Who this game is for
– People who really like dungeon crawlers. Like, really, really like them.
– People with at least 20 hours to devote to the game, usually more.
– People who are tired of always “saving the world”.
– People who are tired of playing as the usual plucky kid with his prickly love interest.
– People who have a lot of patience for long-term party growth and grinding.
– People who don’t mind a bit of initial difficulty in return for curb-stomping galore towards the end.
– People who can let go and don’t mind changing parties frequently (this is always really hard for me).
– Anyone who thinks they’d enjoy playing as multiple generations of the same family.
That’s a pretty specific set of people, but if you can tick off even two or three of the items on that list, Ore no Shikabane might just be for you.
Having said all that, and despite my hearty recommendation, this game is far from perfect. They left a modern-day sequel hook at the end, and if they ever make a sequel (ha!) there are a couple of things I’d want them to look at.
What’s wrong with Ore no Shikabane wo Koete yuke
1. A total of 10 short dungeons (5 for much of the game) is way too few for a game that can drag on so long. There are also way too many of the same enemy/palette swaps to fight. Either make the dungeons longer and more involving or shorten the game or design more enemies. Preferably all three.
2. The pacing is a bit slow. There was a long stretch in the middle where I felt I was just running in place, raising characters only watch them die, then raising more, repeat. I’m not sure what could be done to relieve this. Maybe shorten the game in general, or add more story landmarks (i.e. bosses) so you feel you’re making progress at every stage..
3. Walking is slow as heck, dashing reduces your HP quickly and is not very fast either. Later on you get items and learn skills that make things much better but until then moving around is a real pain.
4. One wrong hit to your leader and it’s bye-bye for that trip. It would help a lot if they put at least one save in the dungeons, at least on the easiest setting.
5. The roulette should be manual, not automatic. As it is getting rare items and scrolls is hard and frustrating. Sometimes there’s a stat requirement before you can land on a particular item, but the game never tells you what it is.
6. Random perma-deaths for KO’ed characters is too painful. I once lost a promising swordsman at 4 months! Another time I almost lost an archer at 7 months, but her mother offered to stand in for her. Only her mother was even better, so I just restarted and lost all the progress I’d made in the dungeon that month.
7. You can only carry 30 items, and the slots fill up in a hurry. There should’ve been some way to either send things home or increase your capacity.
8. Not really a flaw, but after spending all that money upgrading the town it would have been more fun to let me explore it, visit landmarks, talk to NPCs and generally take a look around as it changes through the years.
9. Fighting the bonus boss will make you feel bad. Not bad as in “sorry for the boss” but bad because the bonus boss is as patronizing as hell and clearly lets you win to make you feel better. You can even choose to re-fight the boss over and over again until you’re “satisfied”, but you’ll never really win. I don’t recommend it if you want to walk away from the game feeling good.
10. Some of the stuff that happens in the story is kinda nasty. The anime scenes are hard to watch in general.
11. Characters don’t talk unless they’re dying, so you don’t really get to know them. Bad for people who enjoy character interaction, of which there is virtually none in this game.
12. The stats are kind of confusing, even with lengthy explanations in-game. I’m still not 100% sure I really “get” them, because sometimes it seems the stats don’t correspond to the damage your character dishes out/takes and stuff like that.
13. Breeding takes a whole month, plus another month before the sprog shows up, plus another 2 months before you can actually use them in battle. It calls for careful planning, but it’s also kind of annoying.
14. No sidequests. Hardly a dealbreaker, but I enjoy sidequests and it would liven up those dull, dull slogs through the same old dungeons. A few optional ‘kill 10 frogs’ quests would be cool, since I’m going to be mowing them down anyway.
Apart from Nos. 1, 2 and 6, most of these aren’t as bad as I made it sound. It’s a very good game, all things considered.
Enough about the past, on to the future. I’ve been making good progress with Lunar and Rune Factory Frontier, so I’ll provide an update on one of those next.
This sounds so interesting! This is definitely a game I would like to try. I hope that the Vita sequel slated for release in 2015 will be as excellent as this first installment!
I hope so too. I’ve seen some grumbling on Amazon.jp about an annoying new character that was added that nobody wanted, but hopefully it’s not as bad as they’re making it sound.