Little Witch Parfait: Kuroneko Mahouten Monogatari is an alchemy/shop/relationship simulator about student magician named Parfait whose mother dies leaving her with a magic shop that is 1,000,000g in debt. To work her way out of this hole, Parfait has to drop out of school and devote her days to producing and selling enough magical goods to pay off her debt before the entire shop is repossessed.
Since she’s still a student magician she doesn’t know that many recipes, so in the early stages of the game you’ll have to divide your time between studying at home/the library, foraging in the wild and making stuff to sell in the store.
By the time Parfait hits max magician level and doesn’t need to study any more, your store should be so popular that you’ll be busy day and night producing enough goods to keep the customers satisfied. It pays to do as much studying and foraging as you can early on so you have a lot of ingredients stocked up for the later stages. Especially since foraging takes up so much time every day. A whole hour to fetch two bottles of water from a lake? Really, Parfait?
Or maybe this is what you were doing instead?
The actual selling part of the game is handled by Parfait’s familiar Sakemasu. Your main task is to put items on the shelves and keep an eye on what’s popular in town so you can stock it. Apart from that your only job is to keep the products rolling in by slaving away behind your alchemy pot all day. Luckily the alchemy itself is not that hard either. Success rates are 100% as long as you have the ingredients and magician levels only affect how many of an item you can make, not whether you’ll succeed or not. Piece of cake.
By the way, since Parfait is a magician, you might wonder, “Why doesn’t she just magic up some diamonds and rubies and sell those to repay her debt?” Well wonder no more because that’s exactly what she does — and exactly what you’ll do if you’re a savvy gamer. In the game you’ll learn at least 50 recipes for various magical potions and powders and foods, but nothing will beat a handful of precious stones for sheer lucrativeness.
The catch is that people won’t buy such expensive stuff until your shop gains a better reputation, so you might have to sell them at a heavy discount to move them. Still, selling one 2000g stone at 50% off is faster and better than selling ten cheap potions at 50g each. It’s even better than selling a hundred potions at 50g because it might take weeks to shift that many potions versus a day for the gemstone.
Girls in swimsuits: guaranteed to make your store 30% more popular!
Story-wise the excessive profitability of gems makes a bit of a joke of the heavy emphasis placed on Parfait’s mother helping people with her medicines and being such a great healer blah di blah… but then again maybe the store is so heavily in debt because she focused on unprofitable herbs and potions instead of going where the money was. I put that down as a “maybe” because you never find out just what Parfait’s mom used the money for. You’re supposed to play twice and get the “true ending” if you really wanna know, and I don’t really wanna know so that settles it.
That covers the alchemy/shop simulation part of Little Witch Parfait. What about the relationship aspect? Alas, that’s the part I’m least qualified to comment on, because I skipped a LOT of the text in this game. Every single skit goes on waaaay longer than it needs to, my eyes start glazing over and whooops, my finger accidentally hit the fast-forward button, what a klutz I am. I did pay a little more attention towards the end, but it didn’t really help because some events were just infuriating.
For example your debt in this game turns out to be 2,000,000g, not 1,000,000, because after Parfait earns the first million G, she stupidly (well it’s a forced event so you have no choice. It’s the game that’s stupid) gives it to a loan shark in exchange for a dud piece of real estate. Now you have to earn another million all over again. I almost dropped the game at that point. I should have dropped it. But no, I hung in there and finished the game, got the prince’s ending. You can also get endings with your three female friends, not sure how romantic those are but all three girls were bland, stereotypical anime girl types plus that’s not really my thing so I didn’t bother.
If you don’t do Flore’s route, her mother will kill her and commit suicide. …I wish I were making that up.
As for how I got me that prince, Little Witch Parfait is a flag-based game so I just showed up at the right places at the right time according to this here FAQ and presto, he was mine. The whole thing was a bit weird because there’s Prince Filis and his lookalike Ferel and this whole time Parfait thought she was falling in love with Ferel but it was actually Filis disguised as Ferel she was talking to (sometimes. Other times it was really Ferel). In the end Prince Filis goes “I love you, Parfait” and Parfait says “But I love Ferel!” and Filis says “I’m Ferel! Sort of! Sometimes!” and Parfait goes “Okay, then” and somehow that makes everything okay. It’s weird. Weird, I tell you.
But whatever, a happy ending is a happy ending. I’ll take what I can get in a game with unexpected dark turns (violence, murder, suicide, crushing debt, attempted sexual assault, etc) like this one. The colors are light and cheerful and things work out well in general (except the part where no one blinks an eye about a 15 year old being forced to work to repay a debt to a loan shark) but it’s not as happy-go-lucky a world as you might expect from the cover. That’s not a bad thing, I guess. I don’t really have a horse in this race, I’m just glad to be done with the game.
Final thoughts on Little Witch Parfait: I should have spent the time on something better. The alchemy is too simplistic to be satisfying, plus because very few items are worth making you’ll just synthesize the same things over and over again ad nauseam. Foraging is laborious and unrewarding. The store largely runs itself. None of the characters clicked with me and the dialog was long-winded and tiresome to slog through.
The game reminds me a lot of the Aoi Umi no Tristia/Aoi Sora no Neosphere games also from Kogado/Cyberfront but those had better alchemy and pretty good writing. This game is just fluff with no substance. Oh to be sure it did have a few funny and charming moments here and there, and Parfait and her friends are reasonably cute to look at in a loli kind of way but ultimately this really isn’t my sort of thing. I hear there are other Little Witch games on other consoles (Reinette and Flore at least) but I’ll leave them to another reviewer to play and enjoy. I’m out.
Oh well, sad to hear this isn’t very good despite being a remake but I guess that’s why the company is pretty much comatose.
Probably. I know you played and enjoyed the two Aoi games, but this isn’t in the same league at all.
I wish the Aoi company wouldn’t keep raising my hopes by constantly drawing new art for their Comiket booths.
And changing the topics since I’m here anyway, I’ve gotten around to playing the English version of Fire Emblem Fates and I think I’ll give it a final verdict of being a fun FE game (on Conquest a.k.a Black)… but I think the general improvements made means that even Birthright (White) version is much more interesting than Awakening, though that version’s still kind of boring for me.
I feel like there’s a bit of irony because my expectations before game release was that it would continue Awakening’s trend of having really sloppy game design but instead it turns out the gameplay is probably one of the better ones in the series… while the plot is quite possibly one of the worst I’ve seen not by Fire Emblem standards, but by Videogame standards. Kind of an accomplishment considering they stated that they were aware that Awakening’s plot was not stellar and wanted to improve on it.
There’s also the hot topic about it being torn to shreds in censorship, something that Bravely Default’s sequel also seems to be geared up for. I think you’ve expressed hopes that the localized version would fix the plot somehow but I’m kind of sad to say that they kept the main plot mostly intact and then bizarrely pin-pointed and ripped out random parts of the game which they were afraid would cause controversy – there’s no consistency either in what they remove like leaving the bathhouse in but removing the swimsuit costumes. A handful of characters had unnecessary characterization changes that I think make them weaker
Kind of a shame because the localization is actually decent when they aren’t making random changes.
It kind of strikes me that the series is in a really precarious position despite its sales success because its a double-edged sword where once the team would be mostly left alone, but now it’s “too successful to ignore” and corporate meddling is definitely behind the flawed parts of the game (such as the whole splitting it up into 3 parts decision)… and worse, not just in one country but TWO of them meaning you get the feeling the end product really had a bunch more potential it could fulfill (despite still being really fun)
I think you requested that I tell you about the plot previously so I might do that depending on whether I get around to beating the True Ending path, I assume you won’t mind complete spoilers? Or should I just give a general overview on why the plot is bad?
Kogado will stop just as soon as people stop falling for it…
I’m very happy about FE: Conquest/Birthright’s success, as long as Nintendo understands it succeeded despite their best efforts at sabotaging it, not because. If they get the wrong idea and start chopping all future releases into three and censoring random bits of gameplay then welp, good luck to them.
A brief explanation of what made the plot so bad will suffice. I don’t remember what the story was supposed to be any more (something about a prince brought up by an enemy nation a la Summon Night X?)
Speaking of Summon Night, I’ve been playing 6 since it came out. Despite it being basically a huge fan disc with old characters, the writing is actually pretty decent. (if you can tolerate the game frequently spouting terms like nakama! and the power of friendship a la typical JRPG) I have to admit, it feel quite nice to revisit older SN characters and seeing ones who normally wouldn’t interact with each other do just that is more amusing than I’d expected.
The gameplay itself is a bit of a hit and miss with some mechanics improving (no need to equip summon stone anymore yay!) and other mechanics getting needlessly changed (having to manually walk around instead of just moving one square at a time boo!), however, overall, I found it much more enjoyable than SN5 where you literally can only have 5 units on the field.
I heard about all the cameos and knew it would be mainly targeted at existing fans… which is what I am so that’s okay. Haven’t played 5 yet (only 5 units? maji?!!!) or 6, but what exactly do you mean by manually walking around? You mean there are no grids and you have an area to move in like in Arc the Lad TOS or Shining Force Feather? I like grids, but that doesn’t sound too bad.
The really executive summary would be:
MC is a spineless, brainless and way too “morally pure” which is a really grating combination to experience. Also the plot twists are dumb.
And now the long version with some spoilers (casual comment viewers should stop reading now):
Quick summary of the pre-path split mission – cartoonishly evil King Dad Garon kidnapped MC as a child from Hoshido (White Kingdom) and gave him a magic exploding sword as a trap because he planned for him to be “rescued” and get close to the Queen as a suicide bomber. She set up a barrier around the Kingdom that Nohr (Black Kingdom) can’t get through until she’s dead and the plan works.
(All unintentional on the MC part BTW, it’s a bit dumb how they didn’t confiscate his obviously evil sword that turns out to be a bomb)
And really quick thoughts on Birthright/White path – it’s considered the best written out of the paths but that’s a relative statement – it’s mostly that it’s very safe/boring and doesn’t pull out as many stupid plot devices. It does make your siblings on the opposing side come off as psychopathic morons though considering how reasonable they are on the other side and there’s a bunch of forced death for drama.
Alright back to Conquest plot – despite the fact that White MC immediately figures out that Evil Dad is evil and doesn’t love him at all, for some reason on Conquest it takes another 12 missions for him to figure that out.
In the mean time, he’s constantly whining to dad about how killing unarmed civilians is so mean and dad is all “HOW DARE YOU CHALLENGE MAH AUTHORITY, I’LL HAVE YOU EXECUTED” and his siblings have to bail him out. He’s so stupid that it takes him a couple more missions after that for his younger brother to just outright state “Holy hell you moron, just pretend to be follow his orders but go behind his back, don’t do it in front of his face!”
(On a sidenote, I heard that the localization supposedly made MC less whiny… I can’t imagine how unbearable his JP version must be if this is “toned down”)
The middle is kind of filler-ish – Dad orders MC and crew to suppress rebellions, MC does it but in a special way that somehow involves NOT killing a single person. No joke, the cutscenes after each mission always establishes that he somehow manages to defeat all the enemies without killing a single one.
But since the game doesn’t want to let you feel accomplishment or anything, these two assholes named Iago and Hans always come in after you do the hard work and start executing the civilians anyway and MC has no balls or brains to stop them from doing anything other than throwing a pity party for himself.
Sometimes they try to force him to execute someone he doesn’t really want to but in order for him to remain “morally pure”, the captives always end up committing Seppuku which is kind of grating in its pandering.
Well except for one bizarre mission where they trespassed through some Kitsune territory and end up having to wipe the tribe – for extra drama the writers decided they were really dead just for that one mission and the main heroine gives the most hilarious yet wrong “cheer up speech” which basically boils down to “Well, people would have died anyway no matter what action you took”
Ok BIG SPOILERS so here’s the big stupid plot point revealed in the middle of the story which makes the plot go to hell in a handbasket – are you ready for it?
Evil Dad is actually a monster that killed the original Dad and took his place – original Dad was a noble person and not a cartoonish supervillain who doesn’t even have the good sense to keep his evil laughter in private.
This is revealed to you by main heroine using a Magic Crystal Ball that shatters in one use which she retrieves from a magical alternate dimension there to tease the True Ending DLC route because it would be too convenient if you could use it to convince your siblings I guess… though in retrospect, it really didn’t matter because your siblings love you to the point of always going out of their way to protect you and yet the MC decides the best time to break this particular news to them is THE LAST MISSION OF THE DAMN GAME.
And here’s their brilliant plan they came up with – Hoshido’s Capital has a magic throne that reveals the true form of anyone who sits on it, so they’re going to win the war by stabbing everyone until they reach it and wait for him to sit on it and reveal himself.
I don’t know where to begin with how dumb this is
1) Why the hell would anyone ever build that throne in the context of the fictional universe and not a cheap plot device?
2) It relies on the fact that King Dad would be stupid enough to actually sit on the throne even though there’s really no reason to do so… so of course he does.
3) At no point did collaborating with the enemy in order to make the manpower loss as bloodless as possible ever come to mind for MC.
The last few chapters are just a mess of trying to tie up all the loose ends – RIGHT OUTSIDE OF THE THRONE ROOM after the king has entered, the two assholes got tired of killing civilians so they try to kill MC and finally your siblings grow a spine and decide they had enough and are going to turn the tables instead (notice how it’s not the MC growing a spine).
They even deliver a headslapping justification of “We’ll just dump your bodies in a river and if the king asks what happened to you, we’ll just say some rebels killed you instead” which is just urgh because if they weren’t even going to come up with a good cover story, they really should have knocked them off a lot faster and save us a bunch of “MC whines” scenes.
Even worse because they fight right outside the throne room which means King Dad must have lost his sense of hearing in his old age.
So about the throne room scene – I originally thought this was supposed to be like a scene of erasing Evil King’s “legitimacy” – they established that the kingdom is sort of split into two with loyalists under him and the reasonable ones under Prince Elder Brother, so I was expecting it to be a really public affair where the entire kingdom finally finds out he’s a monster and so it’s OK to kill him but… well, it just kind of ends up being just the MC and crew who witness that he’s a monster.
I mean jeez, you really didn’t need to convince your own party that he’s a monster – there’s already plenty of reasons to kill him even if he wasn’t one since he’s kind of bringing the country down with his policies.
Extra dumbness – your siblings are like “OH NOS, WE CAN’T KILL HIM, HE’S STILL OUR FATHER” and MC is like “what, he’s a monster” and they are “BUT STILL” but Older Brother snaps out of it first and tells everyone they have to do it anyway even though it’s the most emotionally painful for him because he actually knew King Dad back when he wasn’t an imposter monster (which seems bizarrely backwards – wouldn’t it be much easier to kill your dad if you only ever known him to be an evil abusive tyrant?)
Anyway they kill monster and surprise there’s one more mission where your younger brother from the other kingdom got resurrected as an evil zombie ghost because they want to create a loose end to sell the True Ending DLC and you kill him too yay.
Urgh, what wasted potential. I think the concept advertised during the early trailers of “reforming a corrupt kingdom” from within had potential but they somehow managed to bungle every aspect of it.
Even off the top of my head I can already think of a few improvements – improve the MC from being stupidly flawed, remove the stupid monster plot twist and make the king into a ruthless but pragmatic ruler instead of Evil McEvilTon – now you actually have some actual drama where you don’t want to kill someone who used to be a good person but have to for the greater good and what’s now instead of… what we actually got.
Oh well, guess Fire Emblem authors just can’t write at all… I suppose they do have to keep the plot twists to set up the True Ending route, which of course begs the question of whether such a route was needed in the first place outside of wanting to milk money…
*slow applause*
*standing ovation*
That was an epic summary XDDDD I imagine it must have been torture to play, but it was a very fun read. I was expected it to be bad, but this is just all kinds of ridiculous. I’m trying to think of other SRPGs I’ve played with three possible routes. Tactical Guild comes to mind. Elvandia Story too. Both were all kinds of nonsensical but this is on a whole ‘nuther level.
I thought for sure Conquest would be about, you know, conquering and taking over the world, not killing time for 20 hours then killing your not-dad who killed your mom and yet it still took you most of the game to figure out he was evil…? Why does MC feel any sense of loyalty towards him – and why does the Evil King still keep him around? I don’t get it. T
The king actually being a monster has been done very prominently before (Dragon Quest IV? V?) so it’s one of the first things that occurred to me. It would have been more interesting to explore the dynamics of that relationship by keeping the king normal and relatively reasonable at first and only slowly growing crazier as the game progresses. Or not make him crazy but make MC crazy and power hungry and bent on revenge, which is what I was hoping for when I heard of this route. Well, whether. FE writers should just stick to simple “Prince saves kingdom” kind of stories next time.
Thanks again for the summaries Davzz. You’ve saved me a lot of time and wondering.
No, it still has grid, and it’s silly beyond imagination. They made it so you have to move slowly within the grid when you’re deciding where to move to, and to add insult to injury, they also made it that each time you go up or down a step the character does this 1 second animation that can’t be skipped, so whenever you change your mind about where you want to move, instead of choosing another square instantly, you now have to crawl slowly to the other square.
Oh… that sounds like a pain. Slow movements really kill me in SRPGs so this is a huge step backwards. It can be fixed in localization though.
“Why does MC feel any sense of loyalty towards him – and why does the Evil King still keep him around?”
That kind of reminds me but the first scene right after the path split where the MC reports back and King Dad is like “What!? Why the hell are you here!?” in a sort of mixture of disbelief that he didn’t die from the bomb and that he wasn’t expecting him to return even if he lived because seriously who would be that stupid.
MC also kind of outright asks him why he sent him to Hoshido strapped with a bomb as if there’s actually a perfectly reasonable answer that wouldn’t make Evil King look like a supervillain… and he basically just says “Because you’re just a pawn to me and I don’t give a crap about you, you moron” so I guess he got what he asked for.
Elder Brother having some sense of loyalty to the King made sense because he grew up before imposter swap (although it comes off as very naive), but MC’s loyalty for half the game is completely bizarre because its established that the start of the game is the first time they’ve met.
At bare minimum they should really established that he has no trust for him at all and is really only here because of his siblings who raised him.
As for why King keeps him around, technically he just keeps sending MC into suicide missions and siblings goes behind his back to keep him alive… and for some reason King Dad knows about that because Asshole #1 keeps telling on you but he’s like “whatever I’ve arbitrary decided not to execute you because otherwise there would be no plot”
Oh and there’s also some jape about wanting to keep him alive to make him suffer and I think it’s implied that makes it easier for them to turn him into an evil zombie ghost but that never happens.
And yeah, the Monster twist has been done in other games before so any long-term RPG fan can probably see it coming – Final Fantasy IV is the one that comes to mind, right down to the “MC is duped into carrying a bomb with him” part… the difference is that Cecil isn’t completely stupid like Fates MC.
The more you try to explain, the worse it sounds. If I were playing I’m sure I’d spend the whole game expecting a plot twist where MC reveals he was actually playing dumb the whole time so he could get close enough to the king to get his revenge. And the plot twist would never come. And I would be really mad. So yeah, I dodged a bullet on this one.
(Come to think of it, didn’t Lunar SSH do the whole “ruler replaced by evil double” thing as well?)