13.01.12 / Japanese, Konami, Nintendo DS, Romance game, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (20)
Tags: anime, Boku ga Romeo de Romeo ga Boku de, Hayate no Gotoku
Yes, even monkeys fall from trees. And even normally careful gamers forget to keep backup saves and accidentally overwrite precious New Game+ data with an actual new game save.
In most games this wouldn’t be a problem because each route would be (mostly) separate. But in Hayate no Gotoku, the only way to unlock Maria as a romantic partner is to clear all the other girls. No cleared save data = No Maria. No Maria = No point in continuing. And I just had Isumi to go before getting her, what a pity.
On to the next game!
10.01.12 / Japanese, Konami, Nintendo DS, Simulation game, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: anime, Gokujou!! Mecha Mote Iinchou: Mecha Mote Days, review
Konami is the company responsible for some of my favorite games on the DS: Tokimemo GS 1-3, Lost in Blue 1-3 (moaaarr), and more. Even monkeys fall from trees, as the Japanese saying goes. And even good companies make bad games every once in a while. It’s when it’s every time that it becomes a problem (*cough* Nippon Ichi *cough*).
That being the case, I see no need to go on at length about Gokujou! Mecha Iinchou, the dress up game based on the popular shoujo manga/anime of the same name. It’s aimed at pre- and early teen girls, and I’m old enough to have kids that fit that description, so I’m not even the target demographic in the first place.
Plus the general rule of anime-based games is that they’re not for people who aren’t fans of the original. I couldn’t be arsed to check out the show, and even if I had I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it. It’s only natural that I couldn’t follow along, then.
The game: Your character is the class rep, and at the end of the year there’s a beauty contest of sorts for class reps. Your job is to shape her up over the course of the year so she can win that competition. I’ve been playing this on and off since around August, waiting for the big payoff, but when I think of all the other games I could be playing instead, it’s hard to justify spending time on this silliness. *toss*
It could have been good, if the game had given you a certain amount of freedom to shape your character as you saw fit. Since what we got in the end is a kiddy, pedestrian affair where you spend 90% of your time playing mini-games and listening to heavy-handed beauty lectures from your so-called rival while trying to fulfill easy monthly objectives, it’s barely even worth writing about.
A typical month goes like this: you have a trip to the beach planned. You go to school in the mornings (nothing much happens there). You do a few mini-games to earn cash, buy some beach-appropriate clothes, everyone gushes over how lovely you look, the end. Repeat with a different challenge the next month. If the graphics were any good, maaaaybe dressing up the main character would have been fun, but since everything is jagged,small and garishly colored, and the outfit designs are uniformly hideous… *toss*.
The description of the anime also says something about a “bad boy trio” your character has to deal with, but either they don’t exist in the game or they were all given lobotomies, because everyone fawns slavishly over you no matter what you do or wear. Your rival wants to, nay, insists on helping you achieve your goals every month, so you don’t even have the joy of sticking it to the usual snooty rival.
Summary: Good premise poorly executed. Story only fans care about. Dull gameplay. No autonomy. Servile characters. Awful graphics.
Conclusion: Bad game. Avoid like cancer. If you want to play a dress-up game on the DS, try something like the Oshare Princess games instead.
08.01.12 / Japanese, Konami, Nintendo DS, Romance game, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: anime, Boku ga Romeo de Romeo ga Boku de, Hayate no Gotoku, review
It’s been a while since my DS saw any action. And I’m a little disgusted with my PSP after that Blade Dancer experience, so for a change of mood I decided to play something lighter and funnier.
Hayate no Gotoku – Romeo ga Boku de, Boku ga Romeo is the first of three handheld games based on a shonen manga about a debt-ridden butler named Ayasaki Hayate. If you haven’t read it, I’m in two minds as to whether to recommend it or not. On one hand it’s a very funny, charming series with a great cast of characters, but on the other hand the story hasn’t gone anywhere in ages and even I have stopped reading it, so… Eh. The game is for fans only, so if you don’t know the series you can skip the rest of this post.
Since this game came out in 2007 before anything really earth-shattering happened in the manga (Greece arc, A-tan), it still has that silly, gag-filled atmosphere that drew me in in the first place. As such Romeo ga Boku is the kind of story that would work well as a filler episode in the anime. Hakuo Academy is going to stage a play, and one way or another Hayate is going to be cast as one of the leads together with one of his many, many love interests. You have your choice of Nagi, Hinagiku, Ayumu, Sakuya, Isumi, Maria and a “secret character” (I’ll let you find out who that is).
The game is a visual novel 95% of the time, with the occasional save break that allows you to play mini-games to earn Pathos points. Pathos points can be used to unlock special outfits for the girls and also to unlock alternative answer choices during the main game. Apart from that you pick your girl, watch the scenes play out, pick an answer when given the option, hope you get a bad ending because those are hilarious and generally just make your way to the end of the game. Along the way you will also unlock voice clips and CGs that unfortunately I can’t show you because unlike the PSP, the DS does not have a screenshot plugin (I stole these ones from the internet).
Now then, although I normally dislike visual novels, the fact that the game features characters I already know and like, and the fact that each route is short and frequently funny has lead to me pouring more effort into this than I normally do with this kind of game. Right now I’ve gotten Nagi, Hinagiku and Ayumu’s endings. I just started Sakuya’s route and I’m kinda regretting it because I don’t like. But after her I’ll get Isumi, then finally Maria.
Hinagiku: Her play is “Snow White” and nothing much happens on her route until the end, where you have to battle your way up an RPG-style tower to rescue a puppy. She spends the whole play agonizing over what will happen during the kissing scene at the end, but then she panics so much that she sits up before Hayate can kiss her and the play ends there. Bummer. Hinagiku is as twitchy as ever, so her route has quite a few bad endings. That’s all part of the fun, of course.
Ayumu: She’s boring, so her route is boring too. At least she only has one Bad End. Her play is “Romeo and Juliet.” The “climax” of her story occurs when her father spots her practicing in the park at night with Hayate and sets his zombie coworkers on them. You might be wondering how Ayumu got to star in a Hakuo Academy play when she doesn’t even attend that school… well, don’t sweat the small stuff.
Yes, elephantiasis is a horrible disease.
Nagi: The most romantic of the three routes so far, because a magical statue actively tries to bring them together. Nagi’s play is “Cinderella.” Or more like Cinderella mixed with Dance Dance Revolution mixed with Fist of the North Star. Come on, it’s Nagi. The crisis on her route involves Nagi being kidnapped and held for ransom by the same guys that tried to hijack Sakuya’s ship way back when.
It’s been a while since I saw Nagi’s old mansion and bedroom, so this route was a nice trip down memory lane. Speaking of Nagi and her mansion, the realization Hayate would be a dick to end up with anyone else but the girl who loved him enough to throw away her zillion-dollar fortune is part of the reason why I stopped reading the manga. Foregone conclusions are no fun at all.
So that’s how far I’ve gotten. Graphically and musically this game isn’t much to write home about, but it’s cute and it’s funny and it helps pass the time, so that’s good enough for me. I am getting a leeetle bit tired though, especially of the “Tiger’s Den” scenes where Hayate has to try desperately to please these overly-sensitive girls. I might take a little break before continuing with the rest of the characters.
16.10.11 / Japanese, Otome game, Romance game, Sony PSP, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (2)
Tags: starry sky in spring
I mentioned I was going to try more otome visual novels, but finding one that’s actually playable might be harder than I thought. I only made it about an hour in Starry Sky ~in Spring~ before I had admit that this just wasn’t going to work.
First off, there are only three guys to get in this game, and they’re all not my type. Clever Honey Bee decided to split one game into four seasons and dole the guys out sparingly. Lookswise, I don’t like them, personality-wise you’ve got the brash childhood friend (Kanata), the reasonable childhood friend (Suzuya) and the forgotten childhood friend (Tomoe). I hate those three cliches. The current skinny, gangly character design fad doesn’t do anything for me either. How about guys whose parents loved them enough to feed them?
Secondly, and the reason why I’m not even going to try the other games in the series, is that I find the setting ridiculously boring. A specialized school for astronomy? Seriously? My romantic options are all a bunch of pencil-pushing stargazers? They’d better be rich, that’s all I’ve gotta say about that.
Lastly, the story is non-existent. A visual novel lives and dies by its story. Even if the characters are good (and this time they aren’t), it doesn’t mean a thing if they’re not going anywhere. Here the “story” is that you and your friends enrolled in an astronomy school and then a transfer student came in and he says he knows you. The rest of the game appears to be Tomoe and Kanata bitching at each other like a pair of beauty queens while Suzuya tries to keep the peace.
I said “appears”, because strictly speaking I did finish this game. I put it on “Skip” and let it run on and on until the credits rolled, only stopping to pick one option or another. I couldn’t see the context so I was really just picking at random, but I at least tried to get everything Suzuya-related. Eventually the game ended and I have no idea how the story went, I just know I…probably? didn’t end up with Suzuya. I didn’t get any hugs or any kisses, no Suzuya CGs, no Suzuya ending sequence, nothing. The only final CG I got was the one on the right, where apparently Tomoe goes back to France and sends us a letter. Good riddance. But then once I finished and restarted, the new main screen had only Suzuya on it. So…huh?
How did this ever get so popular, I wonder? Needless to say I’m pirating all these visual novels, so I don’t need to “tough it out” if something isn’t working. I don’t want to support the companies that make this sort of game. Heck I’d be happy if they went bankrupt. I’ll try something else next time, hopefully with a better story, and maybe that’ll work out.
27.09.11 / Idea Factory, Japanese, Nintendo DS, Otome game, Romance game, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: will o' wisp
I finished my first ever visual novel!
Will O’ Wisp is about a girl named Hanna who finds a life-sized doll in her basement after her dollmaker grandfather dies. She winds him up and he introduces himself as Will, an elemental doll, which basically means he’s alive and belongs to her. As the game goes on, Hanna will discover more about the other elemental dolls, her own special powers, and the role she is destined to fulfill. You know, the usual twaddle. It’s cliched, but short enough to stay interesting.
Will O’ Wisp DS also comes with a sequel of sorts packaged in there, called “The Miracle of Easter”, but I was sick of the game by the time I finished the main story, so I passed on that. Plus it retcons the ending of the original game. In the ending I got, Gyl turned human, Hanna lost her powers and they lived happily ever after together. In “The Miracle of Easter”, all the dolls were rendered lifeless at the end. Work done = 0.
I’m pretty chuffed that I actually managed to finish Will O’ Wisp. I’ve tried many visual novels, but I’ve never actually made it all the way to the end of one before. To be honest I don’t even recognize visual novels as “games”, but on the other hand they’re often substandard as far as reading material goes, so it’s no-win situation any way I look at it. Will O’ Wisp was a little better, since the story was okay-ish, and things moved at a cracking pace – at first. By Chapter 3, though, every scene started dragging on, Hanna’s internal monologue grew longer and longer, and the characters went over the same things ad nauseam: “Alvin is crazy, Alvin is crazy, Alvin is crazy, do you want to be released, do you want to be released, do you want to be released” again and again and again. To tell the truth, I used the Skip option to fast-forward from middle of Chapter 3 all the way to the final showdown with Ignis, then read from there. But a finish is a finish, and I did watch the ending credits, so I count that as “completed.”
If I had to hazard a few guesses as to why I was able to finish Will O’ Wisp in particular, it would be:
1. The art is nice. I’m a sucker for nice character designs. The CGs were fine to look at as well, though I wouldn’t have minded more. There were relatively few backgrounds, but the story moved fast enough that you were always shuffling between them, so it wasn’t so bad.
2. The scenes moved fast. This is the biggest reason why I can’t play VNs. Each trivial scene drags on interminably. Up till chapter 3 Will o’ Wisp kept things flowing: make a point and move on. Make a point and move on. Then it fell apart, but that’s what the “Skip” option was for.
3. The story’s pretty interesting, for a Rozen Maiden rip-off. Dolls and owners and they were all made by the same person and they’ve been alive for hundreds of years and they’re dressed Victorian-style and they fight, etc. But stories about dolls coming to life are much older than Rozen Maiden, so I’ll give them a pass. And they’ve got nice bishies, that’s gotta count for something.
4. The story develops quickly. Something’s happening at almost every stage, and it all leads to a logical conclusion. Not much time is wasted on petty arguments or comic scenes. Until chapter 3 and onwards, of course.
5. It’s not that long. There’s no timer in the game, but I don’t think it would take more than 4 or 5 hours to finish a route, even without skipping all the dialogue. I don’t have a lot of patience for reading endlessly, so that’s about my limit anyway.
6. Feedback is almost instanteneous. Accidentally selecting the wrong option and dooming yourself to a bad end/locking yourself out of a certain route is another thing I hate about visual novels. “What do you want on your bread?” A: Butter B: Jam C: Nothing. YOU PICKED BUTTER? Welcome to BAD END. Yaahh…Will o’ Wisp has none of that. If you select the right thing, you get a blue glow. Wrong thing, no blue glow. And you can check the affection level of your chosen doll any time you want, so you know you’re on the right track. There’s no way to fail. Heck, even if you don’t speak Japanese you can play this pretty easily.
7. Gyl is hot, in a girly kind of way. I did his route, and he wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes. I liked it best when he stopped wearing drag at the end.
8. Ignis is voiced by Takehito Koyasu. Actually I keep mixing up Koyasu and Kenyuu Horiuchi, so I didn’t know which one of them it was until I read the credits at the end. It wasn’t a very passionate performance either, Mr. Koyasu was clearly phoning it in this time. But I knew it was a voice I liked, so that counted for something. Come to think of it, the only voice actors I can recognize without fail are Norio Wakamoto and Shuichi Ikeda (mitometakunai mono da na). They should do more games.
So you see, so it’s not that hard to make a visual novel even I will like. Just keep the story moving fast, make the bishies hot and tell me when I’m going wrong so I don’t need a FAQ to find my way around. If you do that, I’ll even ignore stuff like 60% of the cast being obnoxious and the main character being a weak-willed lily and the story getting bogged down in the middle and the music grating on the ears. I’m a generous soul, after all.
Now that I’m rapidly running out of actual games to play on my PSP and DS, I might be forced to try more of these in the future, so I hope I can find more stuff that meets these simple requirements.
17.09.11 / Japanese, Romance game, Simulation game, Sony PSP, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: dream c club portable
A game for idiots by idiots, starring an idiot as the main character. You play an idiot who spends his weekdays either working or gambling and his weekends blowing wads of cash on idiotic girls who don’t even put out. Work, blow, work, blow, work, blow, game blows.
It would be one thing if the MC was a rich executive, but he works at a convenience store, making about ¥20,000 (~$260 USD) a week. Since all that money is at his disposal, I’m guessing he lives at home, sponging off mommy and daddy. And yet he’s not ashamed to go out every weekend and waste that money on overpriced drinks and inane conversations with brainless bimbos. What a disgrace to the human species.
Let’s see, $260 a week. All work and no play and all that, let’s give him $60 a week to play around with. That’s $200 a week left over. Excluding sick days and public holidays, let’s assume he works 50 weeks a year. If he saved that $200, he’d save $10,000 every year. In 10 years he’d have $100,000 in the bank. Now that’s hardly Bill Gates material, but how many 30-35 year olds do you know with $100,000 at their ready disposal? And that’s assuming he just tosses it in an account with no interest, makes no investments, buys no bonds, nothing. Not bad for a bumming mooch, yeah?
But nooo, instead he goes out every weekend to a hostess bar. A hostess bar that’s all about pretty girls ripping you off with $15 glasses of beer while chattering pointlessly away. There are 8 different girls in the game that you can have attend to you, and they’re all working in the bar for different reasons. You know, like how strippers always have some “reason” for stripping, they never go “‘Cos I’m a skanky ho”. Yeah baby, whatever you say. But I digress.
It’s not real money, so I wouldn’t be getting worked up if MC was squandering it on something fun. But Dream Club Portable isn’t even any good! As you can see from the chart on the left, the girls aren’t much to look at. Conversations with them consist of the MC macking on them with the cheesiest pickup lines ever while they struggle valiantly to conceal their utter disdain for him. I know exactly how they feel.
Apart from chatting, you’re also forced to buy drinks for yourself and your chosen hostess, and the more you can get her to drink, the greater her affection for you grows. The game even measures your capacity for alcohol. Now at 35 you’ll be broke and have a wonky liver. Wonderful.
So anyway, you work all week, then at the weekend you go to the hostess bar, chat with a girl, waste money on drinks, maybe get her to sing you a song on karaoke, then you leave. Repeat the cycle the next week. And again the next week. And again the next week. And again and again and again for one whole in-game year. It would be quite the formidable feat if DCP managed to keep the chat topics fresh and new from beginning to end, but since I quit after one month, I will never know.
Apparently you can learn more about a girl and help her work through her troubles. For example one of the floozies claims she’s training to be a pro bowler (yeah right), so you’ll probably support her till she fulfills her dream. So there’s a story mode of sorts, but the MC is a pervert and a loser, and the girls can’t be that bright if hostessing is the only way they can pay their bills, so I’m giving it a miss anyway. Next please!
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.
28.04.11 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, Romance game, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: anime, nanatsuiro drops, review, Touch de Hajimaru Hatsukoi Monogatari
Yet another crappy game. Do I know how to pick ‘em or what?
For those not in the know, Nanatsuiro★Drops is a game/anime series about a boy named Tsuwabuki Masaharu who drinks soda from another world and is cursed to turn into a stuffed animal every night. He needs to collect seven “star drops” before he can go back to normal.
Nanatsuiro★Drops started out as an adult visual novel which was then made into a PG anime. Said anime was then made into a video game for the DS, which is what I just played. Logic suggests it would have been better to port the original game (sans adult scenes) to the DS instead of making a new one, but logic never applies when it comes to quick cash tie-ins.
Btw, I watched a bit of the anime prior to starting this game, just try and get a sense of what I was in for. Hmm? “Watched?” More like “suffered through” honestly. I’ve never liked the magical girl genre. I’ve tried several: Card Captor Sakura, Pretear, Nanoha, etc, but I never get far because quite frankly, they all suck they’re just not my thing. Nanatsuiro★Drops was not an exception. Sure it was boring, sure it was repetitive but the really annoying part was the main girl Sumomo Akihime with her faux-cute faux-hesitant demeanor, generic “cute anime girl” looks and sickeningly squeaky high voice. From now on my requirements for picking up anime series will “must not have any shy, stammering girls with stupidly high-pitched voices that JUST WON’T SHUT UP!”
Back to logic though, surely logic suggests that if I hated the anime that much I would hate the game too. As usual logic was completely right. I’m starting to think I have a masochistic streak. Or maybe I just played it to confirm that my Sucky Game radar wasn’t broken after all, what with the Tactical Guild incident and all.
If that was the case then my fears were for nothing; my radar is fine. It’s probably working overtime to compensate, in fact, because there wasn’t that much wrong with the game. The main issues I had with it were the incomprehensible plot and the stupid mini-games. Oh wait, that’s all there is it to the game. Right.
First, the game will make very little sense unless you’ve watched the anime. Nanatsuiro★Drops is less of a video game and more of a whirlwind tour through several famous (?) scenes from the anime. And not in any proper order either. A random scene here, a random character appearance there, that sort of thing. They used some animated footage directly from the anime, which came out pretty well, but logic suggests anyone who wants to see anime footage would be better off just getting the anime. But of course, logic is ignored as usual. Poor logic.
Anyway, I plodded through the random scenes and eventually got the bad ending where Tsuwabuki loses his memory, tries to recall what happened in the past six months and eventually decides it doesn’t matter. Wait, that’s not a bad ending, that’s a good ending! Banzai! Aftewards Nona had the gall to tell me if I’d done better in the mini-games, I would have gotten a better ending. Nona dear, there’s no better ending than forgetting about Akihime forever, trust me.
Those mini-games, though. Man. The subtitle Touch de Hajimaru Hatsukoi Monogatari roughly means “First love that starts through a touch,” so somehow doing the same weeding games and math games and music games and sheep-counting (yes, sheep counting) games will somehow win you Akihime’s love. If they were serious about that, logic sugg– wait, no it doesn’t. Logic has gone on strike. All right then, in my opinion, this game needed better mini-games and a bigger variety too. The weeding game is okay, if a bit frantic. The math game is straight out of Brain Age, it’s okay as well. Sheep-counting is exactly what it sounds like.
The worst game is the music game, though. It’s like Ouendan-gone-crazy, with the stars flying like crazy all over the screen (allegedly in tune with the music, but this is a filthy lie) and Akihime gasping irritatingly every time you miss one. Which is often. The best I managed in those was 0 points – yes, that’s a good score – after which I resolved “Never again!”
Enough about Nanatsuiro★Drops, I can’t believe I wrote such a long post for such a crappy game. Looking ahead, I want to play a plain old turn-based jRPG, but I’ve almost exhausted the DS’s supply of those, apart from Dragon Quest VI which I can’t play so soon after DQV. Play-Asia has Level 5′s Ninokuni on sale (i.e. $50 instead of $80 -_-), but I’m hoping it will come out soon in English. *fingers crossed* That leaves me with the action RPGs, a few strategy ones (Rondo of Swords!) and several visual novels I’m not really looking forward to. Well, I’ll find something eventually.
08.03.11 / Konami, Nintendo DS, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (2)
Tags: review, time hollow, time travel
Finished! Yay! That only took me about 6 hours or so. Short game is short! It’s another one of those games I’d been meaning to play but just never got round to. What gave me the impetus to go ahead was getting bored with Tactics Layer towards the end. Then I got really caught up in Time Hollow, which gave me the energy to finish off Tactics Layer so I could devote my full attention to Time Hollow. So it all worked out in the end and a good time was had by all. I’ll just steal the story description from Wikipedia, hold on:
Time Hollow follows the story of Ethan Kairos, whose parents, Timothy and Pamela Kairos, mysteriously disappear on his 17th birthday. Ethan realizes that the entire world has changed as if his parents had disappeared 12 years ago. Ethan then finds a note tied to his cat’s collar telling him to look in a dumpster behind his school, where he finds a Hollow Pen, an uncanny object with the unique power to open portals to the past, as well as a note from his parents. Ethan uses the pen to solve problems that suddenly and mysteriously occur, thus changing the present, though he himself is able to remember these past parallel universes. He also meets a girl, Kori Twelves, who seems to share Ethan’s displacement from time. Eventually, Ethan comes to realize that the past is being manipulated by another Hollow Pen wielder, Irving Onegin, as revenge for the fact that Ethan supposedly killed his mother.
That’s pretty much how it goes. The gameplay feels a bit like the Ace Attorney games. You know, you walk around looking for clues, questioning people, putting facts together, that sort of thing. It also reminded me quite a bit of Radiant Historia, which I finished not too long ago. You know, the way the bad guy and the good guy have the same ability, and you have to jump back into the past to fix what went wrong in the present. Irving messes something up, Ethan fixes it, Irving messes something else up, Ethan fixes it, all the way till the end.
When the game came out there were a lot of complaints that the gameplay was too easy and too repetitive. I can see where those people are coming from. It was really, really obvious at every stage of the game exactly what you had to do to get the game to progress. There are only about 15 cast members and about 10 locations to visit (several of which you almost never go to). That means that whenever you get a flashback showing something has changed, it’s pretty easy to figure out what, where, who and what to do. Then it’s just a matter of getting more information, visiting the location and changing things with your pen. Simple!
For my part, I liked the gameplay just fine. I wasn’t looking for much difficulty, I just wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to my parents. I appreciated the fact that the system stayed out of my way and let me get on with it. A liiitttle more challenge would have been great though. Instead of the Hollow Pen glowing whenever it was ready to be used, the game should have left it up to you to judge the best time and place to use it. Lots of opportunity for frustration, but lots of opportunity for strategic thinking as well. And there really should have been more to playing the game than just See Flashback, Change Flashback, See Flashback, Change Flashback x100. Thank goodness it was short, is all I have to say about that.
When it was all over, I was pretty satisfied with the ending (though I was hoping for more than one possible end). Ethan got his parents back, his friends were all safe and sound, Uncle Derek and Kori got together, and since cousin romance is legal in Japan, Ethan might even get him some with Kori Junior. There were just a few sticking points I would have liked the game to address:
1. The game says the Hollow Pen has been handed down through the Kairos family for generations. Okay. A little more detail, please? Where did it come from? Why was it invented? What was it supposed to be used for? And why does the Onegin family have one too? Maybe Konami is saving that info in case they ever make a sequel (highly unlikely).
2. Was it really a good idea to let Irving Onegin go off like that? Sure, his mother never dies so he never decides to pick on the Kairos family. But he’s been shown to be highly unstable and even downright murderous. And he’s probably going to inherit his mother’s Hollow Pen sooner or later. Who knows what kind of havoc he could be wreaking out there with that thing? We can only hope his mother got him some much-needed psychiatric care.
3. Why was Ethan so cavalier about letting Uncle Derek sacrifice himself? The whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth. He only hesitated for a frame or two then he was like “…All right.” None of them there even tried to talk Derek out of it or to try an alternate way of saving Kori. Drop a trampoline or a mattress below her or something, I dunno. I can see Ethan’s thought process now:
Derek: Let me go save her, please!
Ethan (thinking): Damn right I’ll let you go! Go get killed, Uncle Derek, you @$$hole! Living in my father’s house, using my father’s study…you’ve talked down to me one too many times. I hope you suffer, Uncle Derek. I hope it hurts real bad. Maybe the next uncle will know better than to mess with the Time Master.
Ethan (aloud): …All right.
4. Nobody thinks anything about Derek going back in time to save Kori? I mean he even addresses himself in the past as “Future Me”. He hasn’t changed much either, I mean Kori recognizes him on sight. Even if she didn’t, after 10-12 years, wouldn’t she notice her husband looks exactly the same as the guy who saved her? Wouldn’t police DNA tests and fingerprinting on the corpse turn up something? Of course even if they did there’s nothing they can do about it, so I guess that’s why the game didn’t bother to go into it. Hey wait, or maybe Derek didn’t die? He did send Ethan a letter at the end, after all. So he’s somewhere in the current world? Stuck in time forever like Sox is? Still doesn’t solve the problem of current Derek looking like Derek-who-saved-Kori. Hmm.
5. Japanese police must be the most incompetent cops in the world. If past-Kori scratched her killer hard enough to leave lifelong scars then she must have had blood and tissue under her fingernails. It wouldn’t have been that hard to check every student, teacher and worker… Oh wait, never mind. Past-Kori never died, right? Because Ethan’s dad went back and changed that, making her merely disappear. Okay, scratch that one.
6. I don’t get how the Kori timeline thing worked. She was about to die, so Ethan’s father pulled her into a parallel world where she didn’t die. Which stopped her time, making her stay 16 for 12 years. But what about the Kori in the present world? Wouldn’t she have graduated and gotten married, etc? So there are two Koris in the present world? Or if the worlds somehow merged so that Kori disappeared in *this* world as well, then how can she boldly go to school and walk around town like that? It’s a small town, someone’s bound to recognize her. The police, her parents, Mr. Twombly, Derek… Weird.
7. Who were those people who said “We shouldn’t have given him the pen. If he gets in the way we can just erase him”? I thought it would end up to be your parents and that they were evil all along, but the incident is never referred to again. Who’s the “we”? Mr. Twombly and Irving? But they didn’t give Ethan the pen, did they? And they never tried to erase him when he started getting in their way. I don’t get it.
8. What was in that “Mystery of Parallel Worlds” book? It was referred to twice, but Ethan never followed up.
9. How did Irving/Jack survive falling off a sheer cliff into the sea?!
10. What’s it like inside Vin and Ashley’s house?!?!
That’s about it, then. I had fun. It was an interesting short story. There wasn’t too much reading, the characters were decent, the music was nice and unobtrusive, I liked the bright graphics. There was definitely room for improvement in terms of challenge, length and depth of story and character development but overall yeah, it was fun.
24.02.11 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, Romance game, Strategy RPG, Video game, Visual novel / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: atelier lina, dimension travel, litinagard senki, review, tactics layer
Once again I have learned the importance of not writing a review too early, especially if the game is from a genre you like. Atelier Lina taught me that sometimes a game might seem to suck at first, but then once you get the hang of it it can be excellent. There are also games that suck in the beginning but then get better as you go along. And then there are games like Tactics Layer, which has taught me that sometimes a game does actually suck, but then once you stop expecting it not to suck and throw away your expectations, you’ll come into a new appreciation of the game and its features.
So yeah, I’m actually loving the game now at about 15 hours in, but if I’d written this review just a few days earlier it would have been all about “OMG this game is awful! Someone fire the developers! This is horrible!” etc, etc. I haven’t finished the game yet so my opinion might change yet again. I’ll blog with my final, overall impressions of the game once it’s all over. For today what I’ll do is to list the main reasons why I would have criticized it, and how I learned to enjoy the game.
It’s not really a Tactics game
“But it says Tactics in the title…” Exactly! That’s why I tried it, because I was looking forward to something along the lines of Luminous Arc or Summon Night. And when you do get to fight it does play out like an ordinary strategy RPG. Unfortunately these moments are few and far between. The gameplay is more like 70% visual novel, 20% dress-up game and beauty pageant and 10% actual fighting. If I’d done a little bit of research into the game before trying it I would have found that out, but dammit it had “Tactics” in the name. What did they expect me to think?!
So it was really hard for me in the beginning. There was just sooo much reading to do! Talk for an hour, fight one battle, talk for another three hours…ugh. It was driving me crazy! Plus you couldn’t save anywhere except on the world map, so if you wanted to interrupt a conversation you’d either have to fastforward it, thus missing the whole event, or just turn the DS off and revert back to your last save. And they weren’t even important conversations, most of it was just girls bossing Takumi around left and right, or bickering among each other, or some other petty random events you just selected, bleeeh.
Even when it’s a Tactics game, it’s not that good
Well, it’s not that bad either. It’s just that battles feel really, really slow for some reason. Think Luminous Arc 1 slowness levels. There’s no way to speed up battle, so you just have to get used to it. Of course I’ve never let slowness stop me from enjoying an SRPG and I’m not about to start now. No, my main problem is the lack of challenge. First off, the storyline enemies show up only once a week and they’re at fixed levels. This means if you do even the tiniest bit of training in the dojo before show up, you’ll vastly outlevel and overpower them. Plus you’ll quickly learn all kinds of abilities that are outright broken, like Shark or Order! which can do massive amounts of damage very easily. Then there’s the enemy AI, which is outright terrible. I’ve lost count of the number of times an enemy will be right next to me and it just won’t move. It won’t attack, it won’t use a spell, it won’t run, it will just sit there and let me kill it. Just like that. Some enemies will move forward a little, move back and little, move forward a little, until you go kill them. Of course since I’m going to kill them with my broken attacks anyway, I can see why they decide not to bother. 
Some of the character designs are extremely ugly
Horribly ugly girls are horribly ugly. Don’t be fooled by the nice-looking cover and promotional art. Look at the CG on the right. The 
squashed up faces. Those droopy pancake-like boobs. Ugh! Doesn’t it just make you gag? And CGs are supposed to be nice, so what about the rest of the art that isn’t supposed to be? Looking at it will make you shudder! Again, though, it’s all about getting used to it. In the beginning it really bothered me. I’d be thinking “eww” in my head the whole time I was playing reading the game because the main girls were so fugly. Later on I got used to it and cuter characters like Mimiko-sensei and Nana joined my party and then it wasn’t so bad after all.
The characters are annoying at first
If you’ve watched any harem or romance anime at all within the past 10 years, you’ve seen the entire cast of Tactics Layer. The childhood friend, the student council president, the older-sister type, the lesbian, the main character’s loser best friend, the main character who complains non-stop about the girls pushing him around but who lets them do it anyway, etc etc. I found them all extremely irritating at first, but again I got used to them little by little. After reading their little stories and helping them through their problems I started to feel some affinity for them, an almost paternal feeling. Not to mention we dealt with the story of the evil bitch Kiriko (ol’ pancake boobs up there) really early. Once I didn’t have to see her so much any more the game got 10000x better.
Apart from the 5 main girls Yuu, Yuka, Kiriko, Emiko and Risa, there are some other, very interesting optional characters you can get. Nue (mai waifu), Nana (mai loli), etc, etc. The sad things is that because they’re optional they have absolutely no relation to the plot whatsover. They join you for the flimsiest of reasons (I want to paint weird scenery! I want to keep stalking you!) and then completely vanish. They don’t take part in conversations, you can’t hang out with them, you rarely run into them in town, etc. And that’s really sad because for the most part I preferred them to the main cast. Oh well.
…And so on and so forth. Once I got over the disappointment of this not being a “proper” Tactics game, and once I got over the shock of how hideous some of the characters were, I was able to put my expectations aside and to start enjoying Tactics Layer for what it really was. I’ve put my complaints down for now, next time I’ll tell you why I’m having a real blast with the game right now.
