(P)Rogress update on Arc Rise Fantasia (spoilers)

af16-thumbYay, 300th post! \o/ And yay, 30th hour of Arc Rise Fantasia! I just finished the Opalus subplot, and I’m having waaay more fun than I ever thought I would when I picked it up.

My opinion of the game has improved quite a bit in the 25 gaming hours since the last post. Part of it is the game improving, and a great part is me either getting used to situations or dialing down my expectations and adjusting accordingly.

Improvements, either on my part or on the game’s part.

The battle system did open up once I had more magic at my disposal. I have more orbs that I can use and have unlocked the level 1 magic for all my characters. I also started using Analyzers to check the bosses’ weaknesses so I can target them with magic. A well-aimed sync attack can knock a healthy chunk off an enemy’s HP in no time at all (thanks teasel for the tip).

So far this strategy is working much better than the Trinity Act strategy the game tries to promote. It does more damage in less time, for one thing. Even better, you can build up quite a nice combo with just two party members while one heals, instead of having to take all three out of action for the first three moves.

The only disadvantage is that I can’t use magic in dungeons at all because I’m saving it for the boss fights. Luckily I always stock up on at least 50 Mid Liquids and as many High Liquids as I can afford.

Got used to

The voice acting. Either the actors improved with time (unlikely, but possible) or my ears just got used to the awfulness, because I don’t even notice it any more. More than that, I actually even like some of these voices. Like, I honestly think Niko’s dorky, clumsy voice fits his dorky, clumsy personality just fine. That Niko, he’s feeding information to the Imperial Army, isn’t he? It’s hard to get mad when they make it so obvious.

Dialed down expectations

I’m having more fun with the boss battles, but map fights are still as useless and as unthreatening as ever. I wish the game would compensate by making boss-like battles more frequent, at least as sidequests, but I’ve realized it’s not going to happen.

I’ve also realized that the story isn’t going to get any better. It’s not going to get better, it’s not going to do anything unusual or exciting and it’s probably going to piss me off by the time it’s over. But that’s okay. A stupid ending is much easier to bear when you’re expecting it.

Is Arc Rise Fantasia a good game? No. I’d call it above-average, where above-average is defined as “highly playable and even enjoyable at times.” And really, what are my options for turn-based RPGs on the Wii? Not many, and not much better than ARF, so I might as well get used to it.

Farm Frenzy: Animal Country – My casualization is progressing at an alarming rate

farm frenzy animal country

There are no sheep, ducks or chicks in this game.

I’m still not in the frame of mind to play anything “long” and “epic”, but the casualest of games? Bring it on! It only took me two days to finish all the levels of Farm Frenzy: Animal Country and get a silver rank in about 75% of them. That’s what I like about these casual games.

1. They’re short.
2. They’re easy to get into. Just pick up and play.
3. I can tell whether they’re good or not within 5 minutes. None of this “It gets better after 20 hours” nonsense.
4. Payoff is immediate and regular. I can finish a challenge or a puzzle in a few minutes and get the results on the spot.
5. They’re easy to pick up and put down. More in theory than in practice, but I can still get a complete experience in two or three minutes.

Compare that to something like Tokyo Mono Hara Shi, where I just spent 40 hours only to find out I don’t have enough friendship points to qualify for the “good end.” Atlus actually expects me to start again from scratch, as if the game is anywhere near worth that amount of time.

I suppose a brief description of Farm Frenzy is in order. I hear there are about 10 games in the series on different platforms, and they all play exactly the same way. You start out with a goal of things to produce, e.g. 5 hats and 5 dresses in, say, 5 minutes. There’s no penalty for exceeding the time, but you get points bonuses for finishing early. These points are needed to upgrade your farm tools and unlock further stages, so you naturally want to do as well as you can.

That’s where the “frenzy” part comes in, as you tap, tap, tap and poke, poke, poke at your livestock, your produce, the bears that keep killing your doodz and basically everything that appears on the screen. Tap the mayonnaise factory to make mayonnaise, then tap the finished good to put it in your storehouse, tap the truck to take it away, tap the ground to grow grass to feed your— OH $#%^, it’s a BEAR! TAPTAPTAPTAPTAP! Trap it in a cage and sell it for money. Pick up and ship the pork the live (?!) pigs drop. Then back to the tapping for as long as it takes to meet your objective.

farm frenzy animal country screenshotIt’s as simple as that, but once I started I just couldn’t stop. I didn’t have time to think about stopping, because there’s so much to do at any given moment. It might be easier if you don’t care about finishing in time, but I found the extra challenge spiced things up. It certainly opened my mind to more flexible ways of playing, including some that might seem counter-productive.

Two examples. First, let’s say you start out with 0g and 5 cows. Your first instinct is to hang on to them for dear life. They cost 10,000g each, after all. But there’s a good chance that a bear might chase one away anyway. Plus if you’re racing against the clock you don’t have time to feed them and wait for them to produce milk to sell. It’s better to sell one or two immediately and use the proceeds to upgrade the farm, then buy the cows back later when your cows produce milk (1000g a bottle).

Example two, you start out with 70,000g and nothing else to your name. You can buy 700 chickens, or 70 pigs or 7 cows or 1 ostrich with that money. You can choose to upgrade all your facilities. Or you can take what looks like the long way round and blow all 70,000 on the ostrich. One ostrich feather gives you 7,000g. Two of them give you one cow and 4 pigs and bam, you’re in business.

Ideas and manipulations like these are what kept me coming back for more and more. My wrists are tired, my knuckles are cramped, my DS screen protector is scratched to hell and back, and it’s all totally worth it. I feel truly refreshed after all that mindless tapping, and finally ready to tackle something more tedious, like a dungeon crawler. UnchainBlades, here I come!

Sakura Note – A study in parental selfishness (spoilers for a game no one has played)

sakuranote-600x462Sakura Note is a short game, only about 4 or 5 hours long, so I finished it quickly once I put my mind to it. I had some harsh words for it last time, but the story improved dramatically in the last two chapters and the ending was very sweet, so I feel a lot more charitable towards it now.

Charitable enough that I’m starting to wonder why it sold so poorly. I can think of plenty of games that should have sold worse than this. Even accounting for the fact that the game starts slowly and doesn’t get interesting until it’s almost over, more than 4,000 people should have picked it up before negative word of mouth got out.

This is my own speculation, but they probably didn’t market it enough to the right people. Actually it’s worse than that: there are no right people because the game is too kiddy to appeal to adults and too adult to appeal to kids. To get all technical, it’s a short reflection on the helplessness of childhood, written from an adult’s perspective. There aren’t many people who would want to play something like that. Maybe only about oh, 4,000 worldwide.

Slow beginning aside, the story was decent enough that they it would have worked out if they had cut down the adult involvement and transformed it into a Ghibli-style children’s adventure movie. It should be about 1 hour long once you minimize the unnecessary dross. This is harder than it sounds though, because “toning down adult involvement” would mean scrapping the whole story and starting afresh, since the story is powered by the selfish, short-sighted decisions of all the parents in Sakura Note. Do please go on, this is most interesting →

Picross 3D – Want… more…

picross-3dOnly 365 puzzles? That isn’t nearly enough to satisfy moi. Up till now I’ve never seriously tried to take any of my handhelds or consoles online, but now I find myself tempted like I’ve never been before. I’m going to fight the feeling for a couple of days and see if it goes away. Picross 3D is just a game, after all, or so I keep telling myself.

They kind of ruined things with the time limits on the hard puzzles, though. The limits were still generous enough that you wouldn’t get a Game Over from them, but 5 minutes to solve a hard puzzle or lose your gold star? That’s too little. It puts unnecessary pressure on that shouldn’t be there. In my opinion, a “hard” puzzle should be hard because it’s hard. Not because of the clock counting down and making you panic. It should be hard like a cryptic crossword is hard (I hate cryptic crosswords). Take all the time you want, google all you like, if you don’t know the answer, you don’t know the answer.

Then again taking the time limit away wouldn’t make a difference because of the cheating-friendly Quicksave option. Most games with quicksave delete them as soon as you reload from the save, but P3D keeps them permanently. Quicksave before a risky move, try it and reload if it doesn’t work out. Challenge = annihilated. To my credit I was pretty good about not abusing that option until the last few stages of the game, but sometimes you just have to guess. It’s that simple.

Much I enjoyed Picross 3D though, I don’t think I have a future as a puzzle gamer ahead of me. It will always be one of those genres where I try something new like once or twice a year. And I will continue my tradition of hating dungeon puzzles oh, so so much. Still it’s nice to refresh my spirit sometimes by doing something completely different. Oh well, now back to the RPG grindstone.

New half-year gaming resolutions

kids at playIt’s more like 5/12th of a year, since we’re still technically, barely in June. I’ve realized I don’t feel like playing most of the games on my New Year’s resolution list right now. When I made that list, I thought I’d never see my PS2 again, but now that it has miraculously resurrected there’s stuff I want to play on that. Not only that, but some of the games on the list, like Monster Hunter and Tales of Hearts, I wasn’t that keen on trying in the first place. Others, like Star Ocean 2 and Sakura Taisen 2, I still want to play but the first game is still too fresh in my mind. With Dragon Quest 7, there’s a good chance I’ll be able to borrow the remake on 3DS when it eventually gets released in English. And so it goes.

Plus I’ve been tossing and turning in the wind too much lately, feeling I have to play X and I want to play Y and when will I ever find the time to play Z. It’s good to get some semblance of order and create something resembling a rough schedule for gaming for the rest of the year. That doesn’t mean these are the only games I’ll play, of course. It’s more like if I only get these done by the end of the year I’ll be happy. Something like that.

July – UnchainBlades Exxiv (PSP). The prequel, UnchainBlades Rexx, needed a bit of polish in nearly all areas, but I still found myself hopelessly addicted for days on end. That’s all I ever want out of a game. In fact, I think their gimmick of having different character designers create the cast is stupid and only adds unnecessary costs to their budget, but the first game was good enough that it didn’t matter. Here’s hoping for more of the same.

August – Earthbound (SNES) – You ever have someone recommend a game to you so many times that you find yourself really, really not wanting to play it? But I tried about 10 minutes of it the other day and I was… well, it’s too soon to say “pleasantly surprised”, but I liked the atmosphere and the art was cute. I’ll give it an honest, unbiased shot as soon as I can.

Dark_Cloud_2September – Dark Cloud 2 (PS2). I was told to skip DC1 and go straight to DC2, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about this, so I’m quite looking forward to it. Back when I first got it, action RPGs used to scare me (my intention was to have someone else play it while I watched), but I think I can manage now. I hope.

October – Devil Survivor 2 (DS). For some reason I don’t quite understand, I’ve gone off the Shin Megami Tensei games and spin-offs in a major way. I suspect I played too many too quickly and made myself sick of them. Still I quite liked Devil Survivor 1. The escort missions were a PITA and the ending I got left a lot to be desired, but it was a good game. This should be decent at least.

November – Final Fantasy Type-0 (PSP). It’s been years since I played any Final Fantasy game. Let’s see, I played Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time in 2009-ish, and FFTA2 some time before that, and I replay FF8 quite frequently, but that’s about it. How much research have I done about Type-0? Almost none. It has a school setting and it has missions and being an FF it probably has some overwrought, overblown story in there. I like the first two elements at least, so it’s worth a try.

December – Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits (PS2). I’ve forgotten which of the PS2 Arc the Lads is supposed to be crap, and I can’t play both back to back, so I’ll pick this one and go for it. I’ve never played an Arc the Lad before so I don’t have any prejudices or overblown expectations.

I have to clear Sakura Note, Tokyo Mono Hara Shi and Arc Rise Fantasia (the battle system is good) off my plate before getting down to business, so that’s what I’ll devote the first week of July to. You never know what will happen from day to day in life, but God willing I’ll get the job done.