It took me about 33 hours to finish, but other reviews claim 21-25 hours is the norm. I should have spent less time exploring the dungeons and skipped the final three seasonal dungeons once the way to the last boss opened up. The ending was brief, but quite happy. The kegare are disposed of forever, MC goes back to his world and has a happy end with his chosen girl (Femiruna). I was pretty satisfied.
As I said in the title, Conception is very enjoyable as a dating sim/visual novel, but as a dungeon crawler it stinks. A brief explanation follows.
Good dating sim
+ The character designs are really cute. The 3D close ups are not so cute, but they grow on you after a while.
+ With two exceptions (Mahiru and Ruka) the girls range from likeable to adorable. As romantic interests Tarua and Collette were a little too kiddy for my tastes, but everyone else was very passable. You’ve probably met all their types if you’ve watched even one high school anime before, but they’re well-done archetypes nevertheless.
+ Building a relationship is a low pressure, no failure affair. There are no bad ends, no jealousy events and no way to lock yourself out of a route. Even if you answer wrongly and piss the girl off, just keep talking to her week after week and you’ll eventually get her affection up.
+ (As far as I know) there’s no time limit in the game, so you could date all 12 girls and watch all 12 endings in one playthrough if you were bored enough and persistent enough. You even get the harem end for maxing out all 12 girls’ affections.
+ All the dating sim staples are present. Cherry blossom viewing, gift-giving, school camps, beach date, festival date. At the same time there’s a refreshing lack of angst, melodrama and ‘comical’ misunderstandings. It’s light, simple fare, good for dating sim beginners.
+ If you’re thirteen you might get a kick out of the super-jiggly boob physics. If you’re curious but don’t want to play the game, you can replicate the effect by taping a shopping bag full of jelly to your chest and jumping up and down a few times. After that, please get a life.
Bad dungeon crawler
– 99% of the battles can and should be played on Auto-Battle at double speed. The battles are so easy and so repetitive that you don’t need to put any personal effort in. Boss battles require a little more alertness, but if you stay on top of your healing you should be fine.
– Since the game is so easy, most skills will go unused. This doesn’t contribute to making the game “bad” but it’s a waste of a good battle system with 18 different classes and many more skills. On paper the mix of strategy and regular turn-based action is very attractive, so I’m sorry it turned out this way.
– Skills are annoying to use anyway. The animations are simple and non-flashy, but they still take a second or two to play out AND they don’t do much more damage than using regular attacks. Element skills, directional skills, all of them are useless compared to the speed and simplicity of just mashing O. In the final dungeon I set everyone to “Don’t Use Skills” so I could get through much faster.
– The miss rate is incredibly high. It’s not unusual for my MC to miss two out of five hits, even with his TEC and LUK in the upper 2000s. I haven’t seen anything this bad since Tactical Guild. Apart from healing skills, skills that claim 100% accuracy and skills that raise the Chain gauge, you’re better off sticking with regular attacks. They aren’t any more likely to hit, but at least you don’t have to watch an animation play out only to get MISS at the end.
– Enemies level up with you. However they don’t do so fast enough or effectively enough to present a real challenge. They only put in juuust enough effort to make themselves a pain in the buttocks. Therefore even though the game promises that you can vanquish low-level enemies without a fight à la Earthbound or Mana Khemia, in practice even the most pathetic weaklings will insist on duking it out to the bitter end.
– The game rewards you with extra EXP for dragging battles out. Later on, though, enemies will be so weak they’ll die before you can over-chain them, making it hard to level later party members up. I ended up never using the Ninja and Bandis (not a typo) classes because I knew I’d need to grind if I wanted to raise them high enough on the drips of EXP the later dungeons gave.
– The dungeons are poorly designed. There’s slightly different decor in each dungeon, but they all have the exact same format. Corridor, rectangular room, corridor, rectangular room, corridor, rectangular room. Apart from an altar that gives you new equips all the traps and features are old and overused.
– The collision detection is off. By that I mean whatever algorithm detects whether you hit and enemy from the front or back is way off. I can recall many, many times where I was certain I’d hit an enemy from behind only to have them get the advantage. And I remember even more cases where we met face to face but they still got the behind attack.
– The town-building aspect of the game was poorly developed. The idea is that once you max the level of your current kids, you set them free in town where they help the city develop by opening shops. With the exception of the training house, the shops they open are useless. The town level is maxed out very quickly and there are no important differences between Granbania at level 1 and Granbania at level max.
+ That said, there are some things about the game that make it a good dungeon crawler for beginners, or for people who aren’t really into the whole DC thing. Auto battles, auto equips, low difficulty, save anywhere, hundreds of treasure chests, easily-escapable battles, easily-avoidable battles and low penalty for failure. These features made the dungeons easy to go through even as they made them more boring.
Conclusion
I went in looking for a dungeon crawler and came out with a dating sim. It’s just lucky that I happen to like dating sims, or there’d be trouble in the paradise right now. Conception doesn’t offer much by way of replay value and I already got the girl I liked most, so I think I’m done here. Unless you really like the look of the girls and want to play a dating sim with brief moments of diversion, I don’t especially recommend it either. Maybe Conception II
What’s next
Territoire demo at long last. And then Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Or maybe Atelier Lilie. No, definitely Aria of Sorrow. After that we’ll see.
Hum, I’m kinda glad I didn’t buy it on a whim. I would have prefered an excellent dungeon crawler with a modest dating sim side. Hopefully the second installment will manage to balance things better.
We can only hope. As I’ve said, the original’s problems are very easy to fix without losing any of its strengths.
Guess I’ll skip the game unless I have way too much free time then~
I’m glad I played it just to get it off my mind, but if I could go back in time a few days I’d skip it too.
The second game is *SLIGHTLY* better as an RPG (not by much, if you didn’t like 1 you probably won’t like 2), but also worse as a dating sim because it lacks seasonal date events and the character designs (school uniform on everyone instead of actually distinguishing clothes) + character variety are worse off (especially if you prefer some older heroines). School setting is all the more prominent, which can be good or bad depending on whether you like that kind of stuff or not.
Hmm, I see. I’ll wait for an eShop sale then. If it’s as meh as you say (and I believe you because I played game 1), it won’t take long for the price to come down.