 500g, but the game was linear enough that I enjoyed the little diversions from the main story.

So, that’s that for Dragon Quest V. I mentioned a little while ago that I was going to give Shiren the Wanderer a try. I did, and I did get killed like I thought I would, but I’m not quite satisfied yet. There’s a difference between getting killed because you didn’t stand a chance and getting killed because “Ah, I could totally have taken that guy!” I want to get to the “didn’t stand a chance” point before I give up. If you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s what I’ll be working on. Oh, and Saga 3 too, can’t forget that.

Finished Saga 2

02.11.10 / Japanese, RPG, Square-Enix, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: final fantasy legend, goddess of destiny, saga 2

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 hadn’t finished Saga 2: Goddess of Destiny.