Tokimeki Memorial 4 – Satsuki GET!

I thought she would be harder than that, but she fell as easily as the rest. Joining the student council wasn’t that hard either, plus I joined it in my second year on Maki’s route, anyway so it didn’t feel particularly fresh and exciting. My stats were all close to or over 90 by the time the election rolled around, I didn’t take any part-time jobs or pick up the naughty magazine and I joined the music club, which raised my moral stat as well. Piece of cake.

I thought managing without a job would be hard, but 20-28 rich a month is doable if you don’t go overboard with the expensive dates. I mostly stuck to affordable dates like the library and planetarium, and occasionally treated her to beach and mountain dates. I was even able to spend money on birthday presents for all the other girls and get Satsuki at least her medium present every year without too much trouble. Of course taking part in the “Special Christmas Party” every year (100 rich+10exp, -10 moral) helped a whole lot with that.

No great discoveries on the skills front, though I did unlock several interesting-looking ones. The one that would have helped me most with Satsuki since it stops girls’ negative skills from activating (心の開錠術) I got too late to be effective. Satsuki’s negative skill is a killer: it removes one of your skills at random and you can’t put it back on till the next term. Oh hey, it’s Satsuki-sempai, fancy meeting you heAAAARGH!

Fending off the other girls was no big deal either. For the most part events and birthdays occurred often enough that I could keep most of them at bay. Maki automatically went all the way up to tokimeki mode without me ever taking her out on a single date (told you she was easy). So to deal with that, I called her up for a few dates and stood her up repeatedly, which somehow brought her affection down without provoking her to bomb me (again, told you she was easy).

Yanagi’s affection also went pretty high, which was actually a good thing because she would randomly show up and improve my mood. Thanks girl. As for the rest of the girls, I dealt with the matter by raising Satsuki-sempai to tokimeki+hand-holding level, then putting on a skill that drastically slowed down the rate at which girls like and bomb you (清廉潔白). And a good time was had by all.

I’d like to say it was worth it, but… Well, I guess it was. Satsuki is the cutest girl of the bunch IMO (Tsugumi is a close second), and while she’s not particularly interesting, she’s all right. I didn’t date her too often, just once or twice a month, so she didn’t get stale as quickly as Maki or Itsuki did. And her CGs were pretty nice, as the picture above demonstrates. As a character she’s a little too ‘perfect’ and her sole flaw, a bad sense of direction, is completely unbelievable. It comes out of nowhere, plays out in one CG and then is never referred to again.

Graduation day she shows up, blah blah blah didn’t have the courage to confess last year blah blah blah confessing now, oh you love me too, yay. From her monologue and from another event, it sounds like she’s related to Shiori Fujisaki from TM1 and that the MC and Fujisaki are still together and still happily in love. That’s sweet…especially since I never did get Fujisaki myself. And everybody lived happily after, the end.

Next up, I’m going to start Tokimeki Memorial 4 all over again because I hear I get a cheap stamina refilling item on my third playthrough. That’s the save file I’ll use to get Rui, Rizumi and Tsugumi before putting the game away for good.

Tokimeki Memorial 4 – Maki GET!

She’s all right, I guess. I did her route because she guilted me into it by being so nice to me last time, but I’m not that into her. Maki is the poor man’s Satsuki-sempai – average, but not quite good enough at anything. The girls in Tokimeki Memorial 4 seem quick to fall in love, but Maki was especially easy, particularly in the face of my almighty stats. Her CGs were easy to get too. I got almost all of them naturally.

The developers often try to include at least one stereotypical “nice girl” in this kind of game, and this time it’s Maki: cheerful, sweet, fishes for compliments by putting herself down frequently, can’t afford to go to a proper hair salon, can only afford a few outfits, etc etc. One day she’s like “I wanna be a nurse!” then later she’s like, “No I suck I can’t be a nurse,” then you encourage her and she goes “Okay I’m gonna be a nurse” and that’s the full extent of her character development. Not that Itsuki Maeda had any development either, but Maki’s supposed to be the “main” girl. I had expectations!

The only exciting thing that happened on Maki’s route had nothing to do with the girl herself. I’d been fiddling with skills for a while, not taking them too seriously. I put on the all-night cramming skill (一夜漬け) that lets you raise your humanities-science-art skills like crazy the night before a test. I also put on a skill that randomly gives you a massive increase in the stat you’re working on (女神の加護). It rarely activates so I barely gave it a thought.

Then, one fateful night, BAM! they activated together! Science and art went up by 60 (!!) each, but that was child’s play compared to humanities: 288 to 520 in one night! That’s two to three years of grinding in ONE SINGLE NIGHT! It took me like a minute to believe what my eyes were telling me. H-how w-what b-b-but– it must be a bug! I saved, turned the game off, put it back on and it was still there. Suddenly Tsugumi and Satsuki were falling all over themselves to please me and the rest of the game was easy-mode. I’ve been trying to reproduce the lucky incident ever since, with no success. Maybe it really was a fluke.

Back to Maki, there’s nothing wrong with her, but there’s nothing right about her either. All that friendly supportiveness gets boring really quickly, which is why I can’t wait to date some of the more prickly types like Tsugumi.  My stamina for this game has dropped even further, so I’ve decided to drop Kai, science girl and Yanagi. My final list is Satsuki-sempai (currently working on), Rui (she’s a funny, funny girl. Her Valentine’s Day event is priceless!), Tsugumi (‘cos I like her) and Rizumi (just because).

Should take me another week or two, then I’ll be ready to move on. I’m thinking of either finishing up Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari (urghhh) or starting something new entirely. Speaking of which, I tried to start TWEWY the other day, but four frames later some anorexic kid with a bad dye job told me to get the hell outta his face, so I did. …This is not going to end well.

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.