Nora to Toki no Koubou – True Ending

I went back and read over the last post I made about Nora. It wasn’t exactly inaccurate, but I realized I’d done the equivalent of calling a girl “Gorgeous” and then quickly adding, “But her nose is too big, and her teeth are a bit crooked, and her face is kinda spotty, and she smells funny, and OMG, that hair!…” etc. By the end of it nobody remembers I said she was beautiful in the first place.

So in the interest of fairness I wanted my very final post about Nora to Toki no Koubou to be a little more upbeat, which is why I went back and did a final run that netted me the true ending. The playthroughs really do all feel the same, but I mixed things up by trying a few recipes (mainly the ‘kerari’ wines) that I hadn’t made in previous rounds. This bumped my alchemy level up to level 18 and qualified me for the true ending.

Said true ending is identical to the normal one until the part where you fix the statue. This time Nora succeeds in fixing it. However she was supposed to keep her powers secret, so she assumes she’s failed her training, even though the townspeople kindly try to pretend they didn’t see anything. That’s where Keke steps in and informs us all that the true purpose of the training was to learn to trust people and be trusted, so Nora has passed after all. *cough* BULLSHIT *cough* And everything works out in the end. Yeah, that totally wasn’t worth the effort, thought at least this round only took 6 hours.

Back to my initial point, I went over my criticisms in the previous post, and to be honest, most of them were fair.The only thing I’d like to take back is the replay value part, because Nora to Toki no Koubou is no different from the other DS Atelier games in that respect. Sure, every run of Nora feels the same. If you want to avoid the worst endings you have to play nice with the townspeople and you have to please Aira, which severely limits your freedom to just explore or fool around. Without getting lucky or checking a FAQ, the player has no way of knowing that either befriending Aira or traveling constantly with one adventurer are the only ways to avoid a bad ending. Anything and everything else you do makes absolutely no difference.

Plus the game feels really short. Just when you’re starting to get into the groove of things, it ends. I’m going to liken this to a completely unrelated game called Recettear. In that game you can go sell things in a store, go adventuring, fuse items, make friends in town, etc., but the first few weeks are consumed by a hectic debt repayment program that makes everything about money, money, money. It’s only after you pass this that you get the freedom to either restart the game with your money and items or continue to play forever – which is the only time you’ll have the freedom to explore, fuse and sell at leisure. If you’ve played Recettear, imagine a Recettear where the game ended automatically after repaying your debt and you’ll know exactly what I’m complaining about (and if you haven’t you should totally try it).

BUT in spite of all that, I played it three times in a row, and that’s the same number of times I’ve played Ateliers Lise, Annie and Lina. So for better or worse, it has the same amount of replayability as the other games do, and shouldn’t be knocked down solely for that.

Another thing I said was that I wouldn’t be looking back fondly on the game in years to come, but there’s no way for me to judge that accurately until those years have passed, so I take that particular line back as well.

All the other things I wrote still apply, but some are a little on the petty side. For example, only being able to save in your room and only being able to sell specific items to specific places. It’s really inconvenient, but hardly a deal breaker. The messy room was irritating, but I resolved that in my final run by putting almost all the tools upstairs and doing my alchemy from the main station. I’m used to messy rooms from Shepherd’s Crossing 2 anyway.

Everything else I wrote? Yeah, it still holds. The items need better sorting. The characters are cliched. The bad ends are unforgivable. I hate being forced to play a certain way every time. Time moves too fast when foraging. New Game+ is more like Same Old Game+. However a sequel that fixes these things and adds a story worth caring about should be a real treat to play. With a little plastic surgery, that “gorgeous” girl will be Miss World in no time.

Arms’ Heart review (spoilers)

I’ve been struggling to finish Arms’ Heart for months. After 18 hours and 45 minutes the last shreds of my patience finally gave out in the final dungeon. It’s always been pretty close to bad, with a sophomoric storyline, tedious, repetitive gameplay and an insanely high encounter rate. But for 18 hours I could live with it, mainly because it’s rather easy to keep going once you start, and I wanted to find out where things were going. Once all the insulting final plot twists were revealed and I was thrown into the psychedelic final dungeon it was time to call it a day.

Story: Jena, the protagonist, was once part of a gang called the Lambs of Johan. The members of this group have had their hearts replaced with mechanical contraptions that give them great power, hence the title “Arms’ Heart.” At the start of the story Jena has abandoned the Lambs, taking with him a homunculus under development. The rest of the game involves him trying to raise the creature so he can get a wish granted when it’s fully grown, while defeating the other Lambs that come after him.

Eventually we find out what he wants to wish for – his mom gave him her heart and died, and he wants it back. We also find out what the shadow leader of the Lambs of Johan is trying to take over the country of Moldaria, and even though Jena put a kink in his ambitions by stealing the homunculus, he still got another power up and is now hiding out in some messed up dimension. That’s where I was when the random battles and lack of progress got too much for me. I’m deliberately spoiling the story to save you the trouble of playing this game. You can thank me later.

Graphics, Music: Nothing interesting. The character designs are pretty blah, though there were some seriously interesting enemy designs in there. Tentacled teacups, pink bats with ribbons, decomposing crocodiles, Hitler zombies… Some of them were really hard to look at, but I can’t fault them for creativity.

Battles take place from a first-person perspective and neither enemy nor ally attacks are ever animated. You just see whooshes and lights and sparkles. There are no animated cutscenes or FMVs either. The game is set in a crapsack world after several years of war, the color palette is dark, bleak and dreary, with a heavy emphasis on yellow, black and dark blue. I wish I could comment on the music, but I spent most of the game in battle so I only remember the battle theme. There was no voice acting that I can recall.

Characters: Your party members (on the right), your former fellow lambs and a few NPCs make up the cast of Arms’ Heart. Jena is the Naruto cosplayer with the heavy make up. Odette is a mole-turned-ally who naturally falls in love with Jena, just because. The drag queen lookalike is Dread, the local blacksmith, and the red-haired brat is his daughter Priscilla. Later on you’ll find out that Priscilla is the daughter of Medina, the long-lost princess of Moldaria and Dread’s wife. This is the kind of development the Japanese call もうどうでもいい, i.e.  nobody cares at this point in time.

I can’t call the cast compelling. Jena is a little more personable than his appearance suggests and might even fit well in in a better game, but his character development is random and unconvincing. Arms’ Heart also suffers from the same issue Saigo no Yakusoku did, in that most of the main players know each other well already, so the player is kept at arm’s length in all their relations and interactions. You’re only welcome to the party when it’s time to fight.

Gameplay: *sigh* This is going to be long, because a full 14 of those 18 hours was most likely spent fighting or running around dungeons. I’m not exaggerating! I’ve played a lot of RPGs over the last 15 years or so, and Arms’ Heart has hands down the worst encounter rate I have ever come across! People talking about terrible encounter rates say stuff like “a battle every three steps” but this time it’s actually true. I swear, there is LITERALLY a battle every three to five steps in Arms’ Heart. One two three *smash*, one two three *smash* You can almost never walk across the screen without *smash* getting *smash* drawn into *smash* yet another *smash* battle. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard the developers were sending a “You are a masochistic idiot” medal to anyone who could prove they actually finished this game.

Uhh, anyway, so the gameplay itself. It’s a dungeon crawler. The crawling is done in a third-person view, but the battles take place from a first person perspective with static enemies, like I mentioned above. The only thing unique about Arms’ Heart is the Howling Gear battle mechanic, where you have to align a spinning gauge on a gear with little blue baubles. Basically the white slice in the red square on the right has to meet the blue thing in the blue square to get net you a hit. It’s all a matter of timing. If you’re good you can time it so the little red sliver hits it instead, getting a Strike instead of a Hit.

Well I guess it’s not that unique, since I saw something similar in Shadow Hearts, which I played briefly on the PS2 and never finished. IIRC I got to Stonehenge and there was some underground puzzle I had to do and I just never got around to it. Some people have touted Arms’ Heart as a spiritual successor to the Shadow Hearts’ series, but I don’t know the series well enough to state whether that’s true or not. In any case every sensible successor should know which features to carry forward and which to quietly abandon. Progress, people, progress.

Here’s exactly why the Howling Gear is such a bad idea. No, it’s not because it’s hard to get hits off it, it’s actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. The problem is that it takes 5 seconds at the start of every character’s turn (not even every battle) for the Howling Gear to fire up, another couple of seconds enter your hits, a little pause if you either miss or get all strikes, then several more seconds to actually carry out the attack. Result: every turn in every battle that happens every three steps is slow, awkward and jerky. 14 hours of slow, jerky battles. Wanna escape from battle instead? Yah well, you have to use the Howling Gear for that too, and even three strikes will only get you a 75% chance at best. By the end of the game the only thing howling was me.

Tentacled teacups!Some gamers might think this sort of thing is good, that a stimulating, challenging battle system is just what they’re looking for. But here’s the thing, it’s not stimulating or challenging at all. In fact, once you get attacks that hit all enemies, it’s pathetically easy. Arms’ Heart ladles out the EXP in spades, so you’ll be leveling up like crazy, meaning you can throw out those magic attacks at will.

There’s also a forging system of sorts, but it’s not that practical until you’re near the end, so I won’t go into it. Still, in spite of all my complaining I did manage to make it almost to the end. I guess I’ll admit the dungeon exploration wasn’t that bad. And the ease of the battle system made the time pass without me really noticing it. If only it wasn’t for DAT ENCOUNTER RATE and DAT HOWLING GEAR and if only the story had gone somewhere sensible in the end instead of some character that had only shown up once suddenly going “It was me all along!” I might be singing a different tune right now.

Right-o, I think I’ve covered just about everything in this game. I’m starting to think I will finish it one day, just not any time soon. Now to try and finish something else. I keep starting new games and I really need to break out of that cycle.

Nora to Toki no Koubou – Finished!

Where “Finished!” means I’ve played all I’m going to play of Nora to Toki no Koubou. I got another ending this time, the normal ending. I was trying to get Ruttz’s ending, which involves killing two dragons, but I guess I started it so late that I was already locked out of it by the time I finally defeated the second dragon.

It took me three attempts to defeat the blighted creature, but with a bit of luck and a lot of healing items I was able to power my way through. Even with stacked defense buffs Nora still got herself killed on the third turn or so, but Karuna stayed alive and kept pounding him with her Fighting Spirit attack that hits for x3. Ruttz played healer and attacked occasionally. I also discovered that the dragon could be poisoned, but I didn’t have any strong poison items so that didn’t help.

The Normal ending starts out like the Witch Hunt bad ending, but you get the choice to stay and explain yourself instead of running away. Your friends (except Octaja, Karuna and Kitt) will cover for you, and the shopkeepers and Aira will come to your defense. In the end you’ll attempt to fix the Pauly statue that got broken and fail, but the attempt will cheer Timos up a little bit and you’ll be able to stay and complete your training. Better than being chased out with torches and pitchforks, I suppose.

Now that that’s over with, I think I’m done here. Character endings might be nice, but I’d probably only be able to do maximum two per playthrough. With 8 possible character endings, that’s at least 4 near-identical runs, blargh.

I also found out from a FAQ that the ending I got before was not the bad ending but in fact the ‘Witch Hunt’ ending. There’s a real bad ending as well, gotten by being friendly with Aira but not doing anything else. To get the ‘True’ ending, I have to see all of Aira’s events, max my friendship with the townspeople and have Lv. 18 or more skill in time alchemy. Having Alchemy Lv. 18 without maxed friendship will give you the ‘Traveler’ ending, said the FAQ. I only had level 16, and my last save is only 7 days before the end so yeah, I’m out. The ‘True’ ending sounds similar to the Normal ending, only you get to fix the Pauly statue, which reveals your background to the townspeople, etc etc. Whatevs.

Final thoughts about Nora to Toki no Koubou? It’s good. I don’t feel lied to or disappointed by the hype now that it’s finally out. It gave as good as it promised, it just didn’t go above and beyond that. The music fits the mood and is relaxing, the character designs, while a little too “cutesy” are fine, the game satisfied my usual craving for bright colors, I got to synthesize lots of items, the random battles were tough but rewarding, etc, etc.

Battling was especially good, except for the part where they sometimes won’t let you run away. Your 9 party members all have different attacks, different things they do well or do poorly – though I doubt there’s a better party than Nora, Karuna and Ruttz. Enemy drops are plentiful, and leveling becomes a cinch once you use the leveling up and leveling down items on a monster, (a fact I discovered only just now by reading a FAQ. Darn, wish I’d thought of it earlier) you get to buy or trade for all kinds of weapons and armor and you can create a wealth of battle items: bombs, healing items, buffs, status items and more. I found plenty to like in this game.

Most of the things I didn’t like are niggling little issues that could be fixed in a sequel to make a fantastic game.

– Time passes too quickly when you’re foraging. Every single item you grab makes a whole day pass. A whole day to grab a bunch of flowers? I feel the hand of Success behind this one. At least time doesn’t pass when you go from town to town, strangely enough.

– You can only save and load in your room. Whut?

– You can only sell and buy specific items from specific places. Some items can’t be sold at all, which is a PITA when you’re trying to liquidate your assets to prepare for the next playthrough. Some item exchange can be done, but it’s highly limited.

– Your room and your garden tend to get very messy and hard to organize. You could move tools and furniture with the L/R and direction keys, but the room is so small it gets cluttered regardless. I also felt that the gardening and pet-keeping concept was under-developed and that far more could have been done with it.

– There was no proper item sorting. If you wanted to see only items of a particular type, e.g. cloth, you had to go stand in front of the sewing kit. If you want to see only food, you have to go stand in front of the cooking range, etc. Again, a little more organization would have gone a long way.

– The number of items you can hold at one time is severely limited unless you buy other items to raise the limit.

– The lack of success rates in synthesis was a bit of a letdown, especially for an Atelier veteran like me. So long as you have the proper ingredients, there’s no way you can fail, even at the most complex jobs. You have a time alchemist ranking that goes up as you make more things. It affects a number of things (recipes sold, chrono fluids used, certain endings) but has no effect on your success rate.

– Neither the story nor the designs nor the characters are particularly memorable. It’s good for a playthrough or two, but this isn’t a game I’ll be pining for in a couple of years.

– There aren’t enough endings to satisfy different kinds of gamers. Most Atelier games at least have Hero endings for beating all the bosses or a special ending for making a philosophers’ stone and more. Here the first 5 endings need very similar requirements to obtain so you’ll be doing the same thing on each run regardless of which ending you’re aiming for. Not good enough.

– DAT BAD END. It’s really unfair.

– The carryovers to New Game+ are almost non-existent. I could understand if they chose to do away with carryovers altogether, but once you’re doing them at least be a little more generous. As it is all you can take is money, your pets and your unlocked CGs. You can’t even keep meaningless little things like your tools or the wallpaper you bought. Throw me a bone here, Atlus.

– The stingy carryovers and lack of ending variety make for low replay value. Since you’re essentially starting from scratch every single time, you’re basically playing the exact same game over and over again. Oh, joy.

So really, just a few things hold Nora to Toki no Koubou back from being great. It’s better than Atelier Lise or Atelier Annie, at least. Lina >>>>> Nora >> Annie > Lise. Something like that. I don’t usually do number ratings but I’d give Nora a solid 3 or 3.5 over 5.

Next time, I really  need to finish either Persona or Arms’ Heart.

Nora to Toki no Koubou – Bad end

Tch. Finished my first run of Nora to Toki no Koubou yesterday at the 9 hour mark. Got an ending where the townspeople run Nora out of town because they blame her for a storm that wrecked the place. Ungrateful wretches, after all the quests I’ve done for them. Since Nora was run out of her hut and didn’t complete her training, she can’t become a time mage, and the game states that neither she nor her friends were ever heard from again.

Hmm. That is pretty bad, as far as endings go. Normally I’m used to getting a bad end on my first FAQ-less attempt at this sort of game (in fact I got three bad endings in a row in Atelier Lise and never did pay off my debt), but somehow this one really got my goat. The whole premise is just so unreasonable. Nora looks nothing like the so-called Mist Witch, she’s never done anything remotely harmful and she’s lived in peace with the townspeople for 2 and a half years, then all of a sudden she’s to blame for a random storm? That’s so unfair.

I’ve started another playthrough which I’ll probably finish, but I don’t like that aspect of the game. I’m thinking I won’t even bother trying to chat up the townspeople, I’ll just hole myself up in my studio and work on alchemy all game long. Screw good endings, screw making nice with the plebs, screw everything else, I’ll just do what I got this game to do.

Hanging around the homestead is fun anyway. Apart from synthesis you get to decorate the place with new walls and floors, you can mature cheeses and hang meat and fish out to dry and plant seeds in your garden. Oh! And when I started the second run, Koko sold me a duck that looks exactly like Brammy from Shepherd’s Crossing. Heck, it doesn’t just look like him, it is him. He’s even called Brammy! I told you I was getting Shepherd’s Crossing vibes from this game. So Success was involved huh? So that’s why your seeds go all over the place in the garden and your house is so messy and you can accidentally end up uprooting crops without meaning to, etc etc. Even some of the items look straight out of SC, especially the wooden fence, hay and the cheese. Heheh, that makes me happy. My love for this game went up +5 when I realized that, but I’m still mad about the ending.

I need to buckle down and finish Persona and some other games, though. I’m slipping yet again into my habit of starting new games before finishing old ones, and right now I have about 4 90%-complete games waiting for my attention. I might delay the completion of this second playthrough of Nora to Toki no Koubou until at least one of them is done.

Nora to Toki no Koubou – First few hours

tl;dr: I love it. So far.

I’m 4 hour 59 minutes in, and it’s been a great ride so far. I just reached October of the 2nd year and the game lasts 3 years so I should be finishing up my first playthrough pretty quickly. I’m not using any kind of FAQ or guide yet, so we’ll see what kind of ending I get.

Nora to Toki no Koubou (Nora and the Time Studio) is about Nora Brandor, an apprentice time mage/alchemist, who has to live and work in a little forest hut for three years as part of her training. Somehow the people in a neighboring town mistake her for the Mist Witch that tormented them years ago, so in addition to her training she also has to carry out quests to increase their trust in her while preventing anyone from finding out what she really is.

That’s pretty much it for the story. There was a lot of “go here and do that” in the first few months, and there are certain items you have to make to progress (and a pesky dragon I still can’t beat) but apart from that the game is fairly non-linear. Whether you want to spend your time holed up in the studio, go out there and forage or go to town and do quests all year round is entirely up to you. I’ve been keeping a balance between the three so far, with an emphasis on synthesis. I’m not sure what’s carried over into the next game so I’ll stock up on money and items in the last year.

Being a time alchemist sounds complicated, but it boils down to using the fast-forward or rewind button on an item. You can turn a fruit back into a flower and the flower back into a seed, you can turn salted fish into dried fish, you can speed-age cheese, etc. It’s pretty interesting, but not exactly “zomg best innovation evar” material. Which is perfectly fine with me. I like gameplay that’s simple and fun without being stale and unoriginal.

Time alchemy isn’t the only form of synthesis though. There’s also “dismantling”, where you split an item into smaller parts (e.g. you split a hunk of meat into ‘delicious meat’ and ‘bone’) and processing, which is the usual synthesis we’re all familiar with. As with most other Atelier games (yes I know it’s not an actually an Atelier game, but it plays almost exactly like one) you have to buy tons of books and tools to make all the things you want to. In fact my only (tiny) beef with this game is that you have to place all the tools and items personally, which makes my room messy and leads to uncomfortable Shepherd’s Crossing flashbacks.

Those are my first impressions anyway, subject to change. The only cloud on the horizon is that I’m a little worried I probably won’t be able to do many replays because the story and characters are weak. Yah okay, the townspeople think Nora is a witch, but I already know she’s not one and I don’t really care about proving them wrong.

Then there’s the little mystery about what really happened between the Mist Witch and the hero Pauly who supposedly vanquished her, but again, ehhh, I dunno. And this might be a bit of a spoiler but… I’ve got this mysterious character named Mellow who has amnesia and doesn’t seem to eat. You think she could have something to do with the witch and hero? Gee, I wonder. Nah, actually I don’t. I don’t really care one way or another.

The characters are okay, but they’re all types I’ve seen before in other games. Your tiny adviser, the young adventurer who wants to make it big, the little girl who’s trying to prove herself, the beautiful and extremely strong swordswoman, the ditzy amnesiac, I’ve seen them all before somewhere.

Of course all that is just going to affect the replay value, but I haven’t even played it completely once, so it’s a little early for me to worry about that sort of thing. “Become the best X you can be within XX years” has been a staple of the Atelier series for years and I’ve always enjoyed the freedom that gave me. It should be no different this time round, as long as they have enough endings to account for different playing styles. I picked this game up for the alchemy anyway, and there’s a lot I still haven’t made so I’m in very good spirits right now. 😀

Now I just have to figure out how to beat that dragon at the springs and then my game can move forward again. Battles in Nora to Toki no Koubou are the usual 3×3 turn-based affairs Atelier games always use, but the enemies hit HARD and your HP is low so you can’t relax too much. That’s another plus, btw. I complain when games are too hard, but I don’t like it when they’re too easy either. With the right equipment, synthesized items and a little training I should be able to get the dragon before the game is out. I might need to revise my party a bit as well. I was using Nora, Keke and …I forgot his name. The red-haired guy who wants to make it big. I’m going to switch them out for Karuna and either Mellow or Sirkka ‘cos I need more attack and more magic. I’ll report back once I’ve beaten the darned thing.