Time Hollow review (spoilers)

Finished! Yay! That only took me about 6 hours or so. Short game is short! It’s another one of those games I’d been meaning to play but just never got round to. What gave me the impetus to go ahead was getting bored with Tactics Layer towards the end. Then I got really caught up in Time Hollow, which gave me the energy to finish off Tactics Layer so I could devote my full attention to Time Hollow. So it all worked out in the end and a good time was had by all. I’ll just steal the story description from Wikipedia, hold on:

Time Hollow follows the story of Ethan Kairos, whose parents, Timothy and Pamela Kairos, mysteriously disappear on his 17th birthday. Ethan realizes that the entire world has changed as if his parents had disappeared 12 years ago. Ethan then finds a note tied to his cat’s collar telling him to look in a dumpster behind his school, where he finds a Hollow Pen, an uncanny object with the unique power to open portals to the past, as well as a note from his parents. Ethan uses the pen to solve problems that suddenly and mysteriously occur, thus changing the present, though he himself is able to remember these past parallel universes. He also meets a girl, Kori Twelves, who seems to share Ethan’s displacement from time. Eventually, Ethan comes to realize that the past is being manipulated by another Hollow Pen wielder, Irving Onegin, as revenge for the fact that Ethan supposedly killed his mother.

That’s pretty much how it goes. The gameplay feels a bit like the Ace Attorney games. You know, you walk around looking for clues, questioning people, putting facts together, that sort of thing. It also reminded me quite a bit of Radiant Historia, which I finished not too long ago. You know, the way the bad guy and the good guy have the same ability, and you have to jump back into the past to fix what went wrong in the present. Irving messes something up, Ethan fixes it, Irving messes something else up, Ethan fixes it, all the way till the end.

When the game came out there were a lot of complaints that the gameplay was too easy and too repetitive. I can see where those people are coming from. It was really, really obvious at every stage of the game exactly what you had to do to get the game to progress. There are only about 15 cast members and about 10 locations to visit (several of which you almost never go to). That means that whenever you get a flashback showing something has changed, it’s pretty easy to figure out what, where, who and what to do. Then it’s just a matter of getting more information, visiting the location and changing things with your pen. Simple!

For my part, I liked the gameplay just fine. I wasn’t looking for much difficulty, I just wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to my parents. I appreciated the fact that the system stayed out of my way and let me get on with it. A liiitttle more challenge would have been great though. Instead of the Hollow Pen glowing whenever it was ready to be used, the game should have left it up to you to judge the best time and place to use it. Lots of opportunity for frustration, but lots of opportunity for strategic thinking as well. And there really should have been more to playing the game than just See Flashback, Change Flashback, See Flashback, Change Flashback x100. Thank goodness it was short, is all I have to say about that.

When it was all over, I was pretty satisfied with the ending (though I was hoping for more than one possible end). Ethan got his parents back, his friends were all safe and sound, Uncle Derek and Kori got together, and since cousin romance is legal in Japan, Ethan might even get him some with Kori Junior. There were just a few sticking points I would have liked the game to address:

1. The game says the Hollow Pen has been handed down through the Kairos family for generations. Okay. A little more detail, please? Where did it come from? Why was it invented? What was it supposed to be used for? And why does the Onegin family have one too? Maybe Konami is saving that info in case they ever make a sequel (highly unlikely).

2. Was it really a good idea to let Irving Onegin go off like that? Sure, his mother never dies so he never decides to pick on the Kairos family. But he’s been shown to be highly unstable and even downright murderous. And he’s probably going to inherit his mother’s Hollow Pen sooner or later. Who knows what kind of havoc he could be wreaking out there with that thing? We can only hope his mother got him some much-needed psychiatric care.

3. Why was Ethan so cavalier about letting Uncle Derek sacrifice himself? The whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth. He only hesitated for a frame or two then he was like “…All right.” None of them there even tried to talk Derek out of it or to try an alternate way of saving Kori. Drop a trampoline or a mattress below her or something, I dunno. I can see Ethan’s thought process now:

Derek: Let me go save her, please!
Ethan (thinking): Damn right I’ll let you go! Go get killed, Uncle Derek, you <beep>! Living in my father’s house, using my father’s study…you’ve talked down to me one too many times. I hope you suffer, Uncle Derek. I hope it hurts real bad. Maybe the next uncle will know better than to mess with the Time Master.
Ethan (aloud): …All right.

4. Nobody thinks anything about Derek going back in time to save Kori? I mean he even addresses himself in the past as “Future Me”. He hasn’t changed much either, I mean Kori recognizes him on sight. Even if she didn’t, after 10-12 years, wouldn’t she notice her husband looks exactly the same as the guy who saved her? Wouldn’t police DNA tests and fingerprinting on the corpse turn up something? Of course even if they did there’s nothing they can do about it, so I guess that’s why the game didn’t bother to go into it. Hey wait, or maybe Derek didn’t die? He did send Ethan a letter at the end, after all. So he’s somewhere in the current world? Stuck in time forever like Sox is? Still doesn’t solve the problem of current Derek looking like Derek-who-saved-Kori. Hmm.

5. Japanese police must be the most incompetent cops in the world. If past-Kori scratched her killer hard enough to leave lifelong scars then she must have had blood and tissue under her fingernails. It wouldn’t have been that hard to check every student, teacher and worker… Oh wait, never mind. Past-Kori never died, right? Because Ethan’s dad went back and changed that, making her merely disappear. Okay, scratch that one.

6. I don’t get how the Kori timeline thing worked. She was about to die, so Ethan’s father pulled her into a parallel world where she didn’t die. Which stopped her time, making her stay 16 for 12 years. But what about the Kori in the present world? Wouldn’t she have graduated and gotten married, etc? So there are two Koris in the present world? Or if the worlds somehow merged so that Kori disappeared in *this* world as well, then how can she boldly go to school and walk around town like that? It’s a small town, someone’s bound to recognize her. The police, her parents, Mr. Twombly, Derek… Weird.

7. Who were those people who said “We shouldn’t have given him the pen. If he gets in the way we can just erase him”? I thought it would end up to be your parents and that they were evil all along, but the incident is never referred to again. Who’s the “we”? Mr. Twombly and Irving? But they didn’t give Ethan the pen, did they? And they never tried to erase him when he started getting in their way. I don’t get it.

8. What was in that “Mystery of Parallel Worlds” book? It was referred to twice, but Ethan never followed up.

9. How did Irving/Jack survive falling off a sheer cliff into the sea?!

10. What’s it like inside Vin and Ashley’s house?!?!

That’s about it, then. I had fun. It was an interesting short story. There wasn’t too much reading, the characters were decent, the music was nice and unobtrusive, I liked the bright graphics. There was definitely room for improvement in terms of challenge, length and depth of story and character development but overall yeah, it was fun.

Tactics Layer – Litinagard Senki(3) – Finished

Good riddance. I sure am glad that’s over with. I watched the last scene where your chosen girl confesses to you (Yuu-nee in my case), the credits rolled and I turned the DS off. In a previous life I would have quit without finishing Tactics Layer, but on the off-chance somebody out there might be curious about it, I decided to plow through till the end.

What changed in the few days between now and when I wrote the last, fairly positive post? Well, back then the charm of the dress-up system was already wearing off, but I could have held out if that was the only problem. What really ruined Tactics Layer was the degeneration of the story, when you find out what’s really up with Litinagard and why they need your help. Basically (spoilers ahead!), they polluted their own world with a machine. Then they found out that the pollutant, prama, could displace mana. So they opened up a gateway to another world (Plutoragard) and pumped the prama in while taking the mana out. The inhabitants of that world first sickened and died, but then eventually they adapted and mutated and turned into the monsters we’re fighting now. 100 years ago, they found a way to get into Litinagard and wrecked the place and that’s what we’re dealing with now.

Well? Doesn’t it sound like Litinagard got exactly what they deserved? When you add the fact that their queen is a cold, manipulative -#-#- on top of that and the only people in that world we care about (Yurika, Risa, Illumina) are all living productive lives in our world, it rapidly made me wish they would just cut off all ties to Litinagard for good and end the story there. Litinagard is almost entirely depopulated anyway, so its viability is in question. In fact, if the bad guy Ouma hadn’t come over to our world and cut off the MC’s best friend’s arm, I might have even voted for taking my friends out and leaving Litinagard to rot.

Ah yes, Ouma. a.k.a. Ouka. Have you ever read or watched a mystery where it’s so obvious who the bad guy is that you start thinking it’s not him? You know, like how “The butler did it” is such a cliche that you’re surprised when the butler actually did do it? Ouka did and said so many suspicious things.  Her name was only one character off from the mystery bad guy’s name. It’s like she had a big “I am EVIL and can’t be trusted” sign painted on her forehead. In fact the other characters outright said she was suspicious! It was so obvious that I convinced myself it couldn’t possibly be her and that the game had some cool swerve in mind. Maybe the queen was up to something. Or maybe Yurika was secretly evil. But no, Ouka turned out to be Ouma. How dull. And his/her whole reason for getting revenge? “The queen’s family was mean to my family so I’m going to destroy Litinagard.” *yawn* Don’t mix me up in your silly family affairs. It’s not like Litinagard isn’t 99% destroyed anyway.

Speaking of family affairs, Risa pulled out some bullshit on me near the end. In fact the whole latter half story of the game was just one smelly cowpat after another. Guess what, Risa’s actually a clone of the queen and thus the next queen of Litinagard. To that end, once Ouma captures the queen, Risa has Shizuka wipe out the whole party’s memories so she can go back and play queen. Whoopee, I’m so happy for you. Bye! Don’t let the door hit you on your way out! …Ah, if only. No, the final chapter of the game is spent playing  a “Disappearance of Kamine Risa” type thing and getting everyone to remember her so we can go save her, the queen and Litinagard. But I don’t wanna save that queen! And I don’t wanna save Litinagard! And I don’t wanna save Risa! Can’t we just pretend this all never happened?

Luckily enough Tactics Layer ended very happily, as far as I was concerned. The final boss was only level 30 with about 800HP so he was a piece of cake for my level 29-31 characters. My most powerful mage Yurika got taken out in the first attack, but after that I blasted him to death with assorted magical and physical attacks. In the ending sequence the Plutoragard people decided to forgive the Litinagard people and focus on themselves. Cool. Risa decided to stay behind in Litinagard for good. Sweet. Yurika pulled out one final piece of bullshit and said all the constant traveling was bringing Litinagard close to destruction, so she was going to seal the gate for good. Awesome. And Yuu confessed to me on the rooftop. Fantastic. I can’t wait to, uhh, go on pure wholesome dates with her where I will never attempt anything untoward. Yeah, that’s it. And we all lived happily ever after, the end.

Normally this is the point where I would say “it wasn’t that bad” or “I enjoyed it”, but I can’t bring myself to lie this time. It was pretty bad, and while I enjoyed some parts of it, I hated other parts. Especially the story in the latter half, which killed any enthusiasm I’d built up stone dead. The characters I’d started to take a liking to all took a backseat to Risa’s drama and the queen BS and that sort of thing. The supply of dresses dried up. The physical characters rapidly became useless in comparison to the magic ones. Magic hits hard, is 100% accurate, hits lots of people at once (that Water Balloon one is outright cheating) and can hit from a great distance. It’s just too bad that my favorite characters (Yuu, Kiriko (on the battlefield, not off), Nana, Eriko) were all physical types.

Oh yeah, before I forget! I finally won the “Yamato Nadesico” and “Otoko no Roman” contests! The trick with Yamato is to use Yuka with the china dress instead of the idol outfit. They’re both highly cute, but the idol outfit is too skewed in terms of cuteness. The Japanese FAQs report winning easily as idols, but I won easily in china dress so I’m sticking to my recommendation. For the Otoko no Roman contest, level up Mio a bit (she’s got great magic growth) and put her in the outfit she came in. They’ll love it!

And that was it for Tactics (cosp)Layer. If you understand a bit of Japanese and you play it because you want to strip girls to their underwear and dress them in cute outfits, I’m sure you’ll love it. However if you play it for stuff like plot or graphics or music or gameplay…you might as well not bother.

Tactics Layer – Litinagard Senki(2)

Still playing along. I checked my latest save and I’ve put in 26 hours and 50 minutes! That’s a lot of hours for a dress-up game with occasional battles. I’m at chapter 15 and a few things are starting to happen, but for the most part it’s still “Defeat the monster of the week and save Litinagard!” I also had to sit through Risa’s “I wanna save this puppy and by the way, I hate my mom!” story arc which was eerily reminiscent of Luca’s story in Ar Tonelico 2, right down to the frying pan wielding mother. Boy am I glad that’s over with.

The way Tactics Layer plays out reminds me a lot of Persona 3, come to think of it. In the morning you go to school, after school you pick a few spots to hang out and a few people to hang out with, and on the weekend (in P3 it was monthly), you fight the monster(s) of the week, rinse repeat. Along the way you make new friends and help them overcome their little problems. The similarities end there, though. Helping people solve their problems is not optional, and it has no effect on their abilities in battle. And of course in P3 if your protagonist got killed it was game over for you, but in Tactics Layer Takumi can’t even fight. His job is to outfit the girls in pretty costumes, and somehow the fact that he’s touched the clothes automatically makes them powerful. He’s some sort of “Savior”, you see.

Now that I’ve stopped expecting anything from the battle and the story, I’ve discovered that playing dress-up is fun! I love games where your characters’ appearances actually change depending on what they’ve got equipped. It’s one of the few things I really enjoyed about Dragon Quest 9. Here they’ve got even nicer costumes and far more of them too. Actually it’s a bit of a pain scrolling through all the different outfits: hairstyle, top, skirt, socks, shoes, weapons. It’s much better to just select an outfit wholesale, like Yuu’s lovely nurse outfit below.

As a matter of fact, wearing certain outfits is the most common way to learn new skills. For example, that nurse outfit comes with two healing spells. A few individual pieces also come with skills and attacks of their own, but this is not that common. It reminded me of Final Fantasy 9, or FFTA, where your choice of armor is determined not by how useful it is but by what kind of attacks you can learn from it. The deal is worsened in Tactics Layer because it’s not enough to wear the outfit, you also have to use the skill or attack a certain number of times before you master it. If you remove the outfit before then, you won’t be able to use it until you put it back on. In that sense it’s lucky that the enemies are so weak and the AI is so bad. If I spammed “Pretty Cure” non-stop against an enemy with half a brain, I’d probably be wiped out before I could say jack!

The other use of costumes is to take part in contests. Or, in my case, to lose repeatedly at contests. Several times in the story one of your girls will be required to take part in a contest. You can also visit the Event Hall and try to win some clothes by winning random contests. In the bottom left section of the picture down here you can see Sexy, Cute, Wicked and Health, right? Those are the criteria the judges use to rate you. Different judges favor different stats. Otakus like Cute girls, children like Wicked (cool?) looking girls, that sort of thing.

After the looks check, you get asked a series of totally random questions like “What is your favorite Japanese sweet?” and that sort of thing. It’s all guesswork, really. The last thing on the list is “Appeal Time”, where you preen and twirl to try and get the judges to like you. A Japanese FAQ I checked said to press YBAXBAXAXAXAX, repeating AX until the judges got fed up. I tried it on the otakus and it worked, but I still lost the looks part so…yeah. I had a 200-cuteness Yuka too, dammit. Lost by two freaking points, no fair!! I’ll have to try again later.

Anyway, dressing up and taking part in contests is fun and all, but I’m ready to finish this game now. You can only wear so many clothes before they all start to look the same, and only a few of those skills are really useful anyway. It’s an entertaining diversion, but I don’t think it’s deep enough to base a whole game around. Other dress up games like Ar Tonelico tend to have a lot of other elements going for them, this game…not quite. See you when I finish the game.

Radiant Historia sidequests (spoiler-free)

Radiant Historia has been out for a few days now. How are you liking it? I was right about the time paradoxes, wasn’t I? Go on, say it.

Why must she be so cute and so deadly?

I’ve played a number of games since I finished it, but I still have a soft spot for it in my heart, so I thought I’d make a final post (and post a picture of my favorite character while I was at it). And I thought I’d make that final post useful, so I decided to make a list of all the sidequests and what chapter they activate in. It’s based on the Japanese FAQ I posted last time, if you can read Japanese. This is meant to be spoiler-free so it’s really just the name of the quest, the chapter and who you talk to to activate it. I also put a star mark (*)beside the quests you need to complete to get the true ending. The not-so-good ending is pretty nice too, IMO.

True History

1. The King’s Daughter – Chapter 1 (Anna, Alistel)*
2. What was Inherited – Chapter 1 (Children in front of Weapon shop, Alistel)*
3. Accident In The Cave – Chapter 1 (Lazvil Hills)
4. The Ultimate Dish – Chapters 1-2 (Cook, Granorg)
5. Mankind and Beastkind – Chapter 2 (Guard, Granorg) finishes in chapter 6*
6. One and Only – Chapter 2 (Kaizan, Granorg inn)
7. Despairing Young Man – Chapter 3 (Guy in hood, Granorg)
8. Dias Assassination – Chapter 3 (Guy at gate, Granorg)*
9. The Next Foe – Chapter 4 (Tournament guy, Cygnus) – one more quest follows
10. An Unwanted Reunion – Chapter 5 (Ricky, Cygnus)*
11. Moon Armlet – Chapter 6 (Garland, Cygnus)
12. The Good Thief’s Way – Chapter 6 (Bram, Cygnus)
13. The Living Legend – Chapter 6 (Sod, well in Itolia)
14. The Blade’s Trial – Chapter 6 (after #13)
15. The Starlit Trial – Chapter 6 (after #13)
16. The Light Trial – Chapter 6 (after #13)

Alternate History

1. Night Watch – Chapter 1 (Guard, Alistel)
2. Soldier Recruit – Chapter 1 (Castle counter, Alistel)
3. “Marco the Calm” – Chapter 1 (Training room, Alistel)
4. “Raynie the Active” – Chapter 1 (same as #3)
5. Red Letter Day – Chapter 1 (Research lab, Alistel)*
6. Flower of Promise – Chapter 1 (Woman, Alistel)
7. Engineer Recruit – Chapter 1 (After #2)
8. A Letter to Tomorrow – Chapter 1 (Cedric, Alistel)*
9. Swordsman Recruit – Chapter 2 (After #7)
10. Mercenary Recruit – Chapter 2 (After #7)
11. Wandering Soul – Chapter 3 (Vanoss, Celestia?)*
12. Second Opinion – Chapter 3 (Woman, Alistel)
13. Battlefield Missive – Chapter 3 (Child in front of weapon shop, Alistel)
14. Conversion – Chapter 4 (Sonja, Celestia)
15. The Beast God’s Birth – Chapter 5 (Galva, Forgia) *
16. The Ultimate Art of War – Chapter 5 (Bergas, Forgia)
17. At Journey’s End – Chapter 5 (Marco, Skalla) *
18. Thaumatech’s End – Chapter 6 (Old Man, Alistel, after #10)
19. The Scholar’s Creed – Chapter 6 (Man, Alistel Underground Research Lab)
20. A Timely Warning – Chapter 6 (Man, Granorg)

There, 36 sidequests altogether. How many RPGs can claim to have 36 sidequests these days? I just noticed that most of these quests take place in Alistel. Guess it’s only natural, seeing as Stock is an Alistel soldier and all. As for how to actually *do* the quests, well, that’s part of the fun isn’t it? Don’t bother asking me, I won’t answer any “How do I—” or “Where do I—” questions because I’d just be hurting you. Back to Tactics Layer now.

Tactics Layer – Litinagard Senki(1)

Once again I have learned the importance of not writing a review too early, especially if the game is from a genre you like. Atelier Lina taught me that sometimes a game might seem to suck at first, but then once you get the hang of it it can be excellent. There are also games that suck in the beginning but then get better as you go along. And then there are games like Tactics Layer, which has taught me that sometimes a game does actually suck, but then once you stop expecting it not to suck and throw away your expectations, you’ll come into a new appreciation of the game and its features.

So yeah, I’m actually loving the game now at about 15 hours in, but if I’d written this review just a few days earlier it would have been all about “OMG this game is awful! Someone fire the developers! This is horrible!” etc, etc. I haven’t finished the game yet so my opinion might change yet again. I’ll blog with my final, overall impressions of the game once it’s all over. For today what I’ll do is to list the main reasons why I would have criticized it, and how I learned to enjoy the game.

It’s not really a Tactics game

“But it says Tactics in the title…” Exactly! That’s why I tried it, because I was looking forward to something along the lines of Luminous Arc or Summon Night. And when you do get to fight it does play out like an ordinary strategy RPG. Unfortunately these moments are few and far between. The gameplay is more like 70% visual novel, 20% dress-up game and beauty pageant and 10% actual fighting. If I’d done a little bit of research into the game before trying it I would have found that out, but dammit it had “Tactics” in the name. What did they expect me to think?!

So it was really hard for me in the beginning. There was just sooo much reading to do! Talk for an hour, fight one battle, talk for another three hours…ugh. It was driving me crazy! Plus you couldn’t save anywhere except on the world map, so if you wanted to interrupt a conversation you’d either have to fast forward it, thus missing the whole event, or just turn the DS off and revert back to your last save. And they weren’t even important conversations, most of it was just girls bossing Takumi around left and right, or bickering among each other, or some other petty random events you just selected, bleeeh.

Even when it’s a Tactics game, it’s not that good

Well, it’s not that bad either. It’s just that battles feel really, really slow for some reason. Think Luminous Arc 1 slowness levels. There’s no way to speed up battle, so you just have to get used to it. Of course I’ve never let slowness stop me from enjoying an SRPG and I’m not about to start now. No, my main problem is the lack of challenge. First off, the storyline enemies show up only once a week and they’re at fixed levels. This means if you do even the tiniest bit of training in the dojo before show up, you’ll vastly outlevel and overpower them. Plus you’ll quickly learn all kinds of abilities that are outright broken, like Shark or Order! which can do massive amounts of damage very easily. Then there’s the enemy AI, which is outright terrible. I’ve lost count of the number of times an enemy will be right next to me and it just won’t move. It won’t attack, it won’t use a spell, it won’t run, it will just sit there and let me kill it. Just like that. Some enemies will move forward a little, move back and little, move forward a little, until you go kill them. Of course since I’m going to kill them with my broken attacks anyway, I can see why they decide not to bother. 😉

Some of the character designs are extremely ugly

Horribly ugly girls are horribly ugly. Don’t be fooled by the nice-looking cover and promotional art. Look at the CG on the right. The squashed up faces. Those droopy pancake-like boobs. Ugh! Doesn’t it just make you sick? And CGs are supposed to be nice, so what about the rest of the art that isn’t supposed to be? Looking at it will make you shudder! Again, though, it’s all about getting used to it. In the beginning it really bothered me. I’d be thinking “eww” in my head the whole time I was playing reading the game because the main girls were so fugly. Later on I got used to it and cuter characters like Mimiko-sensei and Nana joined my party and then it wasn’t so bad after all.

The characters are annoying at first

If you’ve watched any harem or romance anime at all within the past 10 years, you’ve seen the entire cast of Tactics Layer. The childhood friend, the student council president, the older-sister type, the main character’s loser best friend, the main character who complains non-stop about the girls pushing him around but who lets them do it anyway, etc etc. I found them all extremely irritating at first, but again I got used to them little by little. After reading their little stories and helping them through their problems I started to feel some affinity for them, an almost paternal feeling. Not to mention we dealt with the story of the evil bitch Kiriko (ol’ pancake boobs up there) really early. Once I didn’t have to see her so much any more the game got 10000x better.

Apart from the 5 main girls Yuu, Yuka, Kiriko, Emiko and Risa, there are some other, very interesting optional characters you can get. Nue (mai waifu), Nana (mai loli), etc, etc. The sad things is that because they’re optional they have absolutely no relation to the plot whatsover. They join you for the flimsiest of reasons (I want to paint weird scenery! I want to keep stalking you!) and then completely vanish. They don’t take part in conversations, you can’t hang out with them, you rarely run into them in town, etc. And that’s really sad because for the most part I preferred them to the main cast. Oh well.

…And so on and so forth. Once I got over the disappointment of this not being a “proper” Tactics game, and once I got over the shock of how hideous some of the characters were, I was able to put my expectations aside and to start enjoying Tactics Layer for what it really was. I’ve put my complaints down for now, next time I’ll tell you why I’m having a real blast with the game right now.