Going on a little trip

So I’ve been busy making travel arrangements and packing and stuff like that. Been also playing lots of Zill O’ll Infinite Plus, which is a very… unique kind of game. There’s a story in there, but you can progress it when you bloody well feel like it, and not a moment sooner. I’ve played at least 10 hours, and only just got round to moving things forward just a teensy bit. Now for another 10 hours of sidequests. This is the way!

Will write about it in more detail later on. Hopefully in another day or two.

Sakura Taisen (2) – Kanna GET (spoilers)

That took much long than I’d thought it would, roughly 50 hours for a first playthrough. Halfway through I realized there was no way I could play Sakura Taisen again for a while, so I cut my losses and focused exclusively on getting Kanna. Why Kanna? First of all, she’s my best fighter so I want to reward her. Secondly she has the fewest “issues” of the girls in the bunch. Finally, macho chicks don’t get enough love and I wanted to change that.

I don’t know why, but I just haven’t been in the mood to write long posts lately. I wanted to go into a little more detail about the battle system and the story, but… After 50 hours… I think I’m a little burnt out. The fact that Kanna’s ending was more “Best Friends Forever” than the romantic ending I’d hoped for did nothing to prop up my enthusiasm. No hugging, no kissing, no hand holding, not even a decent confession. Seriously, the CG on the right is as romantic as it gets.

There’s also the fact that IMO the game dragged on about 25 hours too long. Sakura Taisen made the same “mistake” Dragon Quest 6 did: they spent an inordinate amount of time setting up one bad guy for you to defeat only to pull out several others and needlessly prolong the game after you did so.

So first they told me to beat Lord Tenkai and his four generals and stop him from taking over the capital. Okay. I did all that. Beat the guy, peace returns, I go on a date with Kanna, everything’s hunky-dory. IMO the game should have ended there, saving all the other BS for the sequel. I wish they had consulted me before making another bad guy show up (technically not a new baddie but still) with three more henchmen to beat up. More fighting, more confusion, more betrayal. And then in the end… Angel Michael vs. Satan. …what. Where the heck did that come from?! Just… seriously… the hell? And what was the whole deal with Ayame being possessed and then being possessed even further under that? The last half of the game was just urrggggghhhh…

So yeah. I enjoyed the first half of Sakura Taisen more than the last half and I’m just glad it’s over. The graphics were great, I really liked the characters, the voice acting was really good, it probably has the best sung opening theme of all time, etc etc but you throw a messy storyline in there on top of everything and it’s like urrrrrrggghhhh…

In closing, I should probably say a few words about Sakura Taisen as an SRPG. Certainly the only good thing about the latter half was all the battling I got to do. However it’s such a simple, straightforward tactical system that there really isn’t much to say about it. You don’t have to mess with weapons and equipment, there are no items, there is no EXP and growths are strictly story-based, so basically you just go out there and fight. There were one or two slightly sticky battles, but in general the AI is pretty poor. The last boss was actually kind of tough, but by using Oogami’s “Cover” ability (shield a girl from an attack while taking no damage yourself, very handy for boosting affection), I managed to keep Kanna alive and plugging away at his HP turn after turn.

I’d like to try the other games someday soon. I hope they added a little more complexity to the battle system. I hope they made the enemies move faster and attack more cleverly. I hope the others don’t drag on as long as this one did. I hope the game stories got better as the series went along. I hope a lot of things, because I actually liked Sakura Taisen, all things considered. It was a good first try.

Sakura Taisen (1)

Getting my romance fix and my SRPG fix at the same time, so I’m a very happy gamer right now. Sakura Taisen is less like a regular video game and more like an anime in game form with a few battles thrown every once in a while to make sure you’re still awake. Gameplay is 90% visual novel with timed choices and 10% very simple SRPG with rather slow battles.

Luckily enough the game fulfills almost all the criteria I set out for a “successful” visual novel so I have absolutely no reservations about proceeding. In fact “no reservations” is a little too mild, because I really, really like all the characters, NPCs included. Even the villains are so weak and comical that they’re hard to hate. And apart from Iris I can see myself getting the endings of just about every other girl in the game. I wonder if Ayame is gettable…

The only things that would hold me back from doing replays to get each ending are 1) The lack of a fast-forward button and 2) The lack of a quick-save/quick-load option for when I mess up with my choices. Maybe I should make a couple of extra saves right now so I can play from halfway through instead. Right now all the girls are kind of “meh” towards me in spite of my best efforts, but faint heart never won fair lady so I must persevere.

Is there a harem ending? I wish there was a harem ending. I want Sakura, but I like Maria too, and Kanna is awesome, and Sumire is not bad and Kouran and Iris are low-tier but I don’t want to let them go…………………………………………………………*sigh* Well, it’s called Sakura Taisen, so I’ll go for Sakura to start with and then play again for Kanna. Sorry, everybody else! ;___;

Astonishia Story – More boring than bad

Quit after 5 hours and 57 minutes. Astonishia Story is not as horrible as I’d heard, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth playing either. I quit because:

1. It was boring. The story wasn’t going anywhere fast and wasn’t doing anything attention-grabbing either. This guy is a soldier, the staff he’s guarding gets stolen and he travels the world looking to get it back. He doesn’t do anything or meet anyone or go anywhere especially interesting either. It’s a slow, tired plod across much the same landscape meeting much the same people and fighting much the same battles for hours on end.

2. I was bored. I can live without a super-good story as long as the gameplay is enjoyable. I’m not sure what to make of the hybrid SRPG-JRPG thingy Astonishia Story has got going on, except to say that it’s not fun to play at all. The encounter rate is fairly high, the EXP you get is pitiful, leveling up doesn’t make you much stronger and buying new equipment doesn’t seem particularly effective either. Also the computer cheats, and its magic seems to be more powerful than yours.

3. It’s not as bad as Tactical Guild. I already knew Astonishia Story was going to be mediocre at best, but I was hoping against hope that it would be so thoroughly bad that it would somehow double back on itself and end up in “so bad it’s awesome” territory like TG. Alas, this is not one of those games worth playing just to see if it’s as bad as everyone says. It’s not. And that’s precisely what the problem is.

The only things I can rate rather positively are:

1. The retro graphics.

2. The cluttered house and town layout made me miss Shepherd’s Crossing.

3. Every once in a while something bizarre and funny happened. Like that WTH “penetralia of Chilseong fist” skit and the part where Lloyd peeped on Ylenne in the bath…and she pulled out an axe…which subsequently became an equippable weapon. I actually laughed out loud at both parts.

That’s about it. I don’t even feel like writing one of my usual lengthy posts about it. I’m just glad to put it behind me and glad I didn’t spend so much time on it that I ended up hating it and myself. Right now I’m playing Sakura Taisen 1 and Zill O’ll Infinite Plus. Will write about either or both of them once I’ve progressed a little more.

Zettai Meikyuu Grimm – Cute, but dark

Zettai Meikyuu Grimm is a standard otome visual novel with cute designs but many dark turns in the plot. I finished it twice and got Akazukin’s (Red Riding Hood) and Ibara-hime (sorta-Sleeping Beauty)’s endings. The more of this sort of game I play, the easier it becomes for me to recognize the sort of visual novels I can stand and the sort that drive me round the bend.

The type I can stand

  • Nice art & character designs, where “nice” means whatever I can stand to look at for hours on end
  • Interesting characters
  • At least one target I want to pursue
  • Fast-moving plots that aren’t too stupid
  • Fast-changing scenes
  • More dialogue based than description-based (very important!)
  • Less telling, more showing. Since it’s a visual novel, I don’t need descriptions of scenes and characters and anything I can see on the screen.
  • Good sound and voice acting – optional
  • Has a relationship value-system instead of an event flag system – optional, but highly preferred.

The worthless type

Anything that does not follow the above. With a handy checklist like that, all I need is an hour with an VN to figure out whether it’s right for me or not. Result: less time wasted, less frustration, lower blood pressure. And everybody wins.

Back on topic, Zettai Meikyuu Grimm: Nanatsu no Kagi to Rakuen no Otome (Absolute Labyrinth Grimm: The 7 Keys and The Maiden of Paradise) was a decent VN that had pretty much everything I was looking for. The character designs were cute, the story was simple but fast-paced (MC Henrietta Grimm falls asleep for 5 years and wakes up to find her brothers missing. She goes on a search for them and has many wacky adventures along the way), on my first run through I took a liking to Akazukin and got his ending without too much trouble.

In the past I wasn’t too fond of the “Hyper guy who may or may not be a shota” type, but watching Fruits Basket and Ookiku Furikabutte made them grow on me a little bit. Plus Akazukin was the best out of my other party members: Hamel, the money-grubbing piper who is a total rip off of the Violinist of Hamelin, Rapunzel, who is a bro but is also a girl, the Frog Prince who is, well, a frog (though you find out later he’s pretty handsome as a human) and Ludwig, who is the MC’s brother, and you know I don’t go there.

Akazukin’s story was standard Red Riding Hood stuff. Tra la laa, picking fruit, eating pie with grandma, turning your back for a second to find out… What are those giant blood splatters all over the walls?! Grandma has been eaten by a wolf?! Like, really really eaten and not just swallowed whole? I thought this was a KID’S GAME!!!

And that sort of thing happens a lot throughout the game. Massive mood whiplash at every turn. One moment you’re all having fun, taking things easy, having a laugh or two. The moment something nasty, violent and gory is happening, your party is getting hurt, your MC is half-dead… and then suddenly everything is fun and happy again. And back, and forth, and as the route progresses the happier moments get fewer and shorter and the bad moments get longer and longer and nastier and nastier. At least the ending was good, but the whole route just left me a feeling disturbed and more than a little bit down. This isn’t really a game for anyone who likes cheery fairy tales.

The downside of the Akazukin route is that it didn’t wrap up the story of Henrietta’s missing brothers or the mysterious golden keys, so I played the game a second time to see if I could sort that out. I was hoping to get either the Frog Prince or Bropunzel’s ending, but it was not to be. Turns out a large part of what route you go on is decided very, very early on with a series of seemingly random choices you make at the start of the game. Before I knew it I was on Ibara-hime’s route with no chance to turn around. Her route didn’t have as many depressing ups and downs as Akazukin’s did, but Ibara-hime herself is pushy, selfish, violent and annoying, and her ending has her snatching Henrietta away from her barely-rebuilt home and pressing her into a lifetime of vain stupidity at her castle, so I hated every minute of it.

The only good thing is that I did at least find out what happened to Henrietta’s older brothers. Jacob got possessed by the Demon King and Wilhelm went along to try and save him. The 7 golden keys are the only way to unseal the goddess Brunhilde, who is locked away within Henrietta, or something bizarre like that. After plenty of waffling and whining, Henrietta managed to seal the Demon King away along with the Grimm brothers. Good riddance. There are probably endings where you get to save either or both brothers, and endings where you find out what the deal is with Muma/Alp, the guy who put Henrietta and Ludwig to sleep for 5 years, but getting two endings is enough for me.

Summary of Zettai Meikyuu Grimm‘s good and bad points:

+ Cute, quirky character designs
+ Some likeable characters (Akazukin, Bropunzel, Frog Prince, Ludwig is okay)
+ Fairly short, dialogue-driven routes
+ Can check characters’ affection for you any time
+ Nice to see how they twisted some of the fairy tales
+ Accordion music started out annoying but grew on me after a bit

– No quick-save/quick-load function
– Some routes are hard to get on without a FAQ
– Some unlikeable characters (everyone except those I named above)
– Sudden dark, disturbing turns keep you on pins and needles
– Sudden dark, disturbing turns also make it impossible to enjoy the cute, happy moments because you’re too busy being depressed over the bad things that happened last time
– Akazukin’s “happy” ending isn’t all that happy once you realize the Demon King is going to be after Henrietta in a bit
– Ibara-hime’s ending was made of excrement and failure
– Voice-acting wasn’t all that good. Akazukin and Ibara-hime were especially annoying
– Demon King routes have you saving the world *yawn*

That’s about it for Zettai Meikyuu Grimm, but I’m going to be trying a few more VNs in the coming months.