Shinigami to Shoujo – Boring, even for a visual novel

Is it legal for a “game” to be this boring? Like, don’t you have to meet some minimum standards of quality before they let you release something? Oh boy.

Umm, well. I haven’t really made a secret of the fact that I don’t like visual novels. Still there aren’t that many otome games with gameplay out there, so I try them from time to time. When I do, my requirements are simple: nice art, decent characters, a sensible story that doesn’t take too long to tell. That’s all. I don’t expect much, and I usually don’t get much, but Shinigami to Shoujo didn’t meet even those low standards.

First, though, I should own up to my own fault in this debacle: I got taken in by the trailer. One, it had piano music and I love piano music soundtracks. More importantly, it spoke of the story of a lonely shinigami and the innocent traveller he meets and how they decide to travel together in search of the most beautiful word in the world. Sounds romantic, right? Right? The poor, sad, lonely shinigami, all alone for millenia, finally finds someone to hold and to comfort him and together they learn to live and love and laugh and overcome all obstacles so they can be together forever and ever and ever… is the interpretation of the story my imagination came up with.

The “reality” is something quite different. To begin with, the first thing we learn about our protagonist Sayo is that she has a brother fetish. You know, the usual “not really siblings” thing. That should have been my clue to stop right there, because I hate that cliche. I mean, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m from Mars or something because where I come from, adopted siblings have the same status and rights and responsibilities as “real” siblings. Adopted or not, you’re both siblings, full stop. There’s no such thing as “siblings until someone gets horny.” That’s just wrong. So that was my warning sign, which I ignored. Mea culpa.

More to the point, it turns out that the story in the trailer was from a book Sayo’s “brother” was writing, and the actual shinigami you meet in the game, Ao, is a wandering amnesiac who just claims to be a shinigami. There’s a place for people like that, and you find it by calling 1-800-NAMI. Moreover, Ao is not particularly lonely or sad or in any way distressed by his condition, and for the three days I played this game, he never treated Sayo as anything more than a bother. Which she is. Always hanging around, asking nosy questions and giggling at anything and everyone in her oh-so-cultured manner. “I’m a death god.” “Tee hee, a death god, that’s so funny.” Urghhhhh.

Don’t glare at me like that; I didn’t make this game.

So, obviously, I didn’t finish the game. There was no point, really. I gave it a solid try for a few days in the hopes that I’d learn more about Ao before the guys in the white van took him away, but no luck. It just dragged on and on with endless descriptions of books and Ao’s blond hair and Ao’s blue eyes, and books and Sayo’s black hair, and Sayo’s black eyes and books and there some clock tower in there somewhere, and look Ao and Sayo like books, they’re nerds just like you, isn’t that great, blah blah blah. I played and played and played and I was still in chapter 1, so eventually I said meh, screw it. I know when I’m not wanted.

Bit of a shame though. The voice-acting was pretty good, the soundtrack is great, the art is like 6.5/10, not too shabby. Takuyo just needed a few more lessons on concise writing and the creation of likeable characters. Oh, and basic moral decency, ‘cos that brother-con stuff ain’t cool. I’m off to find a summary of whatever the heck the story is about, and then I’ll start something new.

Shining Hearts – Glad it’s finally over

Finished after 52 hours and 55 minutes. I got sick of it pretty quickly and had been trying hard to finish it for the past 5 days or so, but the harder I tried, the longer it dragged on. I’m really, really glad it’s finally over.

Thinking back, I went through the same 3 stages with Shining Hearts as I did with Tactics Layer last year, namely:

Stage 1. This game sucks
Stage 2. The game sucks, but the gimmick is fun
Stage 3. The gimmick is fun, but the game really sucks

For those of you lucky people who’ve never played it, Tactics Layer is a dress-up game/visual novel/SRPG where the dress-up part was fun and the SRPG part was okay, but the story and the characters (or one character in particular) ended up ruining everything positive that was going on. Shining Hearts is pretty much the same. The bread-making angle was fun for a while, but not nearly enough to carry an entire game. The characters are seriously cliched: dojikko, fanservice catgirl, refined princess, loli tsundere, and on and on. And for a game about “hearts” and “emotions” the cast never really got close to each other. By the end they were more than acquaintances, but less than actual friends, that’s the feeling I got from the game.

The story was just weird. Like, stupid weird, not good weird. One moment we were all happy in our organic little world, living in harmony with nature, then these pirates show up out of nowhere and turn out to have no real plot relevance, and then the real bad guys show up and they’re all robots and stuff. They’re from another world and they’re after this girl named Kaguya who is also from that world and it’s like, what? What’s that’s got to do with me? I’m just a baker. Here, take her and go, and have some apple pie while you’re it.

Gamer shall not live by bread alone

As you might expect, we solved everything through the power of bread (you’d better believe it) and the power of hearts and killed the bad guys. But the game didn’t end! I had to make even more bread deliveries and do even more quests to trigger the ending sequence. Eventually something happened and Kaguya buggered off back to space because she’s actually a goddess or something, roll credits…

But the game still didn’t end! Apparently I’m supposed to spend even more time with my favorite character so I can get an individual end, then the game will finally be over. Aha. Ahaha. And that was it for me and Shining Hearts.

But seriously, 52 hours. Where did it all go? I remember making a lot of bread deliveries and baking a lot. And I explored the world pretty thoroughly and did almost all the character quests. I probably spent about 10 of those hours on random battles as well, especially when sailing from island to island. I’ll never understand why developers create a interesting world and invite you to explore it and then ramp the overworld encounter rate up so high you can’t even enjoy it.

Final random thoughts on Shining Hearts:

1. I liked all the bright colors and cute monsters and stuff. I like games with an overall cheerful mood. That just made all that weird crap with Pandora’s box and evil robots and two worlds and goddesses stand out all the more.

2. The major antagonists show up out of the blue around the 40-hour mark and are completely gone by the 50-hour mark. They come out of nowhere and go nowhere and the story is largely irrelevant. This would have been better off as a pure simulation game, since they obviously shoehorned in story elements as an afterthought.

3. Baking bread was fun, but quite useless otherwise. You’ll be distributing the same 10 or so types throughout the whole game to the same 10 or so people. It would also have been better if you could experiment freely instead of always having to follow a recipe.

4. Battle system balance is bad. 90% of the battles are too easy. 9% are just right. 1% are too hard. Too hard as in, can’t get a single move in kind of hard. There’s also an Auto-battle system (with rather bad AI) which I used pretty much all the time, thus defeating the purpose of the game even having random battles in the first place.

5. The encounter rate is pretty high for a mainly-sim game. And I never did find an item/bread that would lower it.

6. On the plus side, there were a lot of good, useful active and passive battle skills. Useful passives included Counter, Evade, Finish Off (follow up attack on a low-HP enemy), Critical, Cover, etc. Plus there were character combos with varying degrees of usefulness. If the encounter rate wasn’t so high and the pace of battle wasn’t so slow and the enemies weren’t such pushovers, the battle system would have been really good.

7. I didn’t think too much of the character designs. The guys had these weird, twisted faces, and the girls were trying too hard to show off their chests. Are gamers who care for cheap fanservice the same ones who want to play bread-making RPGs? Can’t help thinking they’re a different demographic.

8. My main character and his partner never regained their memories, and we never found out where he washed up from or why. If that’s a sequel hook, I ain’t biting. Speaking of sequel, it seems Shining Hearts is a ‘spiritual successor’ to a Playstation bread-delivery/village-life sim called Dokidoki Poyacchao so the idea wasn’t even original to begin with.

Overall… I didn’t not enjoy Shining Hearts. However, while it did have its good moments in the middle, I didn’t care for it in the beginning and actively disliked it by the end. I can’t even say “it was all right” now. The most I can muster is a quiet “meh.” I don’t really recommend it, and I’m not particularly glad I played it. The End.

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.