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.