Nora to Toki no Koubou – Finished!

Where “Finished!” means I’ve played all I’m going to play of Nora to Toki no Koubou. I got another ending this time, the normal ending. I was trying to get Ruttz’s ending, which involves killing two dragons, but I guess I started it so late that I was already locked out of it by the time I finally defeated the second dragon.

It took me three attempts to defeat the blighted creature, but with a bit of luck and a lot of healing items I was able to power my way through. Even with stacked defense buffs Nora still got herself killed on the third turn or so, but Karuna stayed alive and kept pounding him with her Fighting Spirit attack that hits for x3. Ruttz played healer and attacked occasionally. I also discovered that the dragon could be poisoned, but I didn’t have any strong poison items so that didn’t help.

The Normal ending starts out like the Witch Hunt bad ending, but you get the choice to stay and explain yourself instead of running away. Your friends (except Octaja, Karuna and Kitt) will cover for you, and the shopkeepers and Aira will come to your defense. In the end you’ll attempt to fix the Pauly statue that got broken and fail, but the attempt will cheer Timos up a little bit and you’ll be able to stay and complete your training. Better than being chased out with torches and pitchforks, I suppose.

Now that that’s over with, I think I’m done here. Character endings might be nice, but I’d probably only be able to do maximum two per playthrough. With 8 possible character endings, that’s at least 4 near-identical runs, blargh.

I also found out from a FAQ that the ending I got before was not the bad ending but in fact the ‘Witch Hunt’ ending. There’s a real bad ending as well, gotten by being friendly with Aira but not doing anything else. To get the ‘True’ ending, I have to see all of Aira’s events, max my friendship with the townspeople and have Lv. 18 or more skill in time alchemy. Having Alchemy Lv. 18 without maxed friendship will give you the ‘Traveler’ ending, said the FAQ. I only had level 16, and my last save is only 7 days before the end so yeah, I’m out. The ‘True’ ending sounds similar to the Normal ending, only you get to fix the Pauly statue, which reveals your background to the townspeople, etc etc. Whatevs.

Final thoughts about Nora to Toki no Koubou? It’s good. I don’t feel lied to or disappointed by the hype now that it’s finally out. It gave as good as it promised, it just didn’t go above and beyond that. The music fits the mood and is relaxing, the character designs, while a little too “cutesy” are fine, the game satisfied my usual craving for bright colors, I got to synthesize lots of items, the random battles were tough but rewarding, etc, etc.

Battling was especially good, except for the part where they sometimes won’t let you run away. Your 9 party members all have different attacks, different things they do well or do poorly – though I doubt there’s a better party than Nora, Karuna and Ruttz. Enemy drops are plentiful, and leveling becomes a cinch once you use the leveling up and leveling down items on a monster, (a fact I discovered only just now by reading a FAQ. Darn, wish I’d thought of it earlier) you get to buy or trade for all kinds of weapons and armor and you can create a wealth of battle items: bombs, healing items, buffs, status items and more. I found plenty to like in this game.

Most of the things I didn’t like are niggling little issues that could be fixed in a sequel to make a fantastic game.

– Time passes too quickly when you’re foraging. Every single item you grab makes a whole day pass. A whole day to grab a bunch of flowers? I feel the hand of Success behind this one. At least time doesn’t pass when you go from town to town, strangely enough.

– You can only save and load in your room. Whut?

– You can only sell and buy specific items from specific places. Some items can’t be sold at all, which is a PITA when you’re trying to liquidate your assets to prepare for the next playthrough. Some item exchange can be done, but it’s highly limited.

– Your room and your garden tend to get very messy and hard to organize. You could move tools and furniture with the L/R and direction keys, but the room is so small it gets cluttered regardless. I also felt that the gardening and pet-keeping concept was under-developed and that far more could have been done with it.

– There was no proper item sorting. If you wanted to see only items of a particular type, e.g. cloth, you had to go stand in front of the sewing kit. If you want to see only food, you have to go stand in front of the cooking range, etc. Again, a little more organization would have gone a long way.

– The number of items you can hold at one time is severely limited unless you buy other items to raise the limit.

– The lack of success rates in synthesis was a bit of a letdown, especially for an Atelier veteran like me. So long as you have the proper ingredients, there’s no way you can fail, even at the most complex jobs. You have a time alchemist ranking that goes up as you make more things. It affects a number of things (recipes sold, chrono fluids used, certain endings) but has no effect on your success rate.

– Neither the story nor the designs nor the characters are particularly memorable. It’s good for a playthrough or two, but this isn’t a game I’ll be pining for in a couple of years.

– There aren’t enough endings to satisfy different kinds of gamers. Most Atelier games at least have Hero endings for beating all the bosses or a special ending for making a philosophers’ stone and more. Here the first 5 endings need very similar requirements to obtain so you’ll be doing the same thing on each run regardless of which ending you’re aiming for. Not good enough.

– DAT BAD END. It’s really unfair.

– The carryovers to New Game+ are almost non-existent. I could understand if they chose to do away with carryovers altogether, but once you’re doing them at least be a little more generous. As it is all you can take is money, your pets and your unlocked CGs. You can’t even keep meaningless little things like your tools or the wallpaper you bought. Throw me a bone here, Atlus.

– The stingy carryovers and lack of ending variety make for low replay value. Since you’re essentially starting from scratch every single time, you’re basically playing the exact same game over and over again. Oh, joy.

So really, just a few things hold Nora to Toki no Koubou back from being great. It’s better than Atelier Lise or Atelier Annie, at least. Lina >>>>> Nora >> Annie > Lise. Something like that. I don’t usually do number ratings but I’d give Nora a solid 3 or 3.5 over 5.

Next time, I really  need to finish either Persona or Arms’ Heart.

Nora to Toki no Koubou – Bad end

Tch. Finished my first run of Nora to Toki no Koubou yesterday at the 9 hour mark. Got an ending where the townspeople run Nora out of town because they blame her for a storm that wrecked the place. Ungrateful wretches, after all the quests I’ve done for them. Since Nora was run out of her hut and didn’t complete her training, she can’t become a time mage, and the game states that neither she nor her friends were ever heard from again.

Hmm. That is pretty bad, as far as endings go. Normally I’m used to getting a bad end on my first FAQ-less attempt at this sort of game (in fact I got three bad endings in a row in Atelier Lise and never did pay off my debt), but somehow this one really got my goat. The whole premise is just so unreasonable. Nora looks nothing like the so-called Mist Witch, she’s never done anything remotely harmful and she’s lived in peace with the townspeople for 2 and a half years, then all of a sudden she’s to blame for a random storm? That’s so unfair.

I’ve started another playthrough which I’ll probably finish, but I don’t like that aspect of the game. I’m thinking I won’t even bother trying to chat up the townspeople, I’ll just hole myself up in my studio and work on alchemy all game long. Screw good endings, screw making nice with the plebs, screw everything else, I’ll just do what I got this game to do.

Hanging around the homestead is fun anyway. Apart from synthesis you get to decorate the place with new walls and floors, you can mature cheeses and hang meat and fish out to dry and plant seeds in your garden. Oh! And when I started the second run, Koko sold me a duck that looks exactly like Brammy from Shepherd’s Crossing. Heck, it doesn’t just look like him, it is him. He’s even called Brammy! I told you I was getting Shepherd’s Crossing vibes from this game. So Success was involved huh? So that’s why your seeds go all over the place in the garden and your house is so messy and you can accidentally end up uprooting crops without meaning to, etc etc. Even some of the items look straight out of SC, especially the wooden fence, hay and the cheese. Heheh, that makes me happy. My love for this game went up +5 when I realized that, but I’m still mad about the ending.

I need to buckle down and finish Persona and some other games, though. I’m slipping yet again into my habit of starting new games before finishing old ones, and right now I have about 4 90%-complete games waiting for my attention. I might delay the completion of this second playthrough of Nora to Toki no Koubou until at least one of them is done.

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.