08.02.12 / Nintendo DS, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: Hero's Saga Laevatein Tactics, review
After blathering on about my “gamer’s pride” in the previous post, I felt a bit silly walking away from the Immortal King without a fight, so I went back and killed him. The King himself wasn’t all that tough. It was those zombie magicians with the crazy range and the filled Valhalla gauges that decimated my party last time. This time I got a little lucky and two of them came down early to their doom. The troublesome one in the middle I took out with a Valhalla attack from one cleric and the rest weren’t much trouble. Victoly!
After all that, it turned out the Immortal King wasn’t even the final boss. It was Ahriman, who was more like Yu Yevon to IK’s Jecht than any credible threat. I rubbed him out quickly, thinking the game would be over then, but nooo. Not even a credit roll. My hero Ernesto promised IK that he’d gather up all the Vaettir Arms on the continent and return them to him, so I’m supposed to help out with that. In the meantime the NPC that started everything got herself frozen in a time crystal and I have to find out a way to undo that and get her back.
…Or not. I ain’t gonna do it. Even if the credits haven’t rolled, I still consider the game over. If there’s anything else the game wants me to do, it should be short and to the point. Instead, right now I have 50% of the Arms and no clue how many more battles I have to fight to get the number I need to return. I also have no idea how I’m supposed to rescue Valerie. Most likely I’m supposed to fight and fight and fight and every couple of fights they’ll give me another clue until the chapter is over. DO NOT LIKE. So that’s it for me and Hero’s Saga, for real this time.
Overall impressions: the story was shallow. Like, really really shallow. It lacked most of the twists that SRPGs usually have, and character motivations rarely made any sense at all. This bad guy developed all these weapons that hurt people on all sides and wasn’t even sorry for it, but because he’s an NPC’s father, he’s magically forgiven. Stuff like that. Character interaction is rare and usually pointless. There were only about 5 or 6 story characters, so they have no real excuse. They seemed to be building a nice love-triangle between our MC Ernesto, his brother Claudio and his fiancee Diana, but then they chickened out and paired Ernesto with Valerie at the end, entirely unconvincingly. Boo, hiss.
Story and characters aside, everything else was pretty good. The battle music was okay, the graphics were okay, the character designs were meh, but passable. The battle system needed a little more balancing though. Higher-level enemies dodge like crazy, especially in the post-game chapter. No matter how high your morale is, once the enemies gets to more than one or two levels above you, prepare to miss just about every hit. You can use Phalanx for a guaranteed hit, but then prepare to do piss-all damage.
Magicians decimate your parties with ease. In most games, magicians are strong against other magicians, but in this game they’re weak against everything when it comes to being hit and strong against everything when it comes to dealing damage. And somehow enemy mages always do more damage to you than vice-versa. Some elements seem to be far stronger and more useful than others. Lightning and Earth especially, even though all four elements are supposed to be even. Valhalla Breaks are just evil. Yet somehow the enemy seems to have very good survivability against them lately.
Etc, etc. It needed a bit of tweaking in all regards and doesn’t stand out in any one aspect. If you like SRPGs you won’t regret playing it, but you won’t miss anything if you don’t get it either.
25.01.12 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (6)
Tags: Hero's Saga Laevatein Tactics, wiZman's world
They were blocking my path to gaming pleasure. For the past few days I’ve been in a state of not wanting to play these games and at the same time not wanting to start anything else until they were done. Obviously something had to give.
Hero’s Saga: Made it to the last boss and fought him once. He’s a cheating bastard, but I outwaited him and he came down to fight me around turn 10. I beat him fair and square, and what did he do? He came back to life with his skills returned and his Valhalla Gauge refilled. Cheater! Cheater! I’d already lost a number of troops to his cheating ways, so I decided to grind a little, strategize a little better, and take him on again. That’s what I thought four days ago, and I haven’t been able to muster up the interest since. The last boss was kind enough to blab the rest of the story before recovering, and I don’t really care what happens to everyone at the end, so… *toss*
WiZman’s World: I don’t really want to drop this. I like it a lot. Sadly it’s time to admit to myself that I don’t have the energy to finish it. I’m about halfway through the last dungeon, and it’s one of those warp dungeons. The map is all but useless and it pains me to realize that I’m putting in all this trouble to go face the final boss just to get killed. Because I just know I’m going to be killed the first time no matter how much preparation I do. Get killed, waste several more hours re-preparing, possibly get killed again, finally kill the boss… I’m tired. I want to finish it, but not at the expense of that much time and effort.
I could put them merely on “hiatus” but then they’d still be there as a mental stumbling block, begging me to come back. No, we can’t just be friends. A clean break is best for us all. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with Persona 2.
18.01.12 / Nintendo DS, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (2)
Tags: Hero's Saga Laevatein Tactics
I’m at it again. SRPG No. 2893. I don’t know what it is about me and SRPGs, but no matter how badly they treat me I keep coming back for more.
I’m supposed to be finishing up WiZman’s World right about now so I can put 2011′s games behind me. Unfortunately I came down with a case of Last Dungeon Syndrome and can’t bring myself to continue, which is where this new game comes in.
Hero’s Saga is as generic as generic SRPGS come. The main character is a prince of a small country threatened by an empire, he wields a sword, there are mysterious legendary weapons, the Empire has the super-powerful (in name only) generals, you recruit NPCs as you go, storyline characters join you from time to time, etc etc.
The story: some undead attack the hero’s friend. Some mysterious girl gives him a sword that can beat them. The evil Empire wants the sword. The hero decides that not only is he not going to hand it over, but he’s also going slash and burn his way to the Empire’s capital and give them what’s for. Bloodthirsty little bugger. And that’s how far I’ve gotten.
The only thing slightly unusual about the story is that it seems to be based on real-life Spain (Valencia) and France (Galia). This leads to the heroes and villains throwing gratuitous French and Spanish around like a lost episode of ‘Allo ‘Allo: hermano, señor, merde (my understanding is that ‘merde’ is considered extremely rude in French, but luckily no one at the ESRB can speak French), diable, that sort of thing. Right now it’s the Valencia vs. Galia, but the threat of the undead hasn’t been addressed yet, so I’m sure they’ll band together to take down the real bad guys before too long.
Gameplay-wise, while you can see your characters as individuals on the map, once you get into battle every “hero” has troops under them that help with attacking and defending. Archaic Sealed Heat tried to implement a similar thing, but the game itself was such a cluster**** that I never got deep into the system.
There’s the normal Attack and Defend, then there’s Charge, a high-powered low accuracy volley, and Phalanx, which is a low-powered attack that never misses and raises accuracy. Some troops may also have the Defend and Evade command, depending on their classes. I’m still exploring the advantages and disadvantages of each class. Magic-users are the strongest so far, but very frail. Melee units are meh. Archers are the worst ever. This is the first tactics game I’ve ever played where the archer class was the most useless, so that’s new. Changing class is as simple as changing weapons, so I’ll keep experimenting for a while.
Hero’s Saga also has bases scattered over the map that you can take control of. It’s a bit like in Advance Wars, but without that charming little ‘boing-boing’ thing they do. Standing on top of one of these refills your life and adds troops if you’re missing any. Characters in range also gain a boost to their Morale, which improves their accuracy.
As of 9:38h in, there are four main things that are bothering me about this game.
1. The enemies are way too passive. Most of them won’t move unless you come into range, and sometimes not even then.
2. 99% of all stages have the same “Eradicate enemy or take over castle” goal as their victory condition. Taking over the castle is almost impossible without first eradicating the enemy anyway.
3. You can only take 6 allies max into battle. I’ve got so many good characters and interesting weapons I want to try out but the game won’t give me the chance.
4. Valhalla Gauge attacks (this game’s equivalent of limit breaks) are too broken. One hit will wipe out most parties or leave them barely alive. It’s painful when they do it to you and dull when you do it to them.
On the plus side:
1. All NPCs have their own little bios, a nice touch.
2. Battles don’t take too long. Maps aren’t that big and don’t take that long to cross
3. Characters have skills and innate talents that range from moderately useful to WTF BROKEN. Makes a lot of difference when putting together a party.
4. Not too much blathering about morality. As far as I can tell both sides are wrong and Might makes Right. I hope it stays that way.
5. I appreciate attempts to shake up the same old SRPG formula. Something tells me I’m going to tire of watching the animations soon, but for now I’m enjoying.
I’m sure a couple more plusses and minuses will pop up before it’s over. An above average game so far.
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!
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.
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.
29.08.11 / Japanese, Nippon Ichi Software, Sony PSP, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: Blue Roses, Yousei to Aoi Hitomi no Senshitachi
My throat hurts, and my nose is all stuffy. I feel the flu coming on, so if I don’t post this now I probably won’t be able to for the next couple of days. I just finished Alicia’s route on Blue Roses and got the Claire (oh sorry, “Crea”) end. It’s not a very happy ending, since everyone ends up separated, working on different things, while Alicia leaves on a long trip with her dad. Oh, and several characters die, I won’t tell you which ones.
The final boss was the same one they told you you’d be fighting in the first hour, the evil fairy Grendain. Grendain’s motivation: human hatred feeds phantoms. Even if you kill me, a new evil fairy will just be born. Alicia: Yah whatever, tell it to someone who cares *slash* The end. That’s pretty much all there is to the story, since it’s pretty clear that this is Roche’s story (the other protagonist’s), and Alicia was probably just added at the last minute to give the game a bit of variety.
I know this because 1. Everyone talks non-stop about Roche towards the end of the game, even though he doesn’t appear at all. 2. It turns out he’s the son of the hero Londario who supposedly passed away 17 years ago, while Alicia is a relative nobody and 3. I started Roche’s route now and it seems far more “natural” and “logical” than Alicia’s. Latrice belongs to him like she’s never belonged to anyone else, Claire is his best buddy right from the start and Jack shows up right away and lets him join the team.
Roche is an obnoxious twerp though, just as I thought he would be. If I’d started with his route first there’s no way I would have been able to finish this game. I didn’t get to carry anything over to his route, but things are going faster this time because I’m more confident than I was before. In Alicia’s route, I tried at all times to limit the number of enemy teams I was fighting to one at a time, while hanging on tight to my healing items and magic, but this time I’m going all out. I’m not sure I have the stamina to finish Roche’s route as well, but I’ll give it my best shot.
It appears you’ll only get the “full” story after you play both routes, and there are a few things I want to know. First off, what’s up with Berry? He’s my favorite party member, but he knows too much about certain things. And he’s the only Blue Roses member apart from Jack to not have blue eyes. While there’s an explanation for Jack’s lack, no one has commented about Berry’s green eyes yet. It doesn’t seem like he’s a noble either. He’s hiding something for sure.
I also want to know what happened to Charlotte and Hamilton, Londario’s lackeys who almost killed me so many times. They just up and disappeared after a certain point in time, when it turned out they were phantoms that had taken human form. This little point is dropped on the player and then never brought up again. But how? Why? And who else could be a phantom in disguise? Hmm, Berrrrrryyy?
Oh, and there’s the whole issue of a new evil fairy rising up even if Grendain is killed. The final route will involve solving this problem once and for all so that humans can live in peace. I’m going to look into finding spoilers online/a youtube video of the true ending, but if I don’t then I’ll finish Roche’s route and tell you about it.
And now my head is really starting to hurt, so I’m going to quit here.
06.08.11 / Japanese, Nippon Ichi Software, Sony PSP, Strategy RPG, Summon Night, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: Blue Roses, review, Yousei to Aoi Hitomi no Senshitachi
One day many years ago, my aunt was really hungry so she came home with a couple of burgers. She wolfed down the first one in 5 seconds flat, then chowed down the second one with gusto. Halfway through the third one she suddenly stopped and went “Hang on… These burgers are undercooked!” The obvious moral of this story is: Even shitty food tastes great when you’re starving.
And even shitty games play great when you’re starving, I guess? Okay “shitty” is far too strong a word for Blue Roses, it’s not really bad at all. It’s just that after playing through the first 14 hours like a maniac, it dawned on me in a flash: This game isn’t actually all that good.
It’s an easy thing to miss, because at first glance there’s plenty to love about Blue Roses. The character designs are fine, the fairies are cute, both your party members and the NPCs have their own personalities, relationships and personal issues, the music does nothing wrong, the game has bright, colorful graphics and a cheery atmosphere, etc, etc…
Best of all, it reminds me a lot of the Summon Night games. So much so, in fact, that I paused and did a bit of research and discovered that Blue Roses was developed by Apollosoft, formed by ex-employees of Flight-Plan, the ill-fated developer of the Summon Night games. The similarities are numerous, but the key telling factors were 1) Walking around town talking to people/party members after battles 2) Not earning EXP during battle 3) Only being able to assign EXP after battle 4) Everything being stupidly expensive.
There’s a branching story (I think?) depending on whether you pick Roche or Alicia as your main character, which should make for some replay value. When I played Mana Khemia 2, I picked Raze first and he turned out to be such an asshole that he put me off not only MK2 but the whole Mana Khemia franchise for good. So I started out with Alicia. Eh, she’s okay, in a dumb, rash airhead kinda way. I prefer that type of protagonist to the glum, moody, ‘leave me alone’ type anyway.
So what woke me up from this pleasant reverie? It was a slow process of realization that culminated in a moment of epiphany, but the main source of my discontent was the tedious battles. Unlike normal SRPGs, battles don’t necessarily take place one-on-one in Blue Roses. Any character that’s attacked/attacking can choose up to two other nearby characters to assist them in battle. One character initiates the fight and up to 6 characters (3 vs 3) take part in it. A character that has already attacked can still take part in team battles. And, a character can move after attacking if it hasn’t moved already. You can attack, move the character, move another character up to attack while the first character assists, etc etc. It’s a very interesting system with a lot of potential, but then a few pesky flies got in the ointment and spoiled everything:
1. To prevent the game from becoming too easy (I presume), enemies are extremely strong. A single turn can take off half of your HP if you’re not careful. Even weak, lower-level enemies can’t be killed easily, making the free battles a pain to slog through. And there are a lot of enemies on every map. Every time I start a battle I just groan.
2. You can field up to 8 characters on the field, but you only have 5 fairies to pair them up with. The three fairy-less characters will be weak and grow poorly, making them annoying to use. Since the enemies are so strong, the most effective way to beat them is to either smack them with status effects or hit them with the magic they’re weak to, and for the most part only characters paired with fairies can do so. I don’t know how far along I am, but I’m already using the same favored characters with the same favored attacks repeatedly, so the excitement factor has taken a huge nosedive.
3. They added a little gimmick where you have to tap correct buttons to power up your attacks or defense. Each attacking animation takes long enough as it is, so this did not help at all. Also having a character go from healthy to half-dead because of one missed press is most unfair.
4. I hate fighting the same bosses over and over again. I’ve fought Charlotte and Hamilton about three times now and hated every minute. There’s not much variety in normal enemies either.
Blue Roses is an SRPG, and 90% of the time in an SRPG is spent battling. If the battles are slow, frustrating and unfair, then the game itself becomes the same. Once the novelty of the team battles wore off, the pretty veneer quickly flaked away and Blue Roses‘s true nature as a rather mediocre game were rapidly exposed.
But wait, what about the story? Yeah, that was stupid too. Stupid, obvious, cliched and predictable. That’s probably the worst part of this game and the main reason why I haven’t played it in over a week. Should I spoil or not? Hmm… Okay, not this time. And there’s still the possibility that it could salvage itself, so it’s too soon to go on a rampage.
16.07.11 / Action RPG, Nintendo DS, Otome game, PS2, RPG, Simulation game, Sony PSP, Strategy RPG, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: allison & lillia, astonishia story, Berwick Saga: Tear Ring Saga, breath toiki wa akaneiro, destiny links, harvest moon, hiiro no kakera, hoshigami remix, houkago shounen, inugami, Legend of Heroes, mimana iyar chronicle, remindelight, the world ends with you
I play a lot of games from start to finish. I play even more from start to whenever-I-get-tired-of-it. However every once in a while (…actually pretty darn often) there’s a game that I try to play only to give up very quickly for one reason or another. I usually don’t even mention them here firstly because I have nothing to say, and secondly because I have better games to write about, but I’ll list a few recent victims of this practice here.
Remindelight (DS) – Long intro, cliched story about rescuing sister from forces of evil, meh graphics, massively squashed-up text that’s incredibly difficult to read, terrible battle system that consists of slashing randomly at the screen, etc. I don’t think I got even an hour into this one.
Houkago Shounen (DS) – One of the games you have to be Japanese to appreciate, I guess. It follows the life of a little boy in 80s Japan as he goes to school, comes home, plays with his friends and tries to avoid moving away with his family at the end of summer. It was heartwarming but, frankly, extremely dull, and none of the mini-games he plays seemed like any fun. Instead of me playing a game about him, he needs to play the game about my childhood.
Astonishia Story (PSP) – I played about an hour last week, and it reminded me of Tactical Guild in terms of sheer terribleness. Even the samey-looking bad guys, walk-up-and-attack battle system, forced humor and paper-thin characters are similar. I could grow to love this game, I know I could. But I’ve already played one so-bad-its-good game this year, so AS will have to wait till at least 2012 to get its turn. If ever.
Inugami DS, Allison & Lillia DS – Not games, just books put on the DS by publishers out to make a few extra bucks. I thought reading light novels on the DS might be more fun than reading scanned copies on the screen (Buy? what is this “Buy” you speak of?), but this probably only applies to books that are worth reading in the first place, i.e. NOT Inugami.
Destiny Links (DS) – Shame, it’s a really promising game. Destiny Links had lots of elements I love in an RPG (quests, item crafting, world exploration, multiple character scenarios to play through), but I just couldn’t get past the pure action RPG battle system. I can handle ARPGs with level ups because then I can just grind till I’m strong enough, but systems that require me to actually show some skill and dexterity are a no-go. I managed to finish the first island, then threw my hands up after that. The tiny characters and the mostly-hiragana text didn’t help either.
Mimana Iyar Chronicle (PSP) – Plays like Tales of the Tempest, feels like a Grandia II rip-off. If I had a dollar for every grumpy mercenary with a chip on his shoulder… I made it to the first boss, who promptly wiped me out. Now I either have to grind or actually get the hang of the battle system, neither of which appeals to me right now. Dumped until further notice.
The World Ends With You (DS) – I’m giving it my best shot, I really am, but… It’s not doing anything for me. I’m just getting more and more stressed by the moment. Not only is the “story” not going anywhere I care to follow but also the battle system is all over the place. Which part of this is supposed to be fun? If it’s the 7-day Lockdown in Tokyo thing, I already did that in Devil Survivor, thank you. And can I get another couple of dollars in here for the “Everybody just leave me alone” protagonist? I haven’t thrown in the towel yet, but…
Hoshigami Remix (DS) – From the makers of my beloved Stella Deus, but this one is a wash. The battle screens make me claustrophic and the battle pace is downright catatonic. The characters on the screen are tiny (I complain about tiny characters because I have bad eyes, true story), the character designs are fuzzy and awful, the story is boring, the music is unremarkable, etc. Basically everything that can be wrong with a game is wrong with Hoshigami Remix. But I like SRPGs enough that I’ll probably play it on and off for a while to come. I especially like the Tower of Trial being unlocked right at the beginning. Maybe I’ll even finish it, eventually.
Harvest Moon Boy & Girl + Hero of Leaf Valley (PSP) – I shouldn’t have to repeat how much I love Harvest Moon games, but both original versions on the PS2 were a bit of a failure for me (I liked Innocent Life though, for some strange reason). I don’t know what I expected from the PSP remakes, but what I got was a whole lot of nothing. Hero of Leaf Valley seems to have a bit of potential – I did play quite a bit of Save the Homeland – but Boy & Girl is definitely out.
Breath – Toiki wa Akaneiro (DS) – I probably haven’t mentioned this before, but I don’t really like visual novels. Every couple of months I give one a shot just to see what’s going on, but it never works out. Breath would have been bad enough on its own, but the existence of several stupidly irritating games that force you to blow into the DS mic repeatedly was the last straw.
Hiiro no Kakera (DS) – Like I said, I don’t like visual novels. I gave this a shot because it’s one of the few otome ‘games’ for the DS, but I sorely regretted it. None of the male character designs appealed to me. The main character was whiny, ungrateful, stubborn, bitchy and mean. My dream was to lead her to a painful, ugly death, but I quit long before I got the chance. The story seemed to have potential, but every single scene, no matter how petty, dragged on for ages and ages so I gave up. This is a feature of all visual novels, btw, which is part of the reason why I don’t like them.
Berwick Saga: Tear Ring Saga series (PS2) – Gave up right in the middle of the first mission. I love SRPGs, but the hexagonal model was too confusing and the battles were hard. It would probably have turned out well if I’d pushed through to the end, but it came at a time when I was up to my nose in other SRPGs, so it just couldn’t compare. I looked around to see if it had gotten stellar reviews or anything, but “meh” seemed to be the general response so I dumped it.
Legend of Heroes I & II (PSP) – Nothing wrong with them, they’re just boring. I should have played them 15 years ago along with BoFII and Lufia I, then they’d have fit right in. I tried both LoH I & II in turn, but I think I’m going to have to save them for when I’ve run out of other PSP RPGs to play. Gotta say, I love Falcom’s character designs though.
Now back to the stuff that is working out. I really need to get off my butt and just finish Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari and three or four other games I’m almost done with but never got round to posting about.
22.06.11 / Sony PSP, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (2)
Tags: jeanne d'arc, review
You knew it was coming. Better games have been raked over the coals, so Jeanne isn’t getting off so easy. Sure I enjoyed it and all, but it’s 
got a lot of flaws that will need to be fixed if Level-5 ever plans to dip into the tactical RPG well again. Some of the things other people complain about like turn limits and long cutscenes didn’t bother me, but plenty of other things did.
1. Jeanne is annoying. Seriously. Yell, whine, mope, yell, whine, mope, yell, whine, mope, doesn’t she get tired? Even that fetching piece of black “armor” that shows off her oh-so-nice shoulders as she angsts yet again didn’t help.
2. Characters die or leave your party at inopportune times. That’s okay with me. No, really. I’m not mad or anything that I had to raise Jean several levels after Gilles up and took off or anything. But I am mad that Roger left my party for like 15 chapters, came back and then I was forced to put him in my party and keep him alive, right before the final boss battle. That was not funny.
3. The story was stupid. I’ve said it before, but one more time won’t hurt: the story was stupid. Either you’re making a history-based tactical RPG or you’re doing a demons-ate-my-baby thing. Pick one. Btw, did I miss something or did characters like Charles VI and Richemont just vanish from the story after a certain point? I was really looking forward to Charles’ reaction after I wasted his precious mommy too. Tch.
4. Battles get too repetitive. Repetitive battles in a tactical RPG? Say it ain’t so! Yeah, it’s kind of a staple of the genre, but Jeanne d’Arc takes it too far. When you’re using the same party, the same skills and fighting the same bosses on top of it (four, five times in a row), it’s hard to stay excited. Exactly how are we beating these guys anyway, if they can turn around and show up again the very next stage with nary a scratch?
4. Limited party was limited. 15 playable characters (that I got) and you could use between 5 and 7 at a time. 5 for most of the game. A lot of my characters went completely unused as a result (Rufus, Bertrand, Rose, Bartolemeo, etc). Lack of class or job changes also meant that Marcel at level 5 is the same Marcel at level 50, only with better gear. Ho-hum.
5. Limited skillset is limited. There are lots of skills, but most of them are useless given the limited number of slots, so I was using the same practical ones over and over again. This goes especially for the stronger magic spells, which I almost never used because my Richard also doubled as my healer. I could heal my entire party twice for the price of a single Thor’s Hammer. I don’t have a problem with MP starting at 0 though, since I’m used to it from FFTA2.
6. Navigation could be a bit iffy. Especially in oddly-shaped stages like Alrond Wood, the cursor can go flying all over the place when you’re just trying to select an enemy close by you.
7. The game was sluggish. First there was all the loading, even when doing simple things like opening the menu. Then some enemies would take several seconds thinking about their next moves. And then in the last third of the game a skill called HP Recovery appeared which meant both enemies and allies would waste time at the beginning of every turn just healing themselves. The cumulative effect of these things was to make the game feel like a massive slogfest by the end.
8. It’s rather easy. I never once got caught by the turn limit, and I only failed two missions once each. Just by doing each Free Combat mission exactly once, my party rapidly became overpowered, overequipped and overleveled, and anything after chapter 25-ish was a complete cakewalk. TBH, I forgot to transform in more than a few battles, and I still won easily.
9. Replay value is zero. I replay SRPGs I really, really like (Fire Emblem games, Luminous Arc 3), especially if I failed to get something in the first playthrough. In this case I’m clearly missing a few stones in some of the bracelets, but I don’t care. Neither the story nor the characters endeared themselves to me, and the battle system is nothing that hasn’t been seen before. Post-game content shmost-game content, I’m done.
10. Seriously, WTF was Talbot’s problem? What’s his stake in this? If he’s mad because the war is a family feud, what’s that got to do with us? What’s behind his sudden change of heart at the end? Why isn’t he dead? And why did I have to fight him five times in a row? WHAT AM I FIGHTING YOU FOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRGGGHH!
And a bunch of other niggling complaints that are too petty to mention here. My final, final assessment is that Jeanne d’Arc is a good, but not a great game. 35 hours of entertainment is nothing to scoff at, though, so I can freely recommend it to fans of the SPRG genre.
