After 45 hours of UnchainBlades EXXiV (spoilers)

I'm sorry Dianne, please stop crying.

I’m sorry Dianne, please stop crying.

I had a nice stretch of free time this week and basically marathoned my way through UnchainBlades EXXiV. I’m on the 5th dungeon, a nice beautiful sunny change from all the underground doom and gloom. I’m a little sad though, because they added some anime harem pick-a-girl crap after chapter 4, and I went and picked the wrong girl! Not only the wrong girl, but the worst girl of all – the tsundere. At least I made a save right before the choice, so I can go back some day and get Dianne’s ending.

Anything that has changed in the past 25 hours:

– I remembered the main guy’s name: Ryuga. I’m probably going to forget it again 5 minutes after I finish the game. Now I know why companies use funny names like Squall and Raguna and Crono.

– The whale dungeon really is a lovely place. I’d love to have a picnic or something there, sipping tea with one hand, looking out over the ocean, fending off monsters with my other hand…

– Scrap what I said about people not making stupid wishes in this game. They’re almost as bad as those in the previous game. We have a kid that uses the wish to cure his toothache, and yet another brother-sister pair who waste their wishes on cancelling each other’s out. It’s only now, after 45 hours of fluff and nonsense, that we’re getting to the meat of the story. Obvious padding is obvious.

– What’s even worse is that this time the main character has a very important reason for making a wish. Yes, he finally came out and told us what the curse was about. As soon as he turns into an adult, he’s going to go crazy and destroy all kinds of stuff and then die very quickly after that. The other two main characters also have fairly serious circumstances to deal with, so it’s highly unbelievable how they keep giving their wishes away to idiots who they know are just going to waste them. It was forgivable in UnchainBlades Rexx, but now it’s just stupid.

– Special sidequest options known as “Bond quests” that supposedly foster inter-team spirit. Or something worthless like that. The quests aren’t hard to complete, but all they do is unlock relatively useless skills on the Skill Map. Obvious afterthought is obvious.

– Using different designers for each character worked out okay in Rexx. I probably wouldn’t even have known if I hadn’t been told. But this time it’s really easy to see – and hard to look at. What a mess. Jeeq and Mint might as well be from different games, and Sophia looks really weird from the side while no one else has that problem, etc etc:

exxiv incongruous sophia funny face

– Game difficulty hasn’t fallen off the cliff yet, but it’s teetering dangerously close to the edge. Ever since I got all three parties together in dungeon and unlocked the second/third Burst Levels for most characters, most battles have been mere formalities. The Nahash dungeon bosses were the weakest I’ve faced in either game. But then I barged into a room with a Special Follower and Holy— ABORT! ABORT! ABORT! I’ll be back though. With an axe.

– I can’t remember whether the previous game had them or not, but UnchainBlades EXXiV has an option for combo burst attacks that give you 2x EXP for finishing a battle with them. Guess what I always finish boss battles with now? 😀 It’s kind of cheating really… or it would be cheating if the bosses weren’t so stingy with the EXP. What is it with developers designing something awesome, then expecting gamers to use it and therefore nerfing the awesome option to compensate? It seems illogical, but maybe that’s just me.

In general my overall impression so far is that EXXiV is a slightly improved Rexx. Slightly easier, a lot more user-friendly, but with a worse story (because they actually added a story this time) and slightly worse characters. There’s not much to choose between the two, but Rexx gets the slight edge because of the freshness factor. EXXiV is very been-there-done-that. I’ll save any other complaints for when I actually finish the game, which shouldn’t be long now at the rate I’m going.

20 hours into UnchainBlades EXXiV

unchainblades-exxiv_frontCleared the first two Titans (Hilda plus main character guy whose name I don’t remember), just reactivated the core in Arctus with Sophie. UnchainBlades EXXiV is not a particularly impressive game and not much has happened so far, so I’m not really motivated to write much about it. I’ll just jot down a few notes about this game in comparison with UnchainBlades Rexx, a.k.a Unchained Blades.

  • The main character is the most forgettable guy I have ever encountered. I’m not trying to be cute, I genuinely can’t remember his name, and I only saw him 10 hours ago.
  • Most likely he has so little presence because he refuses to tell us what his problem is. He wants to remove a curse. Okay. What curse? What does it do? Why does it need to be removed? He can keep his little secrets if he wants, but then he can’t expect me to support him or take an interest in his affairs.
  • Alchemy has been vastly improved. Excavation points offer up more goodies, the alchemist fails less often, the storeroom is available very early on and you can unlock and actually make a lot of the weapons and armor fairly quickly. Great changes.
  • Each party starts out with the capacity to hold 30 unchained monsters. Awesome.
  • I don’t know how to feel about the consumable charisma bars. They’re okay, I guess.
  • I don’t like what they did with unchaining. It’s too easy to stop the moving bits at the right moment (should have taken a screenshot but nvm). Even worse, you know right at the start whether you can unchain an enemy or not, so some battles feel like wastes of time. I liked having a 0.0001% chance of unchaining random strong enemies just by tapping it enough times with my weakest party member.
  • The cast is good in general. There are no truly repulsive characters like the golem prince in Rexx, and the characters’ wishes are slightly less frivolous than in the previous game.
  • Either I’m more used to dungeon crawlers now or Exxiv is much easier than Rexx, I can’t decide which. Let’s say it’s both.
  • Either I’ve gotten the hang of monster conversations or they’ve gotten more reasonable, because I manage to make them happy about 80% of the time. Actually paying attention to their personalities helps a lot.
  • Judgment battles are easier and less frequent. GOOD.

The story will probably pick up once I unite all three parties and the main character finally tells us what the hell his problem is. See you then.

(P)Rogress update on Arc Rise Fantasia (spoilers)

af16-thumbYay, 300th post! \o/ And yay, 30th hour of Arc Rise Fantasia! I just finished the Opalus subplot, and I’m having waaay more fun than I ever thought I would when I picked it up.

My opinion of the game has improved quite a bit in the 25 gaming hours since the last post. Part of it is the game improving, and a great part is me either getting used to situations or dialing down my expectations and adjusting accordingly.

Improvements, either on my part or on the game’s part.

The battle system did open up once I had more magic at my disposal. I have more orbs that I can use and have unlocked the level 1 magic for all my characters. I also started using Analyzers to check the bosses’ weaknesses so I can target them with magic. A well-aimed sync attack can knock a healthy chunk off an enemy’s HP in no time at all (thanks teasel for the tip).

So far this strategy is working much better than the Trinity Act strategy the game tries to promote. It does more damage in less time, for one thing. Even better, you can build up quite a nice combo with just two party members while one heals, instead of having to take all three out of action for the first three moves.

The only disadvantage is that I can’t use magic in dungeons at all because I’m saving it for the boss fights. Luckily I always stock up on at least 50 Mid Liquids and as many High Liquids as I can afford.

Got used to

The voice acting. Either the actors improved with time (unlikely, but possible) or my ears just got used to the awfulness, because I don’t even notice it any more. More than that, I actually even like some of these voices. Like, I honestly think Niko’s dorky, clumsy voice fits his dorky, clumsy personality just fine. That Niko, he’s feeding information to the Imperial Army, isn’t he? It’s hard to get mad when they make it so obvious.

Dialed down expectations

I’m having more fun with the boss battles, but map fights are still as useless and as unthreatening as ever. I wish the game would compensate by making boss-like battles more frequent, at least as sidequests, but I’ve realized it’s not going to happen.

I’ve also realized that the story isn’t going to get any better. It’s not going to get better, it’s not going to do anything unusual or exciting and it’s probably going to piss me off by the time it’s over. But that’s okay. A stupid ending is much easier to bear when you’re expecting it.

Is Arc Rise Fantasia a good game? No. I’d call it above-average, where above-average is defined as “highly playable and even enjoyable at times.” And really, what are my options for turn-based RPGs on the Wii? Not many, and not much better than ARF, so I might as well get used to it.

Farm Frenzy: Animal Country – My casualization is progressing at an alarming rate

farm frenzy animal country

There are no sheep, ducks or chicks in this game.

I’m still not in the frame of mind to play anything “long” and “epic”, but the casualest of games? Bring it on! It only took me two days to finish all the levels of Farm Frenzy: Animal Country and get a silver rank in about 75% of them. That’s what I like about these casual games.

1. They’re short.
2. They’re easy to get into. Just pick up and play.
3. I can tell whether they’re good or not within 5 minutes. None of this “It gets better after 20 hours” nonsense.
4. Payoff is immediate and regular. I can finish a challenge or a puzzle in a few minutes and get the results on the spot.
5. They’re easy to pick up and put down. More in theory than in practice, but I can still get a complete experience in two or three minutes.

Compare that to something like Tokyo Mono Hara Shi, where I just spent 40 hours only to find out I don’t have enough friendship points to qualify for the “good end.” Atlus actually expects me to start again from scratch, as if the game is anywhere near worth that amount of time.

I suppose a brief description of Farm Frenzy is in order. I hear there are about 10 games in the series on different platforms, and they all play exactly the same way. You start out with a goal of things to produce, e.g. 5 hats and 5 dresses in, say, 5 minutes. There’s no penalty for exceeding the time, but you get points bonuses for finishing early. These points are needed to upgrade your farm tools and unlock further stages, so you naturally want to do as well as you can.

That’s where the “frenzy” part comes in, as you tap, tap, tap and poke, poke, poke at your livestock, your produce, the bears that keep killing your doodz and basically everything that appears on the screen. Tap the mayonnaise factory to make mayonnaise, then tap the finished good to put it in your storehouse, tap the truck to take it away, tap the ground to grow grass to feed your— OH $#%^, it’s a BEAR! TAPTAPTAPTAPTAP! Trap it in a cage and sell it for money. Pick up and ship the pork the live (?!) pigs drop. Then back to the tapping for as long as it takes to meet your objective.

farm frenzy animal country screenshotIt’s as simple as that, but once I started I just couldn’t stop. I didn’t have time to think about stopping, because there’s so much to do at any given moment. It might be easier if you don’t care about finishing in time, but I found the extra challenge spiced things up. It certainly opened my mind to more flexible ways of playing, including some that might seem counter-productive.

Two examples. First, let’s say you start out with 0g and 5 cows. Your first instinct is to hang on to them for dear life. They cost 10,000g each, after all. But there’s a good chance that a bear might chase one away anyway. Plus if you’re racing against the clock you don’t have time to feed them and wait for them to produce milk to sell. It’s better to sell one or two immediately and use the proceeds to upgrade the farm, then buy the cows back later when your cows produce milk (1000g a bottle).

Example two, you start out with 70,000g and nothing else to your name. You can buy 700 chickens, or 70 pigs or 7 cows or 1 ostrich with that money. You can choose to upgrade all your facilities. Or you can take what looks like the long way round and blow all 70,000 on the ostrich. One ostrich feather gives you 7,000g. Two of them give you one cow and 4 pigs and bam, you’re in business.

Ideas and manipulations like these are what kept me coming back for more and more. My wrists are tired, my knuckles are cramped, my DS screen protector is scratched to hell and back, and it’s all totally worth it. I feel truly refreshed after all that mindless tapping, and finally ready to tackle something more tedious, like a dungeon crawler. UnchainBlades, here I come!

Sakura Note – A study in parental selfishness (spoilers for a game no one has played)

sakuranote-600x462Sakura Note is a short game, only about 4 or 5 hours long, so I finished it quickly once I put my mind to it. I had some harsh words for it last time, but the story improved dramatically in the last two chapters and the ending was very sweet, so I feel a lot more charitable towards it now.

Charitable enough that I’m starting to wonder why it sold so poorly. I can think of plenty of games that should have sold worse than this. Even accounting for the fact that the game starts slowly and doesn’t get interesting until it’s almost over, more than 4,000 people should have picked it up before negative word of mouth got out.

This is my own speculation, but they probably didn’t market it enough to the right people. Actually it’s worse than that: there are no right people because the game is too kiddy to appeal to adults and too adult to appeal to kids. To get all technical, it’s a short reflection on the helplessness of childhood, written from an adult’s perspective. There aren’t many people who would want to play something like that. Maybe only about oh, 4,000 worldwide.

Slow beginning aside, the story was decent enough that they it would have worked out if they had cut down the adult involvement and transformed it into a Ghibli-style children’s adventure movie. It should be about 1 hour long once you minimize the unnecessary dross. This is harder than it sounds though, because “toning down adult involvement” would mean scrapping the whole story and starting afresh, since the story is powered by the selfish, short-sighted decisions of all the parents in Sakura Note. Do please go on, this is most interesting →