WiZman’s World – Underrated dungeon crawler (2)

Remember when I said I quit Wizman’s World? I liiiiiieeed! But this time I’m telling the truth, I really am dropping it for good this time.

What made me go back for more punishment? Well, when I “quit” last time, I was literally right outside what I thought was the final boss’s door. I thought long and hard about it, and it really didn’t feel right to give up without even trying, so today I decided to go inside and get my ass kicked once and for all. You know, for “closure”.

So I went in. I fought the boss. Easiest boss fight of the game. Why? Because that’s not the final boss. Or rather it is the final boss, but not yet. After the fight, I was kindly informed that all the dungeons and guardians I had fought so far had been at less than optimum strength. I was then given the task of going back from the start and completing all five dungeons again from start to finish and beating all five bosses again, this time far stronger than before, before coming back to take on the final boss again.  Talk about earning your happy ending.

If you think my response to being told this was to flip them the bird and walk out, you’re only half right. The truth is, I really really liked WiZman’s World. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s simple and straightforward and doesn’t have any major problems. So even at that late point, I did at least try to do as I was told. I went back to the Forest dungeon, revived it (a tiresome process involving beating tons of low-level enemies using no-element magic), completed half of the newly revived dungeon and then it hit me that I was totally wasting my time.

To stop myself from crawling back to the game in a moment of weakness, I have deleted both the rom and my save file. I’m kind of regretting it now, because deep down in my soul I still want to play this game. It’s so much fun! And apart from the boss battles, it’s not that hard. It’s pretty relaxing, in fact. You can ditch a dungeon at any time, so just go in, explore, beat up some enemies, get new fusions, go home and fuse, come back and do it again… why did I delete those files? Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah… ;____;

But no, I’d been playing that game for almost a year. It’s time to move on. If I find I still can’t forget it after some time has passed, I’ll do the right thing and buy the game. The prospect of shelling out cold, hard cash should quickly reveal how I really feel about the game.

In the meantime, I’m still playing Grand Knights History and Ragnarok Tactics. I’ve found 3 treasures (out of 13) in GKH and my party has hit level 21. The game’s getting tougher and tougher and consequently more fun, especially now I’ve obtained skills that let me start battles with 10 AP instead of 6. I’m also getting to explore more of the continent, though it’s all yellow-and-red wasteland as far as you go. In Ragnarok I think I’m a few steps away from the final battle on the Aura route. Depending on the carryovers I get for New Game+, I might try one more route after this.

I also plan to start another game from my resolutions list. I’m wavering between Wild Arms 2 and Shining Hearts. Let’s flip a coin… Wild Arms 2 it is.

Grand Knights History – Not feeling it yet

I said I would post once I’d trained my first batch of knights, so here we are. Grand Knights History is, after all, a game where you train generic soldiers to take part in a never-ending war against two other countries.

I haven’t been playing very long (5 hours), but the flow of the game looks like this so far:

1. Go to the Guild and create 4 generics. You have 3 main classes to choose from, Knight, Archer and Wizard (in Union, anyway, other countries might have different classes) and a couple of sub-classes within each one.

2. Outfit them at the Item Shop and Weapon Shop. Each class can use two or three different weapons with corresponding skills. What you can equip/use depends on the unit’s stats.

3. Take them out of town to complete quests and fight random battles. I’m not 100% certain, but it seems quest enemies scale to your level but random battle enemies don’t.

4. When you a) finish a quest or b) run out of time, return to town and prepare to sally forth again.

5. When you complete a quest, you get a permit that allows you to use the training hall to raise stats. You pick the course you want your units to take (e.g. Evasion, Agility, Defense) and let them at it.

6. Repeat steps 2 to 5 in whichever order you want for 60 ingame days, after which your squires cannot be trained in the halls any longer and can be sent to the front.

7. Have your squires knighted and send them to the battle front. Start all over again from Step 1. Or you can do like I do and ignore step 7 because you can’t bear to let your people go. They can continue to level up on the world map, and you can deploy them any time you want.

That’s about all you need to know to play the game. If Play-Asia sells a detailed Grand Knights History strategy guide if you want super-knowledge of the game, but if you understand enough Japanese to follow such a guide, then you know enough to make your way through the game without help. There seems to be a bit of a story in there as well, which you can progress by taking certain quests.

What works: It goes without saying that the visuals are stunning and highly-detailed, though the heavy use of yellow rather depresses me. The battle system is a twist on the usual turn-based system. Fights take place on a 4×3 grid that plays out like this:

You have attacks that can knock the enemy back a row, attacks that can hit a whole row or column, or two squares, or three, etc. I’ve seen enemies setting mines on certain squares as well, though I have yet to learn that skill myself. It’s quite similar to what went on in Radiant Historia, except as far as I can tell you can only knock enemies back, not forward or left or right.

There’s also a class triangle of sorts, where Knight > Archer > Wizard > Knight. At least I think that’s how it goes because I don’t actually put it to use in battles. You have to focus your attacks, not mix-and-match and hope something dies before it kills you.

Attacking and defending are done through the use of AP, which fill up at the start of every turn. You start out with 6 AP (4 if your party has low Brave), standard attacks cost 1AP and it grows from there. Each enemy you defeat gives you 1 more AP, and if you defeat several at once you get bonus AP, allowing you to use stronger and stronger attacks as the battle progresses.

I’m not too impressed with that aspect so far. After all, the time you really need all that AP is at the start of battle, not when the enemy is almost dead. Plus my units were low-level for so long that I haven’t been able to use anything fancy. It’s only now that they’re level 10 on average that they can dish out the heavy stuff, and now it’s time for me to part with them and start all over from level 1. Screw the war, I’m not letting them go!

So there’s all kinds of strategy built into Grand Knights History‘s battle system, I just haven’t been given the chance to use it yet.

Why I’m not feeling it to far: I look for 3 things in games: story, characters and gameplay (fun or not fun?). Grand Knights History has you playing as a mute, there are barely any NPCs and all your units are generics, so there’s not much in the character department. I’ve gotten rather fond of my party though. The story has only just started to develop, so no comment there. It doesn’t seem more complicated than finding 13 secret treasures for the King so he can take over the world.

At least GKH has a decent battle system, but it’s nothing exceptional so far. There hasn’t been that much variety in the enemies either, just palette swaps up the wazoo. Yes the enemy designs are wonderfully detailed, but I don’t want to stare at the same goblins all day long.

The training system isn’t as deep or intensive as I’d hoped either. I was expecting some serious micromanagement of your unit’s growths and stats and skills, but the game does all the work for you. In the training hall you pick a card that determines your success. On the field you just fight till you level up. When you pick a unit, you’re told their likes and dislikes, but this only affects whether they gain or lose Brave when you feed them stuff, it has nothing to do with their stats. I had the patience to do it once, but I’m not ready to repeat the process until I’ve built up an army. It’s waaaaay too tedious for that.

And since I’m hoarding my current batch of troops and not letting them out of my sight, I can’t really take part in the “War” portion of the game. Well, not so much “can’t” as “I’m not really interested” right now. I’m going to ignore that aspect of Grand Knights History for a little longer while I do a couple of quests and try to progress the story.

Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo ~ (2)

Boring. It’s not so bad I can’t finish it, but it’s dull enough that if I try to marathon it I’ll end up disliking it. That’s why I’m on a strict two-battle-a-day limit.

My battle strategy has been quickly reduced to “Spam Burst Strike and Heal as Necessary,” and judging by the high HP monsters have and the pathetic amount of EXP you get unless you finish off an enemy, that seems to be the ‘expected’ way to play the game. Start a turn, move two or three allies within a few squares of one enemy, set off a flashy Burst Strike (combo) attack, share EXP. I usually soften up the enemy with a few individual blows first.

That’s all there is to battle. Hit the enemy a bit, finish it off with a Burst Strike, move forward a little more, repeat. Since most enemies won’t attack unless you’re in range, I either draw one down with a high-DEF character (trying to train up a Paladin for this role, but she’s useless) or snipe them from afar with an arrow then close in for the kill. It’s not like it’s no fun at all but, come on, the same strategy every time? With a lengthy, gaudy, unskippable animation on top of that? (edit: turns out you can skip animations by pressing START)

What’s keeping me going is 1. The hope that my party will grow strong enough that I won’t have to use Burst Strikes in the latter half, 2. The hope of different kinds of Burst Strike combos – I think I got something different when I used a Paladin and a High Priest together, and 3. The hope that the story will pick up enough that I won’t mind slogging through a little boredom to get to the good stuff.

That story… hmm… Yeah, I really don’t care about it. I should have picked Trenet’s route instead of Cynthia’s. That way instead of fighting a war I don’t believe in for a princess I barely know, I could be running all over the (tiny) continent having fun adventures. Why do I always pick the wrong route first in this kind of game? -__-

Anyway, since I have time to spare from not playing this game, I’m going to start something else as well, maybe Grand Knights History. I’ll write a final post on Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo ~ if/when I ever finish it.

Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo ~ (1)

I haven’t gotten that far into this, but I’ll be busy for the next couple of days so I thought I’d dash something off quickly while I still had the time.

Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo ~ (later localized as Ragnarok Tactics) is a regular strategy RPG published by GungHo Online and developed by Chime and Apollosoft, the same guys who brought us Blue Roses. It’s supposed to be related in some way to the Ragnarok Online MMORPG, but since I’ve never played that I have no idea what the similarities are, if any.

The story is the same as for 95% of SRPGs: there’s a war going on between two countries/factions. You’re on one of the sides and you fight till you beat the game. The slight twist is that the player character isn’t a prince/princess/army general but instead a random mercenary you create at the start. As such you have no direct relation to the war going on (you can even choose to side with neither country and keep being a mercenary instead) except as an observer. In fact, apart from one or two story characters on each route, everyone else in the your party is a generic created by you.

So far that hasn’t affected my enjoyment of the game. I’m used to working with whatever fighters a game throws at me, but being able to pour my love and energy out onto my own creations without worrying about them being overshadowed by the story characters is nice in its own way. Right now my MC is a Sniper, I’ve got a second Sniper (as usual archers are slightly broken), two High Priests, an Assassin Cross (basically a thief), a Paladin, a Champion (monk) and a White Smith (axe guy). I wish I could try a couple of the other classes like Clown and Dancer, but you can only field so many characters per battle.

As I said, the gameplay is your standard SRPG fare, speed-based instead of turn-based. Speed seems to be very important, so I’ve been pouring my extra stat points (given at level up) into raising my party’s speed, and I think it’s paying off. You have your regular attacks, skills, overdrive skills and even combos known as Burst Strikes. Battles can be a little slow because the enemies are placed all over the map and generally won’t move until you come near. It makes things easy because you can hang back and buff and heal all you like, but since it’s easy there’s no tension and no real need for thought or strategy. Well, so far, anyway.

After 11 hours, I’m having a good time, but it’s too soon to make up my mind about the game. The only complaints I have right now are

1. The character portraits and background shots are BEAUTIFUL, but the 3D characters look astonishingly bad, especially close up. I’ve gotten used to it, but the massive difference in quality is pretty shocking.

2. Nothing interesting has happened in the story even after 11 hours. I joined the side of Branchard, Aura attacked us, we attacked them back, they counterattacked and took our castle, and that’s where we are. The pace needs to pick up, and soon.

3. Since my character is a complete stranger to both sides, I have no loyalty to any of them, so I feel absolutely nothing no matter how the story goes.

4. Preachy game is preachy! War is terrible! War is terrible! War is terrible! War is terrible! I’m treated to a 5-10 minute lecture on the horrors of war and the meaning of courage before every single battle. Every. Single. Battle. And what hurts most is that the two countries aren’t fighting over anything sensible but over who gets the credit for sealing away the gods and demons a thousand years ago. Honestly, who cares?

5. There are signs that this is shaping up to be yet another one of those stories where some sealed evil needs war and strife on the continent in order to be unsealed. I know I’ve played at least 5 other RPGs like that, though FE:Path of Radiance, FE:Radiant Dawn and Hexyz Force are the ones that come most readily to mind.

6. The game doesn’t like my screenshot plugin and usually freezes when I try to use it.

7. The biggest one: leveling up your party evenly is hard! The only way to get a good amount of EXP is to kill an enemy. Attacking and healing give you 1-10 EXP at most when you need hundreds per level. This makes Kill Feeding essential, but it’s hard to do it right when 1. The game works on a speed system, so the weaker character you want to feed the kill to might not get a turn when you want them to and 2. You’re not given an estimate of what damage an attack will do, so you might either end up killing the enemy by mistake, or NOT killing them because the character was too weak.

Still I’m managing somehow. My party is between levels 8-10 and I could progress the story faster if I wasn’t so busy fighting free battles. I’ve got a high tolerance for crap when it comes to SPRGs, so they just have to avoid doing anything stupid(er than what they’re already doing) and we’ll be fine.

Dragon Quest 6 – I quit

I’ve had enough. I made it to the 35-hour mark, right outside the final boss’s castle, and couldn’t bring myself to move another step. Plus when I think about it, I really don’t have anything personal against Mortamor. I’ve killed his sub-bosses and I’ve opened the way to his lair, so someone else can have the honor of finishing him off. I’m done.

I wasn’t even going to write about it, but… after 35 hours of (dis)service I reckon it deserves a few lines. Here goes:

Things I liked.

1. It can’t have been that terrible if I managed to stick it out for 35 hours… Actually, no, it was that bad. But if I keep telling myself that, maybe one day I’ll believe it :-(.

2. The first 8 hours or so when I was hunting down Murdaw were fun.

3. Lots of treasure to find and chests to open. If there’s one thing Dragon Quest always does right, it’s being generous with the treasure. I just love the rich red-and-gold design of the chests.

4. I’ve traveled in a number of unusual game vehicles, but a flying bed and a private island? That’s new.

5. The ability to do things out of sequence after a certain point and go exploring all over the world is good… in theory.

Why I quit.

1. The abysmally high encounter rate.

2. The abysmally high encounter rate.

3-100. The abysmally high encounter rate.

101. The abysmally high encounter rate. I couldn’t enjoy exploring or progressing the story when I had to fight a random battle every 7 or 8 steps. Only Arms’ Heart and P2: Innocent Sin have frustrated me more when it came to random battles.

102. Those darned random battles aren’t even interesting. With everyone except the hero on Auto, they rarely take more than 2 turns, but it’s two turns of everyone using the same attacks on the same enemies.

103. I like the “traditional” order of plot progression in RPGs. You start out just wandering around, do a few quests, kill a few bosses and eventually everything becomes clear. The final boss reveals himself/herself, you go after him/her, struggle a bit and finally succeed, the end. In Dragon Quest 6, all that played out in the first 8-10 hours, so everything that happened after that felt like one long drawn-out post-game dungeon. From the start of the game, everyone was going Murdaw this, Murdaw that. Let’s beat Murdaw, if you beat Murdaw, everything will be fine. So I was in Murdaw Mode for the first third of the game, I finally beat him and everyone’s happy. In my heart the game ended there.

104. Apart from the Murdaw bit, the rest of the story isn’t very interesting. Murdaw terrorized the entire world (or so they say, but he wasn’t that bad), but the rest of the Dread Fiends stick to petty crime like luring lazy villagers to their doom, squatting in celestial palaces and building undersea dungeons without the proper zoning permits. And the final boss hides in his castle and zaps people every once in a while. Most people in the world don’t even know any of the other fiends exist, that’s how non-threatening they are. I can’t get psyched up to beat bosses like that.

I’m still waiting…

105. I have to gather the legendary items and go to Zenithia again?! Give me a break!

106. No clear sense of direction. Once I beat Murdaw, the world opened up to me, but I had no idea what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go next. The original DQ6 came out in the golden age of strategy guides, and it really shows.

107. Weak cast this time round. Apart from Carver, they’re all generic nice folk with largely interchangeable lines in party chat. There were no particularly memorable NPCs either.

108. The Slippin’ Slime mini-game is no fun at all, especially compared to DQ5‘s T’n’T. It’s a relatively minor point, but I had a great time with T’n’T last time, and I was hoping for a similarly enjoyable experience.

Welp, that’s it for Dragon Quest 6. Since all DQs are essentially the same game, I’ll wait… hmm, another year or so and then play DQ7. Another year after that, I might tackle DQ8. Once that’s done, I don’t like the direction the new games (9 and 10) are taking, so that’ll be the end of the series for me.

More immediately, I felt like playing an SRPG, so I started one yesterday. It’s called Ragnarok ~Hikari no Yami no Koujo~ and I’d heard it was bad. Having played a little bit… yeah, it’s kinda bad. But not quite bad enough to quit over, so I’ll put in a few more hours and see how it turns out.