Ookiku Furikabutte: Hontou no Ace ni Nareru Kamo – Okay for one or two playthroughs

ookiku furikabutte_frontI’m not a mega-huge fan of Ookiku Furikabutte (known in the west as Big Windup!) but it’s definitely one of the best sports anime I’ve seen so far. I liked it enough that I even bought the series after watching it for free on Funimation’s youtube channel. So despite my misgivings about anime spin-off games, i.e. they usually suck, I decided to give this DS game a shot.

For a cheap tie-in to Season 1, it’s not half bad. It’s less a sports game and more a collection of slice of life skits involving the Nishiura baseball team. Maybe it was designed to satisfy those fans who would have preferred less baseball and more team interaction, especially in the latter half of the show.

What you have here is a day by day, blow by blow look at Mihashi’s life from after the Mihoshi practice match all the way until the end of the Tousei match. He goes to school, after school he goes to practice, then he walks home with his buddies and goes to bed. Next day, the same. Next day, the same. Every once in a while they have a practice match. There’s a long interval where you have to study because the coach won’t let you play if you flunk your tests. And she really won’t – you’ll get an instant game over.

screen_game_01_bThe “game” part is a collection of mini-games which raise 4 team stats: trust, strength, batting and fielding. There’s one where you polish balls, another where you pick up balls, there’s pitching and batting, skipping rope, tossing the ball back and forth and some other stuff, all of which you play with the stylus and touchscreen. Easy, fun stuff. If you want more, you can play those games from the main menu screen and they’ll still count towards your stats.

Whether you win, lose or draw practice games and the final match depends on whether your stats are high enough or not. I have to stress that this is not a baseball game, so you won’t be playing the matches yourself. They might let you “pitch” or “bat” once, but that’s about it.

There are also no penalties for losing a practice game and no rewards for winning one, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Also if your stats are too low going into the Tousei match, they don’t bother letting you play, you automatically lose 6-3. I learned that the hard way. If your trust with one particular character is high enough you supposedly get their end. I focused too much on raising everyone’s trust equally, so I got an “Everyone is happy, Mihashi is the ace” ending instead. That’s okay with me.

screen2_game_01_bStuff that bothered me a bit: All 7 schools you face use the exact same pitcher, who throws the exact same pitch. They should have invented 7 new pitchers instead, just for the fun of it. Speaking of which, Junta from Tousei looks horrible when he’s pitching. Another thing: not being able to skip or forward scenes on the first playthrough sucked. Thirdly there really should have been more mini-games. They get kind of boring after a while.

Still, as I said, the point of Hontou no Ace ni Nareru Kamo is to enjoy scenes and minor events that aren’t present in the anime/manga in addition to the regular anime events. Sorta of “official fanfiction”, if there’s such a thing. It’s very much a character game, just like Ookiku Furikabutte is very much a character show and the sports, while very well done, is just there as a medium of expression. So if you’re a fan of the characters and you can read simple Japanese and you really want to see, say, Tajima, Mihashi and Izumi hanging out after school or Sakaeguchi and Suyama fooling around before practice or 10 extra scenes of Abe yelling at Mihashi, this is your game. For everyone else it’s a cute collection of minigames, but not really worth going out of your way to play.

Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru – Metroidvania for girls

ore ga omae wo mamoru_frontThe first release in Idea Factory’s now abandoned Otomate Forte series of games. The idea was to produce regular games with a ‘girl-friendly’ coating to make them more appealing to female gamers. The second game was Date ni Gametsui wake ja nai, which was a remake of Master of the Monster Lair with added bishies. Apart from the new character designs, there was nothing girly about that game. Alas, the same goes for Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru, a tough but enjoyable Metroidvania-meets-dungeon crawler type of game.

Ah, Idea Factory and their wacky ideas. I do so love them. Their thought process must have gone something like: girls don’t play Metroidvania games –> Why not? –> Because they’re too hard and don’t have enough bishies –> So if we make an easy one we can rake in the cash! Brilliant!

Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit here. Maybe producing all those otome games went to their head and they started randomly adding bishies to everything. Either way they went ahead and the result was a pretty good game. It must have sold like trash though, firstly because apart from the bishies, it’s not very girl-friendly and secondly because the “made by girls for girls, now with 20% more bishies” premise must have turned off many a male gamer who might otherwise have enjoyed this game. Heaven forbid anything attack their budding sexualities.

For the purposes of this post I won’t be taking into account the many female gamers who eat action games for breakfast. After all Idea Factory sure as heck didn’t. Their target audience for the Otomate Forte games was most likely the same people who buy their many, many, seriously they have like 1000 titles, many, many otome visual novels. Maybe the intention was to introduce them to other genres and thereby expand the market for Idea Factory’s regular games? If that was the case, then they failed from the start when they chose a male protagonist. Then they failed even further in the following ways:

oregaomae dungeon– The nice art and character designs were calculated to appeal to visual novel fans, but 95% of the game is spent in a dungeon that looks like the screenshot on your right.
– The game is actually pretty hard and requires a decent amount of skill to finish. Yet their target demographic are fans of “games” that require lots of reading and nothing else. There’s a fundamental disconnect there.
– Very little story. The story that does exist is decent, but super duper predictable. There’s this ultra powerful stone, your master sends you and your best friend to get it, haha JRPG best friend, of course he’s gonna get the stone and go crazy and make you have to kill him. The end.
– Very little character interaction. Again, contrast that with the standard visual novel where you do nothing but interact.
– Linear, no choices to make.
– Bad end. Let’s just say your best friend doesn’t go down alone. No alternative endings, no chance to play as another character. It would have been nice to replay from the point of view of your best friend. No New Game+ either, btw.
– No real romance. “I will protect you” is the title, but the hero spends the game keeping the girl at arm’s length. The ending has them going their separate ways in an “I’ll see you when I see you” kind of way. Basically she finally gets the memo that he’s not that into her.

How did they ever expect this to appeal to visual novel players? This is just my guess, but it would have been better to start with a normal turn-based jRPG with an otome game flavor. Maybe something like Arabians Lost, but with less talking and more playing. If that works, they can move on to other genres, like SRPGs and platformers. I mean, I still think it makes more sense to create games that anyone and everyone can enjoy instead of slapping a “for girls” label where it doesn’t belong. But that said, I wouldn’t mind playing the girlish equivalent of Final Fantasy or Fire Emblem. What’s the feminine form of Ike… Ikea? I’d play that.

Gameplay – Who’s gonna protect ME?!

A 2D side-scrolling action game. Run, jump, roll, hack, slash with your sword, throw your knife. You can escape damage by rolling, but you can’t block. There’s an HP bar, but no EXP and no leveling up. You can’t grind your way through, so you must survive by your wits unaided. While you can leave the dungeon at any time, the escape item costs 420G each, so you have to be careful at the start. Your only hope is to get better at running and jumping, quickly. Improve or die.

If the inability to tank your way through doesn’t deter you, welcome to Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru. Apart from the main story mission, most of your time is spent just exploring the dungeon, killing monsters, foraging for alchemy ingredients and carrying out quests for the adventurer’s guild. Along the way you find various power ups, such as more HP and the ability to double jump, as well as several equippable skills that boost your stats and add new abilities.

I might not be the gamer Idea Factory had in mind when making this game, but I sure had a great time playing it. Of course it’s easy to boast now that I’ve finished the game, especially when it ended with my stats like this:

www.tehvidya.com www.tehvidya.com

But really, it wasn’t so hard. Really. And I had a blast all the way through. I especially enjoyed:

1. Collecting random treasures that do nothing but look good in your inventory.
2. Using the alchemy pot in the item shop to make tons of useful items and accessories.
3. Marking up the dungeon map to remind myself of useful information, like where the save points are, where the friendly monsters are, where the best farming points are, etc. All DS games should come with markable maps.
4. Being able to warp around the map to save myself a ton of walking. Discovering a new save point was like winning the lottery!
5. Upgrading and synthesizing powerful new weapons at the weapon shop.
6. Doing all 75 fully optional adventurer guild quests. Fetch quests, extermination quests, go talk to this monster quests, I did them all. I’ve gotta stop pretending I hate sidequests. I can’t live a lie any more.
7. Dat feel when you find a great new accessory or skill in the dungeon.
8. Dat feel when you kill a tough boss, especially early on. It’s too bad they got so easy towards the end. I had like 50 of the best healing item, so I just walked up to the late bosses, tanked their hits and healed when things got bad.

First he needs protection from his tailor...

He will protect you! But first he needs protection from his tailor…

If all Metroidvanias are like this, I think I’ve found me a new genre to explore. Having said that, apart from the problem where it was marketed to the wrong kind of fans, Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru was rightly panned for the following reasons:

1. The horribly, incredibly, shockingly bad slowdown you get when more than two or three enemies appear on the screen. I’ve never seen anything so bad in all my years of gaming. There’s no way Idea Factory didn’t notice this in testing. Which means they deliberately released a game they knew was buggy and charged full price for it. For that alone they deserve to be soundly criticized. Shame on them.
2. Those 3 places where I got stuck for ages. The crumbling platform with the damned bat on level 2 (slash it in mid air), the room with the golden knights in level 3 (there’s a switch hidden behind a pillar) and the place just above that with the backward and forward jumps (don’t use double jump, just fall, throw a knife on the next screen then jump immediately to land next to the golden flower). Together they must have added 3 or 4 hours to my play time.
3. It got a little too easy towards the end. Even I was itching for a little more challenge by the time I cleared the game.
4. The S-rank quests were a joke. Go fight the same dragon 3 times. Then go fight this other dragon 3 times. Then fight this wolf 3 times. That’s the S-rank? I was really hoping for some crazily strong bonus bosses.
5. Palette swap upon palette swap upon palette swap. I hear they got a famous artist to do the main character’s design. They should have spent the money on a famous monster designer instead.
6. The graphics were kinda bad. Not bad enough to interfere with enjoyment, but there was plenty of room for improvement.
7. The sound quality was bad too. Bad enough for me to notice, and I normally don’t care about that sort of thing. It’s a pity because the game is fully voiced by (apparently) well-known voice actors.

Still I’d like to see Idea Factory make a “regular” i.e. non-girly version of this game with the crippling lag issues fixed, more monster variety and a little more challenge. If they do that I’ll wholeheartedly recommend it. I enjoyed it that much.

In which I moderately praise Phantasy Star Portable 2 for being a very good game, objectively speaking

psp2 mikaIt took me 20 hours, but I finished Phantasy Star Portable 2. Take that, stupid Kumhan! You and your stupid Light Attack that killed me 6 times until I realized it was blockable! It’s not just blockable but it’s his weakest attack once you block it. All those wasted attempts. Tch.

I was a bit sorry for Shizuru by the end though. As far as white-haired pretty boys go, he wasn’t so bad. See, this is why I hate possessed and mind-controlled bad guys so much. I tried hard not to get a good ending in the hopes that Emilia would die, but the better characters snuffed it instead. Tch again.

I did a couple of the open missions after finishing, and they were good. Really, really good. Most of the criticisms I made last time only apply mainly to Story Mode anyway. That’s where enemies scale to match your level so that grinding makes no difference and the stinginess of your teammates really hurts. But still, as much as my head knows it’s good, my heart just doesn’t have room for Phantasy Star Portable 2. I’d like to finish up today with a look at the things they got right and the few things they still need to fix up for the next game (which is no longer an auto-buy for me because I’m fickle as hell).

The stuff they got right

+ Lots of variety in story missions. Unlike open missions where you just run from point A to point B grabbing keys along the way, story missions require a lot of thinking and more than a little skill, especially if you want to A rank them. You don’t just have to grab keys, you also have to evade traps, decipher writing, protect facilities, activate switches, etc etc. Some of it was frustrating, but much of it was good.

Hello, ladies!

Hello, ladies!

+ The story was pretty good. “These ghosts are going to take over our bodies and we’re all going to die! Unless we carry out this daring plan with a 0.005% chance of success, which is gamerspeak for 100%!” I like simple stories in my Action RPGs. Let’s me focus on the really important stuff, like massacring enough wildlife to give PETA a heart attack.

+ They threw in a couple of story-related sidequests which were even more interesting than the main plot.

+ I guess it wasn’t that hard after all. I mean, I did manage to finish it without too much trouble. And that final hit felt really good. Action RPG boss fights really are the best!

+ Lots and lots and lots and lots of weapons and armor to collect. Too bad the limited PP meant I only used twin sabers and double sabers all the way through. I thought this would be the game where I finally expanded my repertoire, but it wasn’t to be.

+ Even more fashionable duds for me to deck my dude out in. They even gave me a whole room to decorate!

+ No more slowdown in the battles. They worsened the loading times but once battles actually get under way it’s all smooth sailing. I doubly appreciate this because I’m playing a DS game called Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru right now and it has INCREDIBLY bad lag whenever more than 2 enemies show up on the screen. So thanks for doing it right, Sega.

The stuff they need to fix

silly vn choices– The stupid visual novel choices came back again. Just look at the screenshot on the right. Which one’s the right one? What makes one answer “right” and the other “wrong”? It’s even worse than in the first game because there are even more random questions and the right answers are even more ambiguous.

– Needs less annoying characters. Emilia and Lumia in particular. I give Shizuru a bit of a pass for being possessed, I mean, no sane man would willingly dress like that. Also this might be just me, but I’m already sick of the legacy characters from Phantasy Star Universe and stuff. More new guys, please.

– Not only did carrying my save bonus over give me crappy rewards, but my imported character didn’t look like my old character at all! They went and bishie’d him up and made him look all generic and JRPG-like. Do not want. It took a lot of work to make him look halfway hardcore.

– Visuals are brighter than before, but still kind of dark. I guess it’s a Phantasy Star thing.

And that’s it. Great game, but it never really “got” me in the heart. I probably expected too much after the first game blew me away. PSP2 is a better game all around, but without that advantage of surprise it was never going to overthrow its predecessor. I’d like to do all the open missions at least once before I shelve the game, but I’m kind of bored right now so maybe after a break. We’ll see.

Currently playing: Doki doki Suikoden, Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru, Summon Night 3.

Sol Trigger – Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!

sol trigger farel statusWelcome back. Today I continue to explain why Sol Trigger is such a stupid game. I covered the problems specific to Part 2 of the story last time, but the rest of the story was plenty bad enough to begin with. Obligatory spoiler warning, but you’re better off being spoiled and avoiding this game for life.

Stupidity 8. Sol Trigger is a sequel to Final Promise Story, set 1000 years later. This was Imageepoch’s chance to answer all those nagging questions (spoilers abound) at the end of that game. However, while they do tell us what happens to Wolf and co. after they escape, what I really wanted to know was stuff like how Sabi Chantier built those machines, what they did with the magic they extracted and where they are now. Especially since Litora (a.k.a. Littler) built her own machines based on those designs — waitaminnit, how did those machines get to where Wolf and co. had settled? Does that mean the new settlement got attacked again? Could they take another onslaught from Sabi Chantier? See, they just added more questions than they answered!

Stupidity 9. Was the “golden soul” ritual really necessary? In Final Promise Story, everyone had a golden soul and the final promise was just to draw out its full power through a bond with a friend – of any sex. In a painful, sordid retcon, Sol Trigger trots out the same idea, holds it down and defecates messily on its head by turning it into a casual sex affair. The last chapter of Part 1 is even titled “Lust.” A sweet, pure promise of love and friendship, one of the few good things about FPS, reduced to a cheap h-game “Bonk this girl or die” gimmick. I wept inside all game long.

Stupidity 10. Why does the team dress and act so conspicuously? And do their boobs have to jiggle quite so much? For a hidden faction, they’re really, really flashy with their streetwalker clothes and purple arms. If people of the light like Fran and Litora can easily pass for ordinary citizens, why don’t they hide their powers so they can 1) avoid persecution in the first place and 2) attract less attention while they carry out their subversive work?

sol trigger dungeon mapStupidity 11. It’s a trap. It’s always a trap. And we always have to walk into it anyway. Many JRPGs have a least one such scene, but this time it happens in Every. Single. Chapter for Every. Single. Mission. Sol Trigger takes the prize for stupidest resistance faction of all time. It’s established very early on that their world does have passwords, security keys and central control systems. If the church has all that but makes little attempt to use them and just lets you enter at will, shouldn’t you smell a rat?

Stupidity 12 (I could do this all day). All of Sol Trigger’s plans are senseless and reckless. Every single one can be summed up as follows: “We’ll charge in from the front! They totally know we’re coming, and there’s only 7 of us, but it’ll all work out.” And it does. Except for the one time it doesn’t, then they get wiped out. Of course eventually you realize this is more stupidity on the part of the in-game characters than on that of the writers, i.e. there’s a reason why everything works out 99% of the time and that reason is —

Stupidity 13. You’re doing what the church wants for 99% of the game. They know who you are. They know where you live. They see you come and go. They could stop you at any moment. They just choose not to, because Litora wants a golden soul. When her attempt to get Farel’s fails, she wants Lars’, so same formula again. Heck, Sol Trigger could have hurt her plans a lot more by just sitting on their asses and doing nothing or, worse, by just up and leaving town than by putting up their feeble resistance. Of course they couldn’t have known that… Unless they’d actually, you know, stopped and thought for a  moment about why the church was being so nice.

Stupidity 14. They never considered any other tactics except armed resistance. The few ordinary citizens that do find out what the church is really up to are really shocked and scandalized. The team should have at least tried to capitalize on this. Mount an information offensive. Educate the citizenry. Mount your case in a civilized manner, and then resort to arms only if that fails. Which it probably will. But then you at least have the moral higher ground instead of allowing the church to write you off as terrorists.

sol trigger fran againIt’s especially strange because once the church crumbles at the end of the game, we’re informed that everyone’s happy with that development. That people are cheering and dancing in the street. But why would anyone rejoice over the government being toppled by a “terrorist” movement? And why isn’t anyone worried about what will happen next?

Stupidity 15. Noi was too easily forgiven for being a double agent. More than that, I strongly believe he was a double agent all the way till the end. Think about it: you find out later Litora knew all along about Lars (how?) and about his mother (how?) but never made any attempt to retrieve him in 19 years (why?). That means she must have had ways of keeping tabs on him and making sure he showed up right when she was ready for him – which she could only have done with Noi’s assistance. Noi being a double agent is also the most ready explanation for how Lars grows up free if his mother is either Sophy or Ema. If Sohpy/Ema was captured right after the final battle and put into a cold sleep, how did her baby end up with Noi? Why doesn’t anyone ever ask?!

Stupidity 16. The moral of the story boiled down, as it usually does, to “Mankind doesn’t need gods! We’ll make our own destiny!” Where have I heard this before? Like 200 times before? Hmmm, let me think…

It’s a shame because they had the makings of an interesting story this time. The main villain was monstrous, but she wasn’t entirely wrong, in principle. If you have a country in a serious crisis and there are citizens who can solve that problem at the cost of their lives, is it really so wrong to put them to work? Yyyeeessss, but again, nnnoooo. What’s better, 1,000 people dying or 10 million? I mean, it sucks for the 1,000 but if it’s either they alone die or everyone dies, then, yyeeeahhh, but again, noooo. And eventually the church develops clones so that “real people” don’t have to suffer. And the clones don’t even mind living in facilities. Now Farel and co. can live their lives in peace. That’s great, right? Nooooo, but then again, nnnnnggghhh…. nnn…

sol trigger gustav profileLong story short, Litora’s methods were undeniably wrong, but her (his?!) principles were sound. Obviously it was evil of her to capture and kill all those “people of the light.” I’m not supporting genocide, not even for a so-called “greater good.” But the principle of harnessing the abilities of a few to save the many is a valid one. It just should have been done in a more humane way.

It’s a complicated issue. Which is why it’s a shame the writers adulterated it with all that unnecessary A God Am I stuff. In my humble opinion, the ethical issues were enough to carry the game on their own. Instead of presenting the church as a shadowy entity run by only two (2) humans, they could have delved a lot deeper into the organization. Us vs. The Man is always better than Us vs. This One Chick.

So how did the church start? How is it organized? Where did it get its funding? How does it run? How do they keep the citizenry in the dark? And most importantly for our purposes, what plan does Sol Trigger have for governing the country, keeping law and order and powering the nation once they wipe out the ruling system? I’ll give you the answer, as Lars gave at the end: Someone will figure something out somehow. And of course someone does, we’re never told how, and it all ends happily ever after, the end.

——————————————–

Phew, 3400 words combined for both yesterday’s and today’s posts. I haven’t ranted like this in a while. It’s very therapeutic. I don’t know what it is about Imageepoch and me, but I can never remain indifferent to their games. Overall Sol Trigger was a very technically sound game, but that just allowed me more time to focus on the story and the characters. Oh, how bad they were.

One thing’s for certain: I am never touching one of Imageepoch’s jrpg imprint games again. They usually make good games for other companies, but their own stuff is just terrible. Lesson bitterly, bitterly learned.

Sol Trigger – Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

cvn-soltAnd another 1000 stupids for good measure.

What a stupid game.

And what a stupid gamer I am for seeing it through to the end. I hate Imageepoch so much right now, but I hate myself even more.

*deep breath*

Okay. Let’s do this. But first I must warn you that there’ll be pleeeenty of no-holds-barred spoilers below. If I had my way no one would ever play Sol Trigger again, but I’m putting the warning out just in case.

First, what I liked. Oh, there were a few good things in there. There had to be, or I wouldn’t have made it to the end.

1. Character designs were pretty good. Imageepoch usually does well on that front. They look much better in-game than in their portraits as well, which is rare.

2. The music is good. It sounds similar to the Failure Promise Story soundtrack, except this time it actually fits the mood.

3. Dungeons have a bit of variety. You’re still running around dungeons for 28 hours, but at least the decor changes frequently.

4. Occasionally, very occasionally, they’ll let you skip a cut scene.

5. The battle system is very good. I especially liked the little sliding meter that lets you power up or power down your attacks to meet your needs. They also let you speed up battles a tiny little bit by holding R or O. And I always like games where using a skill levels it up. IMO the battles should have been even faster and there should have been a way of reducing the encounter rate. Apart from that it was great.

sol trigger farel partyThat said, the Hate system and unrecoverable SP in Saigo no Yakusoku no Mongatari was even better – in theory. It was so poorly executed that every battle felt exactly the same, but I was hoping they’d fix the issues and carry the system forward to this game. You just don’t get the same “I barely survived” feel after battles in Sol Trigger. Instead you win so handily with your overpowered skills it’s a mystery why you’re the underdogs.

6. Good character differentiation in battle. This is another thing Imageepoch is usually good at. Every party member has different skills, different equips and different situations where they’re useful. When you’re using Valter you know you’re using Valter. No one’s entirely useless, although some people will always be better than others.

7. The Awaken system for learning new skills was quite interesting. Weapons and armors have potential skills, but they don’t trigger until conditions in battle are just right. For example if your party gets poisoned, that crisis “sparks” the knowledge in Ema’s mind and she learns to remove status effects. It made sense in a way, and I managed to trigger everything fairly easily. I just wish the skill animations had been skippable. They were way too long.

8. The save point warping system was cheap, but lifesaving. It made it easy, too easy even, to go all out with your skills and just warp home to save. The flip side is that the developers expect you do to this, so most skills cost a fortune in Sol to use.

9. The Sol refilling tank was good. My Lars had around 400 Sol naturally, but I was able to dope him with stockpiled sol until he had 2000 before the final boss. I wish other games let you store MP for a rainy day like that.

———————————————————

Okay. That’s it for the good stuff. Let it never be said that I wasn’t fair to Sol Trigger. Now, all the stupidity, which is 99% related to the *spit* story. If you’re scared of spoilers, this is your last chance to look away.

Why this game is so stupid

sol trigger kaiserhaldThe second generation gimmick was all wrong, wrong, wrong. Normally I don’t have anything against “Avenge me, my son!” kind of stories. In this case, however, the son and his friends are annoying and too much time is wasted going over stuff the player already knows by heart. I’m going to have to explain the story in detail, so this is your final, final, final chance to leave.

Still here? Okay. You start off playing Farel, the head of a resistance group known as Sol Trigger. Farel and his troops are “people of the light,” who have the ability to control Sol. The evil church has been capturing their people and using them as living fuel cells to power the country. Pretty nasty stuff, even for video game villains. Sol Trigger comes up with a 5-phase plan to take down the church and free the people of the light. So far, so good.

Towards the end of the story, Farel find outs he needs to unlock his “golden soul” so he can beat the church. The only way he can do this is by fornicating with one of three girls. Oh sure, they dress it up in all kinds of fancy “special bond” kind of language, but that’s the situation. Make Farel sleep with either Ema, Sophy or Fran before the final battle. Pre-final battle sex is the best fertility drug known to man, so of course the girl gets pregnant and has a son, Lars, sometime in the intermission between generations one and two. Farel, of course, dies in the battle, which ends in failure. Not just Farel, it’s a near Total Party Kill. End of Part 1. Still with me? So far, so good. I was moderately cool with the game up to this point. Not crazy about it, but cool.

Then comes a 19 year timeskip and we open up again with a new cast. The plot, never wonderful to begin with, rapidly begins to fall apart.

sol trigger fran please put some clothes onStupidity 1. If you choose Ema or Sophy as Farel’s partner, the girl you choose will die. The girl you don’t choose will die too. Ifyou don’t choose Fran, she will also die. It’s like this:

Choose Ema = Ema, Fran and Sophy die
Choose Sophy = Ema, Fran and Sophy die
Choose Fran = Ema and Sophy die.

None of them immediately, but all of them definitely. Unavoidably. It sucks to be a girl in that world. And it sucks to be the player who develops a liking for them.

Stupidity 2. Lars doesn’t know anything about himself or about his heritage. Thus the first 5 chapters out of 8 can be summed up as “Tell me about my father!” That’s all good and nice, Lars. It’s just that I, the player, KNOW YOUR FATHER REALLY REALLY WELL! A lot better than I know you, that’s for sure! So I don’t need to go over the past and find out things and meet all these people that I know REALLY REALLY WELL again. It completely kills the momentum of the game.

Stupidity 3. It’s not just about his parentage; Lars doesn’t know anything about the world he lives in. I don’t know how it’s possible for him and his friends to live 19 years in the same city that his parents grew up in and not know the most obvious of truths about Sol and the people of the light. But yet again I have to watch him learn everything from scratch. Watch him get upset and indignant about things I knew full well over 20 hours ago. Things that are no longer even relevant by the time he learns about them.WHY?

What should have been done: Skip all that bildungsroman, journey of discovery stuff for Lars. They did it for Farel and it worked out pretty well, but once was enough. Farel and co. have done the groundwork, Lars knows know he needs to do, now do it and end the game. I don’t need to spend 8-10 hours following the wacky adventures of a horny teen who just joined Sol Trigger, the group that fought so hard and died so miserably, just to make time with a girl he just met.

sol trigger night sceneNow, it’s not like Part 1 was perfect. But if it had ended well, I would have been more than okay with the whole experience. And if Imageepoch had to put in a second generation, a short 3-5 hour epilogue would have been passable. Failing that, swap places. Put Lars and his goof troop first and Farel and his team second. Alternative 4: Make Farel’s part 5 hours long and then focus entirely on Lars. There are so many other, better ways they could have done it.

Stupidity 4. Back to the question of Lars’ heritage (oh, you thought we were done?), what the heck is up with his mother? It almost funny, but not quite, how he’s so interested in getting to know Farel but never once asks about the other half of the equation. And when he finds out eventually it’s more like “Oh. Okay,” than any huge display of interest on his part.

It’s not just Lars, either. No one’s surprised or curious about the mother when they hear Farel has a son. At the very least Valter and Cyril should have asked some questions. They were with Farel the whole time, they can’t have known about his night with Fran, as far as they know Ema and Sophy both died in the battle, suddenly “Farel’s kid” shows up. Wouldn’t a normal friend at least have a few questions?

Not that the mother cares either. Yeah, Fran was damaged years ago. Not enough to stop her roaming the world looking for her darling “daddy” Ishtovan, but just enough to stop her doing anything remotely maternal for her child for 19 years. Once they’re reunited, she’s in no hurry to introduce herself. Or make any real excuses for why she’s been gone. From beginning to end her mind is full of Ishtovan, Ishtovan, Ishtovan, and she couldn’t make it any plainer. Lars is like the embarrassing product of a one-night stand she wishes she could forget. Actually, not “like” – that’s exactly what he is, so I don’t even know what I’m complaining about any more.

Stupidity 5. WHY DOESN’T ANYONE AGE IN 19 YEARS?!?! Apart from Cyril. Aged 9 in Part 1 and around 18 in Part 2, 19 years later. Let that math swirl around your brain for a bit. A 10-year time skip I can understand, but 19 years? And everyone still looks exactly the same? And not just looks, but acts the same as they always did. You try to tell me Fran is Lars’ mom when she’s still walking around in panties at age 38? I can’t take this game seriously at all.

sol trigger lars final partyIt’s the same with the city. Almost nothing has changed in 19 years. The city’s the same, the buildings, the locations. The stuff we destroyed is all back to normal like we never did anything. The characters even comment on it. What’s the point of a large time-skip if everything remains the same?

Stupidity 6. To unlock his “golden soul,” Lars has to have sex with a girl who has the body of an 18 year old and the mind of a 9 year old. In case you didn’t know, this is against the law. And before anyone else tries this, “I was saving the world” is not a valid defense.

Stupidity 7. Lars’ sidekicks Klotho and Wilma don’t belong in this game. They’re generic orphans, they don’t believe in the cause, they don’t like danger and there’s no explanation given as to why they act so much like Gustav/Sophy in battle. They’re just there to sing Lars’ praises morning, afternoon and night. Basically they were just added in a desperate attempt to convince me to give a whoop about Lars. Here’s a shocking suggestion, Imageepoch: instead of telling me how great Lars is, why don’t you just show me? Radical, huh?

And these are just the problems with the characters. It’s not the end of Sol Trigger’s overwhelming stupidity. Fortunately the rest of the explanation will have to wait till tomorrow, because I just crossed the 1900-word line.