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.

I quit TWEWY

I’m a casual RPG gamer. I can’t deal with all this mindless dashing about, running all over the screen with one hand, using pins to slash and stab enemies with the other hand, controlling your partner on the top screen with your third hand, reaching for a rope to hang yourself with your fourth hand…

1. I don’t like Action RPGs. And The World Ends With You has an exceptionally hectic and confusing battle system. I just poked and slashed at random until something died, which worked for Days 1 and 2 but would have caught up to me eventually.

2. Every mission seemingly consists of “Erase the Noise.” Wanna walk through the park? Erase the Noise. Wanna scratch your nose? Erase the Noise. Wanna take a shit? Erase the Noise.

3. Amnesia protagonist. Seriously. He doesn’t help his case by being an unpleasant little twerp.

4. Characters I don’t care about. “We’re trapped in Shibuya and we have to fight to get out!” Yeah, uh, good luck with that.

5. Story I don’t care about. Reapers, Noise, battles, sulky teenagers… what part of this am I supposed to give a damn about? The game is all “funky” and “cool”, I get that, I just don’t get the “likeable” and “relatable” part.

6. I spoke to the friend who recommended the game so strongly and it turns out…he hasn’t finished it either! And what he liked about it the most was not the story or the gameplay, but…the SOUNDTRACK. As a matter of fact TWEWY been on his “Keep meaning to finish” list for almost 3 years, he can’t even remember where he got to, and yet he keeps pushing it on other people. Why am I friends with him again?

Phew, that’s a weight off my chest. I was on the verge of repeating my Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari mistake, where I kept plugging away at a game that was making me suffer, even as other games were waiting to be played. Not saying it’s a bad game – for the right kind of gamer – but it’s definitely not for me.

So, that’s a third item struck off my Half-year resolution list. Unfortunately I probably won’t be able to play Summon Night 3 this year because my PS2 is, uhh, indisposed. I need to have it fixed, but things are, uhh, complicated so I can’t do that for a while. As for last two items on that list, Nora to Toki no Koubou is out! I’m struggling with whether to buy it or just pirate it, which is why I haven’t said anything so far. I’ll wait and see a couple of reviews first. I started Persona on the PSP the other day. Whew, old school is OLD. But not bad, I guess.

I’ve also been testing various other games and gotten pretty far in some of them, but that’s all stuff for another post, another day.

Motto Nuga-Cel! review

Months of playing games like Dragon Quest 9, Tactics Layer and Ar Tonelico have created in me a not-so-secret fancy for dressing-up games, so where else to go next but to the PSP remake of the classic “Grand Daddy of them All?” Motto Nuga-Cel! goes way further than any of the games mentioned above, with an entire battle system based around dressing, stripping and being stripped. Gotta give credit to Idea Factory: they’ve got ideas all right!

I don’t quite know where to start with this review, so I’ll play it by the book.

Story

The 23 districts of Tokyo-23 are at war with each other. As the master of Minato District, you and your girls have to conquer the other 22 districts while searching for three legendary artifacts that will supposedly make you the ruler of the world. That is basically all the story you are ever going to get.

Characters

A total of seven playable girls to control, dress up and woo. As a very deliberate policy, no males show up in the game, not even as pictures. There’s also a cast of baddies and assorted mooks, monsters and maids, mostly shallow and mostly there just for comedy/fan-service.

Graphics

Terrible. The character designs range from “okay” to “worst I’ve ever seen”. So this is why the art in Tactics Layer was so bad. It was a tribute to Nuga-Cel, huh? The occasional CG you can get range from “Hmm, okay” to “WTF AM I LOOKING AT” in quality. The quantity of fanservice is pretty high, since the game was explicitly made to appeal to male players. A case in point:

Gameplay

Oh boy, where to start. *deep breath* Okay, clothes. You have your base stats and two weapons per girl, but everything else depends entirely on the clothes you dress your characters in. Enemy attacks weaken these clothes until they suddenly pop off entirely, reducing your stats to nearly nothing. Lose your clothes and your girl is probably a goner. She will also squeal, cover herself and miss a turn out of sheer embarrassment, forcing you to spend the next turn putting more on (if she survives the next hit), so don’t count on her to be any use in battle. Since this happens to enemies as well, stripping is a key battle mechanic, vital for taking down enemies with high HP.

Characters will appear in cutscenes with the outfits you dress them in, no matter how ridiculous. If they get stripped, they’ll walk around in bras and panties until you put clothes on them again. Bosses you manage to strip will also ride out the next scene in their underwear.

Clothes can be bought from the store as the story progresses, but using them as-is is a terrible idea. It is vital to improve clothing stats by adding all kinds of patches and appliques to it. When I first started I had no idea how important this was, so I found the battles incredibly difficult. I kept trying to level up and to use battle items, but it was no use. My girls were stripped repeatedly while barely doing scratch damage to stronger enemies, and even the simplest-seeming battle turned into a life-and-death struggle.

After a few hours I cottoned on to the fact that it’s not about the clothes’ base stats, it’s about how “pimpable” they are, and everything took a turn for the better after that. Instead of craving new clothes, I craved new upgrades. Apart from patches, you can also update most outfits at  least once with special items. E.g. a modern swimsuit can be upgraded to an old-style school swimsuit. A maid outfit can be turned into a catgirl maid outfit, etc. The better the clothes, the higher the stat caps. If I had to give a single piece of advice to anyone who wanted to play this game it would be this: PIMP YOUR CLOTHES!

The stronger I got, the easier the game got. The easier the game got, the more fun things got. Instead of dreading battles, I looked forward to them. I couldn’t wait to attack new areas and continue the story. The final boss wasn’t a complete walkover, but he was still easy as pie compared to the earlier bosses when I didn’t know what I was doing. Motto Nuga-Cel falls in the “Easy if you know what you’re doing, otherwise hard as hell” category of games.

The flow of the game generally goes like this:

1. Conquer area. You can only attack areas that are adjacent to your territory. Each territory takes several battles to conquer, and while they won’t attack you until you attack them first, once you do they’ll retaliate with gusto.

2. Once area is conquered, build some kind of facility on it. This doesn’t apply to areas that have important landmarks on them (e.g. Shibuya and the Hachiko statue) but facilities give you money/items every day.

3. Invest in conquered area so you can get more tribute every day. Maximizing investment will take several days.

4. Explore dungeons underneath the area, if available. Territory fights involve humans, but dungeons are populated by all sorts of interesting monsters, including rocket-propelled pencils, militant baby chicks and the adorable flaming puppy heads pictured in the screenshot.

5. When you’re ready, attack the next area and repeat the process all over again. Areas are ranked by difficulty, from one star to five, so if you follow the rankings, take your time and, most importantly, upgrade your clothing, you shouldn’t find it too hard.

When you’re not fighting, you get the occasional opportunity to woo your party members. This is important partly because it raises their base stats a little and also because you get a specific ending for whichever girl who loves you best at the end. It was obviously thrown in there as an afterthought, and has no real bearing on the plot or story development.

Battle System

Standard turn-based RPG system, characters move based on speed. In fact Speed is probably the most important stat in this Strip or Be Stripped world. Speed, speed, speed! It doesn’t matter how strong you are, the longer the battle goes the more likely you are to end up naked! This is because any enemy attack that hits will do clothing damage even if it hits for 0. You want to dodge at all costs. Plus the lower your speed is, the less accurate your attacks will be and you absolutely cannot have that.

In addition to stats, clothes convey different skills to characters, which are used with MP (called “Tiredness” in this game). Most clothes come with innate skills as well, sometimes negative. For example the powerful animal suits have a “Trip” skill that causes you to miss turns frequently. NOT cool. As an extra note, HP, Tiredness and Clothing Strength do not recover immediately after battle. You either have to wait a few days or take them to healing facilities to be healed.

My battle party for most of the game was Maya, Piyo and Serena. I made a brief effort to raise the other girls as well, but this is one of the few RPGs where EXP does not scale, so it was an exercise in frustration. 50 exp from a level 10 monster is the same as 50 exp from a level 100 monster to all characters. Clothes make more difference than level anyway, so it’s better to have a few extra sets of maxed-out clothing for repeat battles than to have two full parties ready to go. You can also recruit extra party members, but I can’t for the life of me see any reason to do so.

Everything Else

I used the final save I had to get three different endings. The first was a standard ending with Maya where she tries to creep into your bed. Then I reloaded and made the “other” choice which resulted in a very interesting battle. I got two more endings by first losing then winning that battle. I can’t say much for the endings, though. They were…adequate. New Game Plus let me carry everything over except affection levels and conquered areas, which should make replays a breeze, but I’m not sure I want to replay this game. With no new story elements to uncover, easy battles and meh endings all around, Motto Nuga-Cel! is worth only one playthrough.

Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari – Finished!

I lost count of the number of hours I poured into Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari. About 25? Something like that. Most people seem to finish between 15-20 hours, so I really dragged things out. Instead of grinding to beat bosses I should have just used those overpowered SP attacks earlier. I was afraid of running out, though, and they came in really handy for the final boss and subsequent boss rush, so it all worked out.

I got two ending CGs. First I got the one you get where every Messiah is alive, then I went back and killed Sasha off (told you I’d get her someday) so I could get the Rushdie CG you see on your right. If I’d had the stamina I would have tried to get a third ending, where I kill Rushdie off to see which CG they give me. Probably nothing, since I won’t qualify for any of them.

The ending is the same for all ‘routes’ as far as I can tell, it’s just the final CG displayed after the credits that differs depending on who you made your final promise with and who’s still alive at the end. The ending itself was okay, but really short. No surprises throughout the whole game. Around chapter 3 they said “This is the problem we’re having, and this is what we’re going to do about it.” Two chapters later they did it, everything went off without a hitch, roll credits. No unexpected events, no chance to do the wrong thing, no multiple solutions, just linear as the 5 o’clock express.

I was going to write a detailed, spoiler-ful post with my thoughts about Final Promise Story later on, but now I think of it, it doesn’t really deserve that kind of attention.  Plus I would have had to do a lot of reading up about the promotion of this game, and I don’t feel like getting involved in FPS any further.

Why reading up about the promotion? Because the crux of my problem with this game revolves around whether Imageepoch accurately represented Final Promise Story as a pure dungeon crawler and not as a full-fledged RPG before it came out, or not. If it’s the former, then I have very little grounds for complaint. I’d end up whining about stuff like this:

– The characters were shallow and completely undeveloped, probably because they all know each other already and have nothing to discover over the course of 24 hours,

– character interaction was nearly non-existent. Because of the game’s anyone-can-die mechanic, no party members except Wolf and that girl can be intimately connected to the plot. This causes a disjoint because your relationship with the other Messiahs is supposed to be vital to the story, but the Messiahs themselves can’t be important lest they die so, wtf? I’ll also note that Sasha didn’t get so much as an “Alas, poor Sasha” when she kicked the bucket,

– the plot never went anywhere (wtf was that incident a year ago they keep referring to? what is Sabi Chantier’s ultimate goal? how exactly did the war start? who’s the mastermind behind the whole attack? what’s to stop them from coming back with more machines? what happens after the end, aren’t they doomed anyway?) and leaves you with more questions than it answers,

– the mood of the music was off, it felt more like casual lounge music. More “Why yes, I’ll have another glass of champagne with my caviar” than “OSHIT OSHIT we’re all going to die,” and the music stays the same throughout the whole game even as the time gets shorter and shorter. Heck the mood of the whole game was off,

– the battles were repetitive, I just found one or two patterns that worked and used them forever on the same old palette swaps in the same old dungeons. I remember hearing that enemies would adapt to your battle strategy after a while but that’s a 1000% lie,

– goddammit, why do I have to do the same bloody crappy mission over and over again? Hundreds of hours of gameplay my bottom, it’s all the same damned mission worded differently! <— the strong language is because this is by far my biggest complaint about the game,

– having all your skills and attacks as well as the entire map revealed right from the start takes out all elements of surprise and excitement from the gameplay. Now I understand why randomized dungeons and treasure chests are so common in that genre,

etc etc, and these are all common features of dungeon crawlers. Not all of them and not all the time, but the weak plot, repetitive gameplay and underdeveloped characters occur pretty often. So if Imageepoch was clear about that from the start then I was expecting stuff the game was never intended to deliver, and thus I have no case whatsoever. I mean, my memory is telling me stuff about weekly character introductions and action-packed trailers worded in a way to make it seem like an ordinary jRPG, but I’m not as young as I used to be so maybe I imagined it. I freely admit I didn’t pay very close attention to the pre-game hype, to my lasting regret. In any case, I’d need to check all this out before writing anything definitive about Saigo no Yuckysucky no Monogatari, and I really don’t want have anything more to do with this game.

Long story short, Final Promise Story is a short dungeon crawler in which absolutely nothing happens. It’s got pretty graphics, decent character designs and nice, relaxing music. If you can accept that without asking for anything more, go for it and good luck. I’m out.