28.02.11 / Japanese, Nintendo DS, Romance game, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: ar tonelico 2, dimension travel, litinagard senki, persona 3, review, tactics layer
Still playing along. I checked my latest save and I’ve put in 26 hours and 50 minutes! That’s a lot of hours for a dress-up game with occasional battles. I’m at chapter 15 and a few things are starting to happen, but for the most part it’s still “Defeat the monster of the week and save Litinagard!” I also had to sit through Risa’s “I wanna save this puppy and by the way, I hate my mom!” story arc which was eerily reminiscent of Luca’s story in Ar Tonelico 2, right down to the frying pan wielding mother. Boy am I glad that’s over with.
The way the game plays out reminds me a lot of Persona 3, come to think of it. In the morning you go to school, after school you pick a few spots to hang out and a few people to hang out with, and on the weekend (in P3 it was monthly), you fight the monster(s) of the week, rinse repeat. Along the way you make new friends and help them overcome their little problems. The similarities end there, though. Helping people solve their problems is not optional, and it has no effect on their abilities in battle. And of course in P3 if your protagonist got killed it was game over for you, but in Tactics Layer Takumi can’t even fight. His job is to outfit the girls in pretty costumes, and somehow the fact that he’s touched the clothes automatically makes them powerful. He’s some sort of “Savior”, you see.
Now that I’ve stopped expecting anything from the battle and the story, I’ve discovered that playing dress-up is fun! I love games where your characters’ appearances actually change depending on what they’ve got equipped. It’s one of the few things I really enjoyed about Dragon Quest 9. Here they’ve got even nicer costumes and far more of them too. Actually it’s a bit of a pain scrolling through all the different outfits: hairstyle, top, skirt, socks, shoes, weapons. It’s much better to just select an outfit wholesale, like Yuu’s lovely nurse outfit below.
As a matter of fact, wearing certain outfits is the most common way to learn new skills. For example, that nurse outfit comes with two healing spells. A few individual pieces also come with skills and ttacks of their own, but this is not that common. It reminded me of Final Fantasy 9, or FFTA, where your choice of armor is determined not by how useful it is but by what kind of attacks you can learn from it. The deal is worsened in Tactics Layer because it’s not enough to wear the outfit, you also have to use the skill or attack a certain number of times before you master it. If you remove the outfit before then, you won’t be able to use it until you put it back on. In that sense it’s lucky that the enemies are so weak and the AI is so bad. If I spammed “Pretty Cure” non-stop against an enemy with half a brain, I’d probably be wiped out before I could say jack!
The other use of costumes is to take part in contests. Or, in my case, to lose repeatedly at contests. Several times in the story one of your girls will be required to take part in a contest. You can also visit the Event Hall and try to win some clothes by winning random contests.In the bottom left section of the picture down here you can see Sexy, Cute, Wicked and Health, right? Those are the criteria the judges use to rate you. Different judges favor different stats. Otakus like Cute girls, children like Wicked (cool?) looking girls, that sort of thing.
After the looks check, you get asked a series of totally random questions like “What is your favorite Japanese sweet?” and that sort of thing. It’s all guesswork, really. The last thing on the list is “Appeal Time”, where you preen and twirl to try and get the judges to like you. A Japanese FAQ I checked said to press YBAXBAXAXAXAX, repeating AX until the judges got fed up. I tried it on the otakus and it worked, but I still lost the looks part so…yeah. I had a 200-cuteness Yuka too, dammit. Lost by two freaking points, no fair!! I’ll have to try again later.
Anyway, dressing up and taking part in contests is fun and all, but I’m ready to finish this game now. You can only wear so many clothes before they all start to look the same, and only a few of those skills are really useful anyway. It’s an entertaining diversion, but I don’t think it’s deep enough to base a whole game around. Other dress up games like Ar Tonelico tend to have a lot of other elements going for them, this game…not quite. See you when I finish the game.
02.11.10 / Atlus, PS2, Strategy RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: alchemy, gate of eternity, persona 3, review, shigenori soejima, stella deus
Or The Catacombs of Eternity, as I came to call it. But we’ll get to that in a moment.
Stella Deus is a strategy RPG released in 2004. Developed by Pinegrow (I feel like I’ve played another game by them but I can’t remember which) and published by Atlus. Many have heard of it, few have played it.
I’ve had it in my collection for a while, but I always found something else to play when it was time to choose a new game. Then one day, shortly after finishing Persona 3, I looked at the cover and thought…wait, these character designs really look like those from P3. Really. So I did a little digging and yup, Shigenori Soejima did the designs for both games. And that’s what it took for me to finally put this game in and play it.
I’m prone to making snap judgments about games in the first few minutes. Sometimes that proves to be wrong, but often I’m right. Rarely, very rarely, I am both right and wrong at the same time. My initial impression about SD was that it was bland, boring, preachy and colorless and had some of the worst voice-acting I’ve ever heard in a video game in my life.
That’s all true, to a great extent. I’ll give the game props off the bat for the cast. Apart from the dull, goody-goody Spero, the barely-there Gallant, the annoying Tia and the idiotic Lumena, most of the cast is lively, funny and interesting. The overall voice-acting is so flat and awful it’s also easy to forget that a few voices are really well done, Grey’s and Adara’s for example. The battle system is also decent, definitely won’t disappoint fans of the strategy RPG genre. Plus the story is very simple and straightforward, which might be a plus or a minus depending on what kind of gamer you are. Since the story takes place in a world that is gradually being swallowed by a strange mist called Miasma, even the washed-out color palette is strangely appropriate.
Where does Stella Deus go wrong, then? Pretty much everywhere else. The story about trying to revive a fallen world is disgustingly cheesy and preachy. Much of the late-game dialogue is the usual “We’ll never give up!”-”Humans are brave and resilient!”-”Never give up hope!” stuff that you’ve heard about 5,000 times before. As usual the enemies are extremists who have lost all faith in humanity, and then there’s the usual evil deity…who wrote this scenario? Was s/he even trying? *yawn*
The music is meh, so I won’t even talk about it. Over the course of the game you get to visit a lot of towns and cities, but you never get to explore them and you almost never get to interact with ordinary townspeople. You know, the same townspeople you’re trying to save? Might be nice to get to know what they’re really thinking, get them on your side and stuff, don’t you think? What’s more, interacting more with the world around usually leads to greater immersion in the game, giving the player more incentive to save the world and finish the game. As it is, it’s very easy to lose motivation and stop playing, because you really don’t care.
Most of gameplay time in an SRPG is made up of battles though, which is why it sucks when the battle system is really slow (FFTA2, I’m looking at you) or excessively complicated. Thankfully Stella Deus’ system is neither of these. In particular the enemies don’t waste time thinking, so their turns move relatively quickly. The system works like a regular one with a twist: every character starts their turn with 100 Action points that deplete when they move on the map or select an action. When they run out, you can’t move/act any more and have to end their turn. In the beginning it feels really restrictive, but once you get used to it it adds a fun element of planning and strategy. Will you spend your whole turn approaching the enemy? Will you approach, hit, and retreat? Will you hit them with magic, hit them physically and then heal your ally? There’s a lot of thinking to be done once you get into it.
Then there are combos you can do with your party members, some of them extremely powerful. Before too long, your regular attacks will be hitting for more than the combos, but it’s still fun and flashy. Then there are Zone Effects, which are buffs and debuffs or status effects you automatically use on any enemy/ally who gets in range. By equipping ZSkills, you can, for example, boost the evasion of all allies in range/heal them a set amount every turn/cast darkness on enemies/cast Fear on enemies…etc, etc. etc. On top of all that, there are other stat-boosting/reducing skills you can equip on yourself to get stronger.
As you can tell, I had a lot of fun with the battle system. So much so that I quickly abandoned the main storyline to focus on the 100-level Bonus Dungeon called the Catacombs. It’s just 99 battles against powerful mooks, but somehow it’s the most addictive thing in the game. Seeing as it’s automatically unlocked right from the beginning, I believe the game makers anticipated that players would get into it really quickly. How else do you explain the fact that unless you’re a level or two higher than every boss you face, they will usually wipe the floor with your face?
Off to the Catacombs I went then, happily fighting my way down each level. Some of them were tough, I tell you, especially the oddly designed ones and the ones where your party is spread out all over the map. Whew! But clearing each level gives you a sense of achievement that the battles in the main game rarely do, plus you later get all these cool weapons and armor that you can use in alchemy. …Wait, alchemy? Why didn’t I mention that earlier, you ask? Because…alchemy in this game sucks. Without buying or downloading a guide, you won’t be able to make most of the good stuff except by chance. Also since you can only make goods one at a time, you’ll be selecting, deselecting and reselecting items over and over and over again until you’re sick of it. But it’s the only sure way to get really good weapons if you plan to go beyond level 50-ish of the Catacombs, so you have no choice. Blerrrrgh.
I had fun playing this though. The main game was below-average, but I got into the bonus dungeon and the battle system with a vengeance, so it was a worthy purchase. If you like SRPGs, like endless battles, like grinding and don’t mind bad voice-acting, I actually recommend this game. I don’t want a sequel, but I hope to find other games like it soon.
01.11.10 / Atlus, Otome game, RPG, Video game / Author: Kina / Comments: (0)
Tags: devil survivor, nintendo ds, persona 3, persona 5, shoji meguro, strange journey
Old news is so exciting! Yes, I know. It’s been all over the internet for several days. I didn’t write anything earlier for two reasons: one, I don’t own a PSP and I don’t intend to buy one and two, I don’t know if I want this game.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved Persona 3. I was bored at first but by the end I was so in love with the game I didn’t know what to do with myself. I love it enough that I’ve been planning to play it again once I clear my current batch of games and forget things a bit. But much as I love P3, what I really want is a new game. SMT: Strange Journey is coming out but since it’s for DS it’ll probably be as shallow as Devil Survivor was.
So I’d rather save my excitement for a proper detailed announcement of the next game for a console. P5 is in development by all accounts, but apart from the fact that Shoji Meguro’s on board, nobody knows much. In the meantime we’ll watch, and wait.
And I still think Female MC should’ve had blue hair.
