Princess Debut – Too kiddy for me

I’m a fan of otome games, in theory. If it exists and I can get my hands on it, I’ll try it sooner or later. If it’s in English, all the better. And if it has actual gameplay and doesn’t involve 20 hours of non-stop reading then woo-hoo, you just made my day!

But just because I’ll try most of these games once doesn’t mean I’ll like them. Some games are just not for me and sadly Princess Debut was one of them.

The story was simple enough. Sabrina, an ordinary teenage girl, switches places with a Sabrina from another world who happens to be a princess. Princess Sabrina hates dancing, but she has a ball coming up in 30 days. Somehow she manages to convince Sabrina to go to her world and learn to dance, pick a partner and take part in the ball on her behalf.

And of course it’s an otome game so there are six handsome (your mileage may vary on that) princes that you can try to woo in those 30 days. Maybe if I’d actually liked any of those guys my experience of the game would have been different. As it was I either found them annoying and/or creepy, like Vince and Cesar, or just bland and boring, i.e. the rest of them. For some reason they all look very similar as well, so there isn’t much to choose between them.

So, an otome game with a meh story and meh guys. Is the gameplay any good, then? Unfortunately not. You wake up and spend the day wandering around a few locations looking for guys to hang out with. If you find one you talk to him, hope he asks you out on a date, then hope you say the right thing to make him like you a little more. These events are all very short and very dull. For example you run into Klaus and he asks you to go shopping with him. You go shopping. You talk a bit. The end. That sort of thing. The aim of the exercise is to get one of the guys to agree to be your dance partner, then keep his love for you at 100% till the end of the game, at which point he will confess his love for you if you manage to win the ball.

Btw, once you pick a partner you can’t change him for the rest of the game so be careful. I picked Vince early and lived to regret it. He is childish, immature, selfish, inconsiderate and even downright mean from time to time. There’s nothing princely about that guy, let me tell you! Come to think of it I really should have turned him down when he gave me the diamond ring at the end. Tch, what a missed opportunity to get some revenge.

Training for the ball itself will probably take about 50% of gaming time. This is probably where I had the biggest disappointment, though. Going through dance routines is just a matter of sliding the stylus across the touchscreen while following prompts in the top screen. The trailer should give you an idea what to expect: Princess Debut Trailer. Maybe in some alternate reality, this sort of thing is considered challenging, but I’ve played this kind of game before, and I liked it better when it was called Ouendan. In fact I’ve finished all the songs in Ouendan 1, 2 and Elite Beat Agents on all difficulties and S-ranked almost all of them, so believe me when I say this stuff was child’s play to me. Slide, slide, slide. Slide some more, twirl, slide. Zzzzzzz… I wasn’t impressed by the tinny rearrangements of classical tunes they did either. Poor remix, poor sound quality, poor gameplay = poor music game.

And it’s not as if you’re dancing each tune just once and then moving on, as you do in Ouendan. Nope, at the beginning of this game you’ve only got one tune, and you have to practice it over and over again until you level up a bit and then you get another. Then another, then another. At the end of my playthrough I had 10 tunes to show for my hard work. Just ten. For all my hard work. All of which I had to play over and over again to raise my level. Raising your level, after all, raises stamina, which just means you can dance some more. Oh yay (sarcasm). It also raises your Technique and Artistry, which I presume makes you more attractive to the princes. But since they all suck, who cares whether you’re attractive to them or not?

The third thing you get from leveling up, and from winning certain dance contests, is new outfits. There are at least 20 such items to collect and you can’t get them all in one playthrough so in theory there’s some replay value in there. In practice not only are the dresses poorly drawn and animated but they’re also downright ugly and bizarre. In any case, when you’re busy dancing, you’re staring at the bottom screen so you can’t even see yourself in said ugly dress. Big whoop.

My intention wasn’t to bash this game, though. I mean, at least it got released in the Western market, which is more than I can say for most other otome games. Just by looking at the presentation I can tell it’s targeted at the pre-teen and early teen girl market, so I’m not exactly shocked that it didn’t work out for me. Most importantly, if you just want to play a game where you hang out with vaguely good-looking guys, dance to some well-known tunes and put on some rather drab clothing, you could do a lot worse than Princess Debut. It’s not for me, but it might be for you.

Btw, if for some reason you do like this game, Natsume has another one out called Cheer We Go. Check it out.

Suikoden Tierkreis – Finished long ago

I remember mentioning long ago that I was playing Suikoden Tierkreis. I finished it way back in August/September thereabouts, but never posted about it. And now I can barely remember what it was about.

Let’s see, something about the hero going on a mission with some of his friends, and then suddenly some ruins pop out of nowhere. His friends think they’ve been there all along but the hero knows differently. Lots of ups and downs (and lots and lots of characters) later, it turns out they’ve been fighting some destroyer of worlds known as the One King, who is trying to take over the multiverse. They fight him, kill him and live happily ever after.

Something like that really. It was actually kind of fun. Had a number of sidequests to do and several locations to visit. I liked the art as well. For some reason it reminded me of Rune Factory, especially the way the characters waddled around on the screen. The world did feel a bit bare and empty, though, as characters kept popping into and out of existence the whole time.Vast parts of the map are just made of up empty space or desert or forest. It’s a bit depressing, but maybe that was the point.

I only got about 90 out of the 108 stars required, so if there was some super-good ending for getting all 108, I didn’t see it. Come to think of it, this is a good time to look it up on Youtube. Ah, here it is. Watching, watching, watching….too long and boring to watch the whole thing. I skipped to the end and it seems you get to see Atrie again. That’s my reward for getting all 108? Well, whatever. All’s well that ends well!

Speaking of Suikoden in general, it’s one of the RPG series that I think I’m a fan of, but that I haven’t really played much of. The same goes for Wild Arms and the Saga games. I’ve only played Suikoden I and Suikoden Tierkreis from beginning to end, and I’ve played most of Suikoden III but I’m not impressed. I guess I only think I’m a fan because I liked Suikoden I so much. I wanted to play Suikoden II after that, but copies were going for over $100 at the time (they’re still that high even now. New copies go for $250+) so I never got the chance. More recently I went online to look for a new copy of Suikoden V and it was selling for $78.00 on Amazon. Seriously? I don’t want to play it that badly, you  know. I’ll have to obtain them by alternate means later.

In the meantime, there are other, more reasonably priced games to play and enjoy. Including the remake of Saga 3 that came out on the DS a few weeks ago! Gotta finish some other games before that, though.

Deltora Quest – Nanatsu no Houseki

Now that the DS is winding down in preparation for the release of the 3DS, I’ve been taking the time to go back buy or and pirate those games I’d always meant to try but never had the time or money to.

First on the list is Deltora Quest: Nanatsu no Houseki (the seven treasures). Unfortunately I didn’t get very far with the game. I’d heard a little bit about Deltora Quest here and there, a young adult fantasy series about a blacksmith’s son trying to save the world. I’d even seen an episode of the anime, which was really boring to be quite honest. Still, I’m a fan of RPGs and I’m a fan of fantasy series so I thought I’d give it a shot.

So I gave it a shot. For about 30 minutes. 30 minutes of lots of talking, but that’s standard for RPG openings. Only…the story wasn’t very interesting. Neither were the characters. The character design was squat and ugly and the graphics were meh. Well, it was an early DS release. As such it also suffers from that terrible habit early DS developers had of making all the controls touchscreen only. In short, it read horribly, looked horrible and played horribly. Plus it was an action RPG, which I tend to dislike unless something really stands out in the game.

In short, I can’t really give a review of this game. It is so not my sort of game that I really couldn’t keep going. Delete, move on to next.

Recettear – Finished!

Well, finished everything except for Crystal Nightmare, that is. Doing suicide runs with Louie is more stressful than fun, and the rewards aren’t that great anyway. I hate games with poor item drops, they just stress me out.

But anyway, I spent quite a bit of the New Year playing Recettear – An Item Shop’s Tale, so I thought I should at least give it a brief mention here. It’s a really cute, fun game, and both the store-running and the dungeon-crawling aspects have just enough challenge to be both fun and rewarding. I used to hate dungeon-crawlers, but Rune Factory changed all that. Now I’ve been looking for more to play through, I’m thinking of trying Shiren the Wanderer next.

Anyway, story… Recette Lemongrass’s dad disappeared and left her with debt. The debt-collector, Tear, suggests she open a store and use the profits to pay off the loan. They open the store together, hence Recettear. And that’s pretty much it to the story. You pay back the loan pretty quickly and then you can either play all over again or you can continue until you get tired. Along the way you pick up a few adventurers you can visit dungeons with, picking up stuff to either sell in your store or fuse with.

Like I said, it’s a cute game, it’s fun and the challenge level is moderate (except Crystal Nightmare). The characters are likeable and memorable and some of the dialogue is outright hilarious. The only thing that stopped me from enjoying it more was that I’ve played a number of similar games over the past few years, so both the concept and the execution didn’t feel that fresh to me. I’m talking games like Atelier Viorate, Lemuore no Renkinjutsushi and Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, where you make stuff, forage for stuff, sell stuff, etc. The unrewarding nature of the dungeons in Recettear made it lag behind the other games when it comes to fusing items, but unlike them you can get filthy rich just by retailing stuff from the main stores. The game interface is far more polished than Lemuore‘s, and the selling mechanics are deeper than Grand Bazaar‘s.

All in all I had a good time both selling stuff and plundering the dungeons. I think I got filthy rich a little too quickly, which meant I bought excellent equipment for my adventurer too quickly, which meant I finished the dungeons really quickly, but while it lasted it was great fun. I hear the localizers plans to bring over another game by the same company, called Chantelise. More stuff to look forward to in 2011.

Speaking of localization, Luminous Arc 3 is never coming out in the West, is it? And now Imageepoch is making games for the PSP instead. Goodbye, Luminous Arc. You’ll be missed!

Tokimeki Memorial Girls’ Side 3rd Story – Oosako GET!

Oosako returned to the wild! I so don’t want him. I put off doing his route as long as I could, and then once I started I rushed through it as quickly as possible just to see the ending. Unlike everyone else’s ending, his doesn’t take place in the church. It takes place on the beach, and instead of him confessing, you confess to him. Then he’s like “Eh, all right, fine.” And you jump on him and that’s it. I wasn’t expecting much so I can’t call it a letdown but still, meh.

What if despite all this you want to get Oosako? He’s pretty easy if you’ve played the games a few times and know how to go about becoming Rose Queen and winning the Sports Festivals:

1. Fail three subjects in your first exam. It’s easy, just don’t raise any stats when you start the game.
2. You’ll have remedials with Oosako.
3. After that raise your stats till you’re first in class to get another scene.
4. Along the way, let your stress get high and you’ll get an event where he lends you a book.
5. Take part in and win an event in all 3 Sports Festivals.
6. Never miss a day of preparation for the Culture Festivals. You should get an event with Oosako every year.
7. During the trip to Hokkaido, turn your friend down when she asks you to take part in the pillow fight. You should get an event with Oosako by the elevator.
8. Last, but not least, be sure to become Rose Queen in your third year.

If you do all that you should get Oosako pretty easily. Make absolutely sure you don’t date any other guy in the process, because every other guy’s ending takes precedence over Oosako’s.

Till the end Oosako’s kiddy looks (fans might call them “boyish good looks”), screechy voice and cheesy lines of encouragement never grew on me, but I’ll give him credit where credit is due: at least he’s decent enough not to date his student while she was his student. As much as I love Himuro, I know in real life he should have been fired and banned from teaching for going out with the MC of TMGS1. And as for Amanohashi, if my 16 year old daughter’s principal ever invited her to the pool for the express purpose of checking out her body, I’d be there with a shotgun so fast it would make his head spin! Heh, maybe that’s why Himuro, Wakaouji and Amano-pervert all went for my MC, because she doesn’t have any parents to protest! So kudos to Oosako for having some standards, at least.

On that high note, I say goodbye to Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 3rd Story. Well, not goodbye for ever, I still have it, and I’ll go back eventually and play the 3P mode. For now though, I’m through with it and I need a long, long, long break before I can even think of playing it again.