UnchainBlades Rexx – Hope you like grinding!

I finally hit my limit and will be putting this game away briefly while I recuperate with less grindsome games. I’m 24 hours in, probably around the halfway mark. Very, very little has happened except I fought a lot of random battles and killed two bosses. Two bosses in 24 hours.

Still, if you like grinding and first-person dungeon crawling, you could do a lot worse than UnchainBlades Rexx. In fact, you might even like it. But this game is not for everyone, and before you pick it up there are a few questions you should ask yourself.

1. Do you like being prevented from progressing with a story until you go catch monsters for 3 hours?

2. For that matter, do you like grinding in the same small patch of dungeon for 3 hours?

3. On that note, do you like spending hours catching monsters that become obsolete almost as fast as you can catch them?

4. While we’re at it, do you like unimaginative monster designs and lots of palette swaps?

5. Do you like climbing through several vast, twisty, similar-looking dungeon floors?

6. Do you like making a little progress, warping out to save, coming back and starting all over again, making a little more progress and repeating the process 200 times to complete a dungeon?

7. Do you enjoy raising a party from zero to hero only to have them snatched from you and replaced with level 1 weaklings?

8. If yes, would you enjoy doing it twice in a row?

9. Answer the following question: I enjoy listening to mediocre, slightly grating background music, Y/N?

10. Do you like item fusion systems that require you to go foraging with highly breakable shovels, saws and pickaxes, and that taunt you by showing items you can’t possibly make at that stage in the game?

The Goddess of Tacky Outfits

If you answered “No” to more than a few of these questions, you shouldn’t even be playing a dungeon crawler in the first place. Repetition is the name of the game for that genre, so if you want lots of different locations, tons of NPCs to interact with, or basically any variety of any sort, you’re barking up the wrong tree. For me, #1, #2, #7 and #8 are kind of bothering me, but not enough to make me dislike the game. Yet.

The story: UnchainBlades Rexx is set in a world where the Goddess Clunea can grant any one wish – provided you can get to her. The game starts with our super-strong protagonist Fang making his way to her only to insult her. She retaliates by stripping him of his immense powers, whereupon he decides to go back there and teach her a thing or two. A moment’s reflection suggests that she’s just going to strip him of his powers again, but Fang is a fighter, not a philosopher, so that’s your story. Elsewhere on the continent are several other people with wishes of their own, and the game switches from one set of people to another every chapter. Presumably they’ll all come together at the end.

The gameplay: It’s a simple, but repetitive process of going to a dungeon, exploring till you get too weak, warping out to save and recover and coming back to do it all over again until you finish the dungeon. The two dungeon bosses I fought were fairly tough, so you can be proud by the time you finish. Your party will be strong and you’ll have lots of money and items… which is why it’s really going to suck when they take all that away in the next chapter and force you to start afresh with a new level 1 party.

The game is called UnchainBlades because as you go along, you can “Unchain” monsters. This consists of beating a monster to within an inch of its life, and then playing a little mini-game with a shrinking circle to see if you can catch it or not. That part is not hard. The hard part is weakening the monster enough without killing it and then hoping it will let you unchain it, all while it whacks away at your party. Hard. ‘Unchainability’ is random and depends on your level and quite a bit of luck. It follows, then, that any monster weak enough to be easily recruited will become useless almost immediately, but you do get lucky once in a while.

I spent at least 3 hours running around this little patch of dungeon

The battle system: Standard speed-based turns. Speed counts for a lot in this game. You have your basic attacks, skills, items, defend, escape. Escape works in all battles except event-battles. Party members have a Burst gauge that fills up as they get attacked. When it’s full they can unleash a super-powerful attack. Nothing new there. UBR does only two new things with the battle system.

Firstly, the monsters you unchain can be set as “Followers” and if they like you at all, they will randomly either take blows for you or carry out follow-up attacks. Depending on your performance in battle, you may gain Charisma Points and rank up in Charisma. This will allow you to equip more followers and will improve the mood of those you’ve already got on. Additionally, your monsters will occasionally ask you questions after battle, and depending on your answer your Charisma/their mood can go up or down (trying to be nice to them is usually counterproductive. They are monsters, after all).

The second new thing UBR has is Link Skills. Link Skills are attacks activated by having certain monsters with certain Anima as followers. If Skill A needs Earth, Wind and Fire to become usable, you have to find monsters with that Anima and put them on. In my experience this is way too much trouble for regular battles. And for boss battles it’s more important to have monsters who love you enough to take hits for you. But it’s still early days yet, so I might revise this opinion depending on what skills I get later.

Character growth: You level up normally, but with every level up your party members get 2 Skill points to use on the Skill Map. Skill Map, Sphere Grid, Ether Grid, whatever, you know the drill. This is the only way to get new attacks, Link Skills, passive abilities, etc. These grids are huge, and you only get 2 SP per level up so filling out the whole thing is probably impossible on one playthrough. I started out going blindly, but now my advice to new players would be: 1. Head straight for the Burst Gauge nodes. These will give you access to stronger burst attacks. 2. Ignore Link skills unless they’re buffs 3. Get useful passive skills 4. Speed! Speed! Speed!

Where I am right now: On my third real dungeon and third party. Being robbed of my powerful party was not okay the first time, but I adjusted. But this time I don’t even have a party, I just have one lone swordsman. That means if he gets wiped out, it’s game over. That’s not a problem because he’s actually quite strong – the problem is he’s so strong, in fact, that he’s one-shotting monsters instead of recruiting them. It’s just all kinds of frustrating right now, which is why I’m taking a break. I’ll be back soon enough. This game is pretty addictive, in its own way.

WiZman’s World – Underrated dungeon crawler (1)

I’ve been posting mainly about PSP games lately, but my DS Lite is still around and in action. For a few days back in August or so, I played the heck out of WiZman’s World, a dungeon-crawler from Jaleco, but it’s been on hiatus ever since for reasons I will explain below.

Story: A tribe of wizards have been imprisoned in a small town, surrounded on all sides by labyrinthine dungeons. They explore the dungeons constantly, but have yet to find a way out. You play the part of a no-name orphan who was found in the dungeons and taken in by a witch who has since gone missing. Explore the dungeons to try and find your way out while looking for clues about what happened to your mentor.

Simple, right? Simple stories are always the best when it comes to dungeon crawlers. There’s a little bit of mystery in there about where you came from and what the wizards did to deserve imprisonment, which is enough to keep you interested without possibly leaving you going “Huh?” at end of the game. Final Promise Story, are you listening?

You are accompanied on your travels by the three fairy-like homunculi shown on the front cover. Strangely enough they look nothing like that in the actual game. None of them have blue hair, for one thing, and they’re wearing rather fewer clothes. They have no names, so in my infinite wisdom I dubbed them Foxy, Frisky and Booksy (my kids are so gonna hate me). You the MC are a wizard yourself with some very powerful magic, but these homunculi will form the bulk of your offense in-game. The battle system is pretty simple when it comes to playing it, but it’ll take a while to explain in writing, so bear with me here.

The battle system is the regular active time turn-based system, where you attack according to speed. If you’ve played Garnet Chronicle, a.k.a. Crimson Gem Saga, the screen layout looks almost identical to that. Using magic and special attacks delays your next turn, but can be more powerful. Chaining attacks from your party members leads to damage bonuses and multipliers, but there are no combo attacks.

You can see monsters in the field and get the jump on them or vice versa, which gives you an advantage or a disadvantage. The system also has shades of Saga 2 and 3, in that you can get into chain battles with more than one set of enemies. The EXP reward is slightly higher for such battles, but it’s usually not worth the aggravation.

There is also an element system with Earth, Wind, Water and Fire. Earth > Water > Fire> Wind > Earth. This is the basis of your entire strategy: hit the enemies with what they’re weak against while avoiding attacks you’re weak against. If you’re both Earth-element, you don’t do much damage, but you don’t take much damage either. It sounds like a lose-lose situation, but for bosses it can be life-saving. Tch, those damned bosses. I’ll get to them in a minute. But first, how do you make sure you’re one element or another?

Answer: by fusing your homunculi with monsters. WiZman’s World has a monster fusion system where defeated monsters frequently drop “souls”, which your homunculi can combine with for stat boosts, new element alignments and new moves. And not just that, but their appearances change as well into some sexified hybrid furry version of fairy and monster, and that’s what you actually take into battle with you. I suppose SMT & Persona players will be familiar with the concept of fusing monsters together to create new ones, except here it’s the same party member in a different form.

The homunculi level up as well, but fusion is really the only way to make sure they don’t fall hopelessly behind as the game progresses. What’s even better and even more important is that you can take two moves along with you when you fuse. Remember how I said Earth doesn’t damage Earth? Now you can have an Earth monster with Wind moves so she can damage the Earth boss without being hurt in return. If you go into battle and your strategy isn’t working, you can go home, fuse again, get some new moves and come back and try again. In theory, anyway. In practice this doesn’t work so well because the bosses are cheating bastards, but…we’ll get to them.

On top of everything else, the enemies also drop stat-boosting items that you can add when fusing. So if you switch from Monster A to Monster B and your HP goes up but your MP takes a hit, you can just supplement the fusion with an MP+20 item or whatever and then you’re right back where you started. It’s all kinds of awesome. I love this system, and I’d love to see it again in another game somewhere. I’d never heard of Jaleco before this, but I’ll be looking out for whatever they make from now on.

Unfortunately, despite how wonderful it was, something major got in the way of my enjoyment and led to me putting this game on ice. Those damned cheating dungeon bosses! They were created to keep the wizards trapped and boy do they take their jobs seriously! Long ago on 4chan, I remember seeing an MS Paint image that sums up what it’s like to play WiZman’s World. In fact this post was delayed by a few days because I was looking for it. Picture speaks a thousand words and all that. I still haven’t found it, but I did come across something close enough and even simpler, so:

That’s right. You spend your time in the dungeon fighting, beating enemies, you level up quite rapidly at first then you cap off, you fuse your homunculi a couple of times, give them great abilities, everything’s hunky-dory. After a while you start feeling pretty good about yourself, and you think: “Okay, I should be ready to take on the boss now.” Hahahaha, LOLNO.

Well actually, LOLYES. The levels are usually fine, it’s just that the bosses have so much HP and so many annoying attacks that you’re screwed no matter what you do! You need some really good planning, some serious stamina and quite a bit of luck before you can take them down. They’re like Megaten bosses: the first attempt is usually just information-gathering, you don’t actually think you stand a chance of winning. I’ve fought four bosses so far, and each one has taken me between 2 and 4 tries.

You need to damage the boss, but at the same time you need to hold back on the SP for when it inevitably goes berserk as its life runs low. And what I said about using special attacks the boss is weak against? That’ll drop your speed enough that when the boss goes crazy, he’ll be doubling and tripling you, i.e. KILLING you. And he might even start using attacks both of you are weak against, i.e. KILLING you. Oh, I finally found the image I was looking for:

Same thing. Anyway, basically the boss battles are a massive chore. I killed the first four (I think?), so it’s not like they can’t be done. It feels REALLY good when you finally kill one, but at this point I’m just bossed out. I made it to a desert stage which had a real boss that followed a false boss that was tough enough to waste your MP and deplete your HP, and I was just like “No más.” But it’s still an awesomely enjoyable game that I’d like to finish at some point in time, so I’ll be back eventually.

Moving on, I’m about 20 hours into UnchainBlades Rexx. It’s been fun, but the fun is rapidly turning to pain, so I’ll try and write something about it while we’re still on good terms.

Persona 2: Innocent Sin – On hold

Every once in a while, you should do something you don’t usually do, just to remind yourself why you don’t usually do it. I started Persona 2: Innocent Sin several days ago, and now I remember exactly why I don’t play games in a series too quickly after each other: it’s boring! Especially when they’re very similar in terms of settings and gameplay.

I’m sure P1 and P2 will have very different stories, but at the beginning it’s the same high school setting, same “demons from out of nowhere” thing, same-ish kind of city and many of the same stores. I fought the first boss (Principal Hanya) right before stopping, and at about two hours in P2 is just P1 with more annoying party members and much, much easier battles. I seriously can’t believe how easy, I’m thinking of switching to the Hard setting, which I have never done in an Atlus game before.

Well, I guess it’s not the whole party that’s annoying. Just this ditzy reporter girl named Maya and this American girl with a kung fu fetish in my party named Lisa. Oh gawd, Lisa. And she keeps spouting out this bad Cantonese. Like “Kaumenna” instead of “Gaau meng a” or “Holeen” instead of “Ho lin”, it is so painful to read. It’s probably meant to be, and it’s working like a charm. Do I have a fixed party in this game or can I get rid of her? *fingers crossed*

P2 has also brought back the crazy number of options for contacting demons so I’m going to need a FAQ again before too long. =_= It’s much funnier this time round though, because when it says “Sing” or “Dance”, they actually do sing and dance. Even when “Sing” doesn’t work I keep picking that option just to see Michel’s act. Man, I thought it would be bad, but this is just incredible. If there’s one video game character who cannot afford to drop out of school, it’s him.

Dang, talking about this made me want to continue the game. But I know I’d just end up frustrated and bored so I’m going to wait at least another month.

Besides, you know how in Persona the town just went crazy out of the blue through no fault of yours? In Innocent Sin the main character Tatsuya seems like a bit of twat. I wouldn’t be surprised if he really did do something bad, with that attitude. I won’t be amused if I put in all that effort just to find out he was asking for it </understatement>.

What I’m even more worried about is that the “Sin” will turn out to be some ambiguous bullshit that doesn’t make any sense at all. I haven’t had that problem with the other Persona games so far, but I can’t say that of some of the SMT games. Nocturne for example, all I know is the world went kablooey, then I went around killing lots of demons as well as some of my friends, then at some point Dante from Devil May Cry joined me because of my ravishing shirtless torso (there can be no other reason), and then the last thing I remember was sinking down into some depths Terminator 2-style. Awesome game, but I still don’t know what it was all about. Digital Devil Saga wasn’t much better. The first game was good, the second game was doing well until suddenly, fwoop, we flew into the sun. And then Serph was a hermaphrodite.

So I’ll play something else and come back later. Prepare myself mentally, and all that. For better or for worse, Persona 2 isn’t going anywhere.

Starry Sky ~in Spring~ – No good

I mentioned I was going to try more otome visual novels, but finding one that’s actually playable might be harder than I thought. I only made it about an hour into Starry Sky ~in Spring~ before I had admit that this just wasn’t going to work.

First off, there are only three guys to get in this game, and they’re all not my type. Clever HoneyBee decided to split one game into four seasons and dole the guys out sparingly. Lookswise, I don’t like them, personality-wise you’ve got the brash childhood friend (Kanata), the reasonable childhood friend (Suzuya) and the forgotten childhood friend (Tomoe). I hate those three cliches. The current skinny, gangly character design fad doesn’t do anything for me either. How about guys whose parents loved them enough to feed them?

Secondly, and the reason why I’m not even going to try the other games in the series, is that I find the setting ridiculously boring. A specialized school for astronomy? Seriously? My romantic options are all a bunch of pencil-pushing stargazers? They’d better be rich, that’s all I’ve gotta say about that.

Lastly, the story is non-existent. A visual novel lives and dies by its story. Even if the characters are good (and this time they aren’t), it doesn’t mean a thing if they’re not going anywhere. Here the “story” is that you and your friends enrolled in an astronomy school and then a transfer student came in and he says he knows you. The rest of the game appears to be Tomoe and Kanata bitching at each other like a pair of beauty queens while Suzuya tries to keep the peace.

I said “appears”, because strictly speaking I did finish this game. I put it on “Skip” and let it run on and on until the credits rolled, only stopping to pick one option or another. I couldn’t see the context so I was really just picking at random, but I at least tried to get everything Suzuya-related. Eventually the game ended and I have no idea how the story went, I just know I…probably? didn’t end up with Suzuya. I didn’t get any hugs or any kisses, no Suzuya CGs, no Suzuya ending sequence, nothing. The only final CG I got was the one on the right, where apparently Tomoe goes back to France and sends us a letter. Good riddance. But then once I finished and restarted, the new main screen had only Suzuya on it. So…huh?

How did this ever get so popular, I wonder? Needless to say I’m pirating all these visual novels, so I don’t need to “tough it out” if something isn’t working. I don’t want to support the companies that make this sort of game. Heck I’d be happy if they went bankrupt. I’ll try something else next time, hopefully with a better story, and maybe that’ll work out.

Trails in the Sky – The Whereabouts of Copyright

See, I told you I’d heard the main theme of Trails in the Sky somewhere before. It’s a direct rip-off of the main theme of Laputa: The Castle in the Sky!! Not note-for-note, but close enough that someone like me who hasn’t watched Laputa in years could tell I knew that song from somewhere. I’ve been racking my brains for days, and I finally remembered.

Falcom, as if your crimes weren’t horrible enough. The least you could have done was get a proper composer to do your music for you. The Legend of Plagiarizers doesn’t sound very heroic, now does it? Shame on you.