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*

WiZman’s World – Underrated dungeon crawler (2)

Remember when I said I quit Wizman’s World? I liiiiiieeed! But this time I’m telling the truth, I really am dropping it for good this time.

What made me go back for more punishment? Well, when I “quit” last time, I was literally right outside what I thought was the final boss’s door. I thought long and hard about it, and it really didn’t feel right to give up without even trying, so today I decided to go inside and get my ass kicked once and for all. You know, for “closure”.

So I went in. I fought the boss. Easiest boss fight of the game. Why? Because that’s not the final boss. Or rather it is the final boss, but not yet. After the fight, I was kindly informed that all the dungeons and guardians I had fought so far had been at less than optimum strength. I was then given the task of going back from the start and completing all five dungeons again from start to finish and beating all five bosses again, this time far stronger than before, before coming back to take on the final boss again.  Talk about earning your happy ending.

If you think my response to being told this was to flip them the bird and walk out, you’re only half right. The truth is, I really really liked WiZman’s World. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s simple and straightforward and doesn’t have any major problems. So even at that late point, I did at least try to do as I was told. I went back to the Forest dungeon, revived it (a tiresome process involving beating tons of low-level enemies using no-element magic), completed half of the newly revived dungeon and then it hit me that I was totally wasting my time.

To stop myself from crawling back to the game in a moment of weakness, I have deleted both the rom and my save file. I’m kind of regretting it now, because deep down in my soul I still want to play this game. It’s so much fun! And apart from the boss battles, it’s not that hard. It’s pretty relaxing, in fact. You can ditch a dungeon at any time, so just go in, explore, beat up some enemies, get new fusions, go home and fuse, come back and do it again… why did I delete those files? Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah… ;____;

But no, I’d been playing that game for almost a year. It’s time to move on. If I find I still can’t forget it after some time has passed, I’ll do the right thing and buy the game. The prospect of shelling out cold, hard cash should quickly reveal how I really feel about the game.

In the meantime, I’m still playing Grand Knights History and Ragnarok Tactics. I’ve found 3 treasures (out of 13) in GKH and my party has hit level 21. The game’s getting tougher and tougher and consequently more fun, especially now I’ve obtained skills that let me start battles with 10 AP instead of 6. I’m also getting to explore more of the continent, though it’s all yellow-and-red wasteland as far as you go. In Ragnarok I think I’m a few steps away from the final battle on the Aura route. Depending on the carryovers I get for New Game+, I might try one more route after this.

I also plan to start another game from my resolutions list. I’m wavering between Wild Arms 2 and Shining Hearts. Let’s flip a coin… Wild Arms 2 it is.

Grand Knights History – Not feeling it yet

I said I would post once I’d trained my first batch of knights, so here we are. Grand Knights History is, after all, a game where you train generic soldiers to take part in a never-ending war against two other countries.

I haven’t been playing very long (5 hours), but the flow of the game looks like this so far:

1. Go to the Guild and create 4 generics. You have 3 main classes to choose from, Knight, Archer and Wizard (in Union, anyway, other countries might have different classes) and a couple of sub-classes within each one.

2. Outfit them at the Item Shop and Weapon Shop. Each class can use two or three different weapons with corresponding skills. What you can equip/use depends on the unit’s stats.

3. Take them out of town to complete quests and fight random battles. I’m not 100% certain, but it seems quest enemies scale to your level but random battle enemies don’t.

4. When you a) finish a quest or b) run out of time, return to town and prepare to sally forth again.

5. When you complete a quest, you get a permit that allows you to use the training hall to raise stats. You pick the course you want your units to take (e.g. Evasion, Agility, Defense) and let them at it.

6. Repeat steps 2 to 5 in whichever order you want for 60 ingame days, after which your squires cannot be trained in the halls any longer and can be sent to the front.

7. Have your squires knighted and send them to the battle front. Start all over again from Step 1. Or you can do like I do and ignore step 7 because you can’t bear to let your people go. They can continue to level up on the world map, and you can deploy them any time you want.

That’s about all you need to know to play the game. If Play-Asia sells a detailed Grand Knights History strategy guide if you want super-knowledge of the game, but if you understand enough Japanese to follow such a guide, then you know enough to make your way through the game without help. There seems to be a bit of a story in there as well, which you can progress by taking certain quests.

What works: It goes without saying that the visuals are stunning and highly-detailed, though the heavy use of yellow rather depresses me. The battle system is a twist on the usual turn-based system. Fights take place on a 4×3 grid that plays out like this:

You have attacks that can knock the enemy back a row, attacks that can hit a whole row or column, or two squares, or three, etc. I’ve seen enemies setting mines on certain squares as well, though I have yet to learn that skill myself. It’s quite similar to what went on in Radiant Historia, except as far as I can tell you can only knock enemies back, not forward or left or right.

There’s also a class triangle of sorts, where Knight > Archer > Wizard > Knight. At least I think that’s how it goes because I don’t actually put it to use in battles. You have to focus your attacks, not mix-and-match and hope something dies before it kills you.

Attacking and defending are done through the use of AP, which fill up at the start of every turn. You start out with 6 AP (4 if your party has low Brave), standard attacks cost 1AP and it grows from there. Each enemy you defeat gives you 1 more AP, and if you defeat several at once you get bonus AP, allowing you to use stronger and stronger attacks as the battle progresses.

I’m not too impressed with that aspect so far. After all, the time you really need all that AP is at the start of battle, not when the enemy is almost dead. Plus my units were low-level for so long that I haven’t been able to use anything fancy. It’s only now that they’re level 10 on average that they can dish out the heavy stuff, and now it’s time for me to part with them and start all over from level 1. Screw the war, I’m not letting them go!

So there’s all kinds of strategy built into Grand Knights History‘s battle system, I just haven’t been given the chance to use it yet.

Why I’m not feeling it to far: I look for 3 things in games: story, characters and gameplay (fun or not fun?). Grand Knights History has you playing as a mute, there are barely any NPCs and all your units are generics, so there’s not much in the character department. I’ve gotten rather fond of my party though. The story has only just started to develop, so no comment there. It doesn’t seem more complicated than finding 13 secret treasures for the King so he can take over the world.

At least GKH has a decent battle system, but it’s nothing exceptional so far. There hasn’t been that much variety in the enemies either, just palette swaps up the wazoo. Yes the enemy designs are wonderfully detailed, but I don’t want to stare at the same goblins all day long.

The training system isn’t as deep or intensive as I’d hoped either. I was expecting some serious micromanagement of your unit’s growths and stats and skills, but the game does all the work for you. In the training hall you pick a card that determines your success. On the field you just fight till you level up. When you pick a unit, you’re told their likes and dislikes, but this only affects whether they gain or lose Brave when you feed them stuff, it has nothing to do with their stats. I had the patience to do it once, but I’m not ready to repeat the process until I’ve built up an army. It’s waaaaay too tedious for that.

And since I’m hoarding my current batch of troops and not letting them out of my sight, I can’t really take part in the “War” portion of the game. Well, not so much “can’t” as “I’m not really interested” right now. I’m going to ignore that aspect of Grand Knights History for a little longer while I do a couple of quests and try to progress the story.

Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo ~ (2)

Boring. It’s not so bad I can’t finish it, but it’s dull enough that if I try to marathon it I’ll end up disliking it. That’s why I’m on a strict two-battle-a-day limit.

My battle strategy has been quickly reduced to “Spam Burst Strike and Heal as Necessary,” and judging by the high HP monsters have and the pathetic amount of EXP you get unless you finish off an enemy, that seems to be the ‘expected’ way to play the game. Start a turn, move two or three allies within a few squares of one enemy, set off a flashy Burst Strike (combo) attack, share EXP. I usually soften up the enemy with a few individual blows first.

That’s all there is to battle. Hit the enemy a bit, finish it off with a Burst Strike, move forward a little more, repeat. Since most enemies won’t attack unless you’re in range, I either draw one down with a high-DEF character (trying to train up a Paladin for this role, but she’s useless) or snipe them from afar with an arrow then close in for the kill. It’s not like it’s no fun at all but, come on, the same strategy every time? With a lengthy, gaudy, unskippable animation on top of that? (edit: turns out you can skip animations by pressing START)

What’s keeping me going is 1. The hope that my party will grow strong enough that I won’t have to use Burst Strikes in the latter half, 2. The hope of different kinds of Burst Strike combos – I think I got something different when I used a Paladin and a High Priest together, and 3. The hope that the story will pick up enough that I won’t mind slogging through a little boredom to get to the good stuff.

That story… hmm… Yeah, I really don’t care about it. I should have picked Trenet’s route instead of Cynthia’s. That way instead of fighting a war I don’t believe in for a princess I barely know, I could be running all over the (tiny) continent having fun adventures. Why do I always pick the wrong route first in this kind of game? -__-

Anyway, since I have time to spare from not playing this game, I’m going to start something else as well, maybe Grand Knights History. I’ll write a final post on Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo ~ if/when I ever finish it.