17.08.11 / Atlus, Japanese, Nintendo DS, RPG, Simulation game, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (2)
Tags: alchemy, nora to toki no koubou, shepherd's crossing
Tch. Finished my first run yesterday at the 9 hour mark. Got an ending where the townspeople run Nora out of town because they blame her for a storm that wrecked the place. Ungrateful wretches, after all the quests I’ve done for them. Since Nora was run out of her hut and didn’t complete her training, she can’t become a time mage, and the game states that neither she nor her friends were ever heard from again.
Hmm. That is pretty bad, as far as endings go. Normally I’m used to getting a bad end on my first FAQ-less attempt at this sort of game (in fact I got three bad endings in a row in Atelier Lise and never did pay off my debt), but somehow this one really got my goat. The whole premise is just so unreasonable. Nora looks nothing like the so-called Mist Witch, she’s never done anything remotely harmful and she’s lived in peace with the townspeople for 2 and a half years, then all of a sudden she’s to blame for a random storm? That’s so unfair.
I’ve started another playthrough which I’ll probably finish, but I don’t like that aspect of the game. I’m thinking I won’t even bother trying to chat up the townspeople, I’ll just hole myself up in my studio and work on alchemy all game long. Screw good endings, screw making nice with the plebs, screw everything else, I’ll just do what I got this game to do.
Hanging around the homestead is fun anyway. Apart from synthesis you get to decorate the place with new walls and floors, you can mature cheeses and hang meat and fish out to dry and plant seeds in your garden. Oh! And when I started the second run, Koko sold me a duck that looks exactly like Brammy from Shepherd’s Crossing. Heck, it doesn’t just look like him, it is him. He’s even called Brammy! I told you I was getting Shepherd’s Crossing vibes from this game. So Success was involved huh? So that’s why your seeds go all over the place in the garden and your house is so messy and you can accidentally end up uprooting crops without meaning to, etc etc. Even some of the items look straight out of SC, especially the wooden fence, hay and the cheese. Heheh, that makes me happy. My love for this game went up +5 when I realized that, but I’m still mad about the ending.
I need to buckle down and finish Persona and some other games, though. I’m slipping yet again into my habit of starting new games before finishing old ones, and right now I have about 4 90%-complete games waiting for my attention. I might delay the completion of this second playthrough of Nora to Toki no Koubou until at least one of them is done.
03.07.11 / Simulation game, Sony PSP, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: shepherd's crossing
There’s no retirement in this game, so I just gave up when I felt like it, on Day 5 of Acorn month, Year 10.
I would have quit much earlier, but just when I was about to say adieu, the random hunt that gives carrot seeds FINALLY popped up (the one against Waku Waku, if you were wondering), which gave my game a much-needed shot in the arm.
My game was crippled without dem carrots, because without carrots I couldn’t get angora rabbits, which meant I couldn’t get angora rabbit fur, which meant I couldn’t get spotbilled ducks, which meant I couldn’t get pumpkin seeds, which meant I couldn’t get any alpaca fur. And of course by the time I finally got alpaca fur in year 10, I didn’t need any of the trade-in items I’d gotten it for, so I decided it was time to call it a day. 10 years is a nice round number to stop at, anyway.
Final impressions? Haven’t changed much from my first ones. The inability to trade items for money really, really hurt the game, in my opinion. The only pluses that I can list are that hunting was fun till the end and that crops were easier to grow than in SC2. I successfully completed almost all the hunts without too much trouble, except for the final one with the three bears. My plan for that, which I never got around to implementing, was to defeat and collect at least one bear, and then have one of my dogs hide until the turn count was up. Ta-daa, instant success. I was also going to distract them so they couldn’t use Cow Kill, because that move has wrecked my entire party one too many times. But it’s okay. No matter what the reward is, I don’t need it now.
I say crop farming is easier simply because there are no diseases in this game and because adverse weather doesn’t affect crop growth. In SC2 even if you got every dog available to guard against marauding animals, you had no way of countering crop diseases and frost. You just couldn’t catch a break. Here you’ll be fine if only you have enough animals and enough fences. On the other hand, getting those seeds to plant in the first place can be hell, as my little carrot misadventure just proved.
It was addictive in its own way, of course. I had more “wtf, why does the clock suddenly say 5am” moments with it than I’ve had with any other game I’ve played so far this year. As an unexpected side effect, playing Shepherd’s Crossing made me want to play Tactical Guild again. They’re from the same company, and every time Success’s logo appeared with that little hum, I started hearing TG’s theme in my head. I looked around for the soundtrack, but I don’t think it exists. I’ll content myself with watching the mini-theater skits for now.
Speaking of Success and Shepherd’s Crossing, it doesn’t look like they have any plans to release another handheld version any time soon. They’ve made a version for mixi and Japanese cellphones. I made a mixi account many years ago, no idea if it’s still active. I don’t even remember the password. I’m a bit shepherded out right now, but I’ll look into it again in a couple of months when the craving strikes again.
29.05.11 / Simulation game, Sony PSP, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: review, shepherd's crossing, Shepherd's Crossing 2
Since I enjoyed Shepherd’s Crossing 2 for the DS so much, I decided to make Shepherd’s Crossing the first game I played when I got my 
new PSP. Yes, I finally caved in and bought one. The release of Final Promise Story (Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari) made me sit down and take stock, and I realized there are over 75 games I’d like to play on the PSP. I’m too impatient to wait for a price drop when the NGP comes out, so I figured now was as good a time as ever to get one.
I needed something calming after my Tales of the Tempest experience, but I’m not sure Shepherd’s Crossing was really it. This is what happens when you play the sequel before the original and find the sequel has so many great improvements that the original sucks mightily in comparison. Don’t get me wrong. Shepherd’s Crossing isn’t all bad. It just has a number of frustrating elements that make it a tedious chore to play.
Firstly, I finally appreciate how much the clearly demarcated fields helped in Shepherd’s Crossing 2. It was still disorganized, but you could at least plan things: I’m going to fence my animals in here, I’m going to plant cabbages here, and tomatoes there and put a couple of trees there. This game is a complete mishmash, just a wide field with no clear markings at all. It’s so messy! There are many different types of fences, blocks and pickets you can use to pen your animals or fence your crops, but they’re SO hard to place correctly. And every time some animals show up to wreck your farm (which is often), your animals escape anyway and you have to round them up again.
Even worse there are so many things you can’t do in this game: you can’t chop down trees, you can’t explore your house, you can’t leave your farm except to go to the market, you can’t butcher your own animals, you can’t cook or process produce, you can’t get married or have kids, etc, etc. It’s far more limited than 2, especially since you can only hold 3 items at a time. And here I thought 5 items was bad.
You can hunt, though, which is a fun diversion from the main game. It’s a simple turn-based interface where you raise dogs and other attack animals, teach them some attacks and sic them on the local wildlife. Don’t worry, they deserve it. For your reward you get things like pelts and meat as well as points to trade in for items. It’s pretty fun, except they also give you these little statues that teach you stuff, and that you can’t get rid of even after learning the skills. They’re taking up space in my storehouse and it’s pissing me off! Oh wait, it looks like I can put them in the trash can. Just hope it doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass.
Back to the flaws, though, the biggest one for me is the non-existence of money. There’s a reason mankind moved from the barter system to a cash-based society pretty quickly, and that’s because bartering sucks. But at least in real life bartering is a bit flexible. In this game you can only trade specific items for specific other items, and forget about trading that item you have plenty of for that other item you really really need right now, it’s not going to happen. I’ve been forced to drag out my game a little longer because I need to grow wheat to proceed. Only the trading process to get wheat seed is so long (raise rabbits, grow cabbage, feed rabbit cabbage, get rabbit fur) and the wheat is so reluctant to grow that it all died the previous year and I’m having to start the process all over again. RRRGGGGH.
Oh, and my PSP screwed me royally last night. In a stunning incidence of poor design, the battery indicator is placed right under your right palm when you’re playing. In other words, unless you move your hand away frequently (and why would you do that?) you won’t notice when your battery is about to run out. Even if you do move your hand, the low-battery indicator is a slow green flash, so you won’t get the message without staring at it for a few seconds. Next thing you know, fwip. There goes your game and any progress you’ve made in the last couple of hours. I reckon I must have lost about 12 days of progress last night. RRRRRGHHH again. Wait… I just turned my PSP on and it looks like I didn’t lose anything. Phew, and yippee!
Anyway, I’m only two years into the game right now. If things pick up, I’ll let y’all know.
15.05.11 / Atlus, Nintendo DS, Strategy RPG, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (2)
Tags: review, rondo of swords
That took barely any time at all because Path B is way easier than Path A. Also Path B Serdic has ZOC, so I could trot him out where angels fear to tread without fearing too much for his life. I gave him a Black Ring (+1 MOV) and went all out. Unfortunately I missed out on getting Alberich because I spoke to him with the wrong person back in the cell (Serdic instead of Yumiluna), but even without him it was a complete cakewalk.
Apart from the ease, Path B also has a few more story elements than Path A. The main thing is that you find out that Serdic is actually a homunculus of the real Prince Serdic, created by Mephreyu, though it’s not explained how he ended up injured in the woods or whether that was just a manufactured memory. Also instead of Gauss and his Four Grands going out like pussies halfway through the same, they persist until the end. For all the good it does them, of course. (see: Stomping, Mudhole)
At some point Gauss got his hand on a Sword of Darkness from goodness-knows-where and planned to use it for goodness-knows-what, but you manage to stop him goodness-knows-how. Something about Igraine and self-sacrifice, I don’t know. Her role in the story was very poorly-explained so I didn’t give a fig what happened to her. Some kind of princess? Priestess? Dunno, dun care.
As a bonus I got to kill Mephreyu two more times. He was a complete walkover compared to the nightmare that was Path A’s ending though. Part of it was because I already knew the best strategy to take him out: Ansom + Holy Favor to clear out the bad guys, Cotton soaks up his MP with ease and finishes him off. I wonder what people without Ansom and Cotton do in these stages, seriously. I guess you could substitute someone strong with Sprint for Ansom and one of the better mages for Cotton, but still, sounds like hell. Mistress Cotton was also the one who took out Ernest most of the time I fought him. Thunder Rampage? Pffft, you’re a funny guy. She also took Gauss out in the first battle against him (the one with all the Grands) with one massive Fire Dragon.
Somehow Gauss seems to have learned his lesson, and in the final battle Fire Dragon barely did 132 damage. Still I only had to fight that battle twice because he was kind enough to come down and face me. The first time he killed Sasha and then used the resulting OB to wipe out everyone in my party. DO NOT LET GAUSS USE HIS OB! It won’t end well! The second time I was on to his tricks, so I got a number of kills early with Serdic and built up his OB gauge to 3. When Gauss waltzed down, I whittled his HP down as best as I could with the others and then let him have it. Simple, and short. My final party was Serdic, Ansom, Yumiluna, Cotton, Izuna and Sasha, by the way. I wasn’t impressed with Alhambra’s performance in Path A.
Ding Dong, the Evil Emperor is dead! Serdic celebrates continental peace by evidently deciding, “What good is becoming Emperor if I can’t get laid?” and asking Aegil to blow him marry him. And they all live happily ever after, the end.
So now I’ve finished both Paths of Rondo of Swords and there’s nothing else left to do in this game. All things considered, I had a blast, but I can’t let it off the hook so lightly. There were a number of serious frustrations:
1. The randomness of the shopping system was stupid. When you send someone out, you can’t control what they buy or how much or 
even if they buy anything at all. BS. Of course, the real good stuff can be got through battles, and your healer exists to cure you anyway, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.
2. The promotion system sucked. You’ll have to play the game at least three or four times if you want to accumulate enough seals and proofs to promote everyone in your party. This time round, I got a Palta Seal pretty early only to discover I was missing a second Hunter Proof, with no way of getting one, and thus couldn’t promote Ansom to his highest level. Crap! And it sucks that your units have to miss a battle to get promoted.
3. Not being able to move and use OB/Magic at the same time is ridiculous. Some say if mages could move and attack at the same time they’d be seriously overpowered. I say there’s gotta be a better way to nerf magic than that. Even Tactical Guild wised up and let you switch to a more intelligent class later (which was indeed overpowered, but that’s Tactical Guild for you).
4. Apart from Marie and Cotton, mages are weak and useless. I’m talking about offensive mages like Selmer/Elmer, Arios, Igraine and Galahad. The only thing offensive about them is how useless they are, with their low MOV and terrible attacks that either hurt your whole party or only hit one enemy. And their low starting MP pools that mean they can only cast a few times before needing to refill. And if they get hit once? Poof! Sure there are ways of getting use out of them, but it’s so much easier to just use Queen Cotton’s Fairy Fire or Fire Dragon which won’t hurt your allies, AND will refill her OB gauge so she can cast magic over and over again. There’s no comparison.
5. The story in both paths was pretty sketchy. The presentation was lazy as well: a few lines of text, a few lines of dialogue, there go you, your next battle. How’s anyone supposed to get excited from that?
6. Not being able to place your troops on the battlefield is killer for a strategy game. Not being able to even see the battlefield and find out the winning conditions before you pick your troops is even worse. In that respect it’s fortunate I had my preferred party that I just went out and steamrolled the battles with.
7. Wooden characters were wooden. Apart from Serdic, everyone seems to be tagging along for the heck of it. This is always the case in RPGs, but at least try not to make it so obvious, will ya? Character motivations are never delved into in detail, and the short description in the Info panel is all the backstory you’re ever going to get about most of them. Why did Gauss want to take over the continent (lol bicuz hez evul)? What happened to Mephreyu’s friend, when, how? How is releasing the Darkness going to help? Why homunculi? And why a homunculus of Prince Serdic? How was it created? Was Prince Serdic in on the plan? Etc, etc. You’ll never find out, so don’t bother.
But all in all, that stuff didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment. It’s going to take me a while to readjust to normal battle systems after this Route Maneuver business. It was fun, in its own tough, unforgiving way.
Moving on, I started Tales of the Tempest a few days ago, I’m about 4 hours in. It’s…well, I just started so I’ll hold off judgment till now. The weather’s too nice to stay indoors today so I’m heading out to run errands. Toodles!
12.05.11 / Atlus, Nintendo DS, Strategy RPG, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: fire emblem, rondo of swords
Cotton, savior of a million lives
*huff, wheeze* Phew! *pant, pant* Finally! I finally killed that bloody Mephreyu!
FI-NA-LL-YYYY! Gawd, what a pain in the ass that final stage was. I must have tried it at least 10 times. At least. But it’s all good and nice, I finally managed to put that sucker away for good. Smug bastard, that last hit felt so, so good. Death and Destruction to the Mephreyus of this world! All hail! All hail!
Now then, there’s a famous quote attributed (most likely apocryphally) to Einstein that goes: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” By that definition, the final stage of Rondo of Swords must have sent me stark raving nuts, because I kept trying to use the same strategy and something kept going wrong. Then I’d try again, something would go wrong again. It wasn’t until I gave up and went all medieval on Mephreyu’s behind that I finally managed to beat him. But thinking back, the correct strategy was so obvious! All those wasted hours… Oh well.
My failed strategy: Team: Altrius (Serdic), Alberich, Cotton, Ansom, Marie, Alhambra. Clear out mages with Ansom, clear out all other bad guys with rest of team. Slowly work way up to the top. Park Altrius and Alhambra at bottom of wide platform to lure reinforcements down and up. Place Cotton by one upper spawn point and Alberich by another. Slowly take out enemies on Mephreyu’s pyramid by having Ansom go up, shoot them and be rescued by Marie’s Holy Favor. Have Ansom take down Mephreyu’s MP by the same method until his MP is gone and half his HP is down. Have Alberich finish him off with OB level 3.
All well and nice, except either Ansom or Marie or Alberich would get themselves killed somehow. This often happened when the linesmen reinforcements refused to play nice by going up instead of down. Or when Ansom accidentally found himself out of range of Marie (my own carelessness, I know), and more than once Alberich’s Null ZOC failed him and he ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. And on one occasion Altrius got himself critically countered, Game Overing me within a few turns. Even at level 54 he still failed to one-shot some of the level 45 linesmen on occasion, leaving me in a sticky position to say the least. Needless to say I kept him far, far away from Mephreyu.
My successful strategy: Same team as before, same strategy as before except for a few things. Firstly, I had Altrius take the fight to the linesman on the right, standing right on top of the stairs ready to take him out. I also had Alhambra hide in the corner on the top right, keeping the armored guy busy and frustrated. That was all by-the-by, the important thing was, Ansom got killed again. And this time I didn’t restart because I had an epiphany: Cotton. My Queen. Ansom had already cleared all the guys on the platform, and Cotton is strong as hell against magic attacks. If anyone could survive Mephreyu’s attacks it would be her. I’d already used her as a mage killer before, why couldn’t I do it again?
So I tried it, and it worked beautifully. Not only could she survive his attacks with ease (he hit her for 196. Pfft, she’s got over 450HP), but she 
could hit back as well with Fire Dragon. Hard. That meant she was double-draining his MP every round, all while parked in one spot instead of moving back and forth like Ansom did. She could even take a hit or two from the rogue sniper or linesman without breaking a sweat. AND she could refill her own HP and MP with her OB. I still had Marie standing some distance away using Cure Drop every once in a while, just to be on the safe side. I whittled down Mephy’s MP and then HP to half, then he used an item to refill his MP. Pfft, you’re only prolonging your suffering Mephreyu! Give it up, you can’t win!
At some point Marie wandered into the path of a stray sniper and got taken out, but by that point I’d taken the boss’s MP out completely, so I cornered him with Cotton and Alberich, hit him with Fire Dragon and followed it up with Alberich’s OB 3. Narrow Victory for the win.
So glad that’s over with. That was the most frustrating final boss fight I’ve ever faced, bar none. For all my troubles, the ending was surprisingly perfunctory. Marie becomes Queen, everyone takes off back to wherever they came from and Altrius goes adventuring in parts unknown for reasons unsaid. Roll credits, the end.
About the game itself, though… Once I got used to the Route Maneuver System it was surprisingly fun, and definitely strategic in its own way. I both liked and hated the way you couldn’t just rush into battle blindly but instead had to lure enemies down slowly and carefully. The main downside was that every battle took forever even with super-powered freaks like Ansom and Cotton in the house. My Serdic/Altrius was roided up from taking on all the bad guys in “Escape from Egvard” but after the first 15 chapters or so he was just like everybody else. I shudder to imagine how utterly worthless he would be without all that extra grinding. Worse than unpromoted Roy from Fire Emblem 6, I bet. In any case, this is one game I definitely won’t be whining “It was too easy!” about. Oh, and the music was good too. I say it was good because I must have heard the same themes about a thousand times and I still never turned the sound off. That qualifies as good in my books.
The problem with Rondo of Swords was the story, really. The lack of a story, I mean. Enemies invade, you run, you rally, you turn back and press your way back to your kingdom. At one point most of your allies desert you, then a few chapters later they’re back like nothing ever happened. The Grand Meir villains just invaded because they were evil, no other reason. And Mephreyu’s pissed off because Verona killed his friend, so supposedly he wants to… uhmm… release the Darkness so that…umm… You know, I’m really not clear on that part. Anyway, he was mad about something and wanted to release an ancient evil to solve it, but we stopped him and everyone lived happily ever after. The end. Yeah, I’m not impressed either.
Now for Path B, the path where you kill Marie and Serdic becomes this awesome hardcore emperor dude. I made sure to get two saves when the choice came up, so I don’t have to replay from the start. I’m only two chapters into Path B, but I’m loving this no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners Serdic. I can’t believe the milksop Altrius had this side to him, it’s so cool. It’s hard to get used to being weak again though. This could take a while.
01.05.11 / Atlus, Nintendo DS, Strategy RPG, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (4)
Tags: fire emblem, rondo of swords, tactical guild
It was going to be “first impressions”, but after ten hours you kind of lose the right to call it that. Anyway if I’d written my first impressions when I just started out, it would have been a real disaster: “I hate this game! WTF is this! This isn’t a tactical RPG! It…it’s TRASH!” and other expressions along those lines.
I confess I didn’t really pay attention to what the game was about before starting it. I didn’t feel I needed to, I just saw the grids and the top-down view and thought it looked like Fire Emblem with a few gimmicks and that was all it took to draw me in. I’m easy like that, but I’m learning fast not to judge games by appearances any more.
Rondo of Swords may look Fire Emblem-like but it’s a completely different kind of game. Sure there are different classes, and all units have set ranges, and enemies and allies take turns to move and you can recruit people by talking to them and if your main character dies then it’s all over… but still! The fundamental part, gameplay, is waaay different.
Instead of walking up to to an enemy, you draw a path on the map and run (skate? fly? your legs never move) through them, inflicting damage on the way. You can also run (skate/fly) by allies to get all kinds of abilities. It follows then that if you can’t run through an enemy then you can’t hurt it, and vice versa. This makes no sense, but no need to sweat the small stuff. It works in your favor more often than not, because you can hole up in alleys or create chokepoints that will hold out for pretty much ever.
Before you get to that point, though Rondo of Swords has one of the steepest learning curves I’ve ever seen before. If you can make it through the first stage, “Escape from Egvard”, alive, none of the other chapters will make you break a sweat. It’s that hard. I had muddled my way through the tutorial because I thought I’d learn by doing… WRONG. Gawd, that was a nightmare, I don’t even want to talk about it.
See, with future chapters you can just quit if things aren’t going well. You get to start all over again with your items restored and all gained EXP still with you. It’s like the Egress skill in Shining Force, for the older gamers among us. “Escape from Egvard” doesn’t have that: succeed or perish miserably. And I perished, oh how I perished. I was on the verge of giving up, really, but mentally I’d been really, really looking forward to playing this game so I just couldn’t bring myself to. Eventually Youtube came to the rescue and I followed a step by step guide to a Chapter 1 Rout. I failed three or four times, and the whole thing took me 3 hours to do (especially after I lost Margus to a mage), but I got it done in the end. Phew. What’s that saying about appreciating things we have to work hard for? After having to work this hard to pass the first stage, I’m not going to let Rondo of Swords get away that easily!
Now that my Serdic is ridiculously overlevelled and I can use him as bait without worrying too much, the game is a hundred times more fun. It helped that the subsequent chapters were a lot easier, especially since I had more characters. Having learnt from my Saga 3 experience, I looked at a FAQ early on so I’ve been getting all the side characters I need to create a powerful team. I let Rukia die though: the world doesn’t need any more thieves. I’ve also been sending them on Errands regularly, though I’m not sure it’s making any difference to their stats.
Anyway, thing are really smoothly now and I’m having fun, more or less. The layout of some stages is a bit frustrating, and I hate, hate stages with lots of mages, but since you can withdraw from battle and restart as many times as you like, it’s not a deal breaker. The fact that you can’t can’t move and use magic/items/skills on the same turn would bother me if I wasn’t used to it from Tactical Guild (copycats!) but luckily I am. And the story is a bit barebones and the characters are bit shallow, and it’s sad that optional characters don’t get involved in it, but these are all things I can live with.
I’m at the “Thunder Emperor” stage, dunno how much further I have to go. Probably a looong way, because the real bad guys have only just started to surface. May is going to be a busy month for me, though, so I might not finish it any time soon. Well, no rush.
06.04.11 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, Strategy RPG, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: ninja studio, review, tactical guild
Lia, Rosetta and Natsu, the three heroines
Riddle me this, folks: Can you still call a game ‘bad’ after finishing it three times in a row? I mean, not even Luminous Arc 3 got three full playthroughs, and that was 10 times the game Tactical Guild is. The last game I played thrice in quick succession was Atelier Lina and I wouldn’t dream of even suggesting that Tactical Guild anywhere near it in terms of quality. Yet be that as it may, the truth is I just finished my third run of Tactical Guild. Not only that, but I actually enjoyed it! What is this world coming to?
I’ve always said that a game can’t be that bad if I at least manage to finish it. Well in this case, I’ve done it three times, so this practically qualifies Tactical Guild for Game of the Year! I’m still in shock, so I think it would be therapeutic for me to try and figure out why. Because there’s no denying it is a poor game, that fact is not up for negotiation. If I had to go back a few weeks ago and make the call again, I’d probably tell myself, “Don’t play that game. And don’t eat that potato salad!”
So, reasons, reasons… First of all, I think it’s a testament to my love of tactical/strategy RPGs. There’s a relative scarcity of them on the DS, so I’ve played just about every one I can get my hands on (except Disgaea, more on that someday), so unless TG was flat-out awful it was almost certain to get a chance.
Secondly, as I’ve said before, the three-part story got me interested and kept me interested. Natsu’s story made sense because I had played Rosetta’s story before it, but even without that it was better than Lia’s story. Having played all three parts I still have some questions, especially about Shiki and the Reti-Arts, but getting this much story from a game like this is commendable enough. Oh, and I figured out how to get the “good” and “normal” endings (I think). I accidentally got Guin killed during the final battle, so Natsu used a skill to kill the final boss that also ‘reset’ her memories. So she ends the game as an amnesiac, but takes a liking to Guin anyway and they end up together. Easy girl is easy. The “good” ending had me killing the final boss normally (a different one from the previous 2 routes), and then Natsu and Guin are all over each other with confessions of love and “I’ll protect you forever,” the usual crap. Guin is such a playboy. So any girl at all will do, huh? That’s why you can fall in love with them so easily, huh? Don’t get cocky because you’re a little good-looking.
Aaaaanyway, the third reason I was able to play it so much is because most of the frustrations of the gameplay lessened considerably after the first playthrough. For one thing, by the time I was halfway through my second run I had made almost all my characters alchemists. This meant I could move and attack at the same time, with devastating effects for my enemies. I also came across the occasional enemy class that was immune to long-distance attacks, which meant my Search and destroy strategy didn’t work all the time. It was nice to have to use my brain for a change. On top of that, I was able to fast-forward early cutscenes and any quest dialogue that I had already seen, so in total my three playthroughs took only 29:43 hours, an average of 10 hours per run. In terms of length, it’s like I played just one regular RPG, which is bearable. And of course I had done all my shopping and equipping by the end of game two, so I didn’t have to deal with the infuriating shopping system. I got some awesome swag from the quests this time round, but they were almost all geared towards non-mages, so I didn’t bother equipping them. Shame, really.
I should also make a correction from my last post. I mentioned that you don’t get to see your characters in their equipment on the field. 
On the field, this is true. But you do get to see what they’re wearing if you turn battle animations on. It will look something like the screenshot on the right. (Btw, Roy is going to be moving like concrete with all that gear on so don’t dress him like that) Personally I turned animations off ASAP because I just couldn’t stand them. I watch every single animation in Fire Emblem, even on replays, but when it came to TG it was just too annoying. Not only did the monsters have the most dreadful and annoying screams (obviously done by some skinny guy behind a bad microphone) but watching your characters miss attack after attack was hair-rippingly frustrating. Did I tell you about the time I missed four (4!!!) 85% chance hits in a row? What are the odds of that? Plus I almost always used only one attack (Search), so I didn’t need to watch that over and over again. Still the option is available if you really want to see your characters dressed up. The enemies are pretty snazzy dressers as well.
Yet another reason I enjoyed my third playthrough was the scalable difficulty. I mentioned playing my first game on Easy, which was moderately easy. I should have played my second one on Normal, that would have been more fun. But I did play the last one on Hard, and it was great because they scaled all the enemies to my level right from the very first battle. Thanks to that, I got into some genuinely sticky situations from time to time. There was this one quest battle where 5 new enemies spawned every single turn, and they were all three to five levels higher than my party. If the boss hadn’t been kind enough to make his way down so I could kill him, I’d still be fighting them all right now. A bit of challenge is great, even in a game like this. Of course if I had lost the battle, the game would still have gone on as normal, but I tried not to think about that too much.
One more thing I thought was good: the different ways to win a battle. It wasn’t always about killing every enemy on the screen. Sometimes you had to make it to a certain point. Sometimes you had to keep the enemy from making it to that point. Sometimes you had to finish in a set number of turns. Other times you just had to survive that number of turns. There were a few times you had to destroy a certain item. There were battles where you had to kill a certain enemy, or one of three enemies, choose your choice. I remember when I played Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon one of my disappointments was how repetitive your goals were: kill boss, take castle, kill boss, take castle. Variety is the spice of life, and in this particular respect TG had it in spades.
In conclusion, I found plenty to like about Tactical Guild once I’d played a little longer. The fact remains, though, that most people won’t and shouldn’t play it as much as I did. For those people, every negative thing I said about the gameplay will be true: no magic if you move, horrible hit rates, etc. Unless they play Rosetta’s route, the story will make little sense. The characters will be hit-and-miss. The equipment system will be disappointing. The pain will never end. And I don’t have the confidence to tell anyone “Yes, it’s a terrible game, but if you play this terrible game again, maybe you’ll like it!” Even I am not that sadistic. So, so long Tactical Guild! You had some good idea and I got some good hours out of you. Now on to some proper, quality games.
01.04.11 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, Strategy RPG, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: ninja studio, review, saga 3, tactical guild
I finished my second playthrough last night! This time I went for Rosetta’s ending. I don’t know whether I got the “good” ending or the “normal” ending, or even how to differentiate between the two, but I was satisfied when it was all over.
Bad budget game Tactical Guild may be, but I really like what they did with the three heroines. It’s not just about different endings; choosing another girl gives you a different story altogether. The final boss on Rosetta’s path was completely different, for one thing. Shiki had a different goal, Floy and Nora suffered different fates. On Lia’s path, Dahl and Natsu both disappeared until the end. Here they both showed up, and Dahl was in your party until the end (for all the good he did, haha), etc. etc.
I was expecting something more like Hector Mode in FE7, with the same story told through another person’s eyes. But here it’s more like picking a different girl changes the fate of the world itself. If you go through all three paths, you’ll get three different alternative histories. I love that, that’s what I call replay value. It’s almost enough to make up for the crappiness of the rest of the game. Almost, but not quite.
And now I really want to play Natsu’s route and see what happens to her. I got to do some different guild quests on my second playthrough, so maybe there’ll be even more the third time round? The Inna sidequest was Rosetta-specific, so Natsu will probably have at least once of her own. The nice thing about quests is that not only do most of them grow into mini-stories but if you complete them all successfully, the requesters show up at the end of the game and give you nice weapons and armor. The most memorable quest for me was having to help a mad scientist named Franken create the ultimate golem. Instead, he kept creating evil clones of my main character, who tried to kill him and become the real ones. The golem he finally came up with was crazily sarcastic as well. It was hilarious!
So there’s a lot to like about this game if you can see past the horrible gameplay. But I can’t. Why? Why is it so bad? If it was just mediocre or even slightly below average, the branching story and the quests might make up for it, as it is, it’s just…awful. Ninja Studio put all the effort of the game in the wrong places. If they had cut down the story to just one route and made up for it by making Tactical Guild fun to play, that would have been way better. I still haven’t gotten over how they used the same generic sprites with the same colors for both allies and enemies. And the sad thing is, it didn’t have to be that way. On your menu screen when you equip characters, they change their looks depending on what they’re wearing. It’s like Tactics Layer (from the same developer) or Dragon Quest 9. You can customize the look of your characters from head to toe, but! When they appear on the battle field they’re the same old indistinguishable sprites. Work done = 0.
I wish I could say that was the worst thing about equipment in this game. Alas, it is not. The worst thing is buying equipment, because you 
have no way of telling whether a piece of equipment is good or not until you actually buy it and try to equip it. In most RPGs, when you shop for a new sword, it’s easy to tell what’s better than what. Either more expensive goods are always better, or the game lets you see at a glance what effect it will have on your character. It’s been done so often it’s practically common sense. Alas, common sense is not common to common games like Tactical Guild.
What makes things harder is that weapons/armor have unexpected effects and hidden stats that you aren’t told about. This King’s armor might give, say, 18 DEF and 20 MDF. You recall that your current armor is 15 DEF, 15 MDF. This has got to be better, right? Not so fast. You might take it home to find out that it raises those two stats and lowers every single other one. Or that it’s far too damaging to that all-important Magic Attack stat. What now? In the end I dealt with the problem by saving first, shopping, then reloading if I wasn’t happy with the results. Towards the end of the game I focused solely on magic-raising equipment, and that worked much better. Still a massive waste of time, though.
And I said I enjoyed getting a different story, but it’s not like it was perfect or anything. Rosetta’s story made a moderate amount of sense, and is the one I’d recommend if you’re doing only one playthrough. Lia’s route was downright nonsensical. You just go from place to place chasing Nora, the knight army disappears entirely (when they should be playing a big role), someone who seems to be a villain appears and dies in all of 2 minutes, Rosetta pops up and she’s like “Hi guys! I’m killing these monsters! Okay, done, bye guys!” and so on. Then there’s the fact that Rosetta’s route shows a group of people poised to take over the country, which means that ridding the world of Reti-Arts on Lia’s route (wait, did you even?) has merely delayed the inevitable. Though if fate has been changed then maybe they don’t want to take over anymore? Then where did they go? Hmm.
Oh, and I mustn’t forget the sudden love confession out of nowhere. Guin and Lia had something interesting going on, and it was clear from the second mission that she liked him, so it wasn’t that strange when he confessed to her. Guin and Rosetta on the other hand… ZERO chemistry. They barely coexist, she just mopes and gets in the way. All of a sudden she goes “Btw, I love you! Bye!” Where did that come from? Then Guin says he loves her too. If you had to ask him to explain why, I bet his empty little head would explode. After all that, the thought of Guin confessing his love to Natsu on the route gives me the dry heaves. She looks all of 12 years old! You know, I really will pass on the third playthrough. Yeah…
For my next game, I want to try a cooking game. I just came back from buying more groceries than I could safely carry, and I need to do something with them before they go bad. In particular I bought something called “pork belly”, which is the fattiest, most unhealthy-looking cut of meat I have ever seen in my life. I figure something that bad for you must be delicious, right?
I’ll also keep playing Saga 3 You can save anywhere in it, so I just play a few minutes every night before I sleep. It’s kind of boring, so it’s perfect sleeping material.
23.03.11 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, Strategy RPG, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: ninja studio, review, tactical guild, tactics layer
I’m about halfway through my second playthrough of this game. Why a second playthrough when I said it was bad? Well, it turns out this game has three different heroines to pursue and the only way to get the full story is to pursue all three. Since I had no idea when the choice was coming up, I couldn’t save before it, so I have to play again with another heroine to see some more. The bits of the story I got last time didn’t make much sense. Characters appeared and disappeared for no good reason, made reference to incidents I hadn’t seen, the final boss showed up just like that, I killed him, the ending took all of two minutes to watch, the end. Hence the second playthrough to get a different perspective on this game.
To be honest I was truly shocked at just how bad it was when I first started, but then I did some reading on the rationale behind the game. Apparently it was meant from the start to be a “budget” game, which is why it retailed in Japan for about $40 instead of $50-70 for the same kind of game. Dunno about you guys, but $40 doesn’t sound very budget to me. As far as Japan goes it’s a low price, but this game still doesn’t deserve that much. $15 at most, and even that is kind of pushing it.
Just by looking, you can tell the developers Ninja Studio obviously didn’t put much effort into it. The graphics have been called “retro”, but I’ve seen better looking SNES games, and that’s not an exaggeration. It looks like they used RPG Maker to make the game, then ported it to the DS somehow and released it. They called it “budget” so people would think they were getting a good deal, but all along they were just being ripped off. There are only three kind of monsters: wolves, golems and pink birds. Then apart from the important characters, everyone has a generic sprite. And those generic sprites have the same color palette whether they’re friends or foes. They don’t even vary according to job class, it’s just like 5 or 6 different sprites used to represent just about everything. You can’t even tell what someone’s class is unless you move over them with the cursor, how dumb is that?
And it’s not just the sprites and the graphics that look bad, the music is bad as well, and I’ve already mentioned that the story is incomplete unless you play all three parts. Even if you do play them all, the story is still crap. “We are looking for the 7 Reti-Arts for flimsy reasons that involve the resurrection of a god that you can kill in two turns, also the Army is evil.” That’s a “budget” story, is it? I could have predicted that from the start, thank you very much.
Gameplay and related matters
I didn’t pick this up for the story, though. Just as I did with Tactics Layer, I tried Tactical Guild because it had “Tactic” in the name. Also I watched the trailer on Youtube and the battle system was reminiscent of the GBA Fire Emblems. Top-down grid-based SRPG instead of isometric, that kind of thing. That was all I needed to know. But then I started playing. Man… This is so bad… I don’t know where to start with the battle system. The biggest flaw: if you move, the only thing you can do is Attack. The minute you move a single step, your character stops being able to use Items or Special Attacks or Magic. Seriously. It just makes no sense, I mean, are they so stupid they can’t walk and do something else at the same time, is that it? Geez. Anyway, as you might predict, that reduces your battle strategy to either waiting for the enemy to come over to you, or just using direct Attack every time.
Direct Attack is almost always a bad idea, though. The game has three kind of attacks: long-range, mid-range and short-range. Long range 
is stuff like magic and arrows, mid-range is spears, short-range is swords and fists. The game is overwhelmingly skewed in favor of long-range attacks though, especially magic, because of the aforementioned Move=No Special thing. Trying to attack an enemy directly 1) Exposes you up to a counterattack which is often stronger than your attack and 2) Usually misses. This is one of those games where if your hit percentage is less than 99% you will miss 9 times out of 10. Look at the screenshot on the right. That Hit 85 you see? Probably going to miss. It’s easier to just assume you’re going to miss than to get worked up over it, ‘cos it’s going to happen a lot. Meanwhile enemies with 40% hit will beat the crap out of you every chance they get.
So physical attacks are a waste of time, which means most of the job classes are a waste of time as well. There are quite a number of them too, sadly enough. Priest, Paladin, Sniper, Assassin, etc etc. When you reach the required stats to class up, e.g. 120 INT for Sage, you just pick the job change option and switch, no special items required. Due to the stupidity of the battle system, however, only two of the classes are worth changing to: Pirate and Alchemist. Pirate because they can use Special Attacks after moving, and Alchemist because they can do the same, and they have the highest MAT stat in the game.
Back to how overwhelmingly useful magic is, though. Talk about game breakers, there’s this magic attack called Search that you can get right at the beginning of the game. It can hit enemies in an 8×8 area around the caster. That’s 64 squares, people! It’s also stupidly accurate and stupidly powerful for a magic attack you get so early. With the enemy dodge rate as high as it is, and the aforementioned difficulty in moving and attacking, you’ll quickly realize that it’s much smarter to stand still and snipe the enemy with Search as they try to approach than to move out and fight. Thus all battles are reduced to one-way Search spamming fests in the end. I hired myself a witch and a wizard at the Guild and raised them into Alchemists. Oh, the pain. The pain! No one compares to Lia though, the main heroine. She’s just…ouch. If you like broken battle systems and doing sick amounts of damage, you’ll enjoy that part at least.
Of course if you don’t want to take the easy way out, you could try to go out and fight physically. “Oh, but I’ll get a Game Over!” you cry. No you won’t. “Yes I will!” No you won’t. You can’t. It’s not possible to get a Game Over in this game, it is not an option. Win or lose a battle, the game will still play on like you won and the story will continue. Sure you’ll miss out on whatever monetary reward there is to get, but so what? I repeat, win or lose, the game goes on. There is zero motivation to win. ZERO. You might think, “I should level up so I can take on tougher enemies” or something like that. Uhh, even if those tougher enemies take you out, the story’s still gonna continue, so… Might as well not bother, don’t you think? Well, gamer’s pride kept me going at least. I switched the difficulty to Easy though, no sense suffering more when you can suffer less.
The battle system isn’t the only thing that sucks about this game though, but I think I’ve gone on long enough for one day. Color Cross awaits me, just a few puzzles left!
18.12.10 / Nintendo DS, Simulation game, Success, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (4)
Tags: hakoniwa seikatsu, harvest moon, hitsujimura DS, Shepherd's Crossing 2
I first played this as Hakoniwa Seikatsu: Hitsujimura DS (箱庭生活ひつじ村ＤＳ), which is the Japanese version. I liked it. I really, really, really liked it. I played it for hours until my arms ached, I lost track of time, I forgot to sleep, I just totally went head over heels for it. There’s so much to do and in-game time passed so quickly, it was only low battery warnings that could get me back in touch with reality.
Eventually I enlarged my house to the greatest size, expanded my fields to the limit, got married (to Mika!), had a son, filled out my almanac and pretty much did everything there was to do. I retired, enjoyed the credits and put the game to rest.
Until I played Harvest Moon: Twin Villages. I’ve already gone into my thoughts about that game, so I won’t repeat them here. But my disappointment made me think about this game again. Harvest Moon is getting stale, I thought. It would be nice if there were other farming games, I thought. Yes, wouldn’t it be nice if someone localized Hitsujimura DS? I idly googled and found, WTF, someone did localize it! And apparently released it with little or no advertising, because I had no clue until I looked it up. How can people buy games they don’t know exist?
On the other hand, thanks to that it’s going very cheap on Amazon, so I guess that was a good thing. I had to shelf it a little while I played some other games (i.e. more TMGS3 than was good for me), but I started playing it hardcore again last week. I retired just yesterday, with Maki as my wife and a cute little daughter who looks exactly like her. Sweet! For farming game lovers this game is very addictive, but there are several ways in which it falls short. You have to take the good with the bad, so I won’t pull any punches.
Bad: Relationship values don’t exist. You might be fooled at first when you find out you can share your cooked dishes with some of the village folk. When you visit, they’ll make some light conversation and give you some food, so you might think “Oh good, they’re liking me more” and stuff. Nah, don’t bother. It doesn’t make any difference at all. Whether the village folk are nice to you or not depends on their programming, not on your actions. Furthermore, marriage is all about how many sheep you can give in exchange for her (if you’re a guy) or how many bed covers you can offer him (if you’re a girl). It makes things simpler than HM, but I seriously missed interacting with other people and being able to walk around the village.
Good: Your spouse isn’t useless. Even after marriage, she’ll be seen doing various things on the farm, and every month or so she’ll give you her salary for doing various jobs. Maki grinds flour, makes bread and cuts hay, etc. She also regularly calls you in from the field so you can eat together. Aww. Your kid is useless though.
Bad: This game is sexist. It is heavily biased against the female character. If you choose the male character, you can run out of each important item (main dish, side dish, firewood) several times before you get a game over. And that game over is in the form of getting married to the “hottest” girl in the game, who takes pity on you. If you’re female, you automatically get kicked out of the village the moment you run out. Furthermore, a male can get married with just two or three sheep, but a female needs several bed covers, and it takes months to acquire enough wool, wash it, spin it and knit it to make a single bed cover because sheep can only be sheared once a year.
Bad: Starting up is hard. The game does not hold your hand one bit. It shows you the controls at first, then tosses you on your farm and says “Survive. If you can.” Figuring out what to do, how, when, can be extremely frustrating for newbie players. Even worse you have only a tiny amount of money to start with. Make the wrong decisions and you’ll be flat broke in no time at all.
Good: Once you know what you’re doing, it’s almost impossible to fail. I had a ton of close shaves in my first game, but this second time was a total cakewalk. I never even came close to starving. In fact I had more food than I knew what to do with most of the time. A tip for new players: you can start planting crops on the 16th of the previous season. More time for planting = more crops = more money!
Very, very Bad: Your farm is highly disorganized. This was a major flaw that I really couldn’t stand. Everything else (for me) was minor and could be lived with, but this was close to a deal-breaker. There are no storage facilities, no animal pens, no barns, nothing. If you want your animals penned up, you have to create fences and fence them in yourself, but the fences go all over the place and are hard to place right. Your tools will be lying all over the place, your pets will be running all over the farm, your food will be all over the floor, etc etc. It all seriously gets in the way and impedes freedom of movement. Not to mention it looks terribly messy.
Very, very Bad: You can only hold five items at a time. Five (5). If you want to hold more, you have to drop something else to do so. Since there’s no storage, you just drop them on the floor and come pick them later. Before long your items will be all over the place, even if you make an effort to keep them in one place. Some items are stackable, mainly straw and branches, but most are not. It really doesn’t make any sense that you can only hold five carrots at a time (haven’t you heard of pockets?) and is very, very inconvenient.
Good: Time only moves when you do something. The time you spend walking around, eating, feeding your animals, etc, doesn’t count. Time in Shepherd’s Crossing only progresses when you do actual “farm work” like planting, harvesting, knitting, etc. This takes a lot of panic out of the game because you can spend the whole day planting, then go round feeding your animals at the very end of the day and it’s still fine.
Bad: Some tasks take a disproportionate amount of time. Especially sowing seeds and harvesting certain crops. A whole day just to knock three plums off a tree? A whole day to harvest five cabbages? Ridiculous. If you have the whole plot of land unlocked, it can take days to plant crops on every plot. At least they don’t need watering or the game would be nearly impossible.
Good: You can skip forward in time. If you find yourself with nothing to do on a certain day or season, just hit the L button to forward to the next day. HMTV really needed a function like that to make those boring days pass faster. You have to make sure your animals are eating their food before you do so though, because they’re so stupid they’ll just die if you forward without checking.
Good/Bad: Plot fertility goes down (represented by those green circles in the lower half of the picture). The less fertile the plot, the more likely your crops are to die or disappear You have to either practice crop rotation or use copious amounts of fertilizer if you want to keep farming the same pieces of land every time. I solved that by letting a few plots rest every season, but in any case I had more fertilizer than I knew what to do with, so I didn’t worry much.
Bad: Random disasters affect your crops All. The. Time. It’s the rare crop that grows all the way to maturity without being afflicted by some kind of disease or bug that causes you to lose half of it. Also in the beginning, before your pets are fully grown, you’ll have trouble with rampaging boars, ravaging wolves, greedy hares, plundering rats, etc etc. Wolves ate all my sheep once, I was so mad! It keeps you on your toes, though.
Good: You can kill your animals. Not just the meat ones like chickens and sheep but also the ferret, for its lovely pelt. Which you can then tan and sell for munniez, you savvy sadist, you. You can do the same with your rabbits, with the added benefit of getting to turn their meat into a delicious stew that most of the villagers love.
Bad: Vegetarians will hate that. Even if you choose not to kill your animals, you won’t be able to avoid an event where Mika kills your first chicken the minute it’s old enough. Luckily I’m not a vegetarian so I just spent my time drooling over the tasty-sounding dishes.
Good: You can grow many different types of vegetables. This isn’t much of an improvement over HM, which has more. Where the difference comes in is in the types of grain: wheat, sorghum, millet and buckwheat. Harvesting them can be a whole process that takes several days. For wheat, for example, you have to chop it down with a scythe, pile it up into stacks, let it dry for several days, undo the stack, thresh the wheat with a threshing stick (which gives you lots of straw for your animals, yay) and then finally toss it into grain bags. If you want flour you’re going to have to grind it with a stone mortar as well.
Good: You can cook lots of dishes in your kitchen with your meat and vegetables. The recipes aren’t that many, but they’re very detailed. Some of them need 5, 6, 7 different ingredients and cookware to complete. You feel a real sense of achievement when you cook them, not to mention they sound extremely tasty. Additionally you can make food products like cheese, butter, sausage, ham and bacon (mmm) from milk and meat.
Good: You can keep a lot of pets. Cats (only one type), ferrets (only one type) and many, many different breeds of dogs. And they all have their own little “playing” animation. It gets old really quickly, but if you like dogs you’ll enjoy it.
Bad: Pets eat a lot and aren’t multipurpose. In this playthrough I was very well-organized, but I had a really hard time of it in my first game, ‘cos those little critters eat a LOT of meat. The general store sells some meat scraps, but in general you’re going to have to butcher your animals regularly to feed them. Fortunately my rabbits bred like, well, rabbits, so that was fine. The fact that the pets aren’t multipurpose is annoying though. Each one only does one or two specific things, e.g. the terrier only chases rats and weasels. The Sheltie only herds cows, the Sheppard only chases wolves, etc. So instead of one or two dogs you need four or five (I had four) to do the same amount of work.
And more flaws, and more good things. I most enjoyed the time-management and butchering aspects of the game. If things had been a little more organized, if you could hold more items and if you could interact with the other characters a little more, this might have become one of my favorite games of all time. I hope they make a sequel!
