Zero no Kiseki – TL;DR

znkThis is the game that never ends
It just goes on and on my friends
Some people started playing it, not knowing what it was
And they’ll continue playing it forever just because
This is the game that never ends…

…Actually Zero no Kiseki was ‘only’ 60 hours long, but it felt like an eternity. You can’t see it right now, but I’ve packed up my PSP and shut it away in my desk. I don’t even want to look at it for a while.

The last time I wrote about the game, I gloried in the fact that there was no main baddy and no real story. Of course I wasn’t naive enough to think I’d get through the whole game without one. However I never expected there to be game developers who, knowing they had a 20-hour long story to tell, would waste the first 40 hours on absolutely nothing and only then get around to their main point. I’m more exhausted than mad at this point though, so I’ll just scribble some stuff and walk away.

What was okay

1. At least it wasn’t Fails in the Sky.

2. It doesn’t end with a brother tongue-kissing his sister and then running away in a fit of teenage angst.

3. Cassius Bright doesn’t show up. We do have two obligatory “I wanna have Cassie’s babies” scenes, though.

4. Battles are mostly fast-paced and fun. The enemies also start out closer to your party so you don’t need a passport and visa to reach them any more. The battle system just needed an auto-battle option and an animation skip button for magic and joint attacks to be near-perfect.

5. Weak enemies will run from you. They can also be whacked for quick Sepith.

6. I liked my party, there were some interesting NPCs, and even the last boss was more funny than evil. Lloyd is a terrible but typical main character, but the other characters make up for him.

7. It ended well. There are a few unanswered questions, but I’m satisfied enough that I’m not going to bother playing Ao no Kiseki.

znk partyWhat sucked

1. 60 hours of BS, of which only 10 was indispensable. Way too long game was waaaaay too long.

2. Some of the jobs/sidequests were really boring. I know it’s the S.S.S.’s job to do minor tasks like finding kitties, but it got old after the first few.

3. Too many references to Snails in the Sky. Some were references to SC and TC, which I haven’t played. What’s worse, those foul, disgusting Bright kids showed up again and even had the nerve to *vomits* join my final party.

4. Too many rescues of my party, too much kill-stealing. I know we’re supposed to be rookies but every other boss battle ends with someone jumping in to save our hides or even the odds. Thanks but GTFO.

5. Too much talking. The party members take turns repeating answers and facts just to pad out the text. Or maybe it was a misguided attempt to ‘flesh out their characters.’ “He must have gone out.” “You mean he’s gone out?” “But how did he go out?” “Yeah, we didn’t see him go.” “Yeah, he must have gone when we weren’t looking.” “Yeah, that must be it.” etc etc etc.

6. It’s a story about a corrupt city with two rival mafia groups. Mafia that never kill or even hurt anyone. Mafia that the story somehow still tries to present as a threat to Crossbell’s stability, even though they never actually do anything to threaten said stability. Not until the last 10 hours, anyway.

7. Magic is useless for most of the game until the final boss. Then suddenly it’s uber-useful. Also there are way too many useless items and accessories.

8. Wasn’t good enough to justify being 60 hours long. Wasn’t Good Enough, period.

That’s it. That’s enough. No more Legend of the Heroes games for me. I still have Ys DS left to try before I give up on Falcom entirely, but I’m not expecting much.

In other gaming news, I’ve hit the 75 hour mark with Xenoblade Chronicles. I need to stop exploring and move on with the game, but exploration is just so much fun! I also started Date ni Gametsui wake ja ne: Dungeon Maker Girl’s Type on the DS. Gameplay-wise it’s exactly the same as Master of the Monster Lair, but the story and characters are completely different so it’s been good so far. Since the year’s almost over those will probably be the last two games I play till 2013.

I haven’t gone anywhere

And I don’t have writer’s block or anything funky like that. I’m busy playing Xenoblade Chronicles and Zero no Kiseki, but I haven’t reached anywhere worth writing about.

Xenoblade Chroicles: 67-ish hours. Just reached the Fallen Arm and got the ‘final party member’. Do Not Want. I was doing so well raising affinity and mixing and matching my teams. Melia and Riki are actually pretty useful in battle, especially when you control them yourself. I just don’t know what they want me to do with this new character. Well, whatever. Exploring is still fun, and we’re FINALLY getting round to the core of the story, so that’s good.

Zero no Kiseki: Longest. Final Dungeon. Ever. I’ve been trying to finish the game for the past 5 hours, but they just keep sending me deeper and deeper into some ancient ruins. Then I finally killed the last-but-one boss and thought, oh well the last boss must be in the next room, right? Noooo, the dungeon’s going on. And on. And on. At present I don’t have a list of game developers I instinctively avoid. If I did, though, Falcom would be at the top of it.

I think, or at least I desperately hope, that I’ll finish ZnK soon, and then I guess I’ll have to write something about it. *sigh*

I also figure since my PS2 is already dead, there’s no harm taking it apart in a last-ditch attempt to fix it, so that’s what I’ll do tomorrowish.

Haretari Kumottari N – Not bad for a free game

I’ll start by giving out a link to the developer’s website where you can download this game and try it for yourself…HERE. It doesn’t need installing. Unzip, play, delete when tired.

Haretari Kumottari N (Sometimes it’s Sunny, Sometimes it’s Cloudy N) is billed as an adventurer sim. Having played it, however, it comes across as more of a life sim, where the main character just happens to be an adventurer. I say that because the majority of things you can choose to have Fill do have very little to do with adventuring. The only character in-game who gets to have real adventures is Theo, an adventurer you hire to go dungeon exploring for you.

Check out some of the things Fill can do every day (hardly an exhaustive list):

Laundry, take a bath, go to the library, paint, admire painting, cook, think about cooking, take a job, train, polish his sword, wear perfume, talk to friends, hang out with friends, flirt with friends, give friends presents, run a lunchbox shop, go adventuring, take quests from the guild, go swimming, take a class, look at the sky, go fishing, go shopping, clean his room, etc etc etc.

And every week/month:

Play the lottery, visit neighboring countries, take part in cookery/exercise/fitness/painting/swimming contests, sign up for classes, visit the forest to progress the ‘story’, buy/expand a farm, visit the guild to pick up his paycheck, etc, etc.

You notice “traditional” adventurer activities like, you know, adventuring and doing quests form only a tiny part of his day-to-day life. But of course, that’s the choice you make as the gamer, picking which of the many, many available actions you want Fill to take part in. After all, you have to juggle a couple of stats at the same time. First, Fill’s finances. He starts out 5000£ in debt and pays interest every day. He also needs a LOT of money to buy and upgrade weapons, upgrade his farm, upgrade his lunchbox shop, enter certain contests and all the other things your average adventurer needs money for.

Secondly, you have to watch his hunger, since Fill has a metabolism that would put many Harvest Moon protagonists to shame. If he gets hungry he can’t take quests (though he can do everything else just fine) and if he outright begins to starve his happiness and popularity drop like a rock after Shio bails him out.

Which leads me to the third and fourth things you have to watch: happiness and popularity. TBH I’ve never let them drop too low, so I don’t know what happens if you’re unhappy or unpopular. If you’ve very happy, you get to throw a party, or just enjoy your happiness. Parties raise your friends’ affections and your abilities at cooking, swimming, etc. If you’re very popular, you get to be Mayor for a day, which actually improves the town. Somebody fire the regular mayor already!

That leads to the seventh, eighth, ninth…I’m losing count. Basically you’re expected to improve the city by improving safety, increasing the population, beautifying the place, etc. Being Mayor is one way to do it. So is donating money to various collectors. So is taking quests.

I haven’t even gotten round to talking about quests and Guild Rank yet. And then I have to describe weapons and how to improve them and how combat works. And there’s a story in there as well. Phew. Okay, I’ll try to keep this short.

The Guild: You take quests. Some involve fighting. Some don’t. They all increase your hunger and popularity while decreasing happiness. Quests are ranked 0-6. 0 quests have no fighting, 1+ quests have increasingly difficult fights. In addition to the immediate compensation you get for quests, you also get paid a monthly salary depending on how many Guild Points you earned in combat. On top of all that, you can purchase Guild Rank licenses, from Rank G to Rank A. The higher you go, the better the stuff you can buy in stores (especially weapons) but the harder enemies and quests get. However you can switch ranks at will. This means you can go up to Rank A, buy Rank A weapons, then lower your level and fight Rank G enemies.You can also switch between (IIRC) 15 different classes, from swordsman to priest to playboy. I’ve only unlocked about 10 so far.

Weapons: Fill’s stats depend almost entirely on the weapon he has equipped. Weapons come with basic stats. You have to pay money and use Mana Points, intrinsic to weapons, and Mana Bonuses, which you get by leveling up, to improve ATK, HP, MP and Speed.

Skills: The marketing copy boasts of “over 100 equippable skills.” Cutting, thrusting, pounding, magic, recovery, etc. This is probably the worst part of the game for me. I just can’t figure out what makes one skill better than another. The stats are just too horribly obscure and hard to read. I followed basic RPG logic and assumed the later you get a skill, the better it must be. It’s worked out pretty well so far.

Combat: Fill equips up to 8 skills. At the stat of a battle, the CPU chooses one skill at random. Say, skill no.3. Then for the next 5 turns Fill works his way through skills 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. If the battle still hasn’t ended by then, the computer chooses another skill at random and the cycle begins anew. If Fill runs out of HP or 20 turns elapse without a winner, he loses and forfeits all rewards. It’s not a bad system, and for a doujin game they actually have a reasonable selection of enemies. I know I would have enjoyed it way more if they had used a regular turn-based battle system though.

Story: Not much to start with. Fill is a fresh immigrant to the city of Ishvald. He has to try and survive as best as he can, that’s it. A little way into the game, he is beset by a fairy named Rakish, who requests his help to drive monsters out of nearby Mellow Forest. This turns out to be caused by the evil fairy Lily. Lily’s trying to release some evil dragon god sealed somewhere. Needless to say, this story progression is done entirely at my discretion. I’m more interested in having Fill eat Chinese food and go to the circus than in saving the world, but I’ll get there.

Characters: The developers Inu to Neko seem to use the same characters in all their games, but this probably the first game where they all appear together. I say that because this time they actually explain things like why Ruvel has a crush on Yayoi, and what kind of relationship Fill has with Shio (more than friends, less than lovers, also Shio is not a trap 0_0), that sort of thing. As you increase your friends’ affection by giving them gifts and talking to them, you’re treated to character skits and short character-specific sidequests that teach you more about them.

Blah blah blah, and so on and so forth. TL;DR there’s a LOT to do in Haretari Kumottari N.

Enough about that, on to what really matters: Is this game any good?

Why yes, yes it’s good. For, say, two or three days. There’s so much to do and so many activities to try that it’ll keep you busy for a short while. Also this is just me, but I really liked the characters and enjoyed hanging out with them. The reasons why it doesn’t last longer than a few days are:

1. That’s how long it’ll take you to max everyone’s affections, reach Rank A, win most contests and complete the story. It’s a short game.
2. Apart from battles, everything plays out text-only, no animations. You don’t get to see Fill picking up trash or giving elderly people massages. This makes it easy to get tired of doing things.
3. Battles are aight, but not much fun. That means a big chunk of the game – fighting, weapon upgrades, skills, can and should be ignored most of the time.
4. Having so much to do and so little time to do it in is first exciting, then frustrating, then boring. Especially when you combine it with #2.

So it’s a good, short, fun diversion, which is exactly what I was looking for when I picked it up. I’ve gotten the sim game bug out of my system for a little while now. Back to Zero no Kiseki (geh) and Xenoblade Chronicles (urgh) now.

Zero no Kiseki – Hmm…

Just passed the 40 hour mark and finished Chapter 3. Apart from that I don’t really feel like writing about this. More like, I can’t think of anything to say. I like Zero no Kiseki quite a lot. Even though it drags on even more than Trails in the Sky did, at least it’s meant to be a slow-life game. A slice of life RPG about the lives of 4 new police recruits in a new department. No overarching mystery or final bad guy so far, which is fine with me. I don’t mind finding lost kids and retrieving library books and other menial tasks like that. And at least the play this time was about 20,000 times more interesting than that awful, awful school play in TITS.

That’s about it. I’m playing it. It’s nice. I like the characters (except the irritating ones who should have died back in TITS like Joshua and Estelle). The battles are a lot faster this time round. I’m starting to get tired of all the talking, but I’m soldiering on. I’ll be back if anything unusual happens.

In other gaming news I feel like playing either a simulation game or an SRPG. Something very short and light. I had it narrowed down to either the Territoire demo (new game from the guys that made Recettear) or a free doujin game called Haretari kumottari N from the guys that made Lemuore no Renkinjutsushi. It’s supposed to let you play as an adventurer, taking on quests, interacting with the townsfolk, trying to balance your happiness with your popularity and juggling 8 stats and over 100 possible different skills as you fight various enemies. I flipped a coin and Harekumo won, so… yeah.

Suikoden II – Not interesting enough to finish

It’s been a while since I last wrote about Suikoden II, but in the meanwhile I have made my way slowly and painfully to Rockaxe Town, home of the Matilda Knights. My save file reads 11 hours and 36 minutes.

My verdict is just as the title says: it’s an interesting game, but not interesting enough to actually finish. By which I mean I am fairly interested in what’s going on and how the game ends, but I don’t want to go through the trouble of playing for another 20-30 hours just to find out.

The characters are bland, the battles are tedious, and the backtracking… oh lawd, the backtracking. Before going to Matilda I spent time in Greenhill City, and it was crazy. Walk to the hideout, warp back to town, walk to the hideout again, walk back to town again and then walk back to the hideout AGAIN before getting out of that bloody town. That was the final straw.

I did get some entertainment out of finding typos in the script though:

Nanami: If I thought Riou and Jowy were kiiled by the state
Nanami: I could never have forgived them.
Storekeeper: Don’t waist you money, okay?
Don’t talk to me over familiar. Got it?
Nanami: What? I’m going to! [too]
Circuret
Nanami: Goodnight, Riou
Don’t make decision for me
How can you say that I’m loafing off!
Shu: […]for the blood that has flown[…]
If you see a shinning ball, please buy it for us, okay?
This weather isn’t good for an old man bones…
Runemaster: Attach were?
Blacksmith: Dettach which?
Shin: Lord Teresa. [when did she have a sex change?]

Etc. etc. But minor diversions like that can only take you so far. Luckily for me Suikoden II is old enough and famous enough that there are tons of videos and Let’s Plays out there. Like this one, which recaps virtually every line in the game. The internet is so wonderful.

And that’s it for me and Suikoden II. I think maybe, just maybe, the Suikoden series isn’t for me. I really enjoyed the first game, but III was excruciatingly boring. So much so that I still haven’t finished it. Meanwhile I fairly enjoyed Tierkreis, in spite of all the howling and crying about how it’s not a ‘real’ Suikoden game. At least I managed to finish that. I might check out the new one that came out on the PSP earlier this year, but apart from that I think I’m done with the series as a whole.

~Fin~

Update, i.e. not so Fin+ spoilers – Finished reading the Let’s Play. I am so glad I didn’t continue this game. You know, I actually thought Luca Blight was a pretty awesome villain. Turns out he’s not even the final villain. He goes down 2/3rds of the way through (epically, but still) and the final boss is some stupid rune boss. There’s no way beating down some random monster Necron-style could ever match the satisfaction of taking down the omnicidal maniac of the century, srsly.

Not only that, but once his crazy ass is gone, but you’d expect the war with Highland to be over, right? Sign a treaty, stick to it, everyone’s happy, right? But noooo, for some reason I will never understand, Jowy insists on keeping the war going unless everyone surrenders to Highland. WHAT IS HIS PROBLEM? All the deaths after that are completely his fault. All the Highland and other soldiers that die, Nanami if you don’t get all 108, Silverberg, those two generals of Solon Jhee, everything’s all his fault. AND. HE. HAS. NO. REASON!!!!! Unless his aim was to destroy Highland and cause as much collateral damage as possible while doing so. In which case he succeeded brilliantly and should be applauded. Standing O, smart guy.

Urgh, I’m still raging. The sheer stupidity of the situation is mind-boggling. Konami was obviously prolonging the game just for the sake of prolonging it. It’s the only explanation I can come up with. And I can’t come up with any explanation for the fact that the “best” ending has Riou, Nanami and Jowy all together again, all buddy-buddy like nothing ever happened. “After reuniting in Kyaro, the three friends continue to journey together merrily.” What. The. Hell?! And what about Jillia and Pilika, sent off into exile like nobody’s business, and who he refuses to even talk to in the “good” ending even though it would make them so much happier? Screw them, eh? Screw everyone as long as you’re happy, eh Jowy? Geez.

I don’t think I’ve hated a videogame character like this in quite a while. Why is this game so popular again? =_= Well, no matter. Enough Suikoden for now. As I mentioned above I’d like to try Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki, and since I like SRPGs I’d also like to try Suikoden Tactics. Apart from that I don’t think the series is for me. I can live with that.