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…

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.