The Idolm@ster: Dearly Stars – Hmm…

I wanted something with absolutely no random battles in it, and I haven’t started a new raising sim in a while so… here we are.

The Idolm@ster: Dearly Stars has you playing as a wannabe idol singer who grows from a complete nobody into a famous id0l. I picked Hidaka Ai, the one in the middle, and I’ve currently got her up to a Rank D idol (over 100,000 fans).

The gameplay is simple enough. You have three stats, Vocal, Dance and Visual (looks), and you raise them through lessons that take the form of annoying touchscreen mini-games. Additionally you pick a song and an outfit depending on which one of the three stats is trending that week, then you carry out promotions that help you build up “memories.” After a few of these, you qualify to take part in an audition where you use those “memories” to hold the judges’ interest long enough to pass. Pass, rank up, next audition, pass rank up, etc.

I haven’t watched the Idolm@ster anime, and this is the first IM game I’m playing but I hear they’re all quite similar. While this isn’t quite the experience I was hoping for, I can (sort of) see what the attraction of this game would be. It’s like the anti-Princess Maker, made for people who find “regular” raising sims long, tiring and/or confusing. They just want to play with a cute girl and they already know what they want her to be. No need to mess with all those stats and jobs and lessons and multiple endings and stress and time limits and stuff like that. Just a linear story, simple mini-games and lots of anime girls to ogle. Makes sense.

It’s not really for me though. I’m going to finish it and everything, but it’s not really doing anything for me. The foregone conclusion (Ai wins “Idol Ultimate” and becomes a top star like her mother) is painful enough without adding the repetitive gameplay and the vaguely irritating story to the mix. At each stage they try to throw an obstacle in Ai’s way, but with the player at the helm and the auditions so easy to win, they just end up looking ridiculous. For example right now I have to beat an idol named Hoshii Miki in an audition. There’s no way I’m going to lose as long as I take lessons and follow the trends, but the game is acting like it’s this insurmountable obstacle that I could never overcome in a million years, blah blah blah. Pathetic.

Anyway, I’m going to finish it. Apart from being piss-easy and highly repetitive, it’s not exactly bad, and it shouldn’t take too long at the rate I’m going. After this I still won’t be ready to take on any random battles, so… hmm… I’ll probably pick up an otome game.

Hero’s Saga Laevatein Tactics (2)

After blathering on about my “gamer’s pride” in the previous post, I felt a bit silly walking away from the Immortal King without a fight, so I went back and killed him. The King himself wasn’t all that tough. It was those zombie magicians with the crazy range and full Valhalla gauges that decimated my party last time. This time I got a little lucky and two of them came down early to their doom. The troublesome one in the middle I took out with a Valhalla attack from one cleric and the rest weren’t much trouble. Victoly!

After all that, it turned out the Immortal King wasn’t even the final boss. It was Ahriman, who was more like Yu Yevon to IKing’s Jecht than any credible threat. I rubbed him out quickly, thinking the game would be over then, but nooo. Not even a credit roll. My hero Ernesto promised IK that he’d gather up all the Vaettir Arms on the continent and return them to him, so I’m supposed to help out with that. In the meantime the NPC that started everything got herself frozen in a time crystal and I have to find out a way to undo that and get her back.

…Or not. I ain’t gonna do it. Even if the credits haven’t rolled, I still consider the game over. If there’s anything else the game wants me to do, it should be short and to the point. Instead, right now I have 50% of the Arms and no clue how many more battles I have to fight to get the number I need to return. I also have no idea how I’m supposed to rescue Valerie. Most likely I’m supposed to fight and fight and fight and every couple of fights they’ll give me another clue until the chapter is over. DO NOT LIKE. So that’s it for me and Hero’s Saga, for real this time.

Overall impressions of Hero’s Saga: Laevatein Tactics: the story was shallow. Like, really really shallow. It lacked most of the twists that SRPGs usually have, and character motivations rarely made any sense at all. This bad guy developed all these weapons that hurt people on all sides and wasn’t even sorry for it, but because he’s an NPC’s father, he’s magically forgiven. Stuff like that.

Character interaction is rare and usually pointless. There were only about 5 or 6 story characters, so they have no real excuse. They seemed to be building a nice love-triangle between our MC Ernesto, his brother Claudio and his fiancee Diana, but then they chickened out and paired Ernesto with Valerie at the end, entirely unconvincingly. Boo, hiss.

Story and characters aside, everything else was pretty good. The battle music was okay, the graphics were okay, the character designs were meh, but passable. The battle system needed a little more balancing though. Higher-level enemies dodge like crazy, especially in the post-game chapter. No matter how high your morale is, once the enemies gets to more than one or two levels above you, prepare to miss just about every hit. You can use Phalanx for a guaranteed hit, but then prepare to do piss-all damage.

Magicians decimate your parties with ease. In most games, magicians are strong against other magicians, but in this game they’re weak against everything when it comes to being hit and strong against everything when it comes to dealing damage. And somehow enemy mages always do more damage to you than vice-versa. Some elements seem to be far stronger and more useful than others. Lightning and Earth especially, even though all four elements are supposed to be even. Valhalla Breaks are just evil. Yet somehow the enemy seems to have very good survivability against them lately.

Etc, etc. It needed a bit of tweaking in all regards and doesn’t stand out in any one aspect. If you like SRPGs you won’t regret playing it, but you won’t miss anything if you don’t get it either.

Persona 2 – On hold again (spoilers)

Thanks. I heard you the first 2000 times too.

I held out as long as I could, but the absurdly high encounter rate finally did me in. I’m supposed to visit a couple of temples and take back the crystal skulls, but I just got out of grueling crawls at Mt. Katatsumuri and Caracol. I don’t know how long any of these temples are or if I’ll be any closer to finally, finally finishing this game.

I’ve played a number of dungeon crawlers in the past couple of months (UnchainBlades Rexx, Criminal Girls, WiZman’s World, etc.), and Innocent Sin is easily the most unpleasant of the lot. Piss-poor variety of enemies, piss-poor variety of conversation options, no way to change personas until you finish the dungeon, no way to warp out before you’re done, same old horrible battle music from start to finish… At some point I started to contemplate throwing the PSP at the wall, and that was when I knew I needed a break.

There’s a spell called Estoma that was supposed to help, but it only drives away enemies lower than your party’s level. Since I’ve been spending most of the game 9-12 levels behind the enemies, it does diddly-squat. So back on the shelf with Persona 2 while I play something that has few to no random battles in it. If I never see another attacking screen again, it will be too soon.

Ah, right. Before I forget. Following on from the previous post, I did go to Alaya Shrine and from there to Mt. Iwato, where my party did finally tell me “everything.” As I’d feared, it turned out to be “some FF8-style bullshit about how they all played together as kids but then they all got *gasp* amnesia.” I don’t know why something like that is (rightfully) considered a crappy plot device when Final Fantasy 8 does it, but when Innocent Sin does the same thing, somehow it’s “ZOMG BEST STORY EVER!!!” *spit* Well, whatever. Shit is shit. Come to think of it, it’s around that point that I started to find the game unbearable.

[As promised, I did murder something small and fluffy. Fear of prosecution prevents me from posting the actual victim, but this is a representative shot (contents may offend sensitive viewers). May its soul rest in peace.]

Just in case it wasn’t clear from the game, we’ve prepared this whole dungeon to really hammer the point in.

The thing that made the other dungeon crawlers easier to bear was that the story was usually just a framing device for your dungeon adventures. In Innocent Sin the makers have an actual story they want to tell. They just don’t want to tell it too quickly, so they use the dungeons as a stumbling block to slow things down. “Newsflash, rumors come true! Now why don’t you go into this 3-hour dungeon and mull that over while we think up the next development?” It works about as well as you might expect.

And when I think about it, they don’t really have that much story to tell, so they just stretch each development out until you’re sick of it, then throw something else into the mix.

“Rumors come true, rumors come true!” Example 1, example 2, examples 3-500, okay okay, I get it!

“Dreams are meant to be achieved, not given. Dreams are meant to be achieved, not given.” Example 1, example 2, examples 3-infinity. No, no, you don’t have to go that far, I get it already.

“There’s an arsonist on the loose! There’s an arsonist on the loose!” Example 1, example 2… OKAY I GET IT!

How wonderfully convenient.

“Jun is our friend! Jun is our friend! Jun is our friend! Jun is our friend! Jun is our friend!” AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGGHH, I get it I get it, really I do! Just… enough!

At least it turns out that I was wrong and the story was about all their pasts, not just Tatsuya and Maya’s. Only it’s kinda stupid how much they go on about Jun. I mean, just how good a friend was he if they all forgot about him so easily? Pure total memory wipeout on command.

“Amnesia due to trauma, and the bad guy made us forget” is Maya, Eikichi and Lisa’s flimsy-ass excuse (on the same level as “GFs made us forget” tbh), but what about Tatsuya? He didn’t take part in the “sin” of locking Maya in the shrine that burned down, he doesn’t show any sign of trauma and an early flashback shows that he does remember Jun. In fact, I’m entertaining a pet theory that says he knew everything that was going on from the start and kept quiet just to be a dick. Now there’s a sin if there ever was one.

Anyway, the game is only on hold, not dropped. I’m going to play a couple of other things, do some non-game activities and come back in a couple of weeks to finish this off. I thought of quitting entirely, but apart from Strange Journey, I’ve finished every SMT/spin-off game I’ve played so far, and even in SJ I made it to the last boss, so my gamer’s pride is kinda on the line here. I’ll finish this…someday.

Persona 2 – This is taking forever~ (spoilers)

I thought I’d be done by now, but Persona 2 is longer than I’d thought. I checked the time and I’m 19 hours in, but it feels like 190.

Part of it is my fault for just not having the time, and for spending what little time I got on the theater missions.

This. Cut it out.

Some of it is also just Innocent Sin taking forever to get to the point. And they’ve been doing that thing I hate: “Is she…no, don’t tell me…” “It must be… no, it couldn’t be… could it?” JUST SPIT IT OUT ALREADY, DAMMIT! I hate cryptic hints. If IS were a book or a movie I would have skipped to the end by now.

Not that I’m not enjoying myself or anything, now that the story has finally gotten going. Just finished the Aerospace Museum (with Pegasus Strike taking 415HP per round off the boss’s life, that didn’t take long), about to head off to the Alaya Shrine, where Lisa promises to tell me “everything”. If it turns out to be some FF8-style bullshit about how they all played together as kids but then they all got *gasp* amnesia, I swear I’ll murder something small and fluffy.

In any case, I think the game wasted far too much time in the beginning with Eikichi and Ginko’s stories. As far as I can tell, the bulk of the story revolves around Tatsuya and Maya and whatever relationship they had or didn’t have in the past. The other party members are just bit players, so it’s annoying that I had to spend the first 15 or so hours on them.

SPOILERS

Turns out “dependant” is the bastardized American spelling of “dependent.” What are journalism schools teaching their students these days?

Ginko’s was especially bad because she’s such an idiot. “I don’t want to be an idol, I don’t want to be an idol” but she ended up debuting anyway. And she was supposed to root out information about the Masked Circle in the process, but instead she nearly got taken in by them. I thought it would turn out that she was just pretending to be going along with the whole thing, but she acted genuinely shocked when the producer turned out to be bad. Just how stupid can one be?

Then with her friends she was all like “They’re not really my friends, they’re just using me” but then when the dumb cows get turned into shadowmen, she goes “Oh no, if only I’d believed in them!” If only you’d believed in them, then what? Newsflash, they may be your friends, but they were just using you. Plus! On top of all her other sins, she also helped the bad guys get one step closer to their evil goal by singing their “foreign song.” Girl, iz you crazy? Guess what they say about dumb blondes was true all along.

SPOILERS OVER

Anyway, so far so good. I think I finally “paid my dues” by slogging through the dross, so soon I should be rewarded with that “wonderful story” that everyone keeps going on about. To be honest I care a lot when stories turn out to be bad but otherwise *shrug*. Just don’t piss me off in the end, that’s all I ask.

Back to Persona 2

Back to my roots~ Back to my roo-woo-woo-woo-woots~ It’s time to go back to… wait, where was I going again?

I totally forgot what I was supposed to do after beating the headmaster, and I didn’t want to check a FAQ. So I just spent several hours playing poker in the casino and doing a sidequest in the movie theater.

The sidequest was a little on the long drawn-out side, but the Demon Headmaster-like scenario was several shades more interesting than what’s currently going on in the game. I’m getting dizzy trying to keep up with all the rumors in Persona 2‘s main story, plus all that whining about which school badmouthed which is  childish and trivial beyond words. I’ll go back and play “part two” of the sidequest once I clear the dungeon I’m currently in.

The quest confirmed one thing for me though: Innocent Sin is the easiest jRPG ever made. Not the easiest Persona, not the easiest Atlus game. It’s the easiest RPG on Planet Earth. Ar Tonelico and Rhapsody DS are like The 7th Saga compared to this game. I’d challenge you to find an easier game, but then the universe would explode and I’d never be able to get this done.

In what other RPG can you go into a dungeon at level 6 armed only with your starting armor and personae, with 6 medicines and 1 antidote to your name, and curb-stomp enemies 3 or 4 times your level wit da greatest of ease? On the Hard setting, no less? Sure I was using the shockingly overpowered fusion spells, but in a normal RPG I wouldn’t even survive long enough to get one of those off. In IS, when an enemy manages to hit me for 10 damage I’m like “Whoa, he’s a strong one,” it’s that bad.

I’m kinda happy about this though, since it means I won’t have to grind. I just have to look into enemy repelling items so I can focus on where the story is going/not going. See you all in a couple of days.