Fun with The Kayou Generation!

As if my fingers hadn’t been punished enough already. Princess Debut may have been a bit of a failure, but in general I really like rhythm and music games. Especially the ones that don’t require me to actually dance. You really don’t want to see me dance.

Plus I like Japanese music as well. I tend to prefer 70s music to the 80s stuff that makes up the bulk to The Kayou Generation‘s songlist, but there are some good tunes in here. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. First off, what is The Kayou Generation and what does it play like? I’d start with a long description, but I believe a video speaks a thousand words here, so I tried to find a video of the game being played. No such luck, but I did find the trailer:

Not too informative, really, but it did show the three main features of the game: tapping the lyrics in time to the music, the occasional slider, the occasional annoying backup singer that pops up at the bottom of the screen and the occasional converging (broken) circle. It’s pretty easy to get into once you start playing. Sure it would help if you understood Japanese, and sure it would help if you knew those songs to begin with, but you can complete the game without all that.

It’s one of the easier music games out there as far as completion is concerned. Completing every song and unlocking all the bonus tracks shouldn’t take more than a few hours if you play diligently. That’s because the scoring system is very lenient. You start with four blue spots that you can think of as your HP. Each lyric you tap correctly gives you one extra HP, all the way up to 12. Each one you get wrong takes that down by one as well. What that means is that once you’ve built your life gauge all the way up, you can freely commit up to 12 errors without getting a Game Over. Unless you’re half asleep, that’s nearly impossible to do. It’s not like in Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents where one mistake on a hard song can send you into an instant death spiral.

Finishing the game is easy, so if that’s all you’re after then you’ll be seriously disappointed. If you want to finish it with a good ranking, however, you’re in for a bigger challenge. At the end of every song, you get a star rating depending on your position. 1st-10th, Gold star, 11th – 20th, Silver star, 21st-30th, Bronze Star, anything below that, White star. What’s the use of the stars? To be honest, it’s mainly a matter of pride. It feels good to have those shiny gold stars next to each song. I’ve made it up to 19 Gold stars with 10 Silver stars left to conquer and I’m feeling pretty proud of myself now.

The other reason to get Gold and Silver stars is that you can unlock outfits and hairstyles with them. Gold = hairstyles, Silver = outfits, Bronze = accessories. With those outfits, you can customize the character that dances at the top of the screen, changing their looks. You can also change their eyes, noses and mouths but they look ugly no matter what, so I usually leave that alone. If you have the time and effort, you can probably customize the singer for every song to look as much like the original singer as possible. I put the singer for Linda Yamamoto’s “Dou ni mo Tomaranai” in a replica of Linda’s iconic ‘hesodashi’ outift and she looked pretty spiffy, to be honest. I think I’ve unlocked all the outfits now though, so I’m just playing because I want to.

But seriously, getting Gold stars is a real pain. I don’t know how the star system is calculated, but I think combos have something to do with it. Also mistakes made at the end of the song seem to cost you more than mistakes made at the beginning, even if you’ve racked up a big combo. I don’t get that either. What I do get is that getting a “Great” score gives you more points than “Good”, and you can make a mistake or two, get  mostly “Greats” and go on to get a Gold star. And you can play a perfect game without a single mistake and still get just a Silver star, probably because you didn’t get enough “Greats.” It’s fun, but all kinds of messed up.

Why is this game not better known, then? It seems the developers AQ Interactive and Artoon (also behind the craptastic Archaic Sealed Heat and the rather meh Away: Shuffle Dungeon) didn’t do that much promotion for it in the first place. One trailer and one Famitsu online article is hardly what I call publicity. More importantly, the game itself isn’t that good. The song selection is good and older Japanese fans might like that, but is the “Kayou Generation” the same as the generation that currently plays music games on the DS? If they grew up listening to late 70s and 80s music, then they’re in their 30s and 40s by now. Hmm, I’m not sure.

Maybe the game was made so easy because it was an effort to appeal to those people, but the result was that younger players (who are more likely to get it in the first place) found it too short and too easy. It doesn’t help that the sound quality is rather poor and the cover singers range from acceptable to Aaargh My Ears! terrible. Buyers would be better off spending the ¥5,040 yen cover price (now down to ¥1,740 on Amazon) getting the originals on iTunes instead. Plus the singer’s performance is linked to yours, so unless you hit each lyric just right, they’re going to hit those notes either earlier or later, making the song sound weird anyway. Oh, also the graphics are awful. They didn’t just use cheap cover singers, they used cheap graphic designers as well.

In spite of all that, I’ve taken a bit of a shine to The Kayou Generation. Getting the timing right especially for the slow songs is no mean feat, but I’ve come this far so I’m not ready to give up! And that stupid “Koi no Number 6700” song obviously has it in for me, I just know it! If I ever get all Gold stars (har har, not bloody likely) I’ll post again. Until then, it’s back to the DS for me.

Real life keeps getting in my way!

It’s been a busy week, but I managed to sneak in some video games here and there. I plugged away at Color Cross and now I’ve unlocked all the big pictures! I only have about 3 puzzles left to go for each category, so maybe I’ll go ahead and finish the game. This is way easier than Picross!

I’m also close to finishing Tactical Guild, which is a terrible game by any standard. It is seriously bad. It does have a certain primitive charm to it, though, and it’s so short that it was almost over before I knew it. More on that when I actually finish it.

Third thing I’m playing, The Kayou Generation. It’s a rhythm/music game along the lines of Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents but far less polished. Fun and addictive in its own way, of course. I’ll probably post about that next.

I also started Saga 3 (Final Fantasy Legend 3) at long last! They’ve made a few changes to the battle system and the graphics look slightly better, but everything else looks the same. I only just started and there was so much talking that I saved and turned the game off first chance I got. I’m not sure I like this new trend where every RPG starts with 30 minutes of straight exposition.

Last thing I’ve been fooling around with, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time. Yes, it’s an action RPG, yes I do usually avoid those. It looked cute though, and not too hard. I’ve played a few hours, right up to where you’re supposed to kill some monster in the sewer. Then I got too sleepy and had to warp back to town to save and sleep. That was sometime last week, haven’t touched it since.

Of course, playing is one thing and blogging is another, but if you don’t hear from me for a while you’ll know which games to blame.

Color Cross review

Oww, my fingers! My wrist! My elbows! They hurt! Damn you, stupidly addictive and frustrating game!!

Puzzle games are another genre of games I’m bad at, which is why you won’t see too many posts about them on this blog. A while ago, however, I was talked into trying Picross and I loved it. It was simple, fun, interesting and logical. I liked uncovering each picture in turn, unlocking new puzzles and new categories as I went along. I quit once the puzzles got too hard, though. I hate racking my brains for hours only to get the answer wrong anyway.

So, Color Cross. It’s just like Picross, but with colors. Instead of blanks and Xs, each space has to be filled with a certain color. There’s a panel on the side of the touchscreen that lets you cycle between colors, very cool. In principle, this allows you to create more vivid and more complex patterns than regular Picross can provide. And in practice, some of the pictures look great! I used to cross-stitch back in my youth (ahem), and I was often tempted to pull out out a piece of graph paper and record some of the patterns. Hmm, there’s an idea. That was only some of the pictures, though. Others were pretty obscure. I looked them up and down, turned them round and round and still couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to be.

As with Picross, I gave up on Color Cross once the puzzles got too complex. You open up a puzzle and there’s like 7 different colors and all the graphs go 1 1 1 1 1 1, 1 2 1, 1 1 3 1, etc. Pshaw, as if I’m going to spend my time stressing out over these. The nice thing is that you can press Select to save your puzzle and resume it another day, so maybe I’ll peck slowly away at each one in turn every other day or so.

All in all it’s a good game. Picross was great, Picross 3D I really couldn’t get into, Color Cross is good but has four major flaws. First, once the puzzles get big, the squares get TINY. You can zoom in and try to work that way, but then unless you’re working on the edges, you won’t see the numbers you’re supposed to be filling in so it’s really hard to work. I’m not sure what Color Cross could do about it, because I remember Picross having the same problem. Maybe create an option to spread the picture over the top and bottom screen? I don’t know what would work, but as it is the larger puzzles aren’t much fun.

Second flaw, sometimes the colored backgrounds interfere with the placement of colors. If I’m working with light blue, for example, and the background is also light blue, it’s very hard to tell where I’ve placed the color already and where I haven’t. I don’t think the developers put much thought into it, because it should have been possible to make sure the background was a color that wasn’t in that puzzle, or to give the player a chance to choose the background color.

Third flaw, also related to colors, is that sometimes the colors are just too similar. I had to play the game on the DS’s highest brightness setting, and I still kept getting confused about whether I’d placed the colors correctly or not. You can see in the screenshot on the right a puzzle with three different shades of red in it. Definitely not for anyone with eye problems.

The fourth, and most annoying flaw, was the game’s lack of precision. You try to tap a square and somehow it reads that you tapped a different, adjacent square instead. Or that you tapped two squares or more. Then you get penalized for a mistake you didn’t make, or get rewarded for uncovering a square you didn’t know was right. I don’t particularly care about my time, but the penalty interrupts your game for a second or two, which is very annoying. At first I thought it was my stylus, or that I was just clumsy, but I later read a number of reviews and it seems the game is just bad at reading taps. It could have used a little more testing, that’s for sure.

Well, that was a fun diversion. On to the next game!

Time Hollow review (spoilers)

Finished! Yay! That only took me about 6 hours or so. Short game is short! It’s another one of those games I’d been meaning to play but just never got round to. What gave me the impetus to go ahead was getting bored with Tactics Layer towards the end. Then I got really caught up in Time Hollow, which gave me the energy to finish off Tactics Layer so I could devote my full attention to Time Hollow. So it all worked out in the end and a good time was had by all. I’ll just steal the story description from Wikipedia, hold on:

Time Hollow follows the story of Ethan Kairos, whose parents, Timothy and Pamela Kairos, mysteriously disappear on his 17th birthday. Ethan realizes that the entire world has changed as if his parents had disappeared 12 years ago. Ethan then finds a note tied to his cat’s collar telling him to look in a dumpster behind his school, where he finds a Hollow Pen, an uncanny object with the unique power to open portals to the past, as well as a note from his parents. Ethan uses the pen to solve problems that suddenly and mysteriously occur, thus changing the present, though he himself is able to remember these past parallel universes. He also meets a girl, Kori Twelves, who seems to share Ethan’s displacement from time. Eventually, Ethan comes to realize that the past is being manipulated by another Hollow Pen wielder, Irving Onegin, as revenge for the fact that Ethan supposedly killed his mother.

That’s pretty much how it goes. The gameplay feels a bit like the Ace Attorney games. You know, you walk around looking for clues, questioning people, putting facts together, that sort of thing. It also reminded me quite a bit of Radiant Historia, which I finished not too long ago. You know, the way the bad guy and the good guy have the same ability, and you have to jump back into the past to fix what went wrong in the present. Irving messes something up, Ethan fixes it, Irving messes something else up, Ethan fixes it, all the way till the end.

When the game came out there were a lot of complaints that the gameplay was too easy and too repetitive. I can see where those people are coming from. It was really, really obvious at every stage of the game exactly what you had to do to get the game to progress. There are only about 15 cast members and about 10 locations to visit (several of which you almost never go to). That means that whenever you get a flashback showing something has changed, it’s pretty easy to figure out what, where, who and what to do. Then it’s just a matter of getting more information, visiting the location and changing things with your pen. Simple!

For my part, I liked the gameplay just fine. I wasn’t looking for much difficulty, I just wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to my parents. I appreciated the fact that the system stayed out of my way and let me get on with it. A liiitttle more challenge would have been great though. Instead of the Hollow Pen glowing whenever it was ready to be used, the game should have left it up to you to judge the best time and place to use it. Lots of opportunity for frustration, but lots of opportunity for strategic thinking as well. And there really should have been more to playing the game than just See Flashback, Change Flashback, See Flashback, Change Flashback x100. Thank goodness it was short, is all I have to say about that.

When it was all over, I was pretty satisfied with the ending (though I was hoping for more than one possible end). Ethan got his parents back, his friends were all safe and sound, Uncle Derek and Kori got together, and since cousin romance is legal in Japan, Ethan might even get him some with Kori Junior. There were just a few sticking points I would have liked the game to address:

1. The game says the Hollow Pen has been handed down through the Kairos family for generations. Okay. A little more detail, please? Where did it come from? Why was it invented? What was it supposed to be used for? And why does the Onegin family have one too? Maybe Konami is saving that info in case they ever make a sequel (highly unlikely).

2. Was it really a good idea to let Irving Onegin go off like that? Sure, his mother never dies so he never decides to pick on the Kairos family. But he’s been shown to be highly unstable and even downright murderous. And he’s probably going to inherit his mother’s Hollow Pen sooner or later. Who knows what kind of havoc he could be wreaking out there with that thing? We can only hope his mother got him some much-needed psychiatric care.

3. Why was Ethan so cavalier about letting Uncle Derek sacrifice himself? The whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth. He only hesitated for a frame or two then he was like “…All right.” None of them there even tried to talk Derek out of it or to try an alternate way of saving Kori. Drop a trampoline or a mattress below her or something, I dunno. I can see Ethan’s thought process now:

Derek: Let me go save her, please!
Ethan (thinking): Damn right I’ll let you go! Go get killed, Uncle Derek, you <beep>! Living in my father’s house, using my father’s study…you’ve talked down to me one too many times. I hope you suffer, Uncle Derek. I hope it hurts real bad. Maybe the next uncle will know better than to mess with the Time Master.
Ethan (aloud): …All right.

4. Nobody thinks anything about Derek going back in time to save Kori? I mean he even addresses himself in the past as “Future Me”. He hasn’t changed much either, I mean Kori recognizes him on sight. Even if she didn’t, after 10-12 years, wouldn’t she notice her husband looks exactly the same as the guy who saved her? Wouldn’t police DNA tests and fingerprinting on the corpse turn up something? Of course even if they did there’s nothing they can do about it, so I guess that’s why the game didn’t bother to go into it. Hey wait, or maybe Derek didn’t die? He did send Ethan a letter at the end, after all. So he’s somewhere in the current world? Stuck in time forever like Sox is? Still doesn’t solve the problem of current Derek looking like Derek-who-saved-Kori. Hmm.

5. Japanese police must be the most incompetent cops in the world. If past-Kori scratched her killer hard enough to leave lifelong scars then she must have had blood and tissue under her fingernails. It wouldn’t have been that hard to check every student, teacher and worker… Oh wait, never mind. Past-Kori never died, right? Because Ethan’s dad went back and changed that, making her merely disappear. Okay, scratch that one.

6. I don’t get how the Kori timeline thing worked. She was about to die, so Ethan’s father pulled her into a parallel world where she didn’t die. Which stopped her time, making her stay 16 for 12 years. But what about the Kori in the present world? Wouldn’t she have graduated and gotten married, etc? So there are two Koris in the present world? Or if the worlds somehow merged so that Kori disappeared in *this* world as well, then how can she boldly go to school and walk around town like that? It’s a small town, someone’s bound to recognize her. The police, her parents, Mr. Twombly, Derek… Weird.

7. Who were those people who said “We shouldn’t have given him the pen. If he gets in the way we can just erase him”? I thought it would end up to be your parents and that they were evil all along, but the incident is never referred to again. Who’s the “we”? Mr. Twombly and Irving? But they didn’t give Ethan the pen, did they? And they never tried to erase him when he started getting in their way. I don’t get it.

8. What was in that “Mystery of Parallel Worlds” book? It was referred to twice, but Ethan never followed up.

9. How did Irving/Jack survive falling off a sheer cliff into the sea?!

10. What’s it like inside Vin and Ashley’s house?!?!

That’s about it, then. I had fun. It was an interesting short story. There wasn’t too much reading, the characters were decent, the music was nice and unobtrusive, I liked the bright graphics. There was definitely room for improvement in terms of challenge, length and depth of story and character development but overall yeah, it was fun.