Hero’s Saga Laevatein Tactics (1)

I’m at it again. SRPG No. 2893. I don’t know what it is about me and SRPGs, but no matter how badly they treat me I keep coming back for more.

I’m supposed to be finishing up WiZman’s World right about now so I can put 2011’s games behind me. Unfortunately I came down with a case of Last Dungeon Syndrome and can’t bring myself to continue, which is where this new game comes in.

Hero’s Saga Laevatein Tactics is as generic as generic SRPGS come. The main character is a prince of a small country threatened by an empire, he wields a sword, there are mysterious legendary weapons, the Empire has super-powerful (in name only) generals, you recruit NPCs as you go, storyline characters join you from time to time, etc etc.

The story: some undead attack the hero’s friend. Some mysterious girl gives him a sword that can beat them. The evil Empire wants the sword. The hero decides that not only is he not going to hand it over, but he’s also going slash and burn his way to the Empire’s capital and give them what’s for. Bloodthirsty little bugger. And that’s how far I’ve gotten.

The only thing slightly unusual about the story is that it seems to be based on real-life Spain (Valencia) and France (Galia). This leads to the heroes and villains throwing gratuitous French and Spanish around like a lost episode of ‘Allo ‘Allo: hermano, señor, merde (my understanding is that ‘merde’ is considered extremely rude in French, but luckily no one at the ESRB can speak French), diable, that sort of thing. Right now it’s all Valencia vs. Galia, but the threat of the undead hasn’t been addressed yet, so I’m sure they’ll band together to take down the real bad guys before too long.

Gameplay-wise, while you can see your characters as individuals on the map, once you get into battle every “hero” has troops under them that help with attacking and defending. Archaic Sealed Heat tried to implement a similar thing, but the game itself was such a cluster**** that I never got deep into the system.

There’s the normal Attack and Defend, then there’s Charge, a high-powered low accuracy volley, and Phalanx, which is a low-powered attack that never misses and raises accuracy. Some troops may also have the Defend and Evade command, depending on their classes. I’m still exploring the advantages and disadvantages of each class. Magic-users are the strongest so far, but very frail. Melee units are meh. Archers are the worst ever. This is the first tactics game I’ve ever played where the archer class was the most useless, so that’s new. Changing class is as simple as changing weapons, so I’ll keep experimenting for a while.

Hero’s Saga also has bases scattered over the map that you can take control of. It’s a bit like in Advance Wars, but without that charming little ‘boing-boing’ thing they do. Standing on top of one of these refills your life and adds troops if you’re missing any. Characters in range also gain a boost to their Morale, which (allegedly) improves their accuracy.

As of 9:38h in, there are four main things that are bothering me about this game.

1. The enemies are way too passive. Most of them won’t move unless you come into range, and sometimes not even then.

2. 99% of all stages have the same “Eradicate enemy or take over castle” goal as their victory condition. Taking over the castle is almost impossible without first eradicating the enemy anyway.

3. You can only take 6 allies max into battle. I’ve got so many good characters and interesting weapons I want to try out but the game won’t give me the chance.

4. Valhalla Gauge attacks (this game’s equivalent of limit breaks) are too broken. One hit will wipe out most parties or leave them barely alive. It’s painful when they do it to you and dull when you do it to them.

On the plus side:

1. All NPCs have their own little bios, a nice touch.

2. Battles don’t take too long. Maps aren’t that big and don’t take that long to cross

3. Characters have skills and innate talents that range from moderately useful to WTF BROKEN. Makes a lot of difference when putting together a party.

4. Not too much blathering about morality. As far as I can tell both sides are wrong and Might makes Right. I hope it stays that way.

5. I appreciate attempts to shake up the same old SRPG formula. Something tells me I’m going to tire of watching the animations soon, but for now I’m enjoying myself.

I’m sure a couple more plusses and minuses will pop up before it’s over. An above average game so far.

Virtual Villagers DS – Meh

Your villagers look nothing like these guys

Since Konami won’t release another Lost in Blue game, I’ve been forced to look for acceptable substitutes. Candidate number one: Virtual Villagers: A New Home for the Nintendo DS.

A group of villagers from an island destroyed by a volcano settle on a new island. It’s up to you to make sure they can survive.

Controls are usually done via the touchscreen+stylus. Drag and drop villagers next to an item and they’ll carry out a related action. E.g. drop them next to the ocean and they’ll start fishing. Drop them next to a hut that needs repair and they’ll start fixing it. And drop a male and female on top of each other (under the right conditions) and they’ll head off to a hut to make babies.

Virtual Villagers DS is a simple game with two major flaws that made me quit after two days. The first one is its very simplicity. There simply aren’t that many actions your characters can take. Fish, farm, build, research, breed, worship, take care of kids, that’s pretty much it. While they require “food”, they don’t actually eat or sleep.

That lying game cover on the left shows a guy offering a girl a fish. That doesn’t happen. It shows a boy lighting a fire. That hasn’t happened in my game so far. Nobody has picked up a monkey either. Nobody’s blonde or red-haired or tanned either. About the only accurate thing in that picture is the woman carrying a basket of berries. That’s what my villagers have subsisted on for 53 years: berries and fish. Balanced nutrition? Wot dat?

Almost all the things you’d need to worry about on a desert island are ignored in this game.

A Safe source of water? Your villagers don’t drink.

A Balanced diet? Safe sources of food? Like I said, berries and fish and later bananas. All presumably eaten raw.

Shelter? They build huts, but they don’t live in them, even in bad weather. Sunstroke? Wot dat?

Fire? Light? They hang around outside even through the middle of the night. Presumably they can see in the dark.

Dangerous animals? None.

Sanitation? Nobody poops or pees. Or showers, for that matter.

Inbreeding? You start out with 6 villagers. It’s a necessary evil. They’re prudish enough not to mate before age 18, but fathers, mothers, brothers, uncles, everything that moves is fair game.

Seriously, my villagers have got things good. Which is good for them and bad for me, because they’re not very exciting to manage.

The second, and main flaw of the game is the time lapse system coupled with the sheer stupidity of the AI. Building huts, making babies, researching technology all takes so long that it’s pointless to just sit there and watch them. Since time passes even when the game is turned off, in an ideal world you could set everyone a task, leave for a bit and come back to find them completed.

That’s in the ideal world. On Planet Earth, when you turn Virtual Villagers on the next morning, you’re far more likely discover half your villagers dead and the other half deadly sick. Anyone who isn’t sick will either be goofing off or doing a task you never asked them to do. Even if you train a couple of healers, they’ll just stand by and let the others die. Builders will hang around while the huts fall into disrepair. Men and women will laze about when they should be breeding. So that’s where all the challenge went: keeping your moronic populace from dying of idiotus nobrainus syndrome.

The killing blow for me was the arbitrary set of “puzzles” you had to solve to progress. If “progress” is indeed the word. For one of them, I needed an expert builder to knock down a door so I could explore the rest of the island. Btw, the game never tells you this. You have to drag characters of various occupations all over the island until somebody triggers something somehow. Or, more sensibly, read a FAQ. So I set my adept builder to work on a hut, turned the game off, and then I came back he’d reached expert builder and died almost immediately after just to spite me.

Anyway, I stuck it out for a little longer. Got that door open eventually, explored a bit, got 16 villagers now, but all the fun is gone. In fact it was never there to begin with, and I was just deceiving myself. I have a lot of other games to play this year, and there are some great games coming out on PSP in the next few weeks (Suikoden Hyakunen, Atelier Elkrone, Tales of the Heroes, Shining Blade) so I can’t afford to waste time here. Good luck on the island, folks!

Hayate no Gotoku: Boku ga Romeo de, Romeo ga Boku de (2)

Even monkeys fall from trees. And even normally careful gamers forget to keep backup saves and accidentally overwrite precious New Game+ data with an actual new game save.

In most games this wouldn’t be a problem because each route would be (mostly) separate. But in Hayate no Gotoku: Boku ga Romeo de, Romeo ga Boku de, the only way to unlock Maria as a romantic partner is to clear all the other girls. No cleared save data = No Maria. No Maria = No point in continuing. And I just had Isumi to go before getting her, what a pity.

On to the next game!

 

Gokujou!! Mecha Mote Iinchou: Mecha Mote Days, Hajimemasu wa! review

Konami is the company responsible for some of my favorite games on the DS: Tokimemo GS 1-3, Lost in Blue 1-3 (moaaarr), and more. However even monkeys fall from trees, as the Japanese saying goes. And even good companies make bad games every once in a while. It’s when it’s every time that it becomes a problem (*cough* Nippon Ichi *cough*).

That being the case, I see no need to go on at length about Gokujou!! Mecha Mote Iinchou, a dress up game based on the popular shoujo manga/anime of the same name. It’s aimed at pre- and early teen girls, and I’m old enough to have kids that fit that description, so I’m not even the target demographic in the first place.

Plus the general rule of anime-based games is that they’re not for people who aren’t fans of the original. I couldn’t be bothered to check out the show, and even if I had I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it. It’s only natural that I couldn’t follow along, then.

The game: Your character is the class rep, and at the end of the year there’s a beauty contest of sorts for class reps. Your job is to shape her up over the course of the year so she can win that competition. I’ve been playing this on and off since around August, waiting for the big payoff, but when I think of all the other games I could be playing instead, it’s hard to justify spending time on this silliness. *toss*

It could have been good, if the game had given you a certain amount of freedom to shape your character as you saw fit. Since what we got in the end is a kiddy, pedestrian affair where you spend 90% of your time playing mini-games and listening to heavy-handed beauty lectures from your so-called rival while trying to fulfill easy monthly objectives, it’s barely even worth writing about.

A typical month goes like this: you have a trip to the beach planned. You go to school in the mornings (nothing much happens there). You do a few mini-games to earn cash, buy some beach-appropriate clothes, everyone gushes over how lovely you look, the end. Repeat with a different challenge the next month. If the graphics were any good, maaaaybe dressing up the main character would have been fun, but since everything is jagged,small and garishly colored, and the outfit designs are uniformly hideous… *toss*.

The description of the anime also says something about a “bad boy trio” your character has to deal with, but either they don’t exist in the game or they were all given lobotomies, because everyone fawns slavishly over you no matter what you do or wear. Your rival wants to, nay, insists on helping you achieve your goals every month, so you don’t even have the joy of sticking it to the usual snooty rival.

Summary: Good premise poorly executed. Story only fans care about. Dull gameplay. No autonomy. Servile characters. Awful graphics.

Conclusion: Bad game. Avoid like cancer. If you want to play a dress-up game on the DS, try something like the Oshare Princess games instead.

Hayate no Gotoku: Boku ga Romeo de, Romeo ga Boku de (1)

It’s been a while since my DS saw any action. And I’m a little disgusted with my PSP after that Blade Dancer experience, so for a change of mood I decided to play something lighter and funnier.

Hayate no Gotoku – Boku ga Romeo de, Romeo ga Boku de is the first of three handheld games based on a shonen manga about a debt-ridden butler named Ayasaki Hayate. If you haven’t read it, I’m in two minds as to whether to recommend it or not. On one hand it’s a very funny, charming series with a great cast of characters, but on the other hand the story hasn’t gone anywhere in ages and even I have stopped reading it, so… Eh. The game is for fans only, so if you don’t know the series you can skip the rest of this post.

Since this game came out in 2007 before anything really earth-shattering happened in the manga (Greece arc, A-tan), it still has that silly, gag-filled atmosphere that drew me in in the first place. As such Romeo ga Boku is the kind of story that would work well as a filler episode in the anime. Hakuo Academy is going to stage a play, and one way or another Hayate is going to be cast as one of the leads together with one of  his many, many love interests. You have your choice of Nagi, Hinagiku, Ayumu, Sakuya, Isumi, Maria and a “secret character” (I’ll let you find out who that is).

The game is a visual novel 95% of the time, with the occasional save break that allows you to play mini-games to earn Pathos points. Pathos points can be used to unlock special outfits for the girls and also to unlock alternative answer choices during the main game. Apart from that you pick your girl, watch the scenes play out, pick an answer when given the option, hope you get a bad ending because those are hilarious and generally just make your way to the end of the game. Along the way you will also unlock voice clips and CGs that unfortunately I can’t show you because unlike the PSP, the DS does not have a screenshot plugin (I stole these ones from the internet).

Now then, although I normally dislike visual novels, the fact that the game features characters I already know and like, and the fact that each route is short and frequently funny has lead to me pouring more effort into this than I normally do with this kind of game. Right now I’ve gotten Nagi, Hinagiku and Ayumu’s endings. I just started Sakuya’s route and I’m kinda regretting it because I don’t like her much. But after her I’ll get Isumi, then finally Maria.

Hinagiku: Her play is “Snow White” and nothing much happens on her route until the end, where you have to battle your way up an RPG-style tower to rescue a puppy. She spends the whole play agonizing over what will happen during the kissing scene at the end, but then she panics so much that she sits up before Hayate can kiss her and the play ends there. Bummer. Hinagiku is as twitchy as ever, so her route has quite a few bad endings. That’s all part of the fun, of course.

Ayumu: She’s boring, so her route is boring too. At least she only has one Bad End. Her play is “Romeo and Juliet.” The “climax” of her story occurs when her father spots her practicing in the park at night with Hayate and sets his zombie coworkers on them. You might be wondering how Ayumu got to star in a Hakuo Academy play when she doesn’t even attend that school… well, don’t sweat the small stuff.

Yes, elephantiasis is a horrible disease.

Nagi: The most romantic of the three routes so far, because a magical statue actively tries to bring them together. Nagi’s play is “Cinderella.” Or more like Cinderella mixed with Dance Dance Revolution mixed with Fist of the North Star. Come on, it’s Nagi. The crisis on her route involves Nagi being kidnapped and held for ransom by the same guys that tried to hijack Sakuya’s ship way back when.

It’s been a while since I saw Nagi’s old mansion and bedroom, so this route was a nice trip down memory lane. Speaking of Nagi and her mansion, the realization Hayate would be a prick to end up with anyone else but the girl who loved him enough to throw away her zillion-dollar fortune is part of the reason why I stopped reading the manga. Foregone conclusions are no fun at all.

So that’s how far I’ve gotten. Graphically and musically this game isn’t much to write home about, but it’s cute and it’s funny and it helps pass the time, so that’s good enough for me. I am getting a leeetle bit tired though, especially of the “Tiger’s Den” scenes where Hayate has to try desperately to please these overly-sensitive girls. I might take a little break before continuing with the rest of the characters.