Neo Angelique not-so-Special

I finished it now, but I still hate it. It’s boring as hell.

I don’t even know what to write here. Let’s start with a list of synonyms for “boring”.

drudging
dull
ho hum
humdrum
insipid
lifeless
monotonous
routine
spiritless
stale
tedious
tiresome
tiring
unexciting
uninteresting

Using high-powered arcane magic that man was never meant to dabble in, Koei took this accursed list and summoned it to life in the form of a video game. They named it Neo Angelique Special and proceeded to sell it to unsuspecting innocents for $70 a pop.

Feast your eyes on the earthly embodiment of boredom!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hmm? You want me to get serious? I’m deadly serious, I assure you. Okay, okay. *sigh* I played it. I’ll talk about it. Sheesh…

First of all, Koei has this series of otome games called Angelique. I’ve only played the first two games, but the basic premise is that you’re given a continent/universe to develop. You have to do this while competing against a rival and simultaneously trying to raise the affections of several bishie Guardians. It’s much better than it sounds, but even the best formula gets stale after a while.

After  number of permutations, spin-offs and remakes, Koei decided to reboot the series. I’d like to say it’s the thought that counts, but in this case the thought should have lived and died as a thought, because the reality is cold and cruel. In fact, I’m going to go out on a very sturdy limb and claim this: Koei was making a new otome game, realized it sucked donkey balls and slapped the Angelique label on it so donkey-ball-suckers would buy it.

My proof? The game has NOTHING in common with the other Angelique games. There’s a story element where Ange has special powers and is supposed to become the Queen of the World, but that could be any game at all. The world-building element is missing. The guardians are reduced to glorified escorts. There’s no rival. There’s a primitive battle system that’s an insult to any serious gamer. The game is easy beyond imagination.

The real Angelique games have goals to meet and regular reviews. They have daily, weekly and monthly structures, but how exactly to achieve things is entirely up to you. Neo Angelique has no proper structure. Story progression happens when you stumble across the next flag without meaning to. Sometimes you go to the salon and nothing happens. Next time you to go the salon, bam, the story moves on. Your life consists of fulfilling monotonous quests in the hope that you will somehow trip across the next story element. Does that sound like a recipe for fun or does that sound like donkey balls? If you say both, you need help.

This review is all over the place, isn’t it? That’s just like the game. Let’s try and get some order in here. First, the story. There are these bad creatures called Thanatos that make people very unhappy. Luckily a girl named Ange (that’s you) and four bishies have the power to purify these baddies, so they hang out in a fancy mansion drinking tea and having dinner parties (no, seriously) and helping people out once in a while. Eventually you find out there’s this Erebus guy that’s causing all the trouble, so you get in a flying ship and go beat him up. Then you can either become Queen of the World or go back to having tea parties. Decisions, decisions.

Up next, gameplay. Talk to your guardians until they like you. Not much different from the standard Angelique games, except now you have to “unlock” conversation topics by visiting certain places or taking certain missions. Get enough of the right topics and you win the conversation bingo (no seriously, the topics are laid out like a bingo card) and your relationship progresses to the next level. Presumably if you do this enough you’ll get the guy at the end. Pssh, as if I’d want any guy that could be won in a bingo game. Occasionally you’ll have dinner parties and chat the guys up all together. Not as much fun as it sounds. Not any fun at all, in fact.

Urge to keep writing, fading fast… Not like there’s anything left to note. You chat with guys non-stop, you wander around the planet in the hopes of triggering the next event, eventually you trigger it, story continues. There’s also a very rustic, primitive battle system, the kind they put in games for people who’ve never played RPGs before (see Arabians Lost for another example) It’s a bit like Chrono Cross with all the color attacks, and just like Chrono Cross it’s almost impossible to lose a battle unless you try really hard. That’s the last boss there. He makes even Yu Yevon look tough.

So, long story short, Neo Angelique was a massive waste of time. The bishies weren’t that bishie, the story wasn’t very interesting, story progression was lul randum, the battle system was a joke, the music was okay, the background art was GORGEOUS, gotta give credit where credit is due, and while it wasn’t short, it didn’t take that long to finish. No way in hell am I ever playing this again, nor can I recommend it to anyone. Find an artbook (seriously, the background art is really nice) and call it a day.

Will o’ Wisp DS review

I finished my first ever visual novel!

Will O’ Wisp is about a girl named Hanna who finds a life-sized doll in her basement after her dollmaker grandfather dies. She winds him up and he introduces himself as Will, an elemental doll. That basically means he’s alive and he belongs to her. As the game goes on, Hanna will discover more about the other elemental dolls, her own special powers, and the role she is destined to fulfill. You know, the usual twaddle. It’s cliched, but short enough to stay interesting.

Will O’ Wisp DS comes with a sequel of sorts called “The Miracle of Easter”, but I was sick of the game by the time I finished the main story so I passed on that. Plus it retcons the ending of the original game. In the ending I got, Gyl turned human, Hanna lost her powers and they lived happily ever after together. In “The Miracle of Easter”, all the dolls were rendered lifeless at the end. Work done = 0.

I’m pretty chuffed that I actually managed to finish Will O’ Wisp. I’ve tried many visual novels, but I’ve never made it all the way to the end of one before. To be honest I don’t even recognize visual novels as “games”, but on the other hand they’re often substandard as far as reading material goes, so it’s no-win situation any way I look at it.

Will O’ Wisp was a little better, since the story was okay-ish, and things moved at a cracking pace – at first. By Chapter 3, though, every scene started dragging on, Hanna’s internal monologues grew longer and longer, and the characters went over the same things ad nauseam: “Alvin is crazy, Alvin is crazy, Alvin is crazy, do you want to be released, do you want to be released, do you want to be released” again and again and again. To tell the truth, I used the Skip option to fast-forward from middle of Chapter 3 all the way to the final showdown with Ignis, then read from there. But a finish is a finish, and I did watch the ending credits, so I count that as “completed.”

If I had to hazard a few guesses as to why I was able to finish Will O’ Wisp in particular, it would be:

1. The art is nice. I’m a sucker for nice character designs. The CGs were fine to look at as well, though I wouldn’t have minded a few more. There were relatively few backgrounds, but the story moved fast enough that you were always shuffling between them, so it wasn’t so bad.

2. The scenes moved fast. This is the biggest reason why I can’t play VNs. Each trivial scene drags on interminably. Up till chapter 3 Will o’ Wisp kept things flowing: make a point and move on. Make a point and move on. Then it fell apart, but that’s what the “Skip” option was for.

3. The story’s pretty interesting, for a Rozen Maiden rip-off. Dolls and owners and they were all made by the same person and they’ve been alive for hundreds of years and they’re dressed Victorian-style and they fight, etc. But stories about dolls coming to life are much older than Rozen Maiden, so I’ll give them a pass. And they’ve got nice bishies, that’s gotta count for something.

4. The story develops quickly. Something’s happening at almost every stage, and it all leads to a logical conclusion. Not much time is wasted on petty arguments or comic scenes. Until chapter 3 and onwards, of course.

5. It’s not that long. There’s no timer in the game, but I don’t think it would take more than 4 or 5 hours to finish a route, even without skipping all the dialogue. I don’t have a lot of patience for reading endlessly, so that’s about my limit anyway.

6. Feedback is almost instantaneous. Accidentally selecting the wrong option and dooming yourself to a bad end/locking yourself out of a certain route is another thing I hate about visual novels. “What do you want on your bread?” A: Butter B: Jam C: Nothing. YOU PICKED BUTTER? Welcome to BAD END. Yaahh… Will o’ Wisp has none of that. If you select the right thing, you get a blue glow. Wrong thing, no blue glow. And you can check the affection level of your chosen doll any time you want, so you know you’re on the right track. There’s no way to fail. Heck, even if you don’t speak Japanese you can play this pretty easily.

7. Gyl is hot, in a girly kind of way. I did his route, and he wasn’t exactly hard on the eyes. I liked it best when he stopped wearing drag at the end.

8. Ignis is voiced by Takehito Koyasu. Actually I keep mixing up Koyasu and Kenyuu Horiuchi, so I didn’t know which one of them it was until I read the credits at the end. It wasn’t a very passionate performance either, Mr. Koyasu was clearly phoning it in this time. But I knew it was a voice I liked, so that counted for something. Come to think of it, the only voice actors I can recognize without fail are Norio Wakamoto and Shuichi Ikeda (mitometakunai mono da na). They should do more games.

So you see, so it’s not that hard to make a visual novel even I will like. Just keep the story moving fast, make the bishies hot and tell me when I’m going wrong so I don’t need a FAQ to find my way around. If you do that, I’ll even ignore stuff like 60% of the cast being obnoxious and the main character being a weak-willed lily and the story getting bogged down in the middle and the music grating on the ears. I’m a generous soul, after all.

Now that I’m rapidly running out of actual games to play on my PSP and DS, I might be forced to try more of these in the future, so I hope I can find more stuff that meets these simple requirements.

Dream C Club Portable – Idiotic game

A game for idiots by idiots, starring an idiot as the main character. Dream C Club Portable makes you play an idiot who spends his weekdays either working or gambling and his weekends blowing wads of cash on idiotic girls who don’t even put out. Work, blow, work, blow, work, blow, game blows.

It would be one thing if the MC was a rich executive, but he works at a convenience store, making about ¥20,000 (~$260 USD) a week. Since all that money is at his disposal, I’m guessing he lives at home, sponging off mommy and daddy. And yet he’s not ashamed to go out every weekend and waste that money on overpriced drinks and inane conversations with brainless bimbos. What a disgrace to the human species.

Let’s see, $260 a week. All work and no play and all that, let’s give him $60 a week to play around with. That’s $200 a week left over. Excluding sick days and public holidays, let’s assume he works 50 weeks a year. If he saved that $200, he’d save $10,000 every year. In 10 years he’d have $100,000 in the bank. Now that’s hardly Bill Gates material, but how many 30-35 year olds do you know with $100,000 at their ready disposal? And that’s assuming he just tosses it in an account with no interest, makes no investments, buys no bonds, nothing. Not bad for a bumming mooch, yeah?

But nooo, instead he goes out every weekend to a hostess bar. A hostess bar that’s all about pretty girls ripping you off with $15 glasses of beer while chattering pointlessly away. There are 8 different girls in the game that you can have attend to you, and they’re all working in the bar for different reasons. You know, like how strippers always have some “reason” for stripping, they never go “‘Cos I’m a skanky ho”. Yeah baby, whatever you say. But I digress.

It’s not real money, so I wouldn’t be getting worked up if MC was squandering it on something fun. But Dream Club Portable isn’t even any good! As you can see from the chart on the left, the girls aren’t much to look at. Conversations with them consist of the MC macking on them with the cheesiest pickup lines ever while they struggle valiantly to conceal their utter disdain for him. I know exactly how they feel too.

Apart from chatting, you’re also forced to buy drinks for yourself and your chosen hostess, and the more you can get her to drink, the greater her affection for you grows. The game even measures your capacity for alcohol. Now at 35 you’ll be broke and have a wonky liver. Wonderful.

So anyway, you work all week, then at the weekend you go to the hostess bar, chat with a girl, waste money on drinks, maybe get her to sing you a song on karaoke, then you leave. Repeat the cycle the next week. And again the next week. And again the next week. And again and again and again for one whole in-game year. It would be quite the formidable feat if DCP managed to keep the chat topics fresh and new from beginning to end, but since I quit after one month, I will never know.

Apparently you can learn more about a girl and help her work through her troubles. For example one of the floozies claims she’s training to be a pro bowler (yeah right), so you’ll probably support her till she fulfills her dream. So there’s a story mode of sorts, but the MC is a pervert and a loser, and the girls can’t be that bright if hostessing is the only way they can pay their bills, so I’m giving it a miss anyway. Next please!

Persona (2) – Finished

I beat Pandora. As far as SMT/spin-off bosses go, she was by far the easiest I’ve ever faced. The only reason she killed me the first time was because I didn’t know the fight was coming up, so I didn’t have enough Balms of Life and most of my personae were weak to magic. All I had to do was regroup, buy about 50 BoLs and Beads and give Armaiti to Maki so she could have Mediarahan. Everything after that was a mere formality.

Aside: Speaking of buying Beads, I had about ¥3 million at the end of the game. I’ve always wondered what game characters do with their massive piles of cash once it’s all over. Let’s see, that’s about $35,000 USD… If they split it equally that’s about $7,000 each. Pfft, puny. I should’ve wasted a few more demons and bought me a nice condo or two before finishing the game.

But I digress. So I beat Pandora in a long but relatively simple battle and restored Mikage-cho to normal. We gave her the usual “Loners are losers” speech and and she was like “Oh. Okay.” Then Maki kissed me on the cheek and some old guy turned into butterflies. *roll credits*

Yeah, that was a totally…uh…great ending. W-wait, why is my nose growing? Stop that! …I kid, I kid. It was a fairly straightforward, easily understood and well wrapped-up story. That’s rare for an Atlus game. At the end the only question I had was, “How the heck did this ever get a sequel?”

You know, when people ask me which game in a series to play, I almost always advice them to start with the very first one and work their way up. I formed this theory after beating the Breath of Fire II  before I and doing the same with Shining Force I and II. In both cases I was able to finish the original, but I know I would have enjoyed and appreciated both games more if I’d done them the other way round.

Going later-to-earlier is so much harder, because while earlier games may have their own charm, they are usually far less polished and thus much harder to enjoy for fans of the later installments. For example I urge people to play Persona 3 before 4 (even though I honestly think P3 >>>> P4 and I liked it that your party wouldn’t always do what you wanted) simply because the interface and the gameplay are seriously improved.

So, looong story short, I’m not going to ascribe any of my lack of enjoyment to Persona itself. Heck, to be honest I did enjoy much of the game. Uhh, the, uhh, music…was too poppy and annoying. In fact I had the music turned off 90% of the time, so that can’t have been it. The graphics…were okay. The CG bits were nice. The characters were memorable, in their own way. I thought the MC this time was particularly colorless, but he was the first so it’s understandable. The story? As near as I can gather, the message was: “Be true to yourself,” and “If you turn your city into a monster-filled hell, you’ll turn into a penis-monster and your friends will come and kick your butt.” Words to live by.

Holy typo, Atlus!

But seriously, I know I enjoyed something, I just can’t remember what right now. It must have been the dungeon crawling, since that’s what 90% of the game consisted of. I like dungeon crawling, especially if the maps are fixed and just need exploring, i.e. not random. It was easy to go down the wrong path, but hard to get permanently lost, and apart from one puzzle and a few switches to pull, Persona‘s dungeon crawling was largely pain-free.

What’s more, I almost never had to do the same dungeon twice. I hate backtracking. It smacks of a lack of imagination on the developers’ part. Where it’s present, I prefer it to be largely optional. So I’m grateful that apart from the Lost Forest and the subway, progress in Persona is all about the new. The game even records the paths you take, so you can withdraw, restock and then come back and proceed faster than ever. Bliss.

Battles were fairly good too. I think ALL games should have an auto-battle system, no exceptions. At the same time there was enough variety in the enemies that you couldn’t blindly select Auto for every single fight. You have to use your Personas as much as possible so they rank up, and there’s EXP (determined by damage dealt) to consider, so it’s never a “Mash X to win” fest.

It’s not all good news, though. There were a number of clumsy and inconvenient elements as well. For one thing you could only stock 3 personae per party member, and you couldn’t switch personae between party members except in the Velvet Room. Recruiting most of the later demons without a FAQ or a very, very, very good memory is an exercise in futility. The five second pause before the game decides not to allow you to escape a battle was adding insult to (inevitable) injury. Weapon shops are few and far between, and most of the stuff they sell is crappy anyway. “Gather three compacts” to unlock the final dungeon door was dumb, but understandable for a 1996 game, etc etc.

As for why it took me a while to finish it after my last post, it’s because I was suffering from the Sunken Cost Fallacy. I thought I’d spent almost 200 hours on it, so I was all like, “OMG, I have to finish this thing, I can’t let all that time go to waste!” Once anon informed me that this wasn’t actually the case, finishing it took a massive backseat to all manner of other games. If I hadn’t already been in the final dungeon, it might never have gotten finished. But finished it is, and it was a decent experience, all things considered. Now I’m looking forward to the Persona 2 PSP English remake, which should be out next week on September 20th.

Tokimeki Memorial 4 – Rui GET!

“It’s not me, it’s you.”

– Me to Tsugumi, after doing Rui’s route.

I couldn’t tell whether the game or the girl was to blame for my less-than-optimal experience doing Tsugumi’s route, so I decided to play Tokimeki Memorial 4 one more time to make sure. And since I’m such a good friend, what better victim test subject than Nanakawa Rui, the cross-dressing twin sister of my bro and best buddy Nanakawa Tadashi?

Actually Tadashi kind of ruined things a bit by being shockingly chill about the whole thing. I even got an event one Christmas where he picks me up and drives me over to their place so I can spend the night helping Rui finish a manga in time for Comiket. He even encourages me to sleep in her room, then wakes me up the following morning and fixes me breakfast! Breakfast, I tell you! I’m dating your sister, man! Why are you so happy about it? Don’t you care about your sister?! Don’t you care about…me?

Hmph. Leaving Mr. No-Fun-At-All out of it, Rui route was fine, but a bit low on content. The girl herself was fun to hang out with, if a bit exhausting. At least I can introduce her to my friends and family without worrying that she’ll be snooty to all of them (*cough*Tsugumi*cough*). Rui is loud and hyper, but also down-to-earth and honest about her own faults and interests.

She would be my favorite if I hadn’t raised Fumiko Yanagi’s affection all the way to Tokimeki level by accident. That’s right, I took her on a couple of dates, hung out with her during the school trip and took her to the shrine the second year all by accident. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Yanagi is so sweet! In-game, when your mood is at its lowest she’ll often show up and cheer you up considerably, but even as a player I always felt  much better after hanging out with her. She’s got easy-to-be-withability, if there’s such a term. When her affection got too high, I had to stand her up on a few dates to lower it, but even then she was unfailingly sweet. Like she was just worried about me, the poor sweetheart (btw don’t try this with Satsuki-sempai. She will be PISSED and she’s scary when pissed). If I had to pick one girl for the MC to marry in ten years, it would definitely be her.

Err, oops, anyway, this isn’t a post about Yanagi. It’s about the game-loving, cosplaying Rui, whose route had its funny moments. I’ve seen the Valentine’s scene on the right twice, but I laughed out loud both times. It’s also hilarious the way the girls in your school think you and Tadashi are in a relationship because of how close you are to Rui. And Tadashi seems to enjoy the misunderstanding, which is like, hmmm…

Some of her more otaku-oriented events reeked of “trying too hard” syndrome though. Rui works at a maid cafe, sings only anime songs at karaoke, draws doujinshi, loves going to the arcade, etc etc. A few incidents and its cool, after that it’s like “Okay, okay, she’s an otaku, I get it already!” Everything in moderation, Konami.

It’s not all bad news, of course. She’s fun to hang out with, she’s happy to show off her curves to you (oh, the possibilities!), and since she starts out at high friendship with the MC, even on the worst dates she’s usually pretty upbeat.

On the whole it was a fun route that restored my faith in Tokimeki Memorial 4 as a good game. You can’t win them all, but it’s comforting to know girls like Tsugumi are an aberration rather than the norm. Now for another break, after which I’ll do Yanagi (<3) and possibly Doyama-sempai.