Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo (5) – Final roundup 2

4. What style of play is best? Unless you grind a lot, storyline enemies will usually be higher-leveled, and they can hit pretty hard. Like, 1/3rd of your life in a single hit kind of hard. That, and if your MC or a story-related character dies it’s an automatic game over, and enemies like to gang on up on them when they can.

For those reasons, I like to play things safe by ganging up on them in return. 99% of enemies won’t move unless a) They sustain damage or b) You come into range. What I do, then is to keep my whole party together and carefully approach the enemies one or two at a time. Once they’re close enough, I either hit them with a Sniper or put a character in range to draw them down, then beat them normally or waste them with Burst Strikes.

But that’s just me. I’m a coward. And I hate having to restart easy battles because important characters got taken out by cheap hits. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with splitting up your party, especially if you love a challenge,  but I’d recommend sending a priest along with each group and still not taking on more than one or two enemies at a time.

5. Miscellaneous Tips and Hints

  • If I had to play this again, I’d start out with only snipers and one or two priests, then change a few snipers into Zondas when I start the second playthrough. I’d keep 4 skill points on hand and then switch 2 or 3 to Champion once they hit level 25-ish, allowing me to take advantage of the all-attack at job level 36 (update on my “clever” plan here). The rest of the classes can snuff it.
  • Most classes really come into their own at higher levels, so your first playthrough will probably be slow and boring. On one hand there’s no reason to force yourself to play this game. On the other hand, battles do get faster and more bearable on subsequent playthroughs.
  • Always get new recruits at Level 1 so you can use stat distribution to its fullest extent.
  • You can safely ignore all treasure chests. They either contain healing items or shoddy armor, nothing worth going out of your way for.
  • You can safely ignore sidequests as well. They are amusing and often have strong enemies and good cards, but you don’t have to do them.
  • You can skip Burst Strike animations with START. @__@ I only realized this recently.
  • The more battles a character takes part in, the longer their Burst Strike gauge gets. This is a good reason to fight free battles in the beginning.
  • Frozen and stunned enemies and characters take a lot more damage than usual. Cure anyone important who gets struck with them. Silence and poison can be ignored.
  • AFAIK there is no “correct” order to play the routes. Cynthia’s is the route that deals most with the titular “Imperial Princess of Darkness and Light” (wait, it’s not in the title any more now, is it) so it’s a good one to start with story-wise.
  • I don’t know what the best choices are, but worst ones are usually the 3rd on the list. Apparently you only want those on the Dark route.
  • Story-related characters you don’t raise yourself (i.e. all of them) will be invariably weaker than your self-created generics, so don’t spend too much time trying to level them up.
  • You get better cards by over-killing enemies with solo hits. Burst Strike finishes tend to yield lesser-quality cards.
  • Enemies in the Mirage bonus dungeon drop great cards, so don’t worry if you can’t get anything good in regular battles. In fact you can just ignore regular free battles once it opens up.
  • You can save Skill and Bonus points for later, but they may be lost for story characters who are forcibly leveled up when you switch routes (not 100% about this). E.g. if you’re on Trenet’s route and he’s level 25 with 2000 EXP stored and you switch to Yuri, Yuri too will be 25-ish (if that’s the base level of the enemies), even if he was level 10 the last time you saw him. Furthermore, you might come back to Trenet later to find him at level 30, but those 2000 EXP he had saved will be gone forever.
  • You maintain your character levels and old job levels when you switch jobs, and new jobs level up relatively quickly. In other words, don’t hesitate to change classes if something isn’t working out.

The Ragnarok Tactics press release from Aksys is… interesting. “Multiple factions” = 3 factions, plus 1 secret one after completing them. “Plethora of different endings” = 3 shoddy, insulting endings to the 3 faction routes, plus 1 True ending, plus 1 Dark ending. “Unique tactical mechanics” = this is mostly true. Unless you’ve played Blue Roses, the Burst Strike system will probably be new. Overdrives are just super-attacks, and you won’t be seeing too much of them unless you go out of your way. Resting in battles is really cute, and actually quite useful when you’re weak in the early stages. “Unique” doesn’t equal “fun” though, so don’t get carried away. “Customizable characters,” yeah sorta. You can’t do too much about their looks, but you can change classes, hair and voices, and you can make a real difference to their stats with your point distribution. You can’t actually modify what skills they get, but you can boost the ones you like.

That’s enough. You guys figure out the rest for yourselves. Final verdict on Ragnarok Hikari to Yami no Koujo: an average but playable SRPG. Story and characters are pitiful. Battles get much better on subsequent playthroughs when your party is stronger and you have access to more classes. I won’t actually say “Go get it,” but if you’re walking down the street and you trip over it and you’re very bored that day… yeah. It’s that kind of game.

Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo~ (4) – Final roundup 1

Finished my second playthrough of Ragnarok Hikari to Yami no Koujo, doing Trenet’s route. Along the way I did about 90% of Yuri’s route as well, using the A.I.Z. function, but Yuri is a whiny twit so I decided not to finish his. I hate those “My country, right or wrong” characters, especially when it becomes clear very early on that “my country” is completely in the wrong.

Doing both routes at the same time was easy enough, but I can’t recommend it. First off, Your major characters will level up however they please and put points into all the wrong stats. It’s especially bad for Lord Knights like Yuri and Gaston, who will end up pathetically slow with only average defense if you leave them alone.

More importantly, it’s a waste of time because you’ll still have to go back and do the other route from scratch in order to get the clear data you need to unlock the True route. For example, I just got Trenet’s ending. I’ve saved my Trenet clear data. I have an old save with about 90% of Yuri’s path done at the same time, so I could go back and finish that. If I do so, however, I’ll only get Yuri clear data, but nothing for Trenet. In short, you still need 3 complete playthroughs to unlock the True route. tl;dr A.I.Z. is worthless.

Normally I’d add a few more lines and then cut this post off because I’m kind of tired of Ragnarok by now. Today, however, I found out that this game is being localized (talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel…) for Fall 2012, so allow me use this final post to share the few tips for success I’ve acquired over the 63+ hours I have spent playing what will soon be known as Ragnarok Tactics. Note that this is all based on how I played the game and what I would have done if I had to do it all over again, but you are under no obligation to do things my way.

1. Which stats should I raise? Speed and Strength. Specifically, put the majority of points into Agi and whatever counts as strength (Int, Str, Dex) for that class. Class that rely on Dex for strength (Snipers, Clowns, Dancers, etc.) can just stick to Dex. Put a few points into Vit here and there, especially for story characters.

You can safely ignore Int for non-magical classes (they usually have higher HP anyway and can take a few hits) and forget Luck entirely. If you feel your stats are lacking in some area but you don’t want to put points into it, you can make up the difference with handy stat-boosting cards. You can also save the bonus points for later if you need time to think.

2. Which attacks should I boost? You get 3 skill points to boost your special attacks every 3rd job level. Which attacks you want to pump depends entirely on your job and your style of play, but it’s usually safe to raise the first and second attacks on the list to their maximum level. I’ll mention what I think are the most useful attacks when I do the class rundown in the next point. Again, you can save the points for later if you don’t have anything you consider worth raising.

3. Which classes are best? I tried all of them except Dark Knight, Clown and Dancer. If I had to rank them from most- to least-useful, based entirely on my personal experience, it would look something like this.

Sniper – Great range, great speed, good attack power. Raising Dex improves both their Attack and their Speed at the same time, so you don’t have to waste points on lesser stats. Their defense is average, but you can either raise that with cards and equips or just keep them out of harm’s way. This is the class I started my MC out with. Useful skills: W Arrow and Charge Arrow, the first 2 on the list (I’m adding the list position because the English names will probably differ). Story character: Bercht on Cynthia/Yuri’s route.

Zonda – Gunman class. Only available on a second playthrough, and only for males. I gave my MC a sex-change and switched him to this. This class out-damages Snipers and seems to get frequent weapon updates in the stores – although this could be only because of my MC – but I rank it slightly below firstly because it’s not available from the start, secondly because it doesn’t have the Sniper’s highly-useful Charge Arrow (2nd on the list) attack and their attacks have lesser range on average, thirdly because their defense is worse than Snipers’. Useful skills: the first 2 on the list.

Kapla – Gunman class. Only available on a second playthrough, and only for females. Good class with high speed, but the fact that my Kapla used to be a Paladin may have affected her stats negatively, meaning she probably wasn’t as good as she could have been. Ranked below Zonda because of the lower attack power and fewer useful skills. They do have the funniest attacks in the game, though. Useful skills: 1st on the list. The skill that lets you hasten others’ turns (5th). If you use Overdrives a lot, Kaplas have a skill (6th) that lets them fill your Overdrive gauge.

High Priest – They keep you alive and allow you to keep attacking without wasting turns using items. Always take at least one with you, preferably two. High priests tend to have slow speed naturally, so raise their Agi along with their Int. Low HP and Vit shouldn’t bother you, since they shouldn’t be on the front lines anyway. They have a couple of attacking and buffing spells, but I don’t bother with those. Useful skills: Heal, Heal Mist (area heal) and Recovery. Story character: Fiona.

Champion – A monk by any other name… The only melee class worth getting, IMO. Great attack, good speed, so-so defense. They pack quite a punch and their turns come by quite frequently. However they’re not that good at taking hits so be careful not to advance them too far. At job level 36 they get a physical attack that hits every enemy on the map. If you have an army of champions, the battle could be over in the first turn. Barring super-grinding, however, you probably won’t reach job 36 until your second or third playthrough. Save 4 skill points for your champions for when that day comes. Useful skills: 2nd, 6th and 8th on the list. Story character: Trenet.

Wizard: Their spells can actually pack quite a punch, once they’ve been leveled up a bit. They’re useful against human enemies, but not so good against monsters who have all kinds of elemental defenses. They move a little faster than the other magical classes, but as usual they’re allergic to being attacked. They’re useful at earlier levels, not so useful later on when you’re using Burst Strikes that depend mainly on ATK.  Useful skills: Pretty much all of them. Earth Spike has great range. Story character: Cynthia.

Lord Knight: Good defense, great attack. Slow as hell unless you put a lot into AGI. They’re okay, but since 2 out of the 3 main routes come with a forced one, there’s no need to actually create one. Not without testing them out first, at least. Useful skills: Charge Attack (5th on the list) Story characters: Yuri and Gaston.

White Smith: Useless for my style of play, since their attacks tend to hit surrounding enemies, and a surrounded character is a dead character in my book. If you’re the type who likes to push ahead with a single super character, you might like one of these. They have very good defense, at any rate. The only good things about them are their Attack-boost and Critical-boost abilities. Good for aggressive players, not so special for people who play defensively, like me. Useful skills: Over-Trust (2nd on the list), Maximize Power (4th).

Paladin: I tried one for a while, and I got Darius after clearing Cynthia’s route. I’m not impressed. You’d expect a Paladin to have super high defense and HP so they can absorb a few hits, but these guys are pathetic on that score. They’re also rather slow and don’t hit particularly hard. On top of all their other sins, they also have bugger-all for useful skills. With some coaxing and stat cards I managed to get some use out of Darius, and paladins do have a Heal spell for emergencies, but I don’t recommend them. Useful skills: Shield Charge (3rd on the list). Story character: Darius.

Assassin Cross: Good speed, great range, pathetic attack, pathetic defense. Which means they can get to the enemy quickly… but they can’t actually do anything once they get there. Sound good to you? I thought not. Useful skills: Envenom (2nd on the list) Story character: Isara.

Shaman: Only available on a second playthrough. A fail cross between a Wizard and a High Priest. Their attack spells only hit in a straight line, and if you want healing you’re better off with a High Priest. Cool outfit, though. Useful skills: Nothing a Wizard or High Priest can’t top. Story character: Weda.

This post is getting huge. I’ll split it off here and continue tomorrow. I’ll be happy if other people can benefit from all the time I wasted on this affair.

Star Ocean: First Departure – This is great!

Some say the universe is a star ocean…

Star Ocean is so good 😀 I’m only 9 hours in but… THIS GAME IS SO MUCH FUN! I’m a little reluctant to write this post, in fact, in case I jinx it. Ah well, a good game can take a bit of jinxing.

What makes me like it so much? The pace! The fast pace! I’m sick and tired of slow-paced games! We started out in this sleepy village, then oh, this disease. Then aliens! Then we warped into space! Then we warped back! Then my friend turned into stone! Then more aliens! Then we warped to this time gate! 300 years back in time! And all of this just within the first hour of the game. My head was spinning in wonder and delight. This is how a game prologue should go.

I’m a little bit on the fence about the battle system though. So far the battles are okay, not that hard at all. I always had the impression that Star Ocean was tough, but it seems I was wrong, at least so far. Turn-based RPGs are often accused of having “Mash X to win” systems, but in my experience the same goes for many Action RPGs as well.

It helps that I created some Berserk Rings early on, though I’ve been trying to avoid internet spoilers for the most part. There’s no Auto-Battle option, but I solve that by just hanging back and letting my party members (Cyuss, Ilia and Ioshua) do all the work. What I’m really not happy about is the encounter rate. It started out okay, but in the past hour or two it’s really ramped up, and the various skills I’ve got to deal with it don’t seem to work too well.

Back to the things I like, I’m enjoying what they did with the Skill system. There’s nothing new about getting skill points to assign upon leveling up, but it was probably new when it first came out in 1996. I like the stat boosts you get from certain skill, but what is really thrilling me is all the field abilities like Cooking and Art and Crafting. I’m not getting too much use out of them so far because the game is easy enough (and dang, but the failure rate is high even with maxed out skills) but it’s nice to have all these “extra” things to play around with. Alchemy, Music, Customization, Scouting, Writing. And funny ones like Pickpocketing and Contraband, all the things I’m too morally upright to try in real life.

The characters are okay so far. The character designs remind me of Suikoden Tierkries. I should look into that. At the start of the game my MC Roddick seemed like he was going to be the mopey, whiny type, but he’s been a good sport about everything. Of course, there’s still plenty of time for any and all of them to do something stupid but so far so good.

Story… there’s no real story right now. At first we were traveling the world to find our companions who’d been separated from us, but I just found them a few minutes ago so that’s that. We’re also looking for a cure for our friend’s petrification in order to foil an attempt by a mysterious “third party” to take over the universe (? they haven’t said that’s their goal but come on, it’s an RPG) but we haven’t been trying all that hard on that front. It’s like “we’ll get to it when we get to it, the universe isn’t going anywhere.” So basically I’m just going from town to town all over one planet right now. They needn’t have bothered with the whole “outer space” gimmick, come to think of it.

For anyone who’s played the game, I just got Millie back in Eckdart and I’m looking for Ioshua’s master, wherever he is. After that I expect to meet up with Ron in the next town so the story can finally get under way. Here’s hoping for more high-speed developments, because it’s starting to drag on juuuust a liiiiiitttle bit.

Shinigami to Shoujo – Boring, even for a visual novel

Is it legal for a “game” to be this boring? Like, don’t you have to meet some minimum standards of quality before they let you release something? Oh boy.

Umm, well. I haven’t really made a secret of the fact that I don’t like visual novels. Still there aren’t that many otome games with gameplay out there, so I try them from time to time. When I do, my requirements are simple: nice art, decent characters, a sensible story that doesn’t take too long to tell. That’s all. I don’t expect much, and I usually don’t get much, but Shinigami to Shoujo didn’t meet even those low standards.

First, though, I should own up to my own fault in this debacle: I got taken in by the trailer. One, it had piano music and I love piano music soundtracks. More importantly, it spoke of the story of a lonely shinigami and the innocent traveller he meets and how they decide to travel together in search of the most beautiful word in the world. Sounds romantic, right? Right? The poor, sad, lonely shinigami, all alone for millenia, finally finds someone to hold and to comfort him and together they learn to live and love and laugh and overcome all obstacles so they can be together forever and ever and ever… is the interpretation of the story my imagination came up with.

The “reality” is something quite different. To begin with, the first thing we learn about our protagonist Sayo is that she has a brother fetish. You know, the usual “not really siblings” thing. That should have been my clue to stop right there, because I hate that cliche. I mean, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m from Mars or something because where I come from, adopted siblings have the same status and rights and responsibilities as “real” siblings. Adopted or not, you’re both siblings, full stop. There’s no such thing as “siblings until someone gets horny.” That’s just wrong. So that was my warning sign, which I ignored. Mea culpa.

More to the point, it turns out that the story in the trailer was from a book Sayo’s “brother” was writing, and the actual shinigami you meet in the game, Ao, is a wandering amnesiac who just claims to be a shinigami. There’s a place for people like that, and you find it by calling 1-800-NAMI. Moreover, Ao is not particularly lonely or sad or in any way distressed by his condition, and for the three days I played this game, he never treated Sayo as anything more than a bother. Which she is. Always hanging around, asking nosy questions and giggling at anything and everyone in her oh-so-cultured manner. “I’m a death god.” “Tee hee, a death god, that’s so funny.” Urghhhhh.

Don’t glare at me like that; I didn’t make this game.

So, obviously, I didn’t finish the game. There was no point, really. I gave it a solid try for a few days in the hopes that I’d learn more about Ao before the guys in the white van took him away, but no luck. It just dragged on and on with endless descriptions of books and Ao’s blond hair and Ao’s blue eyes, and books and Sayo’s black hair, and Sayo’s black eyes and books and there some clock tower in there somewhere, and look Ao and Sayo like books, they’re nerds just like you, isn’t that great, blah blah blah. I played and played and played and I was still in chapter 1, so eventually I said meh, screw it. I know when I’m not wanted.

Bit of a shame though. The voice-acting was pretty good, the soundtrack is great, the art is like 6.5/10, not too shabby. Takuyo just needed a few more lessons on concise writing and the creation of likeable characters. Oh, and basic moral decency, ‘cos that brother-con stuff ain’t cool. I’m off to find a summary of whatever the heck the story is about, and then I’ll start something new.

Shining Hearts – Glad it’s finally over

Finished after 52 hours and 55 minutes. I got sick of it pretty quickly and had been trying hard to finish it for the past 5 days or so, but the harder I tried, the longer it dragged on. I’m really, really glad it’s finally over.

Thinking back, I went through the same 3 stages with Shining Hearts as I did with Tactics Layer last year, namely:

Stage 1. This game sucks
Stage 2. The game sucks, but the gimmick is fun
Stage 3. The gimmick is fun, but the game really sucks

For those of you lucky people who’ve never played it, Tactics Layer is a dress-up game/visual novel/SRPG where the dress-up part was fun and the SRPG part was okay, but the story and the characters (or one character in particular) ended up ruining everything positive that was going on. Shining Hearts is pretty much the same. The bread-making angle was fun for a while, but not nearly enough to carry an entire game. The characters are seriously cliched: dojikko, fanservice catgirl, refined princess, loli tsundere, and on and on. And for a game about “hearts” and “emotions” the cast never really got close to each other. By the end they were more than acquaintances, but less than actual friends, that’s the feeling I got from the game.

The story was just weird. Like, stupid weird, not good weird. One moment we were all happy in our organic little world, living in harmony with nature, then these pirates show up out of nowhere and turn out to have no real plot relevance, and then the real bad guys show up and they’re all robots and stuff. They’re from another world and they’re after this girl named Kaguya who is also from that world and it’s like, what? What’s that’s got to do with me? I’m just a baker. Here, take her and go, and have some apple pie while you’re it.

Gamer shall not live by bread alone

As you might expect, we solved everything through the power of bread (you’d better believe it) and the power of hearts and killed the bad guys. But the game didn’t end! I had to make even more bread deliveries and do even more quests to trigger the ending sequence. Eventually something happened and Kaguya buggered off back to space because she’s actually a goddess or something, roll credits…

But the game still didn’t end! Apparently I’m supposed to spend even more time with my favorite character so I can get an individual end, then the game will finally be over. Aha. Ahaha. And that was it for me and Shining Hearts.

But seriously, 52 hours. Where did it all go? I remember making a lot of bread deliveries and baking a lot. And I explored the world pretty thoroughly and did almost all the character quests. I probably spent about 10 of those hours on random battles as well, especially when sailing from island to island. I’ll never understand why developers create a interesting world and invite you to explore it and then ramp the overworld encounter rate up so high you can’t even enjoy it.

Final random thoughts on Shining Hearts:

1. I liked all the bright colors and cute monsters and stuff. I like games with an overall cheerful mood. That just made all that weird crap with Pandora’s box and evil robots and two worlds and goddesses stand out all the more.

2. The major antagonists show up out of the blue around the 40-hour mark and are completely gone by the 50-hour mark. They come out of nowhere and go nowhere and the story is largely irrelevant. This would have been better off as a pure simulation game, since they obviously shoehorned in story elements as an afterthought.

3. Baking bread was fun, but quite useless otherwise. You’ll be distributing the same 10 or so types throughout the whole game to the same 10 or so people. It would also have been better if you could experiment freely instead of always having to follow a recipe.

4. Battle system balance is bad. 90% of the battles are too easy. 9% are just right. 1% are too hard. Too hard as in, can’t get a single move in kind of hard. There’s also an Auto-battle system (with rather bad AI) which I used pretty much all the time, thus defeating the purpose of the game even having random battles in the first place.

5. The encounter rate is pretty high for a mainly-sim game. And I never did find an item/bread that would lower it.

6. On the plus side, there were a lot of good, useful active and passive battle skills. Useful passives included Counter, Evade, Finish Off (follow up attack on a low-HP enemy), Critical, Cover, etc. Plus there were character combos with varying degrees of usefulness. If the encounter rate wasn’t so high and the pace of battle wasn’t so slow and the enemies weren’t such pushovers, the battle system would have been really good.

7. I didn’t think too much of the character designs. The guys had these weird, twisted faces, and the girls were trying too hard to show off their chests. Are gamers who care for cheap fanservice the same ones who want to play bread-making RPGs? Can’t help thinking they’re a different demographic.

8. My main character and his partner never regained their memories, and we never found out where he washed up from or why. If that’s a sequel hook, I ain’t biting. Speaking of sequel, it seems Shining Hearts is a ‘spiritual successor’ to a Playstation bread-delivery/village-life sim called Dokidoki Poyacchao so the idea wasn’t even original to begin with.

Overall… I didn’t not enjoy Shining Hearts. However, while it did have its good moments in the middle, I didn’t care for it in the beginning and actively disliked it by the end. I can’t even say “it was all right” now. The most I can muster is a quiet “meh.” I don’t really recommend it, and I’m not particularly glad I played it. The End.