Tokimeki Memorial 4 – Yanagi GET!

Is this what they mean by “Too little, too late?” I finally got Fumiko Yanagi and I’m very happy about it, but after goodness knows how many playthroughs, Tokimeki Memorial 4 is stale beyond belief.

Yanagi herself is very sweet and friendly from the start, no defrosting ice queens here. The downside of that is that even when she falls in love with you, there’s not much difference in her attitude and behavior, so you don’t feel like you’ve progressed much. But I’ll take that over the Tsugumi Godou type any day.

There’s no “story” on this route, unlike how, say, Maki wants to be a nurse or Yuu wants to gather up the courage to confess to you. You just go out on dates, pig out on sweets afterwards and walk her home. Rinse, repeat. I didn’t get most of her CGs, and the two I did get involved her falling down on you. Ooh, clever. But her low-drama, feel-good atmosphere is precisely what’s so good about Yanagi. Her ability to cheer up the MC dramatically when he’s down makes her an automatic keeper.

In the end she blunders and confesses to the MC in front of the whole school by means of the P.A. system, which I thought was cute. Like Rizumi she didn’t confess under the legendary tree,, so there’s no in-game guarantee that their relationship will last forever. A naive ditzy girl like Fumiko will have lots of wolves after her, so I sent my MC to the best university possible juuust in case. As long as he gets a great job and can afford to keep her stocked up on parfaits and cookies, I think they should be okay.

MOVING ON! But before that! This has been bugging me for a while, but is it really necessary to wait three years to confess in these games? I mean, how dumb are high school students these days if they have to go out on date after date after date and hold hands and spend whole days together and STILL not figure out that this is more than an ordinary friendship? This is high school, teenage hormone central! Where a careless “Hi” in the hallway can fuel a whole month’s worth of “Do you think he likes me” conferences! And there you go, blithely picking up the phone and inviting girls to spend time with you one-on-one. And not just once, but for three years and you both STILL can’t figure out you love each other until you spell it out? Tut, tut. Kids these days.

Okay, now moving on for real. I tried to go back to Dragoneer’s Aria, but I couldn’t bring myself to continue. Right now I’m juggling between Blade Dancer and Tactics Ogre: Let us cling together. Neither one is doing miracles for me at the moment, but TO has the advantage of being an SRPG (*bliss*) so I might drop BD and focus solely on TO in the coming days.

Took down all posts about Criminal Girls

Criminal Girls PSP coverLet’s get straight to the point, for once. I feel like a reprobate for liking and recommending a game about torturing teenage girls for the gamer’s sexual pleasure, so I’m taking down all my posts about Criminal Girls. I still like the game a lot – revisionist history can only go so far – but I don’t want to be involved in anyone’s decision to buy it, so I’ll keep my thoughts to myself.

I played a lot of dungeon crawlers in 2011, and Criminal Girls was my favorite of the lot. Compared to the others it was short, it had simple, straightforward dungeons, the challenge level was just right, the suggestion-based battle system never got old, there were a lot gamer-friendly features like instant warps back to camp and, most of all, I loved the cast of characters, loved their individual personalities, loved watching them grow, loved watching them interact. What I did not love were the torture minigames, but I was able to hold my nose enough to enjoy the rest of the game.

Now, it hasn’t happened very often, but occasionally a game I play that I think will never get localized does get localized. I think it’s only happened to Unchained Blades and Ragnarok Tactics so far, and in both cases when I heard the announcement I was like “What, really?” then it came out and it was like “Hey, cool” and that was the end of that.

With Criminal Girls on the other hand, the whole censorship thing with NISA and their “This game is bad and you should feel bad” attitude towards the contents got me thinking, is the game really all that bad? And if I’m honest with myself, the answer is “Yeah, kinda.” The execution may be more silly than sensual most of the time, but the idea behind the game is pretty reprehensible once you think about it.

“But that’s no call to delete all your posts!” you say. Maybe. But I feel better this way.

“When we start self-censoring the terrorists win!” Maybe. But I feel better this way.

“Ah come on, it’s just a game.” Definitely. But I feel better this way.

“This is pretty sudden.” It’s been bothering me for a while. My choices were Delete/Ignore/Rewrite. I went with Ignore for a while, but now I just want this thing off my chest.

“This is really selfish of you.” I’m sorry. You can vent in the comments if you’d like. The posts are gone for good, though.

Dragoneer’s Aria – Very long and very slow

What I asked for: A short, English RPG to act as a rest stop between UnchainBlades Rexx and Persona 2

What I got: Dragoneer’s Aria. Well, it’s in English all right. And it’s definitely an RPG. But at 89 hours and counting, it is hands down the longest RPG I’ve played this year. And it’s not just long, it’s slow. In fact it’s long because it’s slow. When the hell will this thing ever end?

[EDIT: I just found out that there’s an error with the PSP clock in this game: it keeps track of time even when the PSP is asleep, meaning I probably played only about 20-30 hours. Disregard future references to 89 hours.]

The Story: An evil black dragon who was sealed away has broken free and is going to destroy the world. But he can wait a couple of hours while the heroes tramp over the world trying to stop him. I’ve only seen ol’ Nidhogg twice in the whole game, and both times he wasn’t that scary. I only have the game’s word for it at this point that he’s trouble, but that’s how RPGs usually go. Aaaaanyway, our protagonist, a ladyboy named Valen, has to team up with a healer named Euphe, a loli pirate named Mary and an unpleasant elf named Ruslan to find the secret to Nidhogg’s powers so they can stop him once and for all.

The Slowass Battle System: Make it stop. Please. Somebody. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I estimate a full 80 of those 89 hours so far have either been spent running around fields or wasted on the most sluggish battle system I’ve ever faced in my life. It’s hard to describe length verbally, so I looked around Youtube to see if I could find an average battle. i found this minor battle which takes 10 minutes to complete:

It was only that short because there was one enemy. Take note of how every single move by every single character is sllooowly animated, how it takes 15 seconds for each magical attack to be charged up, executed and to hit its target. How each character has to recite a spell “Magic Shot Aspersion! Sicken!” before finally releasing the magic. How much time is wasted by the camera showing each character attacking/defending/being hit individually instead of showing them all together.

The Mana/Energy bar at the top acts as your MP bar. Regular attacks and successful Guards fill it up and Mana (magic, special skill, dragon skill) attacks drain it. The guy in the video plays a lot more defensively than I do and spends a lot of time on guarding and using buffs/debuffs. Level ups are plentiful and refill your HP to full, so I prefer to attack wherever possible.

Using Mary’s Mana Boost skill means I never have to guard to build up Mana either. I don’t think I’ve ever guarded in the entire game. But even with my Attacking mentality, the average field battle takes upwards of 5 minutes to complete and most boss battles take between 15 and 60 minutes (rrgh, Great Spirit). And there are plenty of both in Dragoneer’s Aria. The enemies have high HP, high defence and high attack power, and sometimes they’ll even heal themselves just to mess with you. It’s only in the last few hours or so, now that my characters have hit level 60-ish, that battles are “only” taking 2 or 3 minutes each, and even then I still have to sit through the same slow animations. This sucks.

The Slowass Everything Else: Everyone talks like the player is hard of hearing: slowly, carefully, pronouncing every word, with long pauses between each sentence. Even when something “dramatic” is happening, they take sweet time getting it out. And each line must be punctuated by some kind of look, or gesture, or head toss, which also takes a while to play out. Half the time they aren’t even saying anything worthwhile, just bickering among each other or making snide comments. *sigh*

The story is slow too. I thought T.I.T.S. was bad, but now I bow before the true masters of long drawn-out storytelling. I was very happy when the evil black dragon showed up and laid waste to the city within 5 minutes of the game starting. I thought for sure I’d make a few rounds, find out a few secrets and then kill the boss and that’d be it. More fool me, I am making a few rounds and I have found out a few secrets, but because of the slow battles and long treks, that’s taken me 89 hours. And what I’ve found out isn’t that interesting either. Why am I still doing this?

Hmm. Why am I still playing this game? Hmmmmmmmmm… I’ll have to think on that one.

UnchainBlades Rexx – Finished!

How I felt a few days ago

I was ill for a couple of days after my last post. I’m all better now, but for a while I didn’t have the energy for anything more rigorous than lying in bed and whining, so it took a while to get round to finishing this game. I killed the last boss at around 4pm yesterday, clearing the game and unlocking the 101-floor bonus dungeon. I’m not interested in post-game content though, so that’s it for me.

All in all UnchainBlades ReXX was a fun but very repetitive dungeon crawler. Definitely not for beginners, and definitely not for anyone who hates forced grind, but I can handle stuff like that in moderation, so I had a good time. The first few stages were really hard, but after that it was fairly easy. It’s like it was made for me, with all the complaining I’ve been doing about easy games these days. Some way or another I ended up hopelessly overlevelled in the last dungeon, and I used a lot of monster-repelling items before doing my usual tapdance over the final boss’s face.

This game, like any dungeon crawler, is more about patience, endurance and a high tolerance for extreme repetitiveness than about skill or strategy or anything like that. My personal experience was positive, but anyone considering buying the game should be very, very certain that they like grinding, very very certain that they’re not expecting a good story or good characters and super-duper certain that they can stomach spending hours and hours in exploring the same dungeon to the same tunes.  They tried to lighten things up a bit by adding quests and foraging and alchemy, but it was just more tediousness in the end. I myself had a few moments where I considered throwing in the towel, but those came towards the end when I was almost done anyway, so I was able to push myself to finish it. I don’t think I could do this again any time soon, though.

When the credits rolled, I noticed that the main theme was apparently composed by Nobuo Uematsu. I had no idea. Or more like, I have no idea which one the main theme was. None of the songs stuck in my mind, but apart from the horrible rock-theme in the fire dungeon, none of them were terrible either.

Alchemy system = FAIL

The story was stupid till the end though. Apart from Nico and a pair of NPCs, everyone else wasted their wishes either on invalid wishes, on worthless crap or on undoing other people’s wishes. They’re going to be really sorry when they get home to find out everyone’s been wiped out by an earthquake or something. Should I spoil it in detail? Hmm. Hmmm… No, I’ll let it off this time.

And of course, they had the usual mandatory “Friends makes you stronger, you’re nothing without friends” JRPG moral. Why are Japanese game makers so hung up on friendship anyway? After the 100th iteration you’ve gotta wonder who they’re really trying to convince: us, or themselves? It’s not like “friendship power” doesn’t appear in non-Japanese works as well, but there it’s usually aimed at kids, not grown men and women. What motivates this message? There’s a masters’ thesis in here somewhere, if anyone cares to look.

Enough about UBR. Now comes the formidable task of figuring out what to play next. I’m going to delay Persona 2 for just a little longer and I’ve given up on completing Blue Roses, so my schedule is wide open. Ideally I’d like to play a short, normal RPG in English, so I’ll poke around a bit and see what I can find. See ya!

UnchainBlades Rexx – Almost done (spoilers)

I said in my last post that I was putting UnchainBlades Rexx away, but then I thought “Just one more run” and got sucked in again, so here we are 20 hours later. Addictive dungeon crawler is addictive! I finally got all three parties put together, which increased my monster limit to 100 and my item limit to 60. Now I can stay out all day exploring if I want, which puts a whole new perspective on things.

The gameplay is getting more and more fun, but the story is getting dumber with every passing moment. I know, I know, it’s a dungeon RPG, not an Oscar-winning movie. Dumb is still dumb, though. Seeing as the point is dungeon exploration, you don’t necessarily have to have a reason for all the crawling, but when you do, the least it can do is not be insulting. Spending 5 painful hours exploring a dungeon just so [SPOILER!] my party member with a lolita complex can wish for my other underage party member to like him [END SPOILER] is wrong on so many levels I don’t even know where to start. The wish didn’t even come true, but [SPOILER!]I felt dirty just having him in my party, so I replaced him at the first opportunity.[END SPOILER] Anyway, the one who really needs help is the writer who thought it would be a good idea and the rest of the game company who sat back and watched it happen. Bunch of sickos, all of them.

The rest of the characters seem to have similarly frivolous wishes. Like “I wanna be less ditzy” or “I wanna become a dragon because a dragon saved me once.” or “I don’t want to be afraid of men.” Ma’am, I’m not climbing for 6 hours just so you can get a boyfriend. Save that crap for Dragon Ball. Only two characters seem to have any proper wishes, and it’s weird because the game makes the wishes out to be so serious and urgent, but then one of them gets the chance to wish and passes it up twice. What could those wishes possibly be? I’m looking forward to finding out.

Apart from that, nothing new on the gaming front. UnchainBlades Rexx is all I did this weekend. I forgot to mention a few more things about the battle system. The first one is Judgment Battles. Judgment Battles are the whole reason why I frequently had to stop and catch monsters just to proceed, so I can’t believe I forgot to say anything about them last time.

Judgment Battles: Battles between your monsters and the local monsters in the dungeon. You are forced to do them at least twice per dungeon, and there are several optional fights as well. Judgment Battles are carried out DDR-style by pressing the directional buttons at the correct times. At random points, a master (i.e. one of your party members) can step in and give support. This happens in a very short window and if you fail to press the correct button your chance is gone. There is also the occasional “Single Combat” chance, which is basically “Mash O to win.” I suck at button-mashing, but it doesn’t matter because all Judgment Battles are won and lost by the number, strength and level of your unchained monsters.

That’s why they serve as a roadblock, because your monsters become useless so quickly you’ll be stuck without adding at least a few high-level monsters to your party. But! If they’re high-level, they’ll be incredibly difficult to unchain – especially since you’ll be trying to stay alive while unchaining them. Now you see why I had to roam around for 3 hours unchaining monsters before I could continue? I hate Judgment Battles.

Anima: I mentioned Link Skills last time and said they were a pain to use because you had to get monsters with the same Anima as the skill you wanted to use. What I didn’t add was that there’s a way to give certain Anima to monsters. If you level up a monster to its Max level and then dismiss it, it leaves one of its Animas behind, which can be equipped to other monsters. E.g. If Monster A drops the “Lightning” anima, you can give it to Monster B in addition to what it already has.

The reason I hadn’t bothered with this before now was because it wasn’t practical. For much of the game, you have a 30 monster limit. Because of the aforementioned Judgment Battles, you have to make sure they’re always the strongest, highest-level monsters you can get. Since monsters level up so slowly, it was easier and faster to catch new ones than to grind weaklings to their max level.

Merging parties in chapters 4 and 5 solved that, however. First it raised my monster limit to 60, then to 100, and more importantly it brought several weak monsters into the fold who could be leveled up much quicker by fighting high level monsters. Plus right now my party (Fang, Lucius, Marie and Lapis) is strong enough that it doesn’t have to depend on friendly monsters taking the occasional hit for them.

They’re strong enough, in fact, that I’m still not bothering with Link Attacks, because I can get the battles done just fine without them. The only one I need is Marie’s Sleep Song, which has a very high chance of putting every enemy on the screen to sleep. I learned that lesson from Final Promise Story: sleep attacks are the best! And they don’t ever wake up unless you hit them, so the battles are far less difficult now. *sniff* I’m so happy…

Sheesh, I’m not sure why I’m going into so much detail about a game that’s never going to cross the Pacific, but whatever. I’m having fun. I’m almost done with what is probably the last-but-one dungeon (they say it’s the last one, which means there’s gotta be one more left), so I should be done soon. Awwww…