Nora to Toki no Koubou – First few hours

tl;dr: I love it. So far.

I’m 4 hour 59 minutes in, and it’s been a great ride so far. I just reached October of the 2nd year and the game lasts 3 years so I should be finishing up my first playthrough pretty quickly. I’m not using any kind of FAQ or guide yet, so we’ll see what kind of ending I get.

Nora to Toki no Koubou (Nora and the Time Studio) is about Nora Brandor, an apprentice time mage/alchemist, who has to live and work in a little forest hut for three years as part of her training. Somehow the people in a neighboring town mistake her for the Mist Witch that tormented them years ago, so in addition to her training she also has to carry out quests to increase their trust in her while preventing anyone from finding out what she really is.

That’s pretty much it for the story. There was a lot of “go here and do that” in the first few months, and there are certain items you have to make to progress (and a pesky dragon I still can’t beat) but apart from that the game is fairly non-linear. Whether you want to spend your time holed up in the studio, go out there and forage or go to town and do quests all year round is entirely up to you. I’ve been keeping a balance between the three so far, with an emphasis on synthesis. I’m not sure what’s carried over into the next game so I’ll stock up on money and items in the last year.

Being a time alchemist sounds complicated, but it boils down to using the fast-forward or rewind button on an item. You can turn a fruit back into a flower and the flower back into a seed, you can turn salted fish into dried fish, you can speed-age cheese, etc. It’s pretty interesting, but not exactly “zomg best innovation evar” material. Which is perfectly fine with me. I like gameplay that’s simple and fun without being stale and unoriginal.

Time alchemy isn’t the only form of synthesis though. There’s also “dismantling”, where you split an item into smaller parts (e.g. you split a hunk of meat into ‘delicious meat’ and ‘bone’) and processing, which is the usual synthesis we’re all familiar with. As with most other Atelier games (yes I know it’s not an actually an Atelier game, but it plays almost exactly like one) you have to buy tons of books and tools to make all the things you want to. In fact my only (tiny) beef with this game is that you have to place all the tools and items personally, which makes my room messy and leads to uncomfortable Shepherd’s Crossing flashbacks.

Those are my first impressions anyway, subject to change. The only cloud on the horizon is that I’m a little worried I probably won’t be able to do many replays because the story and characters are weak. Yah okay, the townspeople think Nora is a witch, but I already know she’s not one and I don’t really care about proving them wrong.

Then there’s the little mystery about what really happened between the Mist Witch and the hero Pauly who supposedly vanquished her, but again, ehhh, I dunno. And this might be a bit of a spoiler but… I’ve got this mysterious character named Mellow who has amnesia and doesn’t seem to eat. You think she could have something to do with the witch and hero? Gee, I wonder. Nah, actually I don’t. I don’t really care one way or another.

The characters are okay, but they’re all types I’ve seen before in other games. Your tiny adviser, the young adventurer who wants to make it big, the little girl who’s trying to prove herself, the beautiful and extremely strong swordswoman, the ditzy amnesiac, I’ve seen them all before somewhere.

Of course all that is just going to affect the replay value, but I haven’t even played it completely once, so it’s a little early for me to worry about that sort of thing. “Become the best X you can be within XX years” has been a staple of the Atelier series for years and I’ve always enjoyed the freedom that gave me. It should be no different this time round, as long as they have enough endings to account for different playing styles. I picked this game up for the alchemy anyway, and there’s a lot I still haven’t made so I’m in very good spirits right now. 😀

Now I just have to figure out how to beat that dragon at the springs and then my game can move forward again. Battles in Nora to Toki no Koubou are the usual 3×3 turn-based affairs Atelier games always use, but the enemies hit HARD and your HP is low so you can’t relax too much. That’s another plus, btw. I complain when games are too hard, but I don’t like it when they’re too easy either. With the right equipment, synthesized items and a little training I should be able to get the dragon before the game is out. I might need to revise my party a bit as well. I was using Nora, Keke and …I forgot his name. The red-haired guy who wants to make it big. I’m going to switch them out for Karuna and either Mellow or Sirkka ‘cos I need more attack and more magic. I’ll report back once I’ve beaten the darned thing.

Persona (1)

Nngh… I dunno what to say about this one. I’ve been playing it for a while and I think I’m almost done (I’m in Avidya world if anyone’s played it before). My characters are MC, Reiji, Nanjo, Mark and Maki, and they’re all between level 47 and 58.

I think there’s something wrong with the timer on my PSP though. It says 164 hours and I really can’t believe I’ve been playing this game for that long. I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anything in all that time. We went to the hospital, the world went crazy, we wandered around for a while, got transported to another world, wandered around some more, gathered some magical doohickeys and opened a portal and…that’s all. I haven’t had a single moment of excitement or great interest, but suddenly 164 hours have gone by? Nope, gotta be some kind of mistake.

Usual disclaimer: Persona is not a bad game. In fact I really like it. The dungeon crawling is far more bland and simplistic than in the later, more polished games, but it’s fun in its own way. I just don’t understand how I could have poured 164 hours of my life into this game and have so little in terms of plot development, achievement or satisfaction to show for it. When I was young I had a part-time job that paid me $15 an hour. If I’d poured that kind of time into it, I’d have an extra $2,460 to show for it. Here, nothing.

Still, assuming I really have spent 164 hours on Persona so far (the PSP must be broken, I swear), that just shows I’m having a good time…I guess? Seriously, I don’t know how to feel about this game. I don’t have any strong opinions on it one way or another. There are some things I really like, mostly the auto-battle system and the formations. There are some things that are okay, but could be better. Like the options for talking to demons and trying to recruit them are really confusing. It’s hard enough keeping track of all the demon personalities and right choices, but then you start getting demons with four, five different personality traits. I don’t know how anyone goes through all that without making extensive notes or resorting to a FAQ.

About the only thing I didn’t like was the music. The poppy, hip-hoppy tracks in Persona 3 and 4 eventually grew on me, but even after 164 hours (allegedly), the Persona soundtrack just grates on my ears whenever I attempt to listen to it. I’m also not really crazy about the story so far. “Sick girl gets jealous of healthy friends, crap ensues.” It’s like ehhh, okaaaay, but I expect a little bang for my $2,460 ya know?

Anyway, I think I’m almost done so I’ll just push on and finish it. Maybe I’ll find something to say about it once it’s all over.

Blue Roses – Yousei to Aoi Hitomi no Senshitachi (1)

One day many years ago, my aunt was really hungry so she came home with a couple of burgers. She wolfed down the first one in 5 seconds flat, then chowed down the second one with gusto. Halfway through the third one she suddenly stopped and went “Hang on… These burgers are undercooked!” The obvious moral of this story is: Even s—-y food tastes great when you’re starving.

And even s—-y games play great when you’re starving, I guess? Okay maybe that’s far too strong a description for Blue Roses Yousei to Aoi Hitomi no Senshitachi; it’s not really bad at all. It’s just that after playing through the first 14 hours like a maniac, it dawned on me in a flash: This game isn’t actually all that good.

It’s an easy thing to miss, because at first glance there’s plenty to love about Blue Roses. The character designs are fine, the fairies are cute, both your party members and the NPCs have their own personalities, relationships and personal issues, the music does nothing wrong, the game has bright, colorful graphics and a cheery atmosphere, etc, etc…

Best of all, it reminds me a lot of the Summon Night games. So much so, in fact, that I paused and did a bit of research and discovered that Blue Roses was developed by Apollosoft, formed by ex-employees of Flight-Plan, the ill-fated developer of the Summon Night games. The similarities are numerous, but the key telling factors were 1) Walking around town talking to people/party members after battles 2) Not earning EXP during battle 3) Only being able to assign EXP after battle 4) Everything being stupidly expensive.

There’s a branching story (I think?) depending on whether you pick Roche or Alicia as your main character, which should make for some replay value. When I played Mana Khemia 2, I picked Raze first and he turned out to be such an asshole that he put me off not only MK2 but the whole Mana Khemia franchise for good. So I started out with Alicia. Eh, she’s okay, in a dumb, rash airhead kinda way. I prefer that type of protagonist to the glum, moody, ‘leave me alone’ type anyway.

So what woke me up from this pleasant reverie? It was a slow process of realization that culminated in a moment of epiphany, but the main source of my discontent was the tedious battles. Unlike normal SRPGs, battles don’t necessarily take place one-on-one in Blue Roses. Any character that’s attacked/attacking can choose up to two other nearby characters to assist them in battle. One character initiates the fight and up to 6 characters (3 vs 3) take part in it. A character that has already attacked can still take part in team battles. And, a character can move after attacking if it hasn’t moved already. You can attack, move the character, move another character up to attack while the first character assists, etc etc. It’s a very interesting system with a lot of potential, but then a few pesky flies got in the ointment and spoiled everything:

1. To prevent the game from becoming too easy (I presume), enemies are extremely strong. A single turn can take off half of your HP if you’re not careful. Even weak, lower-level enemies can’t be killed easily, making the free battles a pain to slog through. And there are a lot of enemies on every map. Every time I start a battle I just groan.

2. You can field up to 8 characters per battle but you only have 5 fairies to pair them up with. The three fairy-less characters will be weak and grow poorly, making them annoying to use. Since the enemies are so strong, the most effective way to beat them is to either smack them with status effects or hit them with the magic they’re weak to, and for the most part only characters paired with fairies can do so. I don’t know how far along I am, but I’m already using the same favored characters with the same favored attacks repeatedly, so the excitement factor has taken a huge nosedive.

3. They added a little gimmick where you have to tap correct buttons to power up your attacks or defense. Each attacking animation takes long enough as it is, so this did not help at all. Also having a character go from healthy to half-dead because of one missed press is most unfair.

4. I hate fighting the same bosses over and over again. I’ve fought Charlotte and Hamilton about three times now and hated every minute. There’s not much variety in normal enemies either.

Blue Roses is an SRPG, and 90% of the time in an SRPG is spent battling. If the battles are slow, frustrating and unfair, then the game itself becomes the same. Once the novelty of the team battles wore off, the pretty veneer quickly flaked away and Blue Roses‘s true nature as a rather mediocre game were rapidly exposed.

But wait, what about the story? Yeah, that was stupid too. Stupid, obvious, cliched and predictable. That’s probably the worst part of this game and the main reason why I haven’t played it in over a week. Should I spoil or not? Hmm… Okay, not this time. And there’s still the possibility that it could salvage itself, so it’s too soon to go on a rampage.

Adventures to Go! review

Don’t really know what to say about this one. It was developed by Global A Entertainment, the same guys that brought us My World My Way, which I liked, and Master of the Monster Lair, which I didn’t like. Adventures to Go! falls somewhere between the two, maybe leaning a little more towards the like side. The concept was great and they at least tried to be funny. However half the game was frittered away on very tedious sidequests, so by the time I finally finished it I was bored to tears. If it had been a lot shorter and a little more focused I would have rated it much higher.

The concept: The long and short of it is that ‘Adventures to Go’ is a company that summons various environments and monsters to suit adventurers’ needs. If you need a bug scale from a monster that’s only found in the forest, instead of trudging out to look for one you just order “Forests” and “Bugs” from ATG, go in there and kill bugs till you get one.

What was good

– Bright, colorful graphics. Simple, clean character designs.

– Ordering various kinds of environments in order to get requested items was interesting. It was a huge step up from Master of the Monster Lair because you didn’t have to create a dungeon from scratch.

– Money management was essential. It’s good to play an RPG that forces you to think about your finances while not being as horribly stingy as Dragon Quest games tend to be.

– Greater monster variety. The same bugs and tabbies from the previous games show up, but there are several new enemies and quite a lot of bosses to face. I love a good boss battle.

– The encounter rate was pretty reasonable. It stands out all the more because I’m playing Arms’ Heart at the same time, a game with a truly insane encounter rate. More on that game if/when I finish it.

– The SRPG-like battle system was great. It’s like the system in Stella Deus or Hoshigami Remix where you have a set number of action points (AP) you use to move, heal, fight, etc. You can press square to defend, press X to wait in ambush for enemies, use attacks that sap enemy AP, use all kinds of magic attacks, etc. And random battles take place in the same environment as they occurred in, so if you get caught in a forest you have to maneuver through the trees to get to the enemy, etc. Can be a bit annoying, but it’s usually good fun.

What was not so good

– Let’s face it, Finn is a scumbag. Even if the treasure chests originally belonged to humans, the fact remains that Finn and his cronies are forcefully summoning innocent monsters from their homes, murdering them for money and trophies, and then plundering their homes for cash and treasure. When confronted, his only defense is “Yeah, well, they’re monsters.” That’s not good enough, you greedy capitalist pig-dog. I felt sorry for the poor demons who were just trying to protect their homes and families. ;__;

– The game tried to be cheerful and upbeat, and the characters tried to be likeable, but because of the above-mentioned reason, I couldn’t get into it. I’m an accomplice to genocide! ;__;

– The game got more and more tedious as the number of dungeon screens increased. Near the end you’ll have to cross 10 different screens to get the one stage you want. And there’s not enough variety in the types of dungeon you could summon. Or more like there was a bit of variety, but all the dungeons felt the same anyway.

– Game lacks focus. It just meandered here and there for hours and then suddenly came up with the usual “ZOMG THE WORLD IS IN DANGER” crap. I liked that the chapters moved at a fast pace, but half of them could have been cut out without any great loss to the world.

– Drop rates were stingy. Even if you summon the appropriate dungeon, find and beat the monster in question (sometimes easier than done), there’s no guarantee that it’ll even drop the item you’re looking for. I’m not asking for auto-drops or anything, but a little more consideration would have made the game more fun.

– Not that many quests, and they’re all fetch quests anyway. The quests needed more variety, even if it was just of the “Defeat X monsters and Y bugs” kind.

– The boss battles got too reliant on buffs and debuffs in the last quarter. I think the turning point was the Rock Golem battle, where a few casts of Steel Wall and Temper/Fury are all but compulsory to beat the boss, and most of the others afterwards.

– Once you apply said buffs and debuffs, the battles become easy-mode. Even the final boss barely posed a threat once I had that Steel Wall up and kept using Paralyze to sap his AP. When you have such a fun battle system, it’s a shame to make it so easily breakable. Better too easy than too hard, though.

Etc, etc. In all it was a good experience which just dragged on a bit too long. If only Finn hadn’t been a homicidal *******…

Next up, still have a couple of games to finish, but I don’t think I’m going to finish them so I’ll probably post about something new next time. I’ve been informed that I’m playing Persona all wrong, so I’m going to have to start that all over again. Aarrrrrgghhhh…

Ranshima Monogatari – Rare Land Story (2)

All right, continuing from my last post about Ranshima Monogatari , I tried to see what kind of ending you get when Chilia restores the city to its former glory. Unfortunately I spent so much time walking around the town viewing every event I could that I accidentally ended up with two different wedding endings: one where Hiro marries Abi and another where Chilia marries Hiro’s bastard half-brother Milo.

Well okay, it wasn’t entirely unintentional. I did go out of my way to try and chat up both girls and guys every time I left the house. Actually I was aiming to hook Hiro up with Somarina, but since I didn’t use a FAQ I think I screwed up somewhere, and she ended up married to that toad of a duke. As expected Hiro was persona non grata at the castle for the rest of the game. Tch.

Luckily I’d been playing nice with Abi too, lending her money when she asked for it and treating her at the pub when I got the chance. She looks a bit too kiddy for me so I wasn’t really intending to marry her, but as time went on all the other girls dropped off one by one. She was the only one whose events I kept getting, so I kept being nice to her and before I knew it I was married to her! The ending states that we had twins and opened up a pub on the outskirts of town that makes us enough money to live on. And we lived happily ever after.

Milo and Chilia, I really don’t know how that happened. Most of their events dragged on so long I stopped reading halfway through. I can’t even tell when Chilia fell in love with him. She was all Hiro-Hiro-Hiro, then once I gave her permission to move away with Milo, she suddenly had feelings for him? I dungeddit. Anyway, the story goes that Milo’s not as bad a guy as he first appeared to be, and he only went 300,000 eve into debt because someone stole his money. Eventually he gets it back and puts it in a business that earns him 500,000, so I thought he would be okay. In the end, though, he and Chilia buy a farm together, have triplets (it must be something in the water) and the last time we hear from them they are 470,000 eve(!) in debt. Okay Hiro, time to back away slooowly.

So all in all it was a good second run. Restoring the city took a surprisingly small amount of time, only about two years of hard labor. I learned to manage my money and my tension a lot better in this game, so I only had to do actual work for a few weeks throughout the entire game. For tension I used the temporary skill that stops it from dropping entirely for two months. With a combination of good luck and goals that rewarded me with MP, I was able to keep my MP high enough to keep the skill on for much of the game. Whenever tension went up to 100, I let the skill lapse and allowed the tension to drop a bit, then put it back on again. Piece of cake.

Money I didn’t need that much of because fixing the town is free. Plus the better the town gets, the more money Hiro receives every season. Letting Chilia soak in the bath a bit only costs 70 eve a go, and I kept my house maintenance expenses low. I also got involved with research early and tried to produce “Hot” items as much as possible, selling almost all of the resulting goods right away. I almost never went on vacation with her, although on the two occasions I did a burglar broke in and stole some cash. It’s weird, ‘cos I went on vacation almost every season in the last game and never got robbed. Huh.

Lessee, wot else… Contests. I took part in a few. I could have made some good money if I had bothered to raise Chilia’s attractiveness and strength enough that she could take part in both the javelin throwing contest and the beauty pageant in spring. But I was doing quite well for myself, so I didn’t see the need. I was even able to buy her a few nice clothes and get her several different haircuts. She looked great!

Right now I feel I’ve taken the game as far as it can go, so I’ll give it a short break. But I do want to get Guana’s ending so I can see what she really looks like (if they don’t show her face I will sue), and I want Chilia to end up with Rui since she obviously likes him so much. At the same time I’d like to rescue Somarina from the clutches of the evil duke at least once. Guess I’m not quite so done after all. I’ll be back, eventually.