Shining Hearts – Much better now

Nice implants, Miss.

I’m well over the 30 hour mark (35 hours in, to be precise), I just didn’t feel like writing anything more about Shining Hearts until now. It happens.

Reading over the previous post, I don’t think I fully articulated what was bothering me about the game, so I’ll try to spell it out more clearly, as well as to explain what has since happened to improve/worsen my opinion of the game.

Baking the same bread all the time was boring: It really was. But I’ve since gotten a ton of new recipes and lots of new ingredients to try out. Apart from your standard breads, I can now make pies, pizzas, muffins, croissants, danish pastries and more. I can make close to a hundred different things now. The process is getting old, but experimentation is fun.

Visiting the same places all the time was boring: This is much better now that I’ve opened up 4 main islands and several smaller ones. I’m so busy dashing from place to place that the days pass in a flash. I’ve actually put story progression on hold so I can explore the newest islands a little more thoroughly and stockpile a few more cooking ingredients.

Catching the same fish all the time was boring: It still is. Which is why I’ve largely given up on fishing. Oh I’ll dip my rod in a few times whenever I find a new hole, but otherwise I don’t bother.

Nice…err, never mind.

Interacting with the same townspeople all the time was boring: Ehh… yeah, it’s still boring. I’ve got a few new party members now, that helps. And I’ve learned to separate the wheat from the chaff and narrowed my focus to a few NPCs I like to curry favor with. Shin and Mii forever!

I ignore everyone else except my party members, who have interesting character quests that open up every once in a while. Some of them are super-lucrative as well, like Xiaomei’s quest that just netted me 100,000G. You don’t really learn much about the characters in the process, but not every game needs “deep” backstories.

Fighting the same battles all the time was boring: Nope, that hasn’t changed either. There’s gotta be a bread around that will reduce the encounter rate drastically, I just haven’t found it yet. But my MC Rick got an overpowered attack that hits everything on the map for a moderate cost in hearts. I either spam that or put everyone on Auto-battle and I get through things okay.

The story was boring: Or more like, there was no real story when I last wrote, but something seems to be taking shape now. TBH it’s still boring as hell, and I’ve taken to fast-forwarding when they start yapping on so… I… kinda don’t really know what’s going on. There’s this girl named Kaguya and she locked away her emotions and we have to help her get them back and once we do something bad might happen but we’re going to do it anyway and there’s this mysterious woman who knows everything that’s going on but JUST WON’T TELL US yadda yadda yadda. The story is the last thing I’m playing for at this point.

And so on, and so forth. What I’m going to do now is look for an encounter-reducing bread, and then spend some more time baking and distributing bread. I haven’t even touched danish pastries yet, I’m so far behind. Shining Hearts seems like a game I could finish quite quickly if I wanted to, but screw that. This is probably the only bread-making RPG out there, so I’m going to bake the heck out of it while I can. Back to the kitchen with me.

Shining Hearts – I like the idea, but…

Shining Hearts is billed as a turn-based RPG, but it’s more like a slice-of-life game with random battles. In my last post I called it a cross between Rune Factory and Atelier Iris. It’s not an exact analogy, but that should give you some kind of idea of what this game feels like to play.

Story: Rick washes up on the island of Windaria with (you’ll never guess this)… AMNESIA! A girl finds him, takes him into her home and gets him a job baking and delivering bread. Giving people bread or doing other nice things for them makes them release “hearts”, which you can collect and use for baking bread or pulling off special attacks in battle.

And so your days go. Wake up, deliver bread, bake bread, gather bread ingredients. Every once in a while something happens and the story moves forward a teensy little bit. For example I found a girl named Kaguya washed up on the shore (apparently this happens a lot in Windaria) and after curing her with my magical bread powers, I now have to find some special herbs to complete the cure. I’ve also gained the ability to sail to other islands where I can gather more ingredients as well as materials for a blacksmith I have yet to meet.

This is a game that effectively moves by questing and crafting. Which is fine by me because while I can take or leave quests, I love item crafting. The only catch is that there have to be items worth crafting and so far Shining Hearts has failed to deliver on that front. The only thing you can craft is bread. As we all know, all bread contains the same basic ingredients: flour, yeast, salt. Maybe milk, maybe fat, maybe eggs, maybe sugar. Then you add some extra ingredients and control the amount of heat and presto, bread! Sure, there are lots of different types of flour, eggs, fat, etc. Sure, it’s fun to go around collecting ingredients. Sure, the resulting bread inevitably looks delectable, but in the end bread is bread.

I don’t have a problem with the actual bread-making process though. It’s a little tedious to start with, but once you make something good, you can save the recipe so you don’t have to pick out individual ingredients the next time. Plus the advantage of playing a game that’s 4 years old is that there are tons of FAQs out there to simplify things. As a bonus, this also makes getting new recipes a cinch. Maybe once I have a few more recipes in my repertoire and a few more sources of ingredients things will get a little more interesting. It’s early days yet.

Apart from baking bread, the rest of your time is spent giving bread to others, walking around, collecting stuff and interacting with your party characters and NPCs. A breakdown would look something like this:

The same bread. The same fish. The same people. Every day. That’s why I compared it to Rune Factory, but RFs at least have more interesting characters, seasons, farming, cooking, festivals and (relatively) fast-moving storylines. The developer’s heart is in the right place, but the baking, fishing and fighting they came up with isn’t fun, and I don’t like any of my party members at all. Same goes for the townspeople, except the little tsundere elf girl and the little girl on the beach.

But again, it’s early days yet. Only 13 hours in (wait, is that early?) with only 2 islands uncovered, so I won’t make any hasty decisions just yet. They could still add a lot of gameplay elements and flesh out the characters some more, and the story could turn out to be really good so… yeah. I’ll be back at the 30 hour mark.

Wild Arms 2 – 10 years too late for me

I quit Wild Arms 2 so quickly that normally I wouldn’t even write about it, but since it’s on my New Year’s Resolutions list I should at least say something.

I played Ashley’s prologue and started Lillia’s, so that’s about an hour in. When I played Wild Arms 1 back in 2003-ish, what I really liked about it was all the different Arms the characters had and how those were used to solve dungeon puzzles and progress. You have to realize I was 9 years younger back then and had a TON of patience for crap like that. Right now, 1. I hate dungeon puzzles with a passion and 2. My memory has gotten fuzzy, so I’m probably remembering the first game a lot more fondly than it deserves.

I mean, I really, really liked the dungeon construction in WA. The puzzles made enough sense that I did most of them without a FAQ. Plus they weren’t all that plentiful. And I don’t remember falling off a narrow ledge every five steps just trying to make my way from room to room. Or having to change the camera angle every 5 seconds just to figure out what I was doing. They were normal dungeons with clever puzzles scattered here and there (is what my notoriously unreliable memory is telling me).

Sony probably misunderstood what made the first game popular. For me at least, it was the loveable characters, both good and bad, and the simple storyline and the kickass soundtrack. Oh, and the bitching opening sequence. WA2 was no slouch on that score, at least. Beautiful song, just listening to it got me so pumped to play! This is such a nice change from the usual jpop warbling! This is awesome! This is gonna be the best RPG ev— DUNGEON PUZZLES.

… I don’t suppose there’s a cheat that pre-solves all the puzzles, is there? No? Ah well. I had WA3, 4 and 5 in mind after this, but there’s no way I’ll be able to play them. That won’t stop me from trying, but I don’t have much hope.

In other news, I’m a few hours into Shining Hearts now. If I had to compare it to previous games, it’s like… hmm, Rune Factory meets Atelier Iris? But much slower and less focused. I’m liking it so far.

Grand Knights History – I’ve seen enough

My resolution for the rest of 2012 is not to waste too much time on games I’m not enjoying. I’ve played several hours of Grand Knights History and gotten my characters to level 28, and I still haven’t tried War Mode, but I’ve already had enough.

My reasons

1. It’s neither good nor bad. I like my games to be at one end of the spectrum or the other. If it’s excellent, great. If it sucks royally I can at least look back several years later and reminisce over how awful it was. If it’s just meh, it’s a waste of my precious time.

2. The quests are all the same. Walk to a few spots on the map, fight a few easy enemies, warp back to the capital, complete. There’s absolutely no variation in the kinds of quests you are asked to undertake. I knew I was in trouble when I started having Final Promise Story flashbacks.

3. Speaking of the map, the scenery is seriously bland. The character and enemy designs are nice, but the scenery is painted almost entirely in yellow and brown. It’s seriously getting me down.

4. Story? Hahahaha. Well, there’s sort of one, but it’s not even worth writing about. Apart from the treasures you have to collect, there’s also this Phantom Knight Corps whose leader is your sidekick’s mom or sister or something bizarre like that. It’s called Grand Knights History, but someone forgot to put in the “story.”

5. The battles aren’t exciting at all. Each character can only use 4 skills, and your options are further limited by your scanty AP. This means even if you have better, fancier attacks, you can’t use them anyhow you like and it’s more efficient to use the same tired old attacks on the same tired old palette swaps on the same tired old maps. Running away from even the simplest battles makes a big dent in your party’s Brave, so you have to stay and tough it out.

The dull fights are the biggest problem, really, because the entire point of GKH is to create troops for fighting. If the fighting itself is no fun then the game has failed before it even started.

6. The auto-battle options has to be reset every turn. Animation-skip must be set manually every battle. They went through a lot of trouble with the graphics and animations, but if I don’t want to watch them I shouldn’t be forced to.

7. The raising aspect of the game is weak. The work in the training hall is done automatically for you, unless you care to reload for better stats. The other way to raise characters is to take them adventuring, and I’ve already explained how unpleasant that is. It might be good for people who like one-pattern grinding but probably not for anyone else.

…Actually I’m getting bored just writing this. I’ve given the game a decent amount of time and it hasn’t delivered. Better things await.

Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo ~ (3)

Quick update on Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo ~: finished Cynthia’s route. The ending was abrupt and completely inconclusive. Luckily enough New Game+ let me start over with my levels and items intact (and enemy levels scaled to match), so I’m doing the other routes now.

You can see the event timeline on the screenshot to the right. Events on the same vertical plane happen at the same time, so normally you can only pick one to play through. On the second playthrough, however, there’s this A.I.Z. system that lets you go back in time and replay events from a different perspective, so I’m trying to complete both Yuri’s and Trenet’s routes at the same time. I don’t know if I’ll make it or give up halfway through, but it’s going well so far. Things are going much faster now that I’m not fighting any free battles.

As for what I think about the game after 35 hours and 47 minutes of playing… my opinions haven’t changed much since I started. I’ve gotten used to the slightly iffy graphics. I’ve gotten used to the unnecessarily flashy animations. I’ve abandoned all hope of originality from the story. I’ve accepted that 90% of my attacks will be made up of Burst Strikes. Letting go was very liberating, and now I’m having fun. Sorta. Kinda. I’m enjoying it more than Grand Knights History, which I have all but abandoned right now..

I’ll try and start Wild Arms 2 sometime this week. Starting new stuff is hard! But I think I’ll like it if I force myself, so I’m going to do it. *sigh*