Tactical Guild – Bad Budget Game (1)

I’m about halfway through my second playthrough of this game. Why a second playthrough when I said it was bad? Well, it turns out Tactical Guild has three different heroines to pursue and the only way to get the full story is to pursue all three. Since I had no idea when the choice was coming up, I couldn’t save before it, so I have to play again with another heroine to see some more. The bits of the story I got last time didn’t make much sense. Characters appeared and disappeared for no good reason, made reference to incidents I hadn’t seen, the final boss showed up just like that, I killed him, the ending took all of two minutes to watch, the end. Hence the second playthrough to get a different perspective on this game.

To be honest I was truly shocked at just how bad it was when I first started, but then I did some reading on the rationale behind the game. Apparently it was meant from the start to be a “budget” game, which is why it retailed in Japan for about $40 instead of $50-70 for the same kind of game. Dunno about you guys, but $40 doesn’t sound very budget to me. As far as Japan goes it’s a low price, but this game still doesn’t deserve that much. $15 at most, and even that is kind of pushing it.

Just by looking, you can tell the developers Ninja Studio obviously didn’t put much effort into it. The graphics have been called “retro”, but I’ve seen better looking SNES games, and that’s not an exaggeration. It looks like they used RPG Maker to make the game, then ported it to the DS somehow and released it. They called it “budget” so people would think they were getting a good deal, but all along they were just being ripped off. There are only three kind of monsters: wolves, golems and pink birds. Then apart from the important characters, everyone has a generic sprite. And those generic sprites have the same color palette whether they’re friends or foes. They don’t even vary according to job class, it’s just like 5 or 6 different sprites used to represent just about everything. You can’t even tell what someone’s class is unless you move over them with the cursor, how dumb is that?

And it’s not just the sprites and the graphics that look bad, the music is bad as well, and I’ve already mentioned that the story is incomplete unless you play all three parts. Even if you do play them all, the story is still crap. “We are looking for the 7 Reti-Arts for flimsy reasons that involve the resurrection of a god that you can kill in two turns, also the Army is evil.” That’s a “budget” story, is it? I could have written that myself, thank you very much.

Gameplay and related matters

I didn’t pick this up for the story, though. Just as I did with Tactics Layer, I tried Tactical Guild because it had “Tactic” in the name. Also I watched the trailer on Youtube and the battle system was reminiscent of the GBA Fire Emblems. Top-down grid-based SRPG instead of isometric, that kind of thing. That was all I needed to know. But then I started playing. Man… This is so bad… I don’t know where to start with the battle system. The biggest flaw: if you move, the only thing you can do is Attack. The minute you move a single step, your character stops being able to use Items or Special Attacks or Magic. Seriously. It just makes no sense, I mean, are they so stupid they can’t walk and think at the same time, is that it? Geez. Anyway, as you might predict, that reduces your battle strategy to either waiting for the enemy to come over to you, or just using direct Attack every time.

Direct Attack is almost always a bad idea, though. The game has three kind of attacks: long-range, mid-range and short-range. Long range is stuff like magic and arrows, mid-range is spears, short-range is swords and fists. The game is overwhelmingly skewed in favor of long-range attacks though, especially magic, because of the aforementioned Move=No Special thing. Trying to attack an enemy directly 1) Exposes you to a counterattack which is often stronger than your attack and 2) Usually misses. This is one of those games where if your hit percentage is less than 99% you will miss 9 times out of 10. Look at the screenshot on the right. That Hit 85 you see? Probably going to miss. It’s easier to just assume you’re going to miss than to get worked up over it, ‘cos it’s going to happen a lot. Meanwhile enemies with 40% hit will beat the crap out of you every chance they get.

So physical attacks are a waste of time, which means most of the job classes are a waste of time as well. There are quite a number of them too, sadly enough. Priest, Paladin, Sniper, Assassin, etc etc. When you reach the required stats to class up, e.g. 120 INT for Sage, you just pick the job change option and switch, no special items required. Due to the stupidity of the battle system, however, only two of the classes are worth changing to: Pirate and Alchemist. Pirate because they can use Special Attacks after moving, and Alchemist because they can do the same, and they have the highest magic attack (MAT) stat in the game.

Back to how overwhelmingly useful magic is, though. Talk about game breakers, there’s this magic attack called Search that you can get right at the beginning of the game. It can hit enemies in an 8×8 area around the caster. That’s 64 squares, people! It’s also stupidly accurate and stupidly powerful for a magic attack you get so early. With the enemy dodge rate as high as it is, and the aforementioned difficulty in moving and attacking, you’ll quickly realize that it’s much smarter to stand still and snipe the enemy with Search as they try to approach than to move out and fight. Thus all battles are reduced to one-way Search spamming fests in the end. I hired myself a witch and a wizard at the Guild and raised them into Alchemists. Ah, the pain they dished out! The pain! No one compares to Lia though, the main heroine. She’s just…ouch. If you like broken battle systems and doing sick amounts of damage, you’ll enjoy that part at least.

Of course if you don’t want to take the easy way out, you could try to go out and fight physically. “Oh, but I’ll get a Game Over!” you cry. No you won’t. “Yes I will!” No you won’t. You can’t. It’s not possible to get a Game Over in this game, it is not an option. Win or lose a battle, the game will still play on like you won and the story will continue. Sure you’ll miss out on whatever monetary reward there is to get, but so what? I repeat, win or lose, the game goes on. There is zero motivation to win. ZERO. You might think, “I should level up so I can take on tougher enemies” or something like that. Uhh, even if those tougher enemies take you out, the story’s still gonna continue, so… Might as well not bother, don’t you think? Well, gamer’s pride kept me going at least. I switched the difficulty to Easy though, no sense suffering more when you can suffer less.

The battle system isn’t the only thing that sucks about Tactical Guild though, but I think I’ve gone on long enough for one day. Color Cross awaits me, just a few puzzles left!

Fun with The Kayou Generation!

As if my fingers hadn’t been punished enough already. Princess Debut may have been a bit of a failure, but in general I really like rhythm and music games. Especially the ones that don’t require me to actually dance. You really don’t want to see me dance.

Plus I like Japanese music as well. I tend to prefer 70s music to the 80s stuff that makes up the bulk to The Kayou Generation‘s songlist, but there are some good tunes in here. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. First off, what is The Kayou Generation and what does it play like? I’d start with a long description, but I believe a video speaks a thousand words here, so I tried to find a video of the game being played. No such luck, but I did find the trailer:

Not too informative, really, but it did show the three main features of the game: tapping the lyrics in time to the music, the occasional slider, the occasional annoying backup singer that pops up at the bottom of the screen and the occasional converging (broken) circle. It’s pretty easy to get into once you start playing. Sure it would help if you understood Japanese, and sure it would help if you knew those songs to begin with, but you can complete the game without all that.

It’s one of the easier music games out there as far as completion is concerned. Completing every song and unlocking all the bonus tracks shouldn’t take more than a few hours if you play diligently. That’s because the scoring system is very lenient. You start with four blue spots that you can think of as your HP. Each lyric you tap correctly gives you one extra HP, all the way up to 12. Each one you get wrong takes that down by one as well. What that means is that once you’ve built your life gauge all the way up, you can freely commit up to 12 errors without getting a Game Over. Unless you’re half asleep, that’s nearly impossible to do. It’s not like in Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents where one mistake on a hard song can send you into an instant death spiral.

Finishing the game is easy, so if that’s all you’re after then you’ll be seriously disappointed. If you want to finish it with a good ranking, however, you’re in for a bigger challenge. At the end of every song, you get a star rating depending on your position. 1st-10th, Gold star, 11th – 20th, Silver star, 21st-30th, Bronze Star, anything below that, White star. What’s the use of the stars? To be honest, it’s mainly a matter of pride. It feels good to have those shiny gold stars next to each song. I’ve made it up to 19 Gold stars with 10 Silver stars left to conquer and I’m feeling pretty proud of myself now.

The other reason to get Gold and Silver stars is that you can unlock outfits and hairstyles with them. Gold = hairstyles, Silver = outfits, Bronze = accessories. With those outfits, you can customize the character that dances at the top of the screen, changing their looks. You can also change their eyes, noses and mouths but they look ugly no matter what, so I usually leave that alone. If you have the time and effort, you can probably customize the singer for every song to look as much like the original singer as possible. I put the singer for Linda Yamamoto’s “Dou ni mo Tomaranai” in a replica of Linda’s iconic ‘hesodashi’ outift and she looked pretty spiffy, to be honest. I think I’ve unlocked all the outfits now though, so I’m just playing because I want to.

But seriously, getting Gold stars is a real pain. I don’t know how the star system is calculated, but I think combos have something to do with it. Also mistakes made at the end of the song seem to cost you more than mistakes made at the beginning, even if you’ve racked up a big combo. I don’t get that either. What I do get is that getting a “Great” score gives you more points than “Good”, and you can make a mistake or two, get  mostly “Greats” and go on to get a Gold star. And you can play a perfect game without a single mistake and still get just a Silver star, probably because you didn’t get enough “Greats.” It’s fun, but all kinds of messed up.

Why is this game not better known, then? It seems the developers AQ Interactive and Artoon (also behind the craptastic Archaic Sealed Heat and the rather meh Away: Shuffle Dungeon) didn’t do that much promotion for it in the first place. One trailer and one Famitsu online article is hardly what I call publicity. More importantly, the game itself isn’t that good. The song selection is good and older Japanese fans might like that, but is the “Kayou Generation” the same as the generation that currently plays music games on the DS? If they grew up listening to late 70s and 80s music, then they’re in their 30s and 40s by now. Hmm, I’m not sure.

Maybe the game was made so easy because it was an effort to appeal to those people, but the result was that younger players (who are more likely to get it in the first place) found it too short and too easy. It doesn’t help that the sound quality is rather poor and the cover singers range from acceptable to Aaargh My Ears! terrible. Buyers would be better off spending the ¥5,040 yen cover price (now down to ¥1,740 on Amazon) getting the originals on iTunes instead. Plus the singer’s performance is linked to yours, so unless you hit each lyric just right, they’re going to hit those notes either earlier or later, making the song sound weird anyway. Oh, also the graphics are awful. They didn’t just use cheap cover singers, they used cheap graphic designers as well.

In spite of all that, I’ve taken a bit of a shine to The Kayou Generation. Getting the timing right especially for the slow songs is no mean feat, but I’ve come this far so I’m not ready to give up! And that stupid “Koi no Number 6700” song obviously has it in for me, I just know it! If I ever get all Gold stars (har har, not bloody likely) I’ll post again. Until then, it’s back to the DS for me.

Real life keeps getting in my way!

It’s been a busy week, but I managed to sneak in some video games here and there. I plugged away at Color Cross and now I’ve unlocked all the big pictures! I only have about 3 puzzles left to go for each category, so maybe I’ll go ahead and finish the game. This is way easier than Picross!

I’m also close to finishing Tactical Guild, which is a terrible game by any standard. It is seriously bad. It does have a certain primitive charm to it, though, and it’s so short that it was almost over before I knew it. More on that when I actually finish it.

Third thing I’m playing, The Kayou Generation. It’s a rhythm/music game along the lines of Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents but far less polished. Fun and addictive in its own way, of course. I’ll probably post about that next.

I also started Saga 3 (Final Fantasy Legend 3) at long last! They’ve made a few changes to the battle system and the graphics look slightly better, but everything else looks the same. I only just started and there was so much talking that I saved and turned the game off first chance I got. I’m not sure I like this new trend where every RPG starts with 30 minutes of straight exposition.

Last thing I’ve been fooling around with, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time. Yes, it’s an action RPG, yes I do usually avoid those. It looked cute though, and not too hard. I’ve played a few hours, right up to where you’re supposed to kill some monster in the sewer. Then I got too sleepy and had to warp back to town to save and sleep. That was sometime last week, haven’t touched it since.

Of course, playing is one thing and blogging is another, but if you don’t hear from me for a while you’ll know which games to blame.

Color Cross review

Oww, my fingers! My wrist! My elbows! They hurt! Damn you, stupidly addictive and frustrating game!!

Puzzle games are another genre of games I’m bad at, which is why you won’t see too many posts about them on this blog. A while ago, however, I was talked into trying Picross and I loved it. It was simple, fun, interesting and logical. I liked uncovering each picture in turn, unlocking new puzzles and new categories as I went along. I quit once the puzzles got too hard, though. I hate racking my brains for hours only to get the answer wrong anyway.

So, Color Cross. It’s just like Picross, but with colors. Instead of blanks and Xs, each space has to be filled with a certain color. There’s a panel on the side of the touchscreen that lets you cycle between colors, very cool. In principle, this allows you to create more vivid and more complex patterns than regular Picross can provide. And in practice, some of the pictures look great! I used to cross-stitch back in my youth (ahem), and I was often tempted to pull out out a piece of graph paper and record some of the patterns. Hmm, there’s an idea. That was only some of the pictures, though. Others were pretty obscure. I looked them up and down, turned them round and round and still couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to be.

As with Picross, I gave up on Color Cross once the puzzles got too complex. You open up a puzzle and there’s like 7 different colors and all the graphs go 1 1 1 1 1 1, 1 2 1, 1 1 3 1, etc. Pshaw, as if I’m going to spend my time stressing out over these. The nice thing is that you can press Select to save your puzzle and resume it another day, so maybe I’ll peck slowly away at each one in turn every other day or so.

All in all it’s a good game. Picross was great, Picross 3D I really couldn’t get into, Color Cross is good but has four major flaws. First, once the puzzles get big, the squares get TINY. You can zoom in and try to work that way, but then unless you’re working on the edges, you won’t see the numbers you’re supposed to be filling in so it’s really hard to work. I’m not sure what Color Cross could do about it, because I remember Picross having the same problem. Maybe create an option to spread the picture over the top and bottom screen? I don’t know what would work, but as it is the larger puzzles aren’t much fun.

Second flaw, sometimes the colored backgrounds interfere with the placement of colors. If I’m working with light blue, for example, and the background is also light blue, it’s very hard to tell where I’ve placed the color already and where I haven’t. I don’t think the developers put much thought into it, because it should have been possible to make sure the background was a color that wasn’t in that puzzle, or to give the player a chance to choose the background color.

Third flaw, also related to colors, is that sometimes the colors are just too similar. I had to play the game on the DS’s highest brightness setting, and I still kept getting confused about whether I’d placed the colors correctly or not. You can see in the screenshot on the right a puzzle with three different shades of red in it. Definitely not for anyone with eye problems.

The fourth, and most annoying flaw, was the game’s lack of precision. You try to tap a square and somehow it reads that you tapped a different, adjacent square instead. Or that you tapped two squares or more. Then you get penalized for a mistake you didn’t make, or get rewarded for uncovering a square you didn’t know was right. I don’t particularly care about my time, but the penalty interrupts your game for a second or two, which is very annoying. At first I thought it was my stylus, or that I was just clumsy, but I later read a number of reviews and it seems the game is just bad at reading taps. It could have used a little more testing, that’s for sure.

Well, that was a fun diversion. On to the next game!