Nora to Toki no Koubou

There is still life in the DS! Hallelujah!

*ahem*
Atlus and a team of developers that previously worked on Etrian Odyssey and the Atelier series are working on an RPG for the DS, Nora to Toki no Koubou. It’s due out in Japan on 21st July 2011, which should give me enough time to get Rondo of Swords out of the way and possibly play a little something else. Will it come to the US? Should I wait to play it? (hell no) Only time will tell!

Nora sounds like an Atelier kind of game: fulfilling quests and making items in order to make the villagers like you. According to Famitsu there’s a time-related component to making the items, so it’s not like the usual alchemy system we’re used to. What Nora does is described as “導刻術”, using the characters for “guide”, “time/engrave” and “technique.” It allows her to manipulate time, but we’ll have to wait for more details on exactly what that entails.

The story sounds simple enough: a little girl named Nora goes on a training trip, finds herself accused of being a witch and has to prove her innocence. Like most recent Atelier games (yes yes, I know it’s not an Atelier game), this one has a time limit of three years, during which she has to build up the trust of the villagers while keeping her skills hidden from them. I’m not saying they copied it or anything, but remember how in Atelier Lina Lina is accused of burning down the forest and is forced to help the fairies rebuild it? Just saying.

Btw, the romanization of Nora’s full name is given on the official Atlus website as “Noora Brandor”, but seeing as that same page misspells “character” as “charactor”, I think we’re safe going with Nora for now.

It sound like there are multiple endings depending on how you related to your companions in the course of your adventure. No Saga 3 style hidden requirements, please!

From the sole battle screenshot I saw, the battle system is a regular turn-based one. Probably nothing too complicated either. As long as the quests and the item creation system is rich and complex enough, I don’t really care what they do to the battle system. As for the cutesy-wutesy character designs, I’ll get used to them eventually.

Btw, is it just me or does the world map look an awful lot like the world map from Atelier Lina?

Anyway, massive props to Atlus for continuing to develop games for the Nintendo DS at a time when other companies are shifting their loyalty to the 3DS. Between this and Devil Survivor 2, Atlus is my new favorite company! Three cheers for Atlus!

After all, I don’t have money for a 3DS right now, and if I did have that money I’d spend it on a PSP and a couple of games. I’ve had a DS since 2006 and I must have played at least a hundred (whoa… but yeah, I think so) games on it, but I’m not quite ready to move on yet.

So, looking forward to move details being added to the Official Site and Official Development Blog soon!

Rondo of Swords – Ten hours in

It was going to be “first impressions”, but after ten hours you kind of lose the right to call it that. Anyway if I’d written my first impressions when I just started out, it would have been a real disaster: “I hate this game! WTF is this! This isn’t a tactical RPG! It…it’s TRASH!” and other expressions along those lines.

I confess I didn’t really pay attention to what the game was about before starting it. I didn’t feel I needed to, I just saw the grids and the top-down view and thought it looked like Fire Emblem with a few gimmicks and that was all it took to draw me in. I’m easy like that, but I’m learning fast not to judge games by appearances any more.

Rondo of Swords may look Fire Emblem-like but it’s a completely different kind of game. Sure there are different classes, and all units have set ranges, and enemies and allies take turns to move and you can recruit people by talking to them and if your main character dies then it’s all over… but still! The fundamental part, gameplay, is waaay different.

Instead of walking up to to an enemy, you draw a path on the map and run (skate? fly? your legs never move) through them, inflicting damage on the way. You can also run (skate/fly) by allies to get all kinds of abilities. It follows then that if you can’t run through an enemy then you can’t hurt it, and vice versa. This makes no sense, but no need to sweat the small stuff. It works in your favor more often than not, because you can hole up in alleys or create chokepoints that will hold out for pretty much ever.

Before you get to that point, though Rondo of Swords has one of the steepest learning curves I have ever seen. If you can make it through the first stage, “Escape from Egvard”, alive, none of the other chapters will make you break a sweat. It’s that hard. I had muddled my way through the tutorial because I thought I’d learn by doing… WRONG. Gawd, that was a nightmare, I don’t even want to talk about it.

See, with future chapters you can just quit if things aren’t going well. You get to start all over again with your items restored and all gained EXP still with you. It’s like the Egress skill in Shining Force, for the older gamers among us. “Escape from Egvard” doesn’t have that: succeed or perish miserably. And I perished, oh how I perished. I was on the verge of giving up, really, but mentally I’d been really, really looking forward to playing this game so I just couldn’t bring myself to. Eventually Youtube came to the rescue and I followed a step by step guide to a Chapter 1 Rout. I failed three or four times, and the whole thing took me 3 hours to do (especially after I lost Margus to a mage), but I got it done in the end. Phew. What’s that saying about appreciating things we have to work hard for? After having to work this hard to pass the first stage, I’m not going to let Rondo of Swords get away that easily!

Now that my Serdic is ridiculously overlevelled and I can use him as bait without worrying too much, the game is a hundred times more fun. It helped that the subsequent chapters were a lot easier, especially since I had more characters. Having learnt from my Saga 3 experience, I looked at a FAQ early on so I’ve been getting all the side characters I need to create a powerful team. I let Rukia die though: the world doesn’t need any more thieves. I’ve also been sending them on Errands regularly, though I’m not sure it’s making any difference to their stats.

Anyway, thing are really smoothly now and I’m having fun, more or less. The layout of some stages is a bit frustrating, and I hate, hate stages with lots of mages, but since you can withdraw from battle and restart as many times as you like, it’s not a deal breaker. The fact that you can’t can’t move and use magic/items/skills on the same turn would bother me if I wasn’t used to it from Tactical Guild (copycats!) but luckily I am. And the story is a bit barebones and the characters are bit shallow, and it’s sad that optional characters don’t get involved in it, but these are all things I can live with.

I’m at the “Thunder Emperor” stage, dunno how much further I have to go. Probably a looong way, because the real bad guys have only just started to surface. May is going to be a busy month for me, though, so I might not finish it any time soon. Well, no rush.

Nanatsuiro★Drops: Touch de Hajimaru Hatsukoi Monogatari review

Yet another crappy game. Do I know how to pick ’em or what?

For those not in the know, Nanatsuiro★Drops is a game/anime series about a boy named Tsuwabuki Masaharu who drinks soda from another world and is cursed to turn into a stuffed animal every night. He needs to collect seven “star drops” before he can go back to normal.

Nanatsuiro★Drops started out as an adult visual novel which was then made into a PG anime. Said anime was then made into a video game for the DS, which is what I just played. Logic suggests it would have been better to port the original game (sans adult scenes) to the DS instead of making a new one, but logic never applies when it comes to quick cash tie-ins.

Btw, I watched a bit of the anime prior to starting this game, just try and get a sense of what I was in for. Hmm? “Watched?” More like “suffered through” honestly. I’ve never liked the magical girl genre. I’ve tried several: Card Captor Sakura, Pretear, Nanoha, etc, but I never get far because quite frankly, they all suck they’re just not my thing. Nanatsuiro★Drops was not an exception. Sure it was boring, sure it was repetitive but the really annoying part was the main girl Sumomo Akihime with her faux-cute faux-hesitant demeanor, generic “cute anime girl” looks and sickeningly squeaky high voice. From now on my requirements for picking up anime series will “must not have any shy, stammering girls with stupidly high-pitched voices that JUST WON’T SHUT UP!”

Back to logic though, surely logic suggests that if I hated the anime that much I would hate the game too. As usual logic was completely right. I’m starting to think I have a masochistic streak. Or maybe I just played it to confirm that my Sucky Game radar wasn’t broken after all, what with the Tactical Guild incident and all.

If that was the case then my fears were for nothing; my radar is fine. It’s probably working overtime to compensate, in fact, because there wasn’t that much wrong with the game. The main issues I had with it were the incomprehensible plot and the stupid mini-games. Oh wait, that’s all there is to the game. Right.

First, the game will make very little sense unless you’ve watched the anime. Nanatsuiro★Drops is less of a video game and more of a whirlwind tour through several famous (?) scenes from the anime. And not in any proper order either. A random scene here, a random character appearance there, that sort of thing. They used some animated footage directly from the anime, which came out pretty well, but logic suggests anyone who wants to see anime footage would be better off just getting the anime. But of course, logic is ignored as usual. Poor logic.

Anyway, I plodded through the random scenes and eventually got the bad ending where Tsuwabuki loses his memory, tries to recall what happened in the past six months and eventually decides it doesn’t matter. Wait, that’s not a bad ending, that’s a good ending! Banzai! Afterwards Nona had the gall to tell me if I’d done better in the mini-games, I would have gotten a better ending. Nona dear, there’s no better ending than forgetting about Akihime forever, trust me.

Those mini-games, though. Man. The subtitle Touch de Hajimaru Hatsukoi Monogatari roughly means “First love that starts through a touch,” so somehow doing the same weeding games and math games and music games and sheep-counting (yes, sheep counting) games will somehow win you Akihime’s love. If they were serious about that, logic sugg– wait, no it doesn’t. Logic has gone on strike. All right then, in my opinion, this game needed better mini-games and a bigger variety too. The weeding game is okay, if a bit frantic. The math game is straight out of Brain Age, it’s okay as well. Sheep-counting is exactly what it sounds like.

The worst game is the music game, though. It’s like Ouendan-gone-crazy, with the stars flying like crazy all over the screen (allegedly in tune with the music, but this is a filthy lie) and Akihime gasping irritatingly every time you miss one. Which is often. The best I managed in those was 0 points – yes, that’s a good score – after which I resolved “Never again!”

Enough about Nanatsuiro★Drops, I can’t believe I wrote such a long post for such a crappy game. Looking ahead, I want to play a plain old turn-based jRPG, but I’ve almost exhausted the DS’s supply of those, apart from Dragon Quest VI which I can’t play so soon after DQV. Play-Asia has Level 5’s Ninokuni on sale (i.e. $50 instead of $80 -_-), but I’m hoping it will come out soon in English. *fingers crossed* That leaves me with the action RPGs, a few strategy ones (Rondo of Swords!) and several visual novels I’m not really looking forward to. Well, I’ll find something eventually.

Arabians Lost – Tyrone GET!

Just finished my first and only playthrough of Arabians Lost (no Osama jokes, please) for the Nintendo DS. I went for the heroine’s childhood friend Tyrone Bale because he seemed like a nice guy. Plus he was the only one that didn’t make her go, “Gawd I hate this guy!” at the start, so I figured that was a good sign.

The main character Aileen is a real piece of work. She’s whiny, stubborn, mean, sarcastic and bitchy (inb4 “Just like a real girl”). Her only saving grace is that she keeps most of those thoughts to herself, which is the only thing that keeps her in second-place to Tamaki from Hiiro no Kakera as No. 1 Otome Game Bitch. Plus it helps that most of the people she bitches about are nasty guys anyway.

This is probably the most unlikable cast of characters I’ve ever played with in a video game, and I’ve played quite a few. Thieves, swindlers, murderers, compulsive gamblers, loan sharks… about the only thing they didn’t have is a serial rapist, and I’m still not sure about that Lille… So when Aileen complains in the beginning about having to pick a husband from this bunch, I see where she’s coming from. Which is why it’s so weird that she ends up with one of them in the end. Then again she’s not exactly Princess Charming either.

So! Back to Tyrone Bale, her childhood friend. Unlike the other characters, he’s just a dumb, violent gang leader. Practically a saint, really. And he’s nice to you from the get go. I don’t know whether to call my playthrough “doing his route”, though. “Routes” in other dating sims/visual novels involve a series of events or dates with a guy, picking certain options and doing certain things in order to get them to like you. In Arabians Lost, there’s nothing to choose. Raising a guy’s affection is just about asking him to accompany you to places repeatedly. If his affection is over 100 by the end, you’re set to get a romantic ending with him. That’s it. No choices to make, no dates to go on, no compulsory events to see, nothing. To make the process faster, there are two items you can use to raise a guy’s affection even more. IIRC I raised Stuart’s affection from 0 to 52 in one day just by using them repeatedly.

Back to Tyrone again – he was really boring, so I keep going off-topic – his backstory is that he was a childhood friend of Aileen’s along with Stuart but they got estranged after Stuart’s mother committed suicide. All well and good, but thanks to that we get this really uncomfortable situation (for the player) where all Aileen and Tyrone ever do is talk about their childhood and how they used to play together and stuff. It makes me feel like an outsider butting in when they know each other so well already. Like going to a stranger’s family reunion where everyone knows each other and they’re all talking about “Hey, remember the time we did this? And that time when you did that? That was like, sooo funny!” After a few minutes, you really want to go home.

As if that’s not enough, almost all of Tyrone’s events revolve around talking about either Stuart or Tyrone’s older sister. Stuart this, Stuart that, my older sister this, my older sister that. What about you, Tyrone? Who are you? Don’t you have a mind of your own? To be fair to him, it’s usually Aileen who brings Stuart into the conversation. She seems to be obsessed with him in some kind of way – in fact it’s flat-out stated several times in the game that he was her first love –  so she’s always finding ways of worming him into the conversation even when he clearly doesn’t belong. That’s why I gave her that day with Stuart so she’d be satisfied. Hope you’re happy Aileen, you two-timing <bleep>. She ended up with Tyrone, but it won’t be long before she’s cheating on him with Stuart, I just know it.

Tyrone wasn’t the only disappointment in Arabians Lost though: the game itself is just too easy! Most of the attraction of Arabians Lost for me was that it had actual gameplay elements and wasn’t just 10 hours of reading. Not just gameplay elements: RPG battles and dungeon exploration! Who can turn that down? Unfortunately the game was probably made for an audience that presumably doesn’t play many RPGs so the battles were ridiculously easy! Enemies were few! Palette swaps were many! Helpful guy was helpful <– they’re not supposed to help you in battle unless they like you, but I found they helped me right from the start anyway, the sweethearts. I never died even once. Leveling up was fun, but your level caps off at 5 (five)! Which I managed within 12 days without even breaking a sweat. There’s a dungeon you can only enter at level 5, but what’s the point when your level is maxed? To make money? Well, uhh, about that…

That 10,000,000G you’re supposed to make in 25 days? I made it in 5 days by abusing roulette in the casino. You can play there several times a day (twice at each time of the day, I believe) and make up to 16,000,000G each time playing roulette. In fact, I made the maximum figure of 99,999,900G in 10 days and had nothing to do after that. That was a total mistake on my part. Normally if a game can be easily broken I’m all for breaking it, but this time I definitely shot myself in the the foot. There’ll be no next time, but if I ever play a similar game, I’ll try to make the money honestly. I mean, I can always cheat on the last day, right?

So there I was, max level, max money, 230 affection from Tyrone, only halfway through the game? Too, too boring. There was absolutely nothing to do. There are precious few places you can visit in the game: four dungeons,  five places in the castle. In the city there are two guilds, one casino and one pub, that’s it. Dungeons are usually small and straightforward and the dungeon bosses are as easy as pie. Clearly the gameplay was deliberately dumbed down so players could focus on character interactions instead. I got an amusing scene with Stuart and Tyrone after I raised Stuart’s affection, for example.

Luckily there’s an option in your room that lets you skip straight to the last day whenever you want, but I didn’t want to do that because I was afraid I’d miss something. That something turned out to be the festival on Day 20 where Aileen confesses to Tyrone (no, not vice-versa) and they share their first kiss. Even then Stuart manages to find his way into the conversation.

In short, I don’t really like Arabians Lost. It’s not a complete dud but it hasn’t got anything to offer me. Aileen already has her preferred guys and she already has relationships with all of them, so the player is more going along for the ride than anything else. I couldn’t even stop her from confessing to Tyrone, she just blabbed it all out without permission. The art is also bad and all the guys are average-to-ugly. Short necks, oddly long limbs, weird faces that change from angle to angle. The backgrounds are nice, but there are only so many times you can look at them before getting tired. Ugly art also means ugly-to-meh CGs, and the accompanying events are LOOOOONG. Talk talk talk talk talk talk talk for like 15 minutes for each event.  And there are over 250 CGs to get?! What?! DO. NOT. WANT.

So that’s the end of Arabians Lost for me. I was going to get Stuart next to complete the story and find out why his mom really did kill herself, but now that I think of it, I don’t really care. There’s no way I’ll be able to force myself to read all that text. Lille seems nice, but boring, Shark is okay but also kind of boring. As for Roberto, well, having a gambling addict for a king seems to be a one-way trip to bankruptcy, so I don’t even know what he’s doing in this game. I also have absolutely no interest in that sick murderer Curtis. I don’t care what your reasons are, just GTFO of my kingdom. This isn’t the game for me and it’s time to move on.

SaGa 3 Finished! What I didn’t like

1. It starts off really slowly. The first third or so of the game was really boring. It was all about finding parts for the time-traveling ship. Go here, do this, go there, do that.  Zzzz… I literally fell asleep behind the DS more than once. Things pick up a bit once you go to the past and visit a few places, but it’s still a bit of a snoozefest. SaGa 3 only really got off the ground when I went to the South Tower to kick Ashera’s behind, then topped it off with Chaos’s carcass before proceeding to the future. It was all smooth sailing from there.

2. Sidequests are a pain. The majority of them require a certain number of Time Gear points in order to unlock certain solutions. If, for example, you want to go back in time and fight a certain boss, you might need anything between 1 and 4 Time Gear points to unlock that option. Time Gear points can only be accumulated by fighting battles, so you may very well have to walk away and fight a little before coming back to finish the quest. Some quests also require time travel, sometimes more than once. At least one of them also disappears without warning when you pass a certain point in the game. All this suffering would be somewhat bearable if the quest rewards were worth it but sadly they almost never were. Easily acquirable items or paltry sums of money? Thanks for nothing.

3. I missed the true ending because of three stupid sidequests. I’ve ranted enough about this. I won’t go over it again. Unlocking the True Ending doesn’t just depend on those sidequests, though. You also have to pick the “right” answers in certain sidequests in order to raise the friendship points of your party to a certain level. However, these answers aren’t always intuitive. Sometimes doing the sensible, logical thing is the wrong choice and you were supposed to pick the stupid option instead. To worsen things, you can’t even see those points you’re accumulating, so you won’t even know that you’ve failed until you finish the game and get…nothing. *sigh*

saga3ds84. Traveling back and forth through time gets old. I did it a lot because I was trying to do sidequests. Massive pain in the buttocks. Never again. Next time I’ll… wait, there won’t be a next time. Forget it.

5. The game is a little too easy on Normal. If you know what you’re doing (which stats grow best with which class, which weapon raises which stat, etc), you can break the game pretty quickly with judicious raising of your stats, which rise much more readily than they did in SaGa 2.

What’s worse than that, though, is that you can recharge your weapons. In SaGa 2 (or think Fire Emblem, which has a similar mechanic), when your weapons ran out of uses, that was it. You couldn’t whack away with your best swords and expect to have plenty left over for the final boss. In SaGa 3, it’s no problem at all. Recharging weapons just costs a bit of money and can be done at any inn. I had 500,000G cash by the end of the game so you can tell the costs didn’t hold me back at all.

Status effects were a joke as well. They almost never hit, and when they did they didn’t hurt much. I was poisoned occasionally and cursed a few times and that was it. Around the 25 hour mark, I managed to mass-produce an item that blocked all stat effects, which sealed the deal for good. And as if all that wasn’t enough, the game also threw several powerful guest party members my way. Or more like they would be powerful if I ever used them for more than healing. Can’t have the enemies dying too quickly, can we?

6. Bosses are pushovers. They were so wimpy, in fact, that I had to hit them with my weakest weapons and attacks so they could stay alive longer for more stats-leveling. The only one who made me sweat briefly was Ashera, and even he went down pretty quickly. Wusses.

7. There are a lot of useless gameplay features. Passwords, for example. You’re taught to enter passwords at the beginning, but you will almost never have to. Passwords you find will be automatically entered and the useless item you get will be delivered to you in your ship. Battle Drives were “awesome but impractical,” to borrow a term. To their credit, they would be useful in battle if a) everyone you fight wasn’t a wuss and b) Time Gear points weren’t so precious. Those points take time to accumulate and I used them frequently so wasting a whole node of them on some walking-dead boss was out of the question. Thus Battle Drives went into the unused bag as well.

saga 38. Your airship (Stethros) was useless in battle, especially considering the amount of game-time I devoted to beefing it up. In theory, you could scout monsters to strengthen your airship’s laser attack. Well, I scouted a ton just to get them off the screen and found out it takes tons and tons of them to make even a slight difference to your weaksauce laser. And you know what? You don’t want to make it strong, because then it’ll kill the enemies too fast and you don’t gain any skill levels or stat levels from using it. On some of the later battles, I used the “strengthening” beam to buff my party, but as far as I can tell it didn’t make a lick of difference. Waste of time. Nice ship, though.

9. Transforming into mecha and monsters was worthless. Mecha are weak against magic and can’t gain any stats. Unless you intend to keep that character as a mecha for the rest of the game, you’ll be hurting yourself. Monsters are too limited in what they can do. Getting a useful monster transformation in the first place is luck of the draw. Then you can’t use magic that isn’t yours innately, you can’t wear armor and you can’t use weapons. When you switch forms, you can’t carry over attacks, whereas if you stay a cyborg/human/esper/beast, you get to keep and use attacks you’ve learned. The special attacks are even unlocked on weapons you haven’t used yet, as long as you have learned them. It’s a no-brainer, really.

10. I liked being able to skip battle animations, but having to reenter commands every round was a pain. An auto-battle feature would have been great. I also didn’t like that running away from battle would leave you standing right by the enemy, ready for it to attack you again. Gimme some space, man.

saga 3 combo11. The time travel plot didn’t make any sense at the end. After Dune and his friends save the world in the future, they leave the future and go back 15 years to live there. Doesn’t that mean, first, that they’ll change Dior and Nemesis’s futures and personalities just by growing up with them? Second, that in 15 years time there’ll be two of them in New Dam village when the originals who were originally from the future but came back to the present and then later went into the future catch up with the ones who beat the boss then came back to the present to live and have naturally grown into the future? (It makes sense in context…I think)

Thirdly, are they then going to sit back and let the rest of the resistance handle everything just because “It’s up to our childhood selves to handle it?” Does this mean that even as I play this game, future-present-grownup Dune, Milfy, Polnareff and Shiryu are chilling on a beach somewhere sipping piña coladas because they already know I’m going to succeed? If not, what happened to them? Finally, where did Jupiter (Dune’s dad) come from? He’s not in Dam village in the present, but the present is only 15 years from the future where he’s a married adult, so he can’t not have been born then. I went to every town/village on the planet in the past and present and never ran into him. Speaking of which, where’s Boraju as well? Few time travel plots resolve issues like this, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give SaGa 3 a free pass for it.

So there were a couple of things I didn’t enjoy. It was a long journey from start to finish, and I don’t think I have it in me to replay it any time soon. But I had a fine time while it lasted, flaws notwithstanding. Not that it’s ever going to come out in North America, but if you ever learn Japanese (you should, anyway), give it a shot. Now back to Arabians Lost, which is finally starting to pick up.