7th Dragon – Twelfth hour

It’s highly playable and fairly enjoyable, but not that different from all the other dungeon crawlers I’ve played recently. In fact, Final Promise Story and Fuurai no Shiren 2 are the only dungeon crawlers I can definitively say are worse than this. Everything else – Unchainblades Rexx, Criminal Girls, WiZman’s World, etc – leaves 7th Dragon crawling in the dust on the other side of the world.

Will I be able to finish this game? I’m not very sure. The story simply goes that dragons have taken over the world and a band of adventurers (created and led by me) is out to kill them all and save everyone. What’s interesting is that there’s a counter on the bottom screen that shows exactly how many dragons there are left. It started out at 666, and after twelve hours of killing and adventuring it’s… let’s see… 584. That’s 82 dragons in 12 hours, or approximately 6.8 dragons per hour. Assuming things proceed at the same rate, I’ll need to spend another 85 hours on this game before I finish it, and do I really want to do that? First word: Hell. Second word: No.

Unless something radically changes about the gameplay in the next couple of hours, here are the factors that will most likely prevent me from finishing 7th Dragon:

1. Damage floors, in the form of deadly flowers known as “furowaro” or something silly like that. Stepping on them will sap your party’s HP before you ever take on a single enemy. Warp out to heal and save and when you come back you have to go through all that pain again. This is the real reason it takes so long to take down those dragons, because they themselves aren’t that tough.

2. The encounter rate is way too frickin’ high. Especially on the world map. I’ve tried different items, I’ve tried different abilities and it’s still way too high for me.

3. Coupled with the above, I hate the way low-level enemies keep attacking even when they should know better.

4. The game is stingy with EXP and item drops, even for dungeon bosses. On one hand all the bosses so far have been so pathetically weak that I’m not surprised, but on the other hand, come on! What kind of boss battle doesn’t yield even a single level up? After all I went through getting through the bloody dungeon? It’s disgusting, that’s what it is.

5. Too many useless skills you have to waste skill points on in order to learn the few useful ones on the whole grid. I liked the way Final Promise Story did it, where they let you reset all your skill point assignments in exchange for a monetary penalty. Heavens knows I have more than enough money and nothing to spend it on.

6. Boring sidequests, mainly of the Twenty Bear Asses variety. I almost never do sidequests in this sort of game, but that doesn’t stop me from holding that fact against 7th Dragon anyway.

#1 and #2 are the ones I have a real problem with. If I can find an item/skill that reduces “furowaro” damage and/or stops it from growing back inside dungeons, and if I can find a way to stop non-dragon enemy encounters altogether, this game will take a massive, immediate turn for the better. It’s not an unreasonable expectation.

Everything else in the game I can deal with. I’m playing with an all-girl party now, as a tribute to Criminal Girls. I’m happy with my Samurai, Rogue, Mage and Healer, I can take down pretty much any enemy without too much trouble, I’ve got lots of money and items and I’ve found several shortcuts for getting through completed dungeons. If they’ll just fix those niggling little flaws, there might be hope for 7th Dragon after all.

Iron Master: The Legendary Blacksmith – Finished one route

It turns out you don’t get the complete “story” (what little there is of it, anyway) unless you play the game three times and choose a different town to live in each time. What’s more, you only get to make a maximum of 6 kinds of items in each playthrough, so you have to play repeatedly if you want to make everything. I started a New Game Plus (nothing carries over) so I could get to make armor for a change. Making armor is fun, especially when you turn the finished pieces around and admire them from all angles. While I may finish this second game, I won’t be playing a third time to get the full story, so blog-wise this is a good time to say goodbye to Iron Master: The Legendary Blacksmith.

Final thoughts… haven’t changed that much from my initial ones. It is slow, and it does have frustrating moments, though those are few and far between now that I’m a master at all the mini-games. And what I really can’t stand is the sheer number of reps you have to put in just to master each item category. You need 5 reps to master level 1, 6 for level 2, etc. all the way to 10 for level 6. That’s 5+6+7+8+9+10 reps for each category = 45 reps. And you have a total of 6 categories for each playthrough, = 270 repetitions. And that’s if you get a perfect A rank every single time, which you usually won’t when it’s your first time making an item. It’s pretty crazy.

What’s worse is, because of the amount of time you have to spend on crafting to progress the story, you’re left with very little time to devote to the store management aspect of the game. First off, you don’t get any EXP for making items you’ve already mastered, so you’re just delaying your completion of the game when you make them. More importantly, it is very difficult to keep products on the shelf. They sell out almost faster than you can make them, so 90% of your floor space will be empty no matter what you do. In the end you just get stressed out, and your customers all leave the store in a huff because you can’t keep them happy. Not that keeping them happy has any effect on the game at all, come to think of it. I’ve always been more into crafting than into selling, so this is no big loss. On the other hand, though, I’ve enjoyed pretty much every selling game I’ve played, so I’m disappointed they didn’t flesh out that aspect of the game a little more.

Tedious repetitive mini-games and pointless selling aspect aside, I’ve enjoyed my time with Iron Master. I could throw up simple instructions for each mini-games if anyone is interested in trying it (ask soon, before I forget everything), but otherwise I’m basically done with this for good. Final roundup:

Pros

– You can make lots of different weapons and pieces of armor
– You can analyze your finished pieces from all angles, in very well-done 3D
– Mini-games are challenging, but fun
– You can practice each mini-game as much as you need to before playing for real
– Helen, your assistant, is cute and funny
– The music is surprisingly good. Fits the game perfectly
– Character designs and other graphics are very nice
– Adventurers of different job classes available to hire, each with their distinct advantages

Cons

– You have to play 3 times to make all items
– You have to play 3 times to get the full story
– The story itself isn’t much to speak of
– Each playthrough is too long
– Mini-games get tedious after the 1000th time
– Not much depth beyond endless mini-games
– Item overlap in each route – e.g. I still have to make bows and daggers in my second route
– Selling aspect of the game is woefully underdeveloped
– Adventurers are underutilized as well
– Store customers keep asking for items you can’t make
– No quicksave/quickload. Must turn game off to load from save.

Moving onnnnnn~! Time to start 7th Dragon!! If any game can give Phantasy Star Portable a run for its money in my 2012 Affection Rankings, it’ll be this game. Incidentally the 2011 Champion was Criminal Girls, followed by Tactical Guild, of all things. Lots of good games in that year, though. 2010… definitely Tokimeki Memorial Girls’ Side 3rd Story, with Luminous Arc 3 as the runner up. That was a good year in general. Crap, I’m starting to get nostalgic. Gotta look forward, gotta look forward. So, 7th Dragon! And a little bit of Suikoden II whenever I feel like it.

Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner – Decent (spoilers)

Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner is a passable game. I would even have deemed it “pretty good” if the endgame hadn’t dragged on interminably. It’s one of those games where you approach the final dungeon thinking “I’ll be done in about 5 hours” and then that 5 turns into 50 before you know it. As happened with Persona, the playing time is all screwy because the clock keeps going even when the game is asleep. Except  this time those 311 hours actually feel like 311 hours. I am slightly burned out right now.

Story

Monsters and humans lived in harmony, then the monsters inexplicably turned into jewels after some Great Disaster. Humans known as “jewel summoners” can summon monsters from their jewels and use them to fight. Our main character, Vice, is looking for a winged monster who killed his mother… and that’s about it for the preliminaries. In the process he ends up losing the monster his mother left him, and then joining the Order of jewel summoners to get it back (he never did on my playthrough) while finding out that there’s more to the Order and jewel power than he’d originally thought.

The story isn’t great to begin with, but it’s made a thousand times worse by some of the most stilted, disjointed English dialogue I have ever had the displeasure to read. It’s seriously bizarre, because most sentences usually make sense on their own, but it’s like someone tossed them all into a bag and shuffled them together, so once you string them together it’s like, WTF? It looks like the writers (or translators?) didn’t have the first clue about cohesive devices and coherence and, you know, plain old Making Fricking Sense.

And there’s a bigger problem: once you slog through all the nonsense and make it to the end, you’re still left with a ton of unanswered questions. E.g. What was Grey doing at the lighthouse at the beginning (I get the feeling they accidentally used Grey’s portrait instead of Bargus’s), why hasn’t Zygard aged all this time, what exactly is that evil thing we fought in ending 1 and what does it want, why did the Abomination go after Maera, where does Zygard and Vice’s special power come from, what exactly (if anything) is so special about Vice’s jewel, etc etc. …Come to think of it, I don’t care to know all that badly. It’s that kind of game.

Characters

Squall and Paine had a baby!

Vice starts out as your typical cocky main guy with a bad attitude, and quickly devolves in your typical shocked-at-everything-cares-about-everyone kind of hero. I didn’t hate him as much as I thought I would, mainly because he was so obviously playing it by the book.

A few hours in you’re made to choose two other party members who you are then stuck with for the rest of the game. There’s Elly the Dumb, and Grey the Stupid, then you’ve got Lynn who is nice but nuts, and Bargus who is nice but suspicious. AFAIK there’s no real advantage to picking any particular person, so I went with those I could stand, i.e. Bargus and Lynn.

The supporting cast isn’t much to write home about. No particularly memorable villains or NPCs, though the reveal about Professor Anhj certainly blindsided me. Always be suspicious of unnaturally large boobs!

Gameplay

Third-person dungeon-crawling: Speaks for itself. You also have field abilities like Hover, Decode, Trap, Reveal, etc. that help you make your way through and solve the switch and platform puzzles you come across. While the dungeon layouts were occasionally confusing, I did manage to figure everything out by myself – apart from the bloody awful final Monolith dungeon.

Element triangle: Dark elements (Ice, Water, Earth, Dark) overpower Light Elements (Fire, Thunder, Wind, Light) and vice-versa. It goes like this: Dark <-> Light, and Fire > Ice > Wind > Earth > Electric > Water >Fire. When you hit an enemy with an attack it’s weak against, its turn moves back in the queue, same if they do it to you. It goes on until the monster gets mad (literally. They get pissed) and attack anyway. It’s not too different from the Press-Turn system in some Megami Tensei games otherwise.

Normal turn-based battles: The monsters take to the field, not the summoners, but any damage done to them is drawn from the summoner’s LP (aka HP). When a monster runs out of JP (aka MP) it is removed from battle and replaced with another equipped one. Chaining attacks together gives percentage bonuses to attack. “Escape” works a surprising 75% of the time. I hardly ever used “Guard.”

Monster capture: Beat them within an inch of their lives and then use the appropriate element prism to capture them. It beats the “unchain” mechanic in Unchainblades Rexx, at any rate. Captured monsters are sent to the Jewel Bank and can be equipped and used, though it sucks that you have to exit your current dungeon and return to the Order to do so.

Amalgamy: Where you use quartz and AP to strengthen and level up your monsters. You can make things significantly easier for yourself by giving monsters abilities they normally wouldn’t have naturally or that early in the game. For example, you can give electric attacks to a water monster so it can fight other dark/water monsters more effectively. You can also boost the strength of your attacks, add an ability slot and even evolve certain monsters, though this aspect is hardly explained in-game. Personally, I ended up ditching all my previous monsters in favor of the high-level high-attack monsters I caught in the final two dungeons. Why do monster-capturing games always end up this way?

That’s about it for battle strategy, but the game got a lot more fun and the battles got a lot faster and more interesting once I stopped trying to power my way through and actually took advantage of the element and chain bonus systems. Things got a little too easy towards the end, but hey, I earned it.

Graphics and Music and All the other stuff I don’t care about

The character designs you see on the cover and in the intro are slightly different from the ones that are actually used in-game, which is a real shame. The battle themes were pretty good, but I don’t remember any other tunes – and I just finished the game one hour ago. The screams and croaks of the monsters got on my nerves a bit. Voice-acting was so terrible I turned it off about 5 minutes into the game. I’ve never heard anything so bad. Nothing else worth reporting.

What I think of this game

If not for the half-assed story and the terrible writing and the horrible final dungeon, I would have rated Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner fairly highly. When you actually get to play, it’s actually pretty fun and even challenging in parts. It’s just a shame that my final memories of this game are the painfully bad Monolith dungeon, the pathetically weak final boss and the most insulting excuse for an ending since Blade Dancer. It’s worth playing if you can find it cheap, but don’t expect too much. In summary:

The Good
– Interesting battle system
– Fast transitions to battle
– Short/no loading times
– Decent music
– Easily navigable dungeons (except the Monolith)

The Bad
– Poor story
– Horrible writing/translation
– Meh character design
– Laughable voice “acting”
– Shoddy ending
– Difficulty falls off a cliff near the end
– Amalgamy takes forever unless you cheat
– Insufficient explanation of gameplay elements like stats and amalgamy
– Insufficient differentiation of monsters: all monsters with the same element learn the exact same attacks at the exact same levels.
– The Monolith dungeon SUCKS
– Post-game content is worthless, as usual

Next up

Finally made it to the 9 hour mark in Suikoden II. Also finally patched my DS together so I can continue Iron Master and Aquarian Age. And I’d like to start either Tales of Innocence or 7th Dragon sometime this month. Oh, and I also want to play an SRPG and maybe another otome “game.” So much to do, so little time…

What I’m up to right now

I haven’t posted in a couple of days, which is unusual for me. It’s not because I haven’t been playing any games but rather because I’m playing a few at the same time but haven’t gotten far enough to post about any of them.

Suikoden II – At the 7 hour mark, just got Shu from Radat and beat Solon Jhee outside my new castle. I realized there’s nothing wrong with the game. It’s me – I’m not in the mood for a sit-down RPG. There’s a reason why I’ve shifted the majority of my gaming to handhelds, and it’s because I’m getting increasingly too lazy to play games sitting up. That’s not to say I’m giving up on Suikoden II, but I don’t see myself going much faster than my current pace of 2-3 hours a week.

Iron Master: The Legendary Blacksmith – My DS betrayed me! I may have mentioned this before, but it has a cracked right hinge that I managed to patch together with a hideous but effective combination of epoxy and superglue. A few days ago that mixture finally came apart and the crack opened up again. The broken hinge doesn’t actually affect gameplay, but it bugs the hell out of me and ruins my concentration, so all DS gaming is on hold until I can repair the hinge again.

Aquarian Age – A “gamebook”/visual novel I’ve been reading on the DS. It’s as generic as they come (lazy, perverted boy with dead parents, living with female childhood friend, blah blah.) but I’ve taken a shine to the characters, so I read a few “pages” from time to time. Will continue once my DS is back to normal.

Popolocrois – Started this two or three days ago. I like the cutesy designs and the fast pace of movement. Apart from that it’s not a very remarkable game, but admittedly I haven’t played very long.

Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner – Sounds like the title of a Saturday morning cartoon. Started this one yesterday morning. Kind of liking it. For various reasons I don’t enjoy Pokemon itself any more (they’re all the same game, I don’t like the new mons, etc etc.), but I’m not opposed to battle mechanics that involve capturing, training and fighting with monsters. Speaking of which, I need to start saving for Unchainblades Exxiv. Oww, my credit card.

And there you have my current gaming list going into August. I’ve got one or two others on my mind as well, but first things first.

Iron Master: The Legendary Blacksmith

Why are these simple simulation games always so addictive? I started Iron Master three days ago and it’s been slow at times and frustrating at (many, many) times but I haven’t been able to put it down.

The story and premise are simple: there’s a war going on, and you’re a blacksmith. Blacksmith+war = weapons+money. There’s a background story about empires at war and legendary weapons and blacksmiths being killed or kidnapped, but it doesn’t have much to do with your activities so far.

Iron Master is part selling sim, part item creation game. It’s quite similar to games like Recettear and Lemuore no Renkinjutsushi (the latter more than the former) in that you are not a fighter or an adventurer – though there are plenty of those in the game – you’re a a creator and a salesperson. Your objective is to make weapons and armor, sell them to buy more material to make more weapons and armor, keep doing that until you get access to new weapons and armor, make and sell more of those, and on and on and on until you get tired of the game.

The sales part is very simple and straightforward. Make the item, display it in your store, people come in and buy what they want. Adventurers also place orders sometimes, which you can accept or refuse as you see fit. Nothing difficult about that. The blacksmithing process, on the other hand, is pretty complex and highly failure-prone. I’d explain, but there’s an Engrish trailer out there (a leftover from a failed localization attempt), so I’ll let that do the talking:

If I had to liken the process to another DS game, it would be… Lost in Blue, I guess? I remember chopping and carving and sharpening a number of items in all three LiB games. This is far more complex though. Casting, chopping, cutting, tempering, stretching, hammering, melting… and it seems like there’s more I haven’t unlocked yet. I’ve only unlocked bows, knives, spears, clubs and axes, nary a helmet or piece of armor or jewelry in sight. I haven’t even made half the stuff shown in that video, so I still have a loooong way to go.

Unfortunately the fact that you have to go through these same steps every single time you want to create something is a huge drawback that may very well prevent me from completing the game. It’s all great fun the first 20, 30, 40 times you saw a piece of wood, after that, well it’s still fun right now but I can see the clouds on the horizon. It would have really helped if they made it so you could “register” mastered weapons and make them faster next time. Or have helpers like in the Atelier series. Or at least cut out some steps, since you’re supposed to be a master of weapon making.

Still, I get to make new things at a steady pace, and the process is always slightly different for every weapons so it’s still quite interesting. I’ll quit when it gets too much for me, but I’m still really, really into this game right now.

As for Suikoden II… well… Yah. I’m still playing it. An hour here, 30 minutes there, whenever I feel like it. Nothing new to report on that score.