Nono’s Magic General Shop review – Not bad but there are many better

Nono’s Magic General Shop is a shop simulation game from inutoneko, a Japanese indie game maker known for simulation games. I’ve been a fan of theirs since I discovered Lemuore no Renkinjutsushi in 2010, and have made it my mission to try all their games eventually.

I had been working through their library at a leisurely pace of one or two games per year, but this year I’ve played four in quick succession: Soul Smith of the Kingdom, Witch Ring Meister, Dungeon Shoujo and now Nono’s Magic General Shop. I put the blame squarely at the feet of Gust and the Atelier series. It used to be that I would play one Atelier game and feel good on the crafting/simulation game front for months, but those days ended with Shallie and then the travesty that was Atelier Sophie. So I have to look for my kicks elsewhere. Thus, here we are.

Story

Nono is the sickly little sister of Monica, the dungeon-crawling main character from Dungeon Shoujo. Tired of staying home all day, Nono decides to get a part-time job at her Grandma’s magic shop. And while they’re at it, they decide to sell lots of goods to make their city more prosperous. And that’s all the story you need in a simulation game.

Gameplay

Buy stuff and sell it at a profit, buy more stuff and sell it again. The Area Contribution Rate in the upper right corner shows the income (profit?) targets you’re supposed to reach. Higher contribution rate = better sales. You can also expand your store, etc. The usual shop game stuff.

My main menu early on

Two things make Nono different. The first is the competition system. I’ll be discussing it in more detail under “Problems” below, but basically there are other shops in the neighborhood and if they start selling items in the same category, your sales will drop like a rock. For example, “Vegetables” is a category, so if you sell corn and potatoes and a tenant moves in selling the same things, nobody will buy yours any more. Gotta wonder how predatory Nono’s profit margins are, seeing how easily her store is disrupted by the least bit of competition…

The second difference is “disposal rates.” That means some goods are perishable and a certain percentage of leftover stock will be thrown out at the end of the week. For example if you stock 100 bottles of milk with a 25% disposal rate and you only sell 80 bottles, 25% of the remaining 20 bottles, i.e. 5 bottles, will be lost forever at the end of the week. This encourages you to keep a close eye on your sell-through ratio so you don’t stock too much or too little.

Apart from selling stuff, there’s also an adventuring section like in other inutoneko games. You send adventurers out four times a year during “Management Meetings” and use the items they bring back to upgrade items or unlock new items for sale.

Combat is actually pretty interesting. You have a fixed amount of actions you can take each turn, based on your total “Cost.” Using items and skills all use up “Cost.” It’s like AP in other games with similar systems. So you have to choose attacks and items carefully to get the best cost performance, so to speak. There’s also a strong random component where which enemies and which items drop in each run differ widely, so it’s not unusual to get wiped out if you get super unlucky. Especially since your level resets to 0 after each adventure, like in a roguelike. It wouldn’t be a bad system to have in a proper dungeon crawler game, tbh.

There are other mini-games, such as the “Negotiation” part where you negotiate with the guild to buy new products. I would have taken a screenshot, but it requires all my powers of concentration to pass each game so no can-do. You can also equip useful passives for a small/huge fee and play a very annoying… game? …of chance? to get get useful buffs like extra stamina and mana shards.

The …game…? works like this. You use those bottles to fill up the gauges. Each bottle fills the gauge up a little, a medium amount, a lot, but it’s random how much the gauge will go up every time. It’s a bit like Alice in Wonderland having to nibble on the Big and Little mushrooms until she was just the right size. Anyway, if, after a long struggle, you manage to make the gauge land on a red bar, a roulette starts and you eventually get an item that may or may not be useful, rinse and repeat.

It’s as annoying to explain as it is to ‘play’

Problems

I won’t say I didn’t like Nono’s Magic General Shop at all, but it has a lot of problems that make it inferior to most of the other Ishwald games I’ve played

1. Very little to do

Inutoneko’s other shop games like Kaiyou Resutoran Uminekotei and Ocean Lunch Antique had more to the game than just minding the store. They both had very robust crafting and upgrading systems so you could unlock new items, synthesize new products and learn new recipes all the time.

In Nono your involvement is limited to negotiating for new products, which you then put on the shelf. Then you sit down for 3 months straight (in-game) and watch them sell. Sometimes you pull something off the shelf and replace it if it’s not selling well, or you make a minor enhancement to your items because the major enhancement system is such a time-wasting, expensive chore that I’m not going to bother explaining it.

That’s it. After a while, I would stock the shelves with popular items at the beginning of the season and then leave the game to run itself while I played with my smartphone or tablet or just walked away and came back 10 minutes later. It’s good if you want an idle kind of game, but I prefer the more involved systems of previous games.

2. The manasource system of growth

You need mana shards to boost your adventurers’ stats and unlock new skills. Since their levels reset to 0 every season, this is really important. But the only way to get shards is from the manasource game. Which is random. It’s random whether you’ll successfully land on a roulette spin, it’s hard to control where the roulette stops, and more likely than not you’ll get junk orbs you don’t need instead of mana shards. And you can only play this useless games 4 times a year AND the board resets regularly so you can’t even wipe out the useless orbs first and collect the shards later. Terrible, terrible idea.

3. The competition system

Renting stores to tenants is an important feature in Nono’s General Magic Shop. It raises land prices and resident life satisfaction. Happier, wealthier residents buy more expensive goods, which makes more money for you. So having tenants is a good thing… in theory.

In practice, because each tenant is a direct competitor for a certain category of goods, they limit your gameplay options severely. If a tenant moves in selling veggies, fruits and books, that means you can’t sell any of those. Three categories representing dozens of goods, all closed off to you. What’s the point of the game boasting of over 300 items when you’ll never be able to sell a large chunk of them due to competition?

Sure, there’s always the option to run them out of business through a sales battle, but first off, losing even one tenant will tank land prices and satisfaction, reducing sales of your pricier items. Secondly there’s no guarantee the next tenant won’t compete in the same category, or a different but equally important category, unless you save and reload like crazy.

I’ll have to get rid of some tenants if I want to sell Tools, Books, Staves, Drinks, Herbs, etc…

And then there’s the whole mutual competition thing where you want tenants to compete with each other, not with you. Taking one out can disrupt the balance. Plus in the worst-case scenario, you will have to defeat two, three or more tenants just to free up one category so you can sell those items. It’s not worth the hassle. A whole game based on collecting and selling items shouldn’t have so many restrictions on buying and selling.

4. The slow pace of getting new items

Unlocking new items is a pain because first your adventurers have to collect ingredients from a dungeon. Then you have to hope that promising items appear on the list of available items. Sometimes all the items you get are in categories your tenants are competing in, i.e. you’ll have a hard time selling them. Then you have to hope you have enough ingredients. Then you have to play a stupid negotiating game to unlock them. Then you finally put them in the shop. In practice you will probably only unlock 8-12 new items in every in-game year.

Couple that with the fact that the bonuses for selling 100, 500 and 999 of an item are much-reduced compared to past games and you’ll end up selling the same bestselling items year-in year-out for most of the game. So much for 300+ items.

BTW, as a tip to new players, instead of bothering with new items, you can create super-items by selling over 999 of staples like milk and fruit. E.g. The base price for Ishwald milk is around £18, but once you sell 999 of it, the price starts to go up. Right now I’ve sold around 4000 units and the price per bottle is now £955. You can compare the price in the main menu screenshot below with the one way above. Blueberries went from £6 to around £288 and still rising. Why bother unlocking new items when you can do this?

My main menu much later

Even better, if the rarity of the base ingredient goes up, all derived products experience a boost in rarity and price as well. Blueberries are rare, so blueberry jam is rare too. And blueberry jam has a 0% disposal rate, so really, you could finish the game by leveling up your fruits and then stocking your store with jam only.

The reason I’m mentioning this here is because the game doesn’t explain it properly apart from a few throwaway comment. The game manual and tutorial are largely useless. For example they don’t explain that you can’t finish the game with just jam, because once prices rise to a certain level, people can’t buy them any more unless you also raise general satisfaction and land prices and upgrade your contribution rate. I had to find that out the hard way, so I’m currently sitting on a ton of expensive milk and jam I can’t sell for now.

5. The translation

It’s not as awful as Soul Smith of the Kingdom, but it still needs a solid round of editing by a native English speaker. It doesn’t even need to be a professional editor, just someone who can recognize blatant errors like this one:

And this one:

Among many others. Starship Studio still has a long way to go.

Summary

Nono’s Magic General Shop has kept me entertained for 80+ hours so far, so I won’t trash it too badly. But there are better games out there if you want a shop simulation fix, even in the same Ishwald series.

At least 50 of those hours were spent purely idling

The frustrations are too many and there isn’t much to do most of the time. Play it if you’re an inutoneko fan, if you want an idle clicker kind of game, or if you have nothing better to do. Otherwise save your time and money for something more rewarding.

Dropped Dragon Quest VII for real this time. I really mean it!

I didn’t mean to do a “No Game November” but it kind of ended up that way. Apart from my usual casual games and a ton of Mega Picross, I didn’t touch any games for the whole month. Since it wasn’t a deliberate abstinence, I did zero thinking or self-reflection about gaming, unlike last time. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t touched any ‘real’ games until December hit.

Then I realized, I’ve barely played anything all year. It’s time to clear out the old junk and start 2020 with a fresh plate. First thing I pulled out was Dragon Quest VII, a game I’ve been having an on-off relationship with since October 2018, though I first planned to play it way back in 2013. It’s time to finally put up or shut up with this game, and I decided to shut up once and for all, so this is my last post on DQ7.

What I liked

🟢Fixing the problems of the past to get a prosperous future. Very interesting idea, and more complicated and involving than Radiant Historia, Infinite Loop and other games of the kind that I’ve played.

🟢Going to the islands in the present to see how the changes I’d made had affected people was pretty satisfying. It would have been even better with a Before and After though.

🟢The music was nice. Dragon Quest always has good music IMO.

🟢Bright happy colors!

🟢Simple, familiar gameplay that’s easy to get the hang of.

Why I dropped it

🔻It was too long. 53 hours and it seemed I still had about 20 hours more to go. I was just tired.

🔻Too much walking back and forth, especially in the past where you can’t warp around.

🔻Jobs took forever to level up and you had to make your way to the Abbey every time to change them. I already hate job systems in RPGs, and this didn’t help one bit.

🔻Maps were useless or non-existent. Whenever I used Quick Save in a dungeon and returned after a while, I found myself heading the wrong way because there was nothing to mark the right way.

🔻The encounter rate was too high. There are few things worse than constantly getting lost in a dungeon where enemies won’t stop attacking you. Except maybe having a super-tough boss at the end of that dungeon, and you can’t save, so you keep getting wiped out and having to do the same dungeon all over again…

🔻The stories were often depressing even after you ‘fixed’ things. I liked that at first, by way of variety, but when every single story is either bittersweet or outright tragic, it takes a toll on the player. If the game had been shorter, I might have seen it through to the end, but it was just too much dying all the time.

Ultimately that was the biggest problem – DQVII was too much of a good thing. They did some nice things with the time travel and future-changing gimmicks while keeping the core gameplay of the system intact. If they had rounded it up in 40-50 hours, it would have been great. As it is, I’ve seen enough of what the game has to offer. I’m not even interested in how the game ends, I’m just done.

What’s next

I really don’t know. I started Etrian Odyssey again, but nothing has changed for me since the last time I tried it, so I don’t think it’s going to work out. If anything it’s even more annoying because now it’s old-hat AND annoying. In the spirit of clearing up loose ends, I think I’ll give Tokyo Xanadu eX+ a final chance, and either finish it or write a closure post like I just did with Dragon Quest VII. See you then!

Figured out Mega Picross

I’ve always ignored the “Mega Picross” sections of the Picross games I played, but after playing Sanrio Characters Picross, I thought I would give those puzzles one last try. I’d always found the explanations too complicated to understand, but once I took my time and worked through the tutorial puzzle along with the instructions, huh, it’s not so bad after all.

So then I thought I would just do the 10×10 puzzles and then quit because the rest would be too hard. So I did them all. Then I thought, I’ll just try one of the 15×15 puzzles. Then another. Then another…

A few days ago I was almost out of Picross puzzles to do. Now I have access to hundreds more via Mega Picross. That means you won’t be seeing me for a while, because now I have to go through Picross e to e7 cleaning up all the mega picross sections I missed. I’d already decided take it easy and follow my gamer’s heart this November (*cue Disney music*) and now I have the perfect tool. Don’t wait up for me!

Update (Nov 12) – It turns out Picross e and e2 don’t have Mega Picross, but the later games do. I’m also feeling more confident after conquering Sanrio Characters Picross, so I tackled some of the Extra and Free puzzles I had left undone last time. Thanks to that, I was able to fully clear Picross e as well! Commemorative “screenshot” below:

The rest are going to take a while longer, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to fully clear them. But I’m having a really good time so it’s all good. See you in a while!

Update (Nov 17th) Managed to fully clear Picross e4 and e5 as well. e2 and e3 have that annoying thing where certain puzzles won’t give you hints or let you use the roulette. BOO, HISS. I’ll probably get them one day, but that day is not any time soon. I started working on Picross e6’s collection of Mega Picross puzzles. What they did was take the regular Picross puzzles and Megafy them, so there’s a ton to do. TBH I’m starting to flag now. I’m well and truly Picrossed out… And yet whenever I try to start something new, I find myself being drawn back. I have some free time from Tuesday, so I might start/continue something then. See ya!

Update (November 23rd) Finished Picross e2, almost done with all the puzzles in Picross e6. I really have to stop myself sometime…

Final update (December 2nd) Finished Picross e3 thanks to a lucky burst of inspiration, finished Picross e6, time to dig into e7 and e8? Or quit while I’m ahead? Or borrow my brother’s Switch and do the Mega Picross puzzles there? The possibilities are endless!

I’m also STILL plodding on with DQVII. About to quit for real this time. No seriously, I actually mean it. Also giving Etrian Odyssey another chance, but I don’t think it’s going to work out. More on these stories as they develop.

Suffering from gamer’s block

Gamer’s block is when you have a lot of games on your backlog but you don’t feel like playing any of them. And at the same time, nothing new is attracting you. And yet you don’t want to quit playing games either. Last time I experienced this, I solved it through “No Game November,” which gave me a fresh boost to my love of gaming.

This time, I’m not going to do that… or am I… nah. It’s one thing to feel too lazy to game. It’s another to ban yourself. IT’S PAINFUL! So anyway, this blog isn’t actually dead, I’m just lazing around for a bit before getting into something new again. Not to say I haven’t played anything at all recently. Apart from the usual casual games, I played:

–Sanrio Characters Picross. I love Picross. I thought I would be fine with any kind of Picross as long as the puzzles were fun, and for the most part that was true. But TBH when you neither know nor care about the characters in the pictures you unlock, it’s a bit… hollow? Empty? If you like random cutesy characters and/or Hello Kitty, you’ll probably enjoy this a lot more. But it’s good enough to scratch my Picross itch so that’s good enough.

Dragon Quest 7 – No, I haven’t dropped it yet. Not playing it very enthusiastically, but it’s still on the cards. The depressing storylines and repetitive gameplay have taken a greater toll on me than expected. I won’t do another post on it until I either drop it for good or finish it, whichever comes first.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+ – I recently tried to pick it up again after going through a lot of trouble to hook my PS4 controller to my laptop. In hindsight it’s not that difficult, but it required a lot of googling various solutions and buying a bluetooth adapter, blah blah. My hope is that more familiar controls will make it easier to go through action RPGs on my laptop/TV. Only problem is, I’ve totally forgotten all the controls for Tokyo Xanadu eX+. I’m going to have to run through a few earlier dungeons to get my groove back before moving on with saving a certain character who will certainly wait patiently at the end of the dungeon no matter how long I spend dilly-dallying outside. I love video games <3

Others

Other games I was hoping to start soon, but can’t work up the energy: FFXIII, God Eater Resurrection, Harukanaru Toki no Naka de, Sakura Wars 4, Ys Seven. Most likely I won’t play any of these but will start something completely different when I’m done with the games above. Etrian Odyssey Untold: Millenium Girl is already begging for a comeback…

So that’s what I’ve been (not really) working on in October. Next update will be when I finish something or get sufficiently far into something new, just don’t hold your breath.

Granblue Fantasy – Level 175 at last!

I say “at last” like there’s something special about it. And maybe a year ago there might have been, but right now Granblue Fantasy has been so powercreeped that 175 is like, barely able to hold your own. You can’t argue with me because look, even the likes of me is level 175. That means anyone can do it.

Still, just because anyone can doesn’t mean everyone has. I’m sure there are people who started after me who are in their 200s now, just like there are people who began before me who are lower or who dropped the game ages ago. Heaven knows I had my own struggles with whether to drop it or not, but in the end I decided Granblue Fantasy was too much fun to drop. I just had to pace myself better and now at last, woo hoo, level 175!

Nothing really happens at 175 though. There’s a rank uncap quest where you fight a couple of nostalgic mooks like Mithra Malice and Freesia and stuff. Cygames really doesn’t want anyone to get stuck at such an inconvenient location, so they don’t make things too hard for you. Unless you slimed your way to 175 or took some similarly unrealistic shortcuts, you’ll be just fine.

…or so I say, but I actually died once to Leviathan Malice. ^^;; Bring Dispel or wait out his buffs, is all I have to say about that. Also not having a totally crappy Earth team would help.

Achievements at level 175

Well well, so here we are at level 175. It’s been a little over six months since I wrote my last update post at level 170. My play style for the past two years has been to go easy at regular times and go crazy during Half AP events. For some reason, 2019 has had fewer such times, which is probably why it’s taken me 6 months to grow by 5 levels. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t get anything done at all in that time.

-ULB’d both Bahamat and Lucifer. I had most of the materials already. I just had to leech a few Tiamat Malices in the wild and everything else fell in place.

-Got my first Arcarum Evoker. Alanaan, who is supposed to be good in fire, but I haven’t really tested him yet. I just got him as a natural extension of powering up The Sun, who is so useful I’m surprised Cygames hasn’t nerfed him yet. I especially love cross-summoning him into a Shiva <3

Shifty-looking old rotter

-Got my first Dark Opus weapon, the Sword of Renunciation. I’ve mentioned before that keeping up with the Granblue Fantasy meta can be stressful and confusing, but support for an Opus weapon in magna Light was near-unanimous so I went for it. It’s just a matter of leeching a few Dark Rapture and Metatron raids anyway, no biggie.

-Unlocked the Conqueror of Eternals skin. To unlock it, you have to get all 10 Eternals and then battle a big tortoise that Siete sics on you. It killed me once because it’s water element and my Earth team is made of kaka and doodoo. I returned later and fought water with water: Varuna team with Katalina + a Chaos Ruler wielding a Murgleis for a damage cut + a water carbuncle for additional cuts while boosting my attacks. It never stood a chance. The skin itself looks kind of cool on Djeeta, but Gran just looks like he’s trying too hard. Still I earned it, so I’ve been using it a lot lately.

-Forged the Murakumo class champion weapon and unlocked the Kengo class in a single afternoon. By itself this would be unremarkable news, especially since I don’t have Vajra or Summer Grea to take advantage of Bonito memes.

I only mention it because I remember when I first reached HL and was thinking about class champion weapons. Remember? Kina Farm remembers. I thought getting a Murakumo would be sooo much work. Now years later I just happened to have all the materials lying around or ready to exchange for in a few minutes. Powercreep is real, folks. That, and the kind tendency of Cygames to simplify anything that’s too stressful and/or unpopular.

-One-turn KO’d Tiamat, Colossus, Yggdrasil and Luminiera Omega. As with the above, I only mention this because I remember how much struggling and strategizing I had to do to beat them in the early stages of the game. It’s really nostalgic. Note that Leviathan and Celeste aren’t included. The former because my Earth team is junk and poopoo and the latter because Celeste has way too much HP.

Achievements left to do

-I still haven’t faced Bahamut HL. Nowadays even BahaHLs on the raid list tend to clear with ease, so maybe I’ll pub it and see what happens. Not until this magnafest is over though. I also have yet to host or fight Ultimate Bahamut HL (what for?) and Lucilius HL (for Dark Opus uncaps).

-Slowly working my way to 40-boxing Nio at a rate of 3-4 boxes per GW. We’ll discuss this again maybe a year from now. Why Nio, though? I really don’t know. I might switch to Eahta instead because my Earth party really needs help.

-Gotta finish uncapping my Seraphic weapons. I’ve done fire, water and earth so far, hoping to get wind done this Rise of the Beasts. Light and Dark will have to wait for the next round. I really need light quartz for the Light harp. Luckily I have a couple of untouched SSRs in the Side Stories for just such an occasion. Sure would be nice to pull a Vortex Dragon right about now…

-Have to unlock the rest of the Extra II classes like Doctor and Soldier. Mainly for the really cool skins, especially Soldier. Reminds me of my childhood watching Rambo.

-Have to SSR the rest of the Arcarum summons. Not a priority really, because I’m pretty happy with my summon lineup. But the ones offering extra HP in particular should come in handy down the line. It’s not like I have anything better to do with my Arca tickets now I have Alanaan anyway.

It took a while to get the Grimnir anima, but what is that between me and trumpet kitty?

-Continue leisurely replacing my M1 weapons with M2. I’m buying them with Prestige Pendants at the rate of one a month so… yeah. Occasionally I get a lucky drop from a raid, but it’s not something to rely on.

-Level all my characters up to the cap. It’s something I was enthusiastic about when I first started Granblue Fantasy, but eventually I had too many characters and too few resources so I couldn’t keep up. Now I have the resources to spare and some actual trophy rewards for doing so, I’m back in business.

State of my grids at level 175

You knew it was coming. They haven’t changed too much from March, but I have swapped a few things in/out, so take a look!

Earth!

I got that Alexiel axe from the free Anniversary weapon ticket. I also FLB’d that Uriel fist a few hours ago. Now I’m saving up to buy more Alexiel axes with Prestige Pendants. Though at this rate my next one will probably come from the next Anniversary ticket…

Here are my Earth summons as well. I use largely the same summons for most grids so take this as a representative sample.

The art in this game keeps getting better and better. The characters even have noses these days.

Can’t even OTKO a simple Leviathan Omega. Why even live?

Fire!

Look Ma, no Colo staves! All the Ancient Ecke Sachs came from the Pendant shop except one, which came from Arcarum. People who say Twin Elements can drop them are just messing with you. (j/k but srsly) I still need a few more to complete the set, and I will probably replace that Bahamut Dagger with something at some point, I just don’t know what.

I have an Agni I’m idly considering build a grid for, but only super-idly because this Fire grid isn’t bad at all. Would Agni be strong enough to justify the effort? I’m not convinced yet, which is why Ixaba remains unsparked.

Wind!

Took out one Tiamat gun and slotted in a Grimnir harp. I should be working on a second one, but Alexiel axes take priority. Do I feel any stronger? I used to, until I got wiped out by Siegfried Proud in the last event. Welp, back to the drawing board! …Not. It’s good enough for most content, which means it’s good enough for me.

Water!

I was planning to spark that third Murgleis, but I got lucky on a 10-pull so, ta-daa! Still running mainly Berserker, with the occasional Chaos Ruler where necessary. I’ve been doing some cautious experiments with Chrysaor for more damage and Sage for extra sustain, but I’m most used to Berserker so it’s hard to adapt to a new playing style. Plus TBH nowadays I just leech or Auto everything I get away with.

Just posted this to express my extreme displeasure at FLB’ing Varuna and not getting any new uncap art. BOO, Cygames, BOOO! That Justice is there for the extra HP, not her relatively useless call. I might ULB her for a few more stats, but I haven’t heard anything good about her Evoker Maria Theresa so I won’t be getting her.

Heart! Uh, I mean, Light!

Why is this “light” sword more fiery than anything in my Fire grid?

Now with 30% more HP!

Much stronger than last time. It’s easy to tell with this one because I struggled a lot with Proud+ Huanglong and Qilin the first time they came out. This time it was much easier to wipe Qilin out and focus on Huanglong, who also went down much faster than previous times. I’m satisfied with Light for now, so it will go on the backburner for development while I focus on other parties.

Dark!

I took the Ancient Cortana out because it was cutting into my HP. I also need to get a better mainhand than that Qilin sword. Eventually I will incorporate some M2 elements, but not for a long time because this grid gets the job done, more or less.

Final comments

I’m just killing time in Granblue Fantasy waiting for the next big content to drop. For the rest of the year my focus will be on unlocking the remaining classes I don’t have while uncapping my Arcarum summons on the side. If the 2020 Zodiac character is excellent, I might do a spark in the New Year, otherwise this is as far as updates go for the next six months or so. See ya!