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.

Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer

Baby’s first real rogue-like! I’ve played it for 4 hours total and gotten killed 14 times! That’s, uhh, my math is failing me right now… 3.5 times per hour! In the beginning getting killed was fun. I thought “Okay, I’ve figured it out, next time I’m gonna go for it!” and other encouraging thoughts along that line. And in truth I did go a little further almost every time. I’ve made it all the way to level 14, reached the bottom of Table Mountain. I’ve taken Naoki to Mountaintop Town and paid him 3000g, and Oryu the Blinder has joined my party. For a rogue-like newbie, I’m not doing too terribly right now.

However, playing the same stages and fighting the same enemies 14 times in a row would take a toll on anyone. I’ve never been the most patient gamer in the world either, and I’m always ready to admit it when I suck at something, so it seems now would be a good time to say goodbye to Shiren the Wanderer, at least for this game. I’m sure if I keep playing, I’ll keep slowly progressing, dying occasionally, putting a few things down here and there in warehouses for the future, but what’s the point?

Story is not the strong point of any rogue-like, and this one is no exception. As far as I can tell, Shiren and his weasel (ferret? mink?) companion Koppa are on their way to El Dorado to find the Golden Condor who can make their wishes come true. I’m probably wrong on this score, but anyway it goes something like that. Why does Shiren want to get there? What does he want to wish for? In the beginning I was a little curious, but now I’m like “Whatever it is, it’s not worth 30 hours of my life to find out.”

Of course, as I said, the story is not the point. The point should be the planning, the exploration, the thrill of success, the heart-pounding close escapes, feeling the disappointment of failure only to get up, dust yourself off and try again. And again. If you can enjoy those elements in a game and you don’t mind a whole lot of repetitiveness then you might just like this. For me after a while it was just too dull and too punishing. They weren’t kidding when they said the game was unforgiving! Back to Canyon Hamlet again. Back to level 1 again, back to 0 money again, it’s like “Ouch, someone must really hate me!”

Prior to Shiren the Wanderer, the only similar games I’d played were Grandia Xtreme and Recettear, and neither of those were that hard or that unforgiving. Plus they both had interesting characters, something of a story, a permanent level up system and item fusion, all of which I really like in a game. Not to mention Grandia Xtreme had an awesome battle system. I’m glad I tried Shiren though, if only so I can say I did it. Oh, and I really liked the soundtrack, that’s always a plus.

My Farm Around The World DS – Blah

There are three kinds of children’s games:

1. Children’s games that children can enjoy,
2. Children’s games that adults can enjoy and
3. Children’s games that noone can enjoy.

Sadly My Farm Around The World falls firmly into the third category. Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit. I did rather enjoy myself for a day or two, but it was more a case of laughing at the game than laughing with it. I should dispel a misconception right off the bat though: it’s called “My Farm”, but you don’t actually grow any crops. You’re a rancher and you rear various animals either for the produce they give or so you can fatten them up and resell later.

You start out farming on an American farm. The animals are all pretty standard: hens for eggs, ducks, turkeys and pigs for fattening up, that sort of thing. There’s a day and night cycle, but the day passes so slowly that it would take about an hour to get through each one. Luckily you can press the forward button to make time go up to 64x faster. Every day goes pretty much like the one before it:

1. Feed your animals
2. They get dirty once they eat, so you have to brush them
3. They also poop once they eat, so you have to clean the poop
4. Sell whatever produce they’ve given so far
5. Every other day one of them will fall sick. Give it medicine.
6. Watch them until they fall asleep at night and wake up again.
7. Start over again from step 1.

That’s all there is to it. Your animals have Lost In Blue-like metabolisms, so you’ll have to feed them pretty often, which means you’ll have to clean their poop pretty often, so that’s what 80% of the game will be spent on: feed and clean, feed and clean, sell produce, feed and clean. Repetitive and unexciting gameplay.

But wait! Once you’ve bought one of every animal you can get for that region, you’ll unlock a new region and you can go over and start the process all over again. There’s the American, African, Asian and Australian farms to get through, none of which will take you very long. The laughs I talked about came from the African farm, mostly. Do you know what animals you’re supposed to fatten up on your African farm? Hippos, rhinos and lions! Seriously! A picture speaks a thousand words:

Lions and hippos and rhinos, oh my!

Look at them right there, Rhinos! And hippos behind them. See the lions in the pen on the right? Very cute, well-behaved creatures too. If you starve them they’ll just die quietly. None of that attacking your gnus (pen on the left side) or  eating your baby hippos nonsense that real life lions would do in real life, no sir. Btw, those brightly colored creatures behind the hippos are parrots. I always thought those particular parrots were native to Southern America, but I’m no expert.

Also in the laughs category, the game makers created a neighbor in each region for you who helps you get started and comes over every once in a while to warn you if your animals fall sick, i.e. every day. To give some extra African flavor, your African neighbor always says “Nimefurahi kukutana nawe” when he comes to give you the bad news. Now file this under “unlikely but true”, but I actually know a bit of Swahili and I’m 99.99% sure that “Nimefurahi kukutana nawe” means “Pleased to meet you” not “I have some bad news for you” so I think now’s a good time for the developers to look into hiring a new Swahili translator.

Hmm, I guess My Farm Around The World DS wasn’t a complete waste of time, then. I’ll remember those lions and tigers and kangaroos for a while, at least, and I got a little Swahili revision out of it. On the other hand the gameplay was dull, simplistic shallow and repetitive, the graphics were weak, the goofy-looking animal design wasn’t really my style and there’s absolutely no reason to ever replay this game. So yeah, category 3 after all.

Dragon Quest V – Hand of the Heavenly Bride review

Just finished Dragon Quest V after 34-ish hours. That includes lots of time spent playing T’n’T and an hour or two spent finishing Estark off in his labyrinth. I still haven’t managed to beat the final T’n’T board, but no matter what reward there is at the end I have no use for it so I’m not exactly shedding tears over it.

Overall impression, it was a very good game. Unfortunately I played it too soon after DQIV, so I couldn’t get the full enjoyment out of it. They were just too similar, both looks and content-wise. I felt more like I was playing some extension to DQIV than like I was playing a completely new game. It’s a bit sad, because I was trying to get Dragon Quest V out of the way so I could enjoy DQVI when it came out next week, but now I don’t dare buy it. I know for sure I’ll be bored stiff.

I guess part of the reason Dragon Quest games sell so well in Japan is because they don’t come out so often. So you play one, enjoy it, and then when after a year or two you feel like playing it again, a new one comes out and you play that too. Similar character designs, similar storylines, similar soundtracks, almost identical gameplay, rinse, repeat. Of course you might get unlucky and hit a clunker like DQIX, but if you’re a fan you might get some enjoyment out of that anyway.

So anyway, I had a pretty good time with DQV. I would have had an even better time if I’d waited a while to play it, but there’s no use crying over spilled milk. Or at least I want to think I would have, because I was rather dissatisfied with the way the story played out this time. I spent the whole game just doing what I was told, over and over again. Silent protagonists almost always come across as laidback pushovers, but even among them I have never met a hero as sheep-like and as passive as Dragon Quest V‘s protagonist. I named him Mouse on a whim, little knowing how completely right I would be.

Fine, in the beginning he’s a kid and he doesn’t have much say as his dad drags him from place to place. Bianca says let’s go beat some ghosts, he follows. His dad goes to Coburg, he follows. He ends up as a slave for 10 years. Someone sets him free. Harry wants to go to Coburg, so he goes to Coburg. Then I completely forget what happens until I landed in Mostroferrato. Some guy wants me to marry his daughter and gives me fetch quests. Like a sheep I run off and do them, then I have my pick of three girls I don’t like and don’t want to marry. When I heard “Hand of the Heavenly Bride”, I thought for a second I might get to actually woo somebody. In any case a slug like Mouse would have just messed things up anyway.

So I married fat, bossy Debora and had twins (named Micki and Free, thus betraying my age). Uncle says he’s the new king, Mouse is like “okay”. Uncle tells him to go do a quest, he’s like “Okay.” Debora gets kidnapped. At that point I really, really wanted to leave her kidnapped. I mean, the babies were saved, and I don’t believe for a second that they’re in love or anything. Screw her. But the game says go save her, so I go save her. Then I spend 8 years as a stone statue and somehow manage to have more personality doing so than in the entire game up to that point, etc, etc etc…

As you can tell from the summary, I wasn’t excited for a second over anything I had to do in the game because it didn’t feel like I was doing it of my own volition. I mean, you never do anything of your own volition in jRPGs anyway, but the better ones manage to convince you that this is what you’d want to be doing if you really were in the game. That you’d do it anyway even if no NPC told you to. Throughout Dragon Quest V, however, it’s clear that you’re always following other people’s wishes and orders. You don’t have any desires of your own. I don’t even think you have a mind, you’re an automaton. I can’t get into a story like that, especially when bad things just keep happening to you at every step of the way. Not to mention some parts of the game were things I’d done already, like finding and protecting the legendary hero, collecting the Zenithian equipment and working my way over to Zenithia.

Hmm? But I said I enjoyed the game, didn’t I? I did, I did, but it was despite the story, not because of it. The localization team left the team conversations in, so I had a good time talking things over with my children every time I spoke to an NPC or went to a new location. It really helped flesh out the characters and the game world. I actually feel cheated now that they took those things out of DQIV. The team also toned the accents down as well. Every characters and NPC was intelligible, even though Sancho got really tiresome with all his “ees” and “eet”. If I had to complain, I’d say that I still don’t agree with their policy of making the villains speak in broken English. I don’t know how they spoke in the original Japanese, but I do know for a fact that it’s impossible to take a bad guy seriously when he’s speaking like a “token foreigner” comedy show reject. They don’t sound intelligent, and usually the less intelligent a villain is, the less threatening you find him.

Apart from all that, I also enjoyed having lots of money for the first time in any DQ game ever (okay I’ve only ever played three of them, but my point stands). You see, I lucked out really early at the casino in Fortuna and got a number of Metal King Swords. After that I just made sure I used monsters that could equip that sword (a slime knight and a slime for most of the game, later got a golem) and I didn’t have to spend a single penny on weapons for the entire game. Plus since the best defense is a good offense, I rarely bothered to upgrade my armor. I had 130,000 in the bank with nothing to spend it on at the end of the game, lol. And I had a ton of unsold armor in my bag, including two Flowing Dresses, two Magical Shields and two sets of Flame Armour. Of course, having the most powerful sword in the game on three of your characters just a few hours in means that most enemies aren’t going to put up a fight. I even beat the bonus boss in 28 turns on my first try. Broken game was broken, bwahahaha!

I thought I would enjoy recruiting monsters a little more, but it turned out you don’t really “recruit” them, per se. You just beat the tar out of enough of them until one of them decides to join you. It might have been better if they’d included ways of increasing the likelihood of them joining you, maybe with special items or abilities. As it was, getting one of every recruitable monster would have been an incredible waste of time. Most of them are pretty useless and take forever to level up. Besides, you can only take 8 party members with you, so most of the monsters will spend their time locked up in Monty’s pen anyway. A cute addition to the game, but not that useful.

The addition I did enjoy was T’n’T, a gigantic board game that really pulled me in. It’s a bit like snake and ladders mixed with a little D&D and a little Monopoly (the way you keep getting fined) mixed with a little blood from a very sadistic devil. I haven’t been so into a minigame since I played Triple Triad all those years ago. I was actually disappointed when I got lucky on two of those boards and finished them in one try. There’s still the Estark board to try and finish, though. That’ll probably take me weeks, at the rate I’m going.

I also enjoyed the knick-knackatory, which is just a museum where you put special items on display. I’m not much of a collector, but there are only about 30 of those things and they are pretty easy to find as you play through the game, so I had a good time collecting, cleaning and displaying them. No rewards except bragging rights and 500g, but the game was linear enough that I enjoyed the little diversions from the main story.

So, that’s that for Dragon Quest V. I mentioned a little while ago that I was going to give Shiren the Wanderer a try. I did, and I did get killed like I thought I would, but I’m not quite satisfied yet. There’s a difference between getting killed because you didn’t stand a chance and getting killed because “Ah, I could totally have taken that guy!” I want to get to the “didn’t stand a chance” point before I give up. If you don’t hear from me for a while, that’s what I’ll be working on. Oh, and Saga 3 too, can’t forget that.

Princess Debut – Too kiddy for me

I’m a fan of otome games, in theory. If it exists and I can get my hands on it, I’ll try it sooner or later. If it’s in English, all the better. And if it has actual gameplay and doesn’t involve 20 hours of non-stop reading then woo-hoo, you just made my day!

But just because I’ll try most of these games once doesn’t mean I’ll like them. Some games are just not for me and sadly Princess Debut was one of them.

The story was simple enough. Sabrina, an ordinary teenage girl, switches places with a Sabrina from another world who happens to be a princess. Princess Sabrina hates dancing, but she has a ball coming up in 30 days. Somehow she manages to convince Sabrina to go to her world and learn to dance, pick a partner and take part in the ball on her behalf.

And of course it’s an otome game so there are six handsome (your mileage may vary on that) princes that you can try to woo in those 30 days. Maybe if I’d actually liked any of those guys my experience of the game would have been different. As it was I either found them annoying and/or creepy, like Vince and Cesar, or just bland and boring, i.e. the rest of them. For some reason they all look very similar as well, so there isn’t much to choose between them.

So, an otome game with a meh story and meh guys. Is the gameplay any good, then? Unfortunately not. You wake up and spend the day wandering around a few locations looking for guys to hang out with. If you find one you talk to him, hope he asks you out on a date, then hope you say the right thing to make him like you a little more. These events are all very short and very dull. For example you run into Klaus and he asks you to go shopping with him. You go shopping. You talk a bit. The end. That sort of thing. The aim of the exercise is to get one of the guys to agree to be your dance partner, then keep his love for you at 100% till the end of the game, at which point he will confess his love for you if you manage to win the ball.

Btw, once you pick a partner you can’t change him for the rest of the game so be careful. I picked Vince early and lived to regret it. He is childish, immature, selfish, inconsiderate and even downright mean from time to time. There’s nothing princely about that guy, let me tell you! Come to think of it I really should have turned him down when he gave me the diamond ring at the end. Tch, what a missed opportunity to get some revenge.

Training for the ball itself will probably take about 50% of gaming time. This is probably where I had the biggest disappointment, though. Going through dance routines is just a matter of sliding the stylus across the touchscreen while following prompts in the top screen. The trailer should give you an idea what to expect: Princess Debut Trailer. Maybe in some alternate reality, this sort of thing is considered challenging, but I’ve played this kind of game before, and I liked it better when it was called Ouendan. In fact I’ve finished all the songs in Ouendan 1, 2 and Elite Beat Agents on all difficulties and S-ranked almost all of them, so believe me when I say this stuff was child’s play to me. Slide, slide, slide. Slide some more, twirl, slide. Zzzzzzz… I wasn’t impressed by the tinny rearrangements of classical tunes they did either. Poor remix, poor sound quality, poor gameplay = poor music game.

And it’s not as if you’re dancing each tune just once and then moving on, as you do in Ouendan. Nope, at the beginning of this game you’ve only got one tune, and you have to practice it over and over again until you level up a bit and then you get another. Then another, then another. At the end of my playthrough I had 10 tunes to show for my hard work. Just ten. For all my hard work. All of which I had to play over and over again to raise my level. Raising your level, after all, raises stamina, which just means you can dance some more. Oh yay (sarcasm). It also raises your Technique and Artistry, which I presume makes you more attractive to the princes. But since they all suck, who cares whether you’re attractive to them or not?

The third thing you get from leveling up, and from winning certain dance contests, is new outfits. There are at least 20 such items to collect and you can’t get them all in one playthrough so in theory there’s some replay value in there. In practice not only are the dresses poorly drawn and animated but they’re also downright ugly and bizarre. In any case, when you’re busy dancing, you’re staring at the bottom screen so you can’t even see yourself in said ugly dress. Big whoop.

My intention wasn’t to bash this game, though. I mean, at least it got released in the Western market, which is more than I can say for most other otome games. Just by looking at the presentation I can tell it’s targeted at the pre-teen and early teen girl market, so I’m not exactly shocked that it didn’t work out for me. Most importantly, if you just want to play a game where you hang out with vaguely good-looking guys, dance to some well-known tunes and put on some rather drab clothing, you could do a lot worse than Princess Debut. It’s not for me, but it might be for you.

Btw, if for some reason you do like this game, Natsume has another one out called Cheer We Go. Check it out.