“Finished” Shepherd’s Crossing

There’s no retirement in Shepherd’s Crossing, so I just gave up when I felt like it, on Day 5 of Acorn month, Year 10.

I would have quit much earlier, but just when I was about to say adieu, the random hunt that gives carrot seeds FINALLY popped up (the one against Waku Waku, if you were wondering), which gave my game a much-needed shot in the arm.

My game was crippled without dem carrots, because without carrots I couldn’t get angora rabbits, which meant I couldn’t get angora rabbit fur, which meant I couldn’t get spotbilled ducks, which meant I couldn’t get pumpkin seeds, which meant I couldn’t get any alpaca fur. And of course by the time I finally got alpaca fur in year 10, I didn’t need any of the trade-in items I’d gotten it for, so I decided it was time to call it a day. 10 years is a nice round number to stop at, anyway.

Final impressions? Haven’t changed much from my first ones. The inability to trade items for money really, really hurt the game, in my opinion. The only pluses that I can list are that hunting was fun till the end and that crops were easier to grow than in SC2. I successfully completed almost all the hunts without too much trouble, except for the final one with the three bears. My plan for that, which I never got around to implementing, was to defeat and collect at least one bear, and then have one of my dogs hide until the turn count was up. Ta-daa, instant success. I was also going to distract them so they couldn’t use Cow Kill, because that move has wrecked my entire party one too many times. But it’s okay. No matter what the reward is, I don’t need it now.

I say crop farming is easier simply because there are no diseases in this game and because adverse weather doesn’t affect crop growth. In Shepherd’s Crossing 2 even if you got every dog available to guard against marauding animals, you had no way of countering crop diseases and frost. You just couldn’t catch a break. Here you’ll be fine if only you have enough animals and enough fences. On the other hand, getting those seeds to plant in the first place can be hell, as my little carrot misadventure just proved.

It was addictive in its own way, of course. I had more “wtf, why does the clock suddenly say 5am” moments with it than I’ve had with any other game I’ve played so far this year. As an unexpected side effect, playing Shepherd’s Crossing made me want to play Tactical Guild again. They’re from the same company, and every time Success’s logo appeared with that little hum, I started hearing TG’s theme in my head. I looked around for the soundtrack, but I don’t think it exists. I’ll content myself with watching the mini-theater skits for now.

Speaking of Success and Shepherd’s Crossing, it doesn’t look like they have any plans to release another handheld version any time soon. They’ve made a version for mixi and Japanese cellphones. I made a mixi account many years ago, no idea if it’s still active. I don’t even remember the password. I’m a bit shepherded out right now, but I’ll look into it again in a couple of months when the craving strikes again.

Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari – Screenshots

The game’s going well, now that I’ve figured out the correct way to play it. I was trying to marathon my way through like it was an ordinary RPG, but repetitive dungeon crawlers like Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari are best played in small doses. Once I started doing just one or two missions per day while playing other games, things got far more bearable.

I’m almost done now with just one in-game hour to go and everything set up for the ending. But today I just want to play with the screenshot plugin I got for the PSP. Wish the DS had one, it would make this blog so much easier to write.

I made my final promise with Rushdie, who still hasn’t betrayed me yet.

Thank you Rushdie, you’re the best! As a matter of fact I made all three promises with him, because he’s the only character I really liked. Cain has grown on me because of his incredible battle prowess, but he has almost no story presence at all, so it’s hard to get into him. As it turns out, once you make a promise with a character, they’ll let you sleep in their bed!

Look how happy he looks! It makes me wonder, what does he do while you’re sleeping? Does he stand outside? Stand by the bed and watch you sleep? (Don’t wanna clooose my eeeeyeeesss!) Or does he *gulp* crawl in with you? They’re bros so it’s okay but on the other hand it is a really small bed. I’d better not think about it too much.

Here’s the rest of my party:

Note the obscene amount of money I have now. Things were ridiculously expensive at first, but now I’ve got all this cash and nothing to blow it on. Note also that Rushdie and Wolf need the same amount of EXP to level up. As a matter of fact I have convinced myself that they are actually brothers (no seriously, I really have) and a result I restart any battle in which one falls without the other. Note lastly that Cain is still a little behind them after goodness knows how many levels, and that Sasha will probably not catch up before the end of the game. Another mugshot of the usual suspects:

This is the main menu screen. I have no idea why everything is in English in a Japanese game that’s probably never going to be localized, but that’s for Imageepoch to figure out. I had 1336 civilians rescued then, right now I have about 1550-something. Apparently it’s possible to rescue over 2000 (2042, to be precise) by doing the missions in a specific sequence, but there are absolutely no rewards for doing so.

Selecting the skills, then customize option takes you to a screen where you can improve your skills by adding customize points (CP) to them.

The little numbers next to each skill show what level they’re at, and the M shows that a skill has been mastered. I’ve had Sasha focus almost exclusively on healing and support skills so far, because that’s what I got her for. It’s possible that she’s a decent fighter as well, but I’m satisfied with her current role. Pressing the Square button on this screen would allow me to redistribute her CP if I ever changed my mind. Come to think of it, the only reason I got a healer was because I couldn’t afford healing items, but now I’m a millionaire I could toss Sasha out and bring Mallarme back so I can have four attackers instead of three. But raising her up from level 18 or wherever she is now would be too much work now. Oh well.

Moving on, you can overlay a map on the screen while you’re running around in a dungeon:

This helps you figure out where you’re going and let’s you avoid dead ends (those red Xs and crossing lines). See the little yellow dot in the top left corner? That’s where your current objective is. Combine this with the English menu and you should be able to get through the game even with minimal Japanese skills. In theory. It’s not like there’s a grand story to miss anyway.

Lastly, the major NPCs.

This girl, Ainey, is the blacksmith. The big lummox next to her is Ricardo, the item seller, and the girl behind the desk is Lissete, your navigator. As further proof of how laid-back the mood is in this game, Ainey spends most of her time just chilling in a rocking chair in front of her furnace.

This last guy is Julio. He’s just a hater. He shows up frequently to mock the Messiahs and make trouble for them. It was amusing at first, but then like most things in this game it was speedily beaten to death with the force of a thousand bludgeons. Note that she-who-shall-not-be-named has been censored from this shot.

That’s it for today. The next time I post about this game will be when it’s finally over.

Edamoto Naomi no Shiawase Kitchen review

Happy times with Naomi Edamoto’s Happy Kitchen! I’ve been playing this since around the time I got Itsumo no Shokuzai, but I’ve been stretching it out because I didn’t want it to end! This falls under Category 2 of children’s games: children’s games even adults can enjoy.

Edamoto Naomi no Shiawase Kitchen is a kid’s game about a little girl named Tsugumi who promises to make a home-cooked meal for her dad. The only problem is, she doesn’t know how to cook! So, since it’s a kid’s game, instead of asking her mom to teach her like an ordinary person would, Tsugumi wishes on a star and the Fairy Queen on the Moon (uh-huh) sends down an angel to help her. This angel possesses and animates Tsugumi’s stuffed bunny Usako, and their adventures begin.

Oh, and also famous Japanese chef Naomi Edamoto (never heard of her) suddenly shows up to teach Tsugumi how to cook in fourteen lessons. Magic is a wonderful thing.

I got it because it was a cooking game, but I rapidly found myself more interested in the cute little adventures of Tsugumi and her animated dolls than in the actual cooking. Tsugumi’s so cute. I think they got her characterization just right, making her interesting and lively but not annoying. On one hand she’s sweet, helpful and hardworking, but on the other hand she can also be rash and hyper with just the tiniest hint of a mean streak (Tsugumi+Emily=win). The fact that she wasn’t Little Miss Perfect made me want to cheer her on all the more. Her cast of dolls was interesting as well, in a childish sort of way. I could have interacted with them more by choosing to stay home instead of taking walks in the park every day. Stuff for a second playthrough? I’ll think about it. Seriously.

The cooking itself is a series of chopping and stirring mini-games using the stylus. Chop up the onions, stir fry them in oil, add water, stir the soup, wash and boil rice, all using the stylus. The actions are repetitive, but the meals usually look and sound delicious. I made spaghetti neapolitan (a scrumptious-looking Japanese concoction of spaghetti stir-fried with ketchup, bacon and vegetables), minestrone and rolled cabbage for the final day, which earned me top marks as usual. If you just follow Edamoto’s instructions and then add lots of decorations to your meal at the end you shouldn’t fail.

Shiawase Kitchen is more of a cooking simulation than a proper cooking game, so for one thing none of the recipes come with quantities listed. Edamoto also skips a lot of steps, e.g. “Let’s make gyoza, I already made the dough”. Most likely the intention is for children to cook together with an adult, so they don’t see the need to be too specific. A pity really, some of those dishes looked great.

I never thought when I picked this up that I’d be that sad when the final day rolled around. :’-< Still, when all’s said and done, it’s very much a children’s game. And it’s in Japanese. And I haven’t played Cooking Mama, but it’s most likely more of the same. I loved it, but I can only recommend it to one group of Western gamers: beginners in Japanese. Since it was developed for Japanese children, it uses mainly kana with only a little kanji, which comes with furigana. Now the problem with kana-only text is that it’s usually hard for beginners to tell where one word ends and the other begins. Never fear, the writers were kind enough to leave spaces between words and phrases. It’s not exact, but it’s more than enough to be able to make sense of just about everything.

Plus they’re kind enough to highlight important nouns in red. Knife will be ほうちょう and will frequently have an arrow pointing to it, etc. If you didn’t know that pot was ‘nabe’ and rice cooker was ‘suihanki’ before you played it, you will by the time you’re done. If you’re learning Japanese and starting to wonder “When will I ever be good enough to play games in Japanese?!” you should give it a shot.

Come to think of it, I never did play games in Japanese when I was learning. That’s because I didn’t learn Japanese to play games with. I just liked the look of the characters and thought it sounded intriguing, so I learned a little here, a little there, took a few classes eventually and went on my merry way. I used Japanese mainly to read books and manga and watch the occasional anime and played all my games in English. Then one day after finishing Atelier Iris 1, 2 and 3, I found I really, really wanted more Atelier stuff. Gee, too bad they’re only in Japaneeee— waitaminnit! And the rest is history.

Enough about that. I’m slowly working my way back into Saigo no Monogatari no Yakusoku, I’m almost done with Rizumi‘s route in TM4, I’ve started TWEWY for real and I finally got some carrot seeds in Shepherd’s Crossing, so I’ll talk about one of those next time.

Tokimeki Memorial 4 – Satsuki GET!

I thought she would be harder than that, but she fell as easily as the rest. Joining the student council wasn’t that hard either, plus I joined it in my second year on Maki’s route, anyway so it didn’t feel particularly fresh and exciting. My stats were all close to or over 90 by the time the election rolled around, I didn’t take any part-time jobs or pick up the naughty magazine and I joined the music club, which raised my moral stat as well. Piece of cake.

I thought managing without a job would be hard, but 20-28 rich a month is doable if you don’t go overboard with the expensive dates. I mostly stuck to affordable dates like the library and planetarium, and occasionally treated her to beach and mountain dates. I was even able to spend money on birthday presents for all the other girls and get Satsuki at least her medium present every year without too much trouble. Of course taking part in the “Special Christmas Party” every year (100 rich+10exp, -10 moral) helped a whole lot with that.

No great discoveries on the skills front, though I did unlock several interesting-looking ones. The one that would have helped me most with Satsuki since it stops girls’ negative skills from activating (心の開錠術) I got too late to be effective. Satsuki’s negative skill is a killer: it removes one of your skills at random and you can’t put it back on till the next term. Oh hey, it’s Satsuki-sempai, fancy meeting you heAAAARGH!

Fending off the other girls was no big deal either. For the most part events and birthdays occurred often enough that I could keep most of them at bay. Maki automatically went all the way up to tokimeki mode without me ever taking her out on a single date (told you she was easy). So to deal with that, I called her up for a few dates and stood her up repeatedly, which somehow brought her affection down without provoking her to bomb me (again, told you she was easy).

Yanagi’s affection also went pretty high, which was actually a good thing because she would randomly show up and improve my mood. Thanks girl. As for the rest of the girls, I dealt with the matter by raising Satsuki-sempai to tokimeki+hand-holding level, then putting on a skill that drastically slowed down the rate at which girls like and bomb you (清廉潔白). And a good time was had by all.

I’d like to say it was worth it, but… Well, I guess it was. Satsuki is the cutest girl of the bunch IMO (Tsugumi is a close second), and while she’s not particularly interesting, she’s all right. I didn’t date her too often, just once or twice a month, so she didn’t get stale as quickly as Maki or Itsuki did. And her CGs were pretty nice, as the picture above demonstrates. As a character she’s a little too ‘perfect’ and her sole flaw, a bad sense of direction, is completely unbelievable. It comes out of nowhere, plays out in one CG and then is never referred to again.

Graduation day she shows up, blah blah blah didn’t have the courage to confess last year blah blah blah confessing now, oh you love me too, yay. From her monologue and from another event, it sounds like she’s related to Shiori Fujisaki from TM1 and that the MC and Fujisaki are still together and still happily in love. That’s sweet…especially since I never did get Fujisaki myself. And everybody lived happily after, the end.

Next up, I’m going to start Tokimeki Memorial 4 all over again because I hear I get a cheap stamina refilling item on my third playthrough. That’s the save file I’ll use to get Rui, Rizumi and Tsugumi before putting the game away for good.

Tokimeki Memorial 4 – Maki GET!

She’s all right, I guess. I did her route because she guilted me into it by being so nice to me last time, but I’m not that into her. Maki is the poor man’s Satsuki-sempai – average, but not quite good enough at anything. The girls in Tokimeki Memorial 4 seem quick to fall in love, but Maki was especially easy, particularly in the face of my almighty stats. Her CGs were easy to get too. I got almost all of them naturally.

The developers often try to include at least one stereotypical “nice girl” in this kind of game, and this time it’s Maki: cheerful, sweet, fishes for compliments by putting herself down frequently, can’t afford to go to a proper hair salon, can only afford a few outfits, etc etc. One day she’s like “I wanna be a nurse!” then later she’s like, “No I suck I can’t be a nurse,” then you encourage her and she goes “Okay I’m gonna be a nurse” and that’s the full extent of her character development. Not that Itsuki Maeda had any development either, but Maki’s supposed to be the “main” girl. I had expectations!

The only exciting thing that happened on Maki’s route had nothing to do with the girl herself. I’d been fiddling with skills for a while, not taking them too seriously. I put on the all-night cramming skill (一夜漬け) that lets you raise your humanities-science-art skills like crazy the night before a test. I also put on a skill that randomly gives you a massive increase in the stat you’re working on (女神の加護). It rarely activates so I barely gave it a thought.

Then, one fateful night, BAM! they activated together! Science and art went up by 60 (!!) each, but that was child’s play compared to humanities: 288 to 520 in one night! That’s two to three years of grinding in ONE SINGLE NIGHT! It took me like a minute to believe what my eyes were telling me. H-how w-what b-b-but– it must be a bug! I saved, turned the game off, put it back on and it was still there. Suddenly Tsugumi and Satsuki were falling all over themselves to please me and the rest of the game was easy-mode. I’ve been trying to reproduce the lucky incident ever since, with no success. Maybe it really was a fluke.

Back to Maki, there’s nothing wrong with her, but there’s nothing right about her either. All that friendly supportiveness gets boring really quickly, which is why I can’t wait to date some of the more prickly types like Tsugumi.  My stamina for this game has dropped even further, so I’ve decided to drop Kai, science girl and Yanagi. My final list is Satsuki-sempai (currently working on), Rui (she’s a funny, funny girl. Her Valentine’s Day event is priceless!), Tsugumi (‘cos I like her) and Rizumi (just because).

Should take me another week or two, then I’ll be ready to move on. I’m thinking of either finishing up Saigo no Yakusoku no Monogatari (urghhh) or starting something new entirely. Speaking of which, I tried to start TWEWY the other day, but four frames later some anorexic kid with a bad dye job told me to get the hell outta his face, so I did. …This is not going to end well.