Jeanne d’Arc limitations (spoilers)

You knew it was coming. Better games have been raked over the coals, so Jeanne D’Arc isn’t getting off so easy. Sure I enjoyed it and all, but it’s got a lot of flaws that will need to be fixed if Level-5 ever plans to dip into the tactical RPG well again. Some of the things other people complain about like turn limits and long cutscenes didn’t bother me, but plenty of other things did.

1. Jeanne is annoying. Seriously. Yell, whine, mope, yell, whine, mope, yell, whine, mope, doesn’t she get tired? Even that fetching piece of black “armor” that shows off her oh-so-nice shoulders as she angsts yet again didn’t help.

2. Characters die or leave your party at inopportune times. That’s okay with me. No, really. I’m not mad or anything that I had to raise Jean several levels after Gilles up and took off or anything. But I am mad that Roger left my party for like 15 chapters, came back and then I was forced to put him in my party and keep him alive right before the final boss battle. That was not funny.

3. The story was stupid. I’ve said it before, but one more time won’t hurt: the story was stupid. Either you’re making a history-based tactical RPG or you’re doing a demons-ate-my-baby thing. Pick one. Btw, did I miss something or did characters like Charles VI and Richemont just vanish from the story after a certain point? I was really looking forward to Charles’ reaction after I wasted his precious mommy too. Tch.

4. Battles get too repetitive. Repetitive battles in a tactical RPG? Say it ain’t so! Yeah, it’s kind of a staple of the genre, but Jeanne d’Arc takes it too far. When you’re using the same party, the same skills and fighting the same bosses on top of it (four, five times in a row), it’s hard to stay excited. Exactly how are we beating these guys anyway, if they can turn around and show up again the very next stage with nary a scratch?

4. Limited party was limited. 15 playable characters (that I got) and you could use between 5 and 7 at a time. 5 for most of the game. A lot of my characters went completely unused as a result (Rufus, Bertrand, Rose, Bartolemeo, etc). Lack of class or job changes also meant that Marcel at level 5 is the same Marcel at level 50, only with better gear. Ho-hum.

5. Limited skillset is limited. There are lots of skills, but most of them are useless given the limited number of slots, so I was using the same practical ones over and over again. This goes especially for the stronger magic spells, which I almost never used because my Richard also doubled as my healer. I could heal my entire party twice for the price of a single Thor’s Hammer. I don’t have a problem with MP starting at 0 though, since I’m used to it from FFTA2.

6. Navigation could be a bit iffy. Especially in oddly-shaped stages like Alrond Wood, the cursor can go flying all over the place when you’re just trying to select an enemy close by you.

7. The game was sluggish. First there was all the loading, even when doing simple things like opening the menu. Then some enemies would take several seconds thinking about their next moves. And then in the last third of the game a skill called HP Recovery appeared which meant both enemies and allies would waste time at the beginning of every turn just healing themselves. The cumulative effect of these things was to make the game feel like a massive slogfest by the end.

8. It’s rather easy. I never once got caught by the turn limit, and I only failed two missions once each. Just by doing each Free Combat mission exactly once, my party rapidly became overpowered, overequipped and overleveled, and anything after chapter 25-ish was a complete cakewalk. TBH, I forgot to transform in more than a few battles, and I still won easily.

9. Replay value is zero. I replay SRPGs I really, really like (Fire Emblem games, Luminous Arc 3), especially if I failed to get something in the first playthrough. In this case I’m clearly missing a few stones in some of the bracelets, but I don’t care. Neither the story nor the characters endeared themselves to me, and the battle system is nothing that hasn’t been seen before. Post-game content shmost-game content, I’m done.

10. Seriously, WTF was Talbot’s problem? What’s his stake in this? If he’s mad because the war is a family feud, what’s that got to do with us? What’s behind his sudden change of heart at the end? Why isn’t he dead? And why did I have to fight him five times in a row? WHAT AM I FIGHTING YOU FOOOOOAAAAAARRRRRGGGHH!

And a bunch of other niggling complaints that are too petty to mention here. My final, final assessment is that Jeanne d’Arc is a good, but not a great game. 35 hours of entertainment is nothing to scoff at, though, so I can freely recommend it to fans of the SPRG genre.

Jeanne d’Arc – Finished (spoilers)

The game has been out for 4 years at this point so I see no need to hold back on the spoilers, but consider yourself forewarned if you haven’t played it yet.

I finished Jeanne d’Arc a few hours ago at 35:05:37. That time includes a lot of hours spent fighting Free Battles to level up my party. I thought I was going overboard at first, but it paid off when I showed up to the final-final battle with Gilvaroth and he was level 60, which was where most of my party was as well. He wasn’t so tough, only 3000 HP. Some annoying minions on the side would heal him from time to time, but never enough to undo the damage I had done. IIRC I beat him in about 10 turns.

The ending has Jeanne and Roger going back to Domrémy to find out that somehow Jeanne’s father and most of the other villagers managed to survive the destruction of the village in chapter 2. Jeanne gets a happy ending back at home with her dad and Roger while Liane, well, we know what happened to Liane. I don’t know whether I should admit this or not, but I kind of enjoyed the torching scene.

– Jeanne?
– But my name is Liane–
– IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOUR NAME IS!

Silly Liane, you can’t enjoy the fame and glory and then try to beg out when things get hot (heh heh). Tant pis!

While we’re on the subject, I’m a little disappointed the armlets turned out to be completely benign in the end. I was hoping for a plot twist where they would turn out to be evil or at least dangerous, and that would explain why Jeanne and Liane started out as normal, well-adjusted peasant girls then went batshit insane as soon as they put them on.

The other armlet wielders didn’t seem to be similarly mentally affected. So I thought, oho, the game is sexist! The others are all male, and thus blessed with greater mental fortitude than that possessed by hysterical females. Or maybe it’s classism. The others are originally of noble birth (Roger got his armlet too late in the game to be affected), Jeanne and Liane are peasants. Of course their feeble lowborn intellects are too weak to adequately control the power of the armlets, etc, etc. But in the end it turned out Jeanne and Liane are just shrill nutcases who got what was coming to them. Oh well.

Apart from Gilles, Jeanne and Liane, the rest of the characters don’t even get a courtesy blurb to say what happened to them after the game ended. Gilles’s later ‘activities’ are explained away as being due to having Gilvaroth sealed within him after the final battle. Ho hum. See why I don’t like games based on actual historical figures. They tend to oversimplify things to ludicrous levels.

And then once the story diverted from history into a hackneyed “Historical figure X was actually demon-possessed” plot, things really slowed down for me. But I pressed on and I’m glad I did because  apart from the weak story Jeanne d’Arc was above average all around. I won’t be able to play Summon Night 3 for a while because my SRPG itch has been well and truly scratched by all the battling I did in this game. Of course it would have been even better if half the story battles didn’t consist of fighting the exact same bad guys in four or five times in a row (Talbot [wtf was his problem anyway? he never said], the therion trio, Roger), but I just glad it’s over so I won’t dwell on it.

Moving on, I’m “finishing up” my playthrough of Shepherd’s Crossing. Unlike the sequel, you can’t retire when you’ve had enough so you just keep going until you get tired and then give up. There’s no way I’m going to fill out all of Brammy’s Diary, but I have one or two more things I want to grow/rear before I call it a day, so that should take me another in-game year and then I’ll be done.

Tokimeki Memorial 4 – Quick impressions

General impressions of Tokimeki Memorial 4 compared to other Tokimeki Memorial games I’ve played…

1. The art style in this game is fairly plain, so none of the CGs I got were anything to swoon over.

2. The date answers are much easier to figure out than in the GS games. If a girl tells you she loves singing and then asks how her singing was, of course the correct answer isn’t going to be “You suck.” Why is it even an option?

3. Your stamina sinks faster and your stats rise slower than in other games in the series. This is most likely because the developers expect you to use skills to boost or counter these effects. It was frustrating in the beginning but I was a studmuffin by the end anyway so it’s all good.

4. Losing money and stamina on dates is so unfair. It makes sense, though. Someone’s gotta pay for the tickets and it sure as heck ain’t gonna be the girl. Wait, does this mean the guys in TMGS have been treating me all along? That’s…kinda cool.

5. What kind of cell phone can only make 4 calls a month?  And if the cell phone is down, what about the land line? A payphone? E-mail?  Haven’t they heard of Skype? I see what they tried to do there, but it was so farfetched as to be ridiculous. On the plus side, it’s nice that making a call doesn’t take up the whole day any more.

6. I like my friends, Manabu and Tadashi. Not only do they not mack on your girls (Onoda Chiyomi, are you listening?) but they also give you random stat boosts when you call them up to chat. Awesome. The only thing that hurts is that they gloat when they do better than you, but when you beat them they’re genuinely happy for you. Cry a little, dammit!

7. Bombs weren’t a problem in this game, despite me meeting 7 girls by the end. It helps a lot that you can call them up at any time to ask them out instead of having to wait till the weekend. The game where bombs were a real nightmare was the first Tokimeki Memorial on SNES. My hat is off to anyone who managed to get Fujisaki Shiori without setting off a million of them.

8. Skills are fun to experiment with but EXP is hard to come by. I tried not to stress out and just play normally as much as  possible and it worked out pretty well. And thank goodness you can only change them once a term or I’d  have 500 in every stat by the end. There’s such a thing as too broken, you know.

Etc, etc. It was fun, but those 3 years felt really long. I’m going to raise my stats evenly for a year then save and use that save file as a base. But even then I don’t know if I have the patience to date 6 or 7 near-identical girls (Hoshikawa, Tsugumi, Yanagi, music girl, science  girl, Tadashi’s sister, maybe Satsuki). Guess I’ll keep going till I get bored and then call it a day.

Tokimeki Memorial 4 – Itsuki GET!

As I’d predicted, the sporty girl was incredibly easy to get. I joined the soccer club and worked on my exercise stat. I also took her to the stadium to watch soccer matches and took her to the “recommended” date spots whenever they opened up. Itsuki likes anything active, so the pool, the beach and the bowling alley were good as well.

Itsuki’s a sweet girl, in the cliched sporty tomboy kind of way. Like sports, lives with dad and brothers, dresses and acts boyish, blushes heavily when she likes you, drags you from place to place at the school festival, etc etc. Nothing unexpected or untoward. She was mine before the second year was up.

And not just her, but most of the other girls at least liked me by the end of Tokimeki Memorial 4. I raised all my skills like crazy, which somehow made me utterly irresistible. I even ended up getting chocolate from 7 of them on the final Valentine’s Day. Maki Hoshikawa in particular was only one or two steps away from tokimeki by the final year. I made a second save so I could dump Itsuki and get Maki’s ending instead without having to do her whole route, but now that I think of it, she deserves better. I’ll give her a proper go.

I’ll also do all the other routes in turn except the following:

1. Haru. Nothing against her but reading her diary entries gave me a serious case of the yawns. So you want to become a pâtissier, big deal. One vapid, brainless high school girl (Yanagi) is enough for me.

2. Elisa D. Naruse. Daughter of two naturalized weeaboos. I don’t have a problem with that, in fact it’s rather cute. But I can’t live with that backwater Miyagi dialect she speaks. Trashing Miyagi Prefecture may be low in light of what happened there recently, but I’ll come right out and stay it: their accent sounds like ****.

3. Miyako. I’ve watched, played and read a lot of series, and she is hands down the most unfriendly childhood “friend” I have ever encountered. What’s more, I strongly suspect her of pulling a fast one with my allowance. A measly 8 rich raise over three years? Really, Miyako? Really? The real deal-breaker, though, is that she hit me at the start of the game. We all called Saeki an abuser when he hit the MC in TMGS2, and rightly so. So why should Miyako get away with it just because she doesn’t have a penis? Start saying things like “crazy is cute” and “yanderes are great” and it will be you in handcuffs 10 years from now because your crazy girlfriend broke her own nose and told the police you did it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

4. Satsuki-sempai. Ehh, I dunno. Yamato Nadesico types bore the crap out of me so unless she’s going to turn into a raging temptress once she melts a little, there’s nothing in this for me. But on the other hand I would like to join the Student Council and try to get by without a part-time job. Hmm. Okay, I’ll save her for last and then decide.

Jeanne d’Arc + Tokimeki Memorial 4

I was hoping to have Jeanne d’Arc finished by now, but I’ve been too busy fighting Free Battles and binding Skills instead of progressing the story, so I haven’t gotten very far. The Human Barbeque scene is long over, and it played out like I’d predicted ~_~. Right now I’m fighting reapers while slowly learning who the real bad guys are. My last game ended at the start of the Luxuria battle.

I’ve never played it before, but I’m estimating I’m at the 3/4th mark, because that’s the point where things always start to fall apart for me. Not that I’m sick of Jeanne d’Arc or anything. Au contraire, I’m having a blast. It’s just that the flush of the new has worn off, I’ve gotten used to the good stuff and slowly the not-so-good stuff is starting to bother me juuuust a teeny little bit.

For example, I’ve fallen into a gameplay rut. My party is largely finalized (Jeanne, Gilles, Marcel, La Hire and Richard, with Colet and Beatrix as subs) and they are pretty strong so a bit of complacency is setting in. There are lots of skills around, but most of them are useless, especially given the tiny number of slots, so my skills are finalized as well. Unless something wonderful comes my way, only upgrades I see myself making are updated versions of current equips, e.g. HP Recovery III instead of II, etc. So since I use the same party and the same skills, it’s only natural that the battles feel the same after a while. It’s not just Jeanne d’Arc, this happens to me a lot in other SRPGs as well.

Little things like frequent loading screens and enemies taking their time thinking before they move are also dragging down the experience a bit. Again this has been present from the start, I was just too excited to be bothered by them at first.

The story is also dragging on a bit for me. From the start I was mainly interested in who would get burned at the stake. Stuff that’s happening now with possession and evil royals and kings with mommy-issues and stuff is barely enough to elicit a yawn from me. I don’t care how it ends, but luckily the battles are still fun enough to keep me moving on. As far as SRPGs go, it’s one of the better ones I’ve played so far.

In other news, I seem to be relapsing into my old habit of starting a new game when I’m about to finish another and then abandoning the old for the new. Jeanne d’Arc supplanted Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari, and now Tokimeki Memorial 4 is threatening to take Jeanne‘s place. Only it’s not that interesting so far, so I’ve been able to keep the change at bay for now.

I love proper dating sims (i.e. not visual novels) but the girls I’ve seen so far in TM4 all look rather homely. And they have near-identical faces, unlike in TMGS or even the original TM. I hope they have unique, likeable personalities to make up for it, or this isn’t going to take very long. It would be a pity though, because the game interface is beautiful. The DS TMGS games don’t come anywhere near the level of polish this game displays. I’m like a country mouse that just went to the city, playing . Too bad there’s more to making fun games than just graphics, eh?

But really, I only just started. I’m only about a “month” into the game. It’s more complex than Girl’s Side – a few more stats to raise, your cellphone battery dies if you make too many phone calls, there are all kinds of items and skills to juggle, etc. I’m planning to use my first run to get a general feel for it, then I’ll spend subsequent playthroughs actually getting a girl. Usually the sporty character tends to be the easiest, so I’m raising my sports stats as well, just in case. More updates on the story as they occur.