Deltora Quest – Nanatsu no Houseki

Now that the DS is winding down in preparation for the release of the 3DS, I’ve been taking the time to go back buy or and pirate those games I’d always meant to try but never had the time or money to.

First on the list is Deltora Quest: Nanatsu no Houseki (the seven treasures). Unfortunately I didn’t get very far with the game. I’d heard a little bit about Deltora Quest here and there, a young adult fantasy series about a blacksmith’s son trying to save the world. I’d even seen an episode of the anime, which was really boring to be quite honest. Still, I’m a fan of RPGs and I’m a fan of fantasy series so I thought I’d give it a shot.

So I gave it a shot. For about 30 minutes. 30 minutes of lots of talking, but that’s standard for RPG openings. Only…the story wasn’t very interesting. Neither were the characters. The character design was squat and ugly and the graphics were meh. Well, it was an early DS release. As such it also suffers from that terrible habit early DS developers had of making all the controls touchscreen only. In short, it read horribly, looked horrible and played horribly. Plus it was an action RPG, which I tend to dislike unless something really stands out in the game.

In short, I can’t really give a review of this game. It is so not my sort of game that I really couldn’t keep going. Delete, move on to next.

Recettear – Finished!

Well, finished everything except for Crystal Nightmare, that is. Doing suicide runs with Louie is more stressful than fun, and the rewards aren’t that great anyway. I hate games with poor item drops, they just stress me out.

But anyway, I spent quite a bit of the New Year playing Recettear – An Item Shop’s Tale, so I thought I should at least give it a brief mention here. It’s a really cute, fun game, and both the store-running and the dungeon-crawling aspects have just enough challenge to be both fun and rewarding. I used to hate dungeon-crawlers, but Rune Factory changed all that. Now I’ve been looking for more to play through, I’m thinking of trying Shiren the Wanderer next.

Anyway, story… Recette Lemongrass’s dad disappeared and left her with debt. The debt-collector, Tear, suggests she open a store and use the profits to pay off the loan. They open the store together, hence Recettear. And that’s pretty much it to the story. You pay back the loan pretty quickly and then you can either play all over again or you can continue until you get tired. Along the way you pick up a few adventurers you can visit dungeons with, picking up stuff to either sell in your store or fuse with.

Like I said, it’s a cute game, it’s fun and the challenge level is moderate (except Crystal Nightmare). The characters are likeable and memorable and some of the dialogue is outright hilarious. The only thing that stopped me from enjoying it more was that I’ve played a number of similar games over the past few years, so both the concept and the execution didn’t feel that fresh to me. I’m talking games like Atelier Viorate, Lemuore no Renkinjutsushi and Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar, where you make stuff, forage for stuff, sell stuff, etc. The unrewarding nature of the dungeons in Recettear made it lag behind the other games when it comes to fusing items, but unlike them you can get filthy rich just by retailing stuff from the main stores. The game interface is far more polished than Lemuore‘s, and the selling mechanics are deeper than Grand Bazaar‘s.

All in all I had a good time both selling stuff and plundering the dungeons. I think I got filthy rich a little too quickly, which meant I bought excellent equipment for my adventurer too quickly, which meant I finished the dungeons really quickly, but while it lasted it was great fun. I hear the localizers plans to bring over another game by the same company, called Chantelise. More stuff to look forward to in 2011.

Speaking of localization, Luminous Arc 3 is never coming out in the West, is it? And now Imageepoch is making games for the PSP instead. Goodbye, Luminous Arc. You’ll be missed!

Tokimeki Memorial Girls’ Side 3rd Story – Oosako GET!

Oosako returned to the wild! I so don’t want him. I put off doing his route as long as I could, and then once I started I rushed through it as quickly as possible just to see the ending. Unlike everyone else’s ending, his doesn’t take place in the church. It takes place on the beach, and instead of him confessing, you confess to him. Then he’s like “Eh, all right, fine.” And you jump on him and that’s it. I wasn’t expecting much so I can’t call it a letdown but still, meh.

What if despite all this you want to get Oosako? He’s pretty easy if you’ve played the games a few times and know how to go about becoming Rose Queen and winning the Sports Festivals:

1. Fail three subjects in your first exam. It’s easy, just don’t raise any stats when you start the game.
2. You’ll have remedials with Oosako.
3. After that raise your stats till you’re first in class to get another scene.
4. Along the way, let your stress get high and you’ll get an event where he lends you a book.
5. Take part in and win an event in all 3 Sports Festivals.
6. Never miss a day of preparation for the Culture Festivals. You should get an event with Oosako every year.
7. During the trip to Hokkaido, turn your friend down when she asks you to take part in the pillow fight. You should get an event with Oosako by the elevator.
8. Last, but not least, be sure to become Rose Queen in your third year.

If you do all that you should get Oosako pretty easily. Make absolutely sure you don’t date any other guy in the process, because every other guy’s ending takes precedence over Oosako’s.

Till the end Oosako’s kiddy looks (fans might call them “boyish good looks”), screechy voice and cheesy lines of encouragement never grew on me, but I’ll give him credit where credit is due: at least he’s decent enough not to date his student while she was his student. As much as I love Himuro, I know in real life he should have been fired and banned from teaching for going out with the MC of TMGS1. And as for Amanohashi, if my 16 year old daughter’s principal ever invited her to the pool for the express purpose of checking out her body, I’d be there with a shotgun so fast it would make his head spin! Heh, maybe that’s why Himuro, Wakaouji and Amano-pervert all went for my MC, because she doesn’t have any parents to protest! So kudos to Oosako for having some standards, at least.

On that high note, I say goodbye to Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 3rd Story. Well, not goodbye for ever, I still have it, and I’ll go back eventually and play the 3P mode. For now though, I’m through with it and I need a long, long, long break before I can even think of playing it again.

Radiant Historia – Final thoughts (may contain spoilers)

After my last post, I went back and did the last two quests I was missing (Garland’s “Moon Bracelet” and Rainey’s “End of the Journey” quests) and got the best ending. I think Rainey’s was the one that did the trick. I also switched Ath out for Rainey for the final boss battle this time. I hate to admit it but Rainey worked out even better because of Ath’s aforementioned weakness against screen-filling bosses. The “true ending” wasn’t very different from the other one except one last, very important scene, which I won’t spoil. Definitely worth getting if you can.

I’ve made a ton of posts about Radiant Historia so far, so I don’t have much left to say about it. It was great fun in the beginning, slowed down a lot and got rather dull and draggy towards the end, but ended on a high note so I’m pleased with it. If I had to play it again, I’d find a couple of days when I’m not playing anything else and just blast through RH without slowing down or pausing for thought.

Final thoughts? Firstly, anyone who’s looking for the “next Chrono Trigger” will have to keep looking. Radiant Historia is nothing like Chrono Trigger. If I had to compare it to another game, it would be a cross between Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy X, but even then not exactly. That doesn’t mean there’s no time or dimension travel in it, but it’s not as far reaching as CT’s. The game takes place over a maximum of one year and you can only go back and forth in that timespan. I haven’t played Radiata Stories, but as far as I know it’s not related to this game.

Secondly, Radiant Historia is not that intellectual. If you’re looking for a deep, thinking man’s game with lots of philosophy or discussion of life, the universe and everything, forget it. As I’ve documented time and again, the time travel plot is full of holes, and as for the sidequests, don’t even go there. They have their own continuity and trying to merge them into the main line is just asking to be made insane.

Time and dimension travel is extremely simplistic because the game runs on rails. You have to do a bit of thinking for the sidequests, but the main game story itself is 100% linear. You always know exactly when to go to the other timeline and when to come back. And just in case you don’t, the twins Tio and Lipty will usually show up and outright tell you or hint heavily as to what you should do. If you make a wrong choice, you see the consequences right away and then the twins bring you back to try again. Thus you bounce between the two continuities like a ping-pong ball, fixing what went wrong until you uncover the whole plot and bring the two timelines together again.

Speaking of which, trying to mentally reconcile the two timelines at the end will make your head explode (wait, so X died there, but is alive here, so is s/he alive in the combined timeline or not? Shouldn’t s/he be dead? But oh look, s/he’s not. So did event ABC happen or not? And which Character Y was taken into the combined timeline? Which memories does Y have, timeline A’s or B’s? Aaaarrrghhhhh *splat*), so I don’t recommend it.

The game doesn’t take place on a very grand scale either. Theoretically you’re trying to save the world, but in actual fact the game involves a few locations on one small continent that you visit repeatedly. As the game goes on, new locations are revealed, but they’re usually things that were there all along but you just didn’t have access to. There’s no overworld map per se, either, just dungeon-like places connecting one city to another (like FFXII, I guess). The enemies are also on a small scale, with a ton of palette swaps and very few original designs.

Don’t expect much by way of different endings either. Completing certain quests will give you certain extra scenes in the ending, and completing all of those certain quests will give you the “True” ending. In other words, apart from the “True” ending, each ending only varies from the others in terms of the number of scenes you get to see. It’s not like in say, Chrono Trigger where all the endings are different enough to make them each one worth seeing. Furthermore there’s nothing like New Game-only content or New Game Plus. The only good thing is that if you save after the ending, you can go back, fill more sidequests and aim for a better ending without restarting the game. Here’s a list of all sidequests (in Japanese), don’t ask me about them (update, I made a list in English). There are almost no missables in this game so don’t stress yourself out too much.

If you can bring yourself not to expect too much from the plot and the time travel mechanic, though, there’s plenty to love in Radiant Historia. The game soundtrack is fantastic, for one thing. I thought it matched the game exactly, and it didn’t sound like the average generic RPG BGMs that I’d heard a million times before. There was a medieval-and-yet-modern feel to it that matched the medieval-and-yet-modern state of the game world. The tunes never grated on my ears either, in fact sometimes I even turned the sound up. The “Bad Ending” tune was the best for me, but I loved the soft opening theme as well. Oh, and the Historia music. And the battle themes. And the Alicetel music. In fact I liked everything!

The visuals are okay enough, for a DS game. I liked the character designs (Ath!!) and I liked the sepia-toned palette. If I had to complain about one thing, it’s that the character portraits never change. No matter how happy or sad or angry a character is, they will always look exactly the same on the screen. When you couple that with the lack of voice-acting, it can be hard to get into the spirit of a scene sometimes. Especially when they’re obviously trying to elicit some emotion from you, they really should have made the visuals fit the mood.

The characters are pretty likeable. It’s a minor point of discontent for me that the game never went much into their backgrounds, though. When I don’t like a character, I don’t care about their childhoods and where they came from, etc, but when I do, I can’t get enough of it. I would have liked to learn more about anyone other than Elca, Ath and Stock. I mean, you do get some comments here and there, but not nearly enough to satisfy your curiosity. There are some great side characters like Viola, Keel and Raul that you never really get to know much about. At the very least a character profile list or glossary or something, updated as the game goes along, would have been nice.

Gameplay was, of course, lots of fun. Because of the massive amounts of backtracking, you will usually be overleveled. Most normal battles aren’t much trouble, but a couple of sidequests will make you weep (Master Vancule, I’m sorry! Don’t hurt me any more!), though they can usually be beaten in one or two tries once you reevaluate your strategy. It’s nice to see things like Poison and Sleep working on many bosses, and your playable characters have different skillsets and abilities that make them unique, unlike the cookie-cutter fighters many RPGs tend to have. Not to mention I haven’t seen the grid thing outside of isometric SRPGs, so it was really fresh and new. Pushing enemies onto Ath’s deadly magic traps, oh, how sweet the satisfaction!

No gameplay system is perfect, though. Fighting does get a bit formulaic after a while, and it’s annoying when weak enemies chase you when they have no chance in hell of winning. There’s an ability that you can use to avoid battles, but you can’t use field abilities with it on so you have to take it off sometimes. Moreover this is one of those games where you’ll accumulate a ton of items you haven’t used by the end. Not because you’re being stingy, but because most fights aren’t challenging enough to force you to use them. Oh, and some of the items are just weak and useless. I’d like to see a Radiant Historia with a ‘Hard’ option to force me to bring out the depths of the battle system. If I ever do a replay, I’ll skip the sidequests so I can keep my level down a bit, then we’ll see.

Aaaannnddd… that’s it. I’ve blogged a ton about this game because I was looking forward to it. It came out, I got it, I played it, I really liked it and now it’s over. When it comes out in your area (Feb 22!), give it a shot, don’t expect too much and hopefully you’ll enjoy it like I did. Until then!

Radiant Historia – Playable characters (minor spoilers)

I finally finished Radiant Historia today. I got the semi-best ending, I believe. When all the ending scenes were played out, I only had 232/236 of all events complete so I must be missing a sidequest or two. Note that you don’t have to finish all the events to get the best ending, just certain important ones. Right now I’m torn between going back and getting the True Ending or just not bothering. The ending sequence I got was a decent ending to the game, I could accept it.It was also really, really long and filled to the brim with Deus ex Machina, but in a game with rampant time and dimension travel, I’m not going to quibble over minor points.

In the meantime, this is a good time to talk about my party. There’s a total of 7 playable characters, but you can only use 3 of them in battle at one time. Luckily this is one of those games where just about anyone will do, but certain characters will still make things much easier for you than others. Plus some characters are better for boss battles while others are better for ordinary battles. Not to mention they learn new battle abilities as they go along, so each character goes up and down in the usefulness ranking as the game goes along. And then on top of all that, there’s things like character availability to consider, so there’s a lot to think about. Without further ado, the playable characters of Radiant Historia, starting with my final party. This post will contain minor spoilers.

Stock – The hero of the game. You can’t take him out of the party so you’d better get used to him. If I had to describe him in a phrase it would be “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” He learns some attack magic, some healing magic and lots of physical attacks. He also has all of the grid-moving attacks except Pull. Unfortunately his phys attack is lower than Gafka’s and (probably) Roche’s, and his magic stat falls behind all the girls’, so he’s not quite as strong as you might expect. Early to mid-game he’ll be your main tank and attacker but by the end of the game he was largely playing the “pusher”, shoving enemies onto Ath’s area traps. He’s a solid all-round member of the team though, no question about that.

Ath – My beloved Ath. Isn’t she cute?! Her bad points first: low defence, low HP for much of the game very weak physical attack, no grid-moving attacks, no direct magic attack until very late in the game, rather useless in boss battles that fill the whole enemy grid. Her high points? First and most importantly, disgustingly powerful area traps. I discussed the battle system a while back, if you need a reference. See those blue spots? Ath can set traps on one or two of them for the enemies to step on. They won’t willingly step on them, which is where Stock comes in handy to knock them right onto the sweet spots. I took 2200hp off a late-game boss in one attack, and that was without using any magic boosting items! And for some reason many, many bosses are weak against poison so I just set a poison trap to begin with and watch it sap their lives as I pound away on them. And she can steal their items too! Ah, sweet Ath, what would I do without you? But as I said, she’s useless against bosses that fill the whole screen, because then there’s no space for her to set her traps. Such bosses are rare, but they’re usually pretty tough.

Other reasons why Ath pwns so hard: her crazy speed. She’ll be getting two or three turns in a row by the end of the game, even without any speed boosting accessories (which I foolishly equipped on Gafka and Roche. Next time I’ll go for speed overkill with Ath, nyeh heh heh). Stock is the only other character who regularly gets more than one attack in a row. More turns equals more opportunities to set traps, mug enemies and help your party. This is where I should mention that she’s the best healer in the game, learning Super Heal and Area G Heal very early on. And did I mention that she’s CUTE?!

Elca – Officially her name is Eruca I think, but somehow that sounds like a skin disease or something so I call her Elca. Elca is an awesome addition to your party once she starts learning her more powerful abilities. She has two that hit every enemy on the battlefield for a goodly (and often godly) amount of damage, which is fantastic for random battles. You can wipe the whole field clean in one turn in many cases. She also has one called Divine Light, which makes a party member invulnerable for two turns. There are items that duplicate that, but they’re rare, and Elca takes only 10MP to do it. Plus she learns the standard G Frost, AND she has the highest magic attack in the game. She also learns the Trans-Turn ability, which means she can give her turn to another character on the rare occasion that you can’t find anything to do with her.

I’d almost rank her higher than Ath except for several serious flaws. First, she only joins halfway through the game, and on one route only at that. Secondly she’s missing a lot of the time, especially for many crucial battles in the late game. These two factors combined will leave her underleveled compared to your other characters. At the end of that game Stock was 70, Ath was 68 and Elca was 59. Thirdly her HP is ATROCIOUS, under 500 when characters like Gafka were kicking it around the 800s at the same level. Her defense isn’t much to speak of either, and forget about using physical attacks with her. Fourthly, as a story character she annoyed me a lot. Her good points more than make up for the above though, so she was an indispensable member of my team when she was around.

Gafka – That’s Tank McTank to you, bub! Highest HP and strongest physical attacker in the game. Slow as molasses, which sometimes makes chaining hard, but nothing that can’t be worked around. I especially liked his final attack that gathers every enemy in the screen in the middle so that other characters can whale on them and racket up the hit combos. This one time I got a turn with Gafka followed by two turns from Ath, a turn from Stock and some other stuff I forget but anyway, I smacked a dying boss and his cronies into the middle, used Ath’s Dancing Death repeatedly and racked up a Lvl 41 combo (“Brilliant!”) by the end. Sweet!

Since Gafka hits so hard and so late, I often adopted the strategy of having Ath steal from the enemy on her first turn, Stock steal again on his turn and then Gafka put the enemies out of their misery. Much like Elca and Roche, Gafka has poor availability (not as bad as theirs, though), but he’s strong enough that he can hold his own very quickly. His defence is not that good, but since his HP is so high you usually won’t notice it. His MP is terrible, but magic-refilling items are a dime a dozen in this game so no biggie. If I hadn’t taken Elca into the final battle I would have taken Gafka instead.

Rainey – She’s a useful physical attacker in the beginning and gets powerful magic attacks (all the G magic) really quickly. She also joins your party right at the beginning and is available almost constantly. Unfortunately, through no fault of her own she is quickly outclassed by the characters above in every significant respect. For some screen-filling boss battles I restarted and switched Ath out for her, but after a while I didn’t bother any more. You won’t go wrong using her, but she doesn’t have much apart from that G magic. A solid dependable team member nevertheless.

Roche – I’m certain he’s strong. He’s gotta be strong, given how important he is to the story. Plus he has high HP and attack stats, always a plus. But! His availability is even worse than Elca’s! By the end of the game he was only level 55 because I couldn’t bear to bench better characters for this slow upstart. To be honest I have no idea what most of Roche’s attacks do, and while his HP and attack are high, all his other stats are pretty terrible. I found him a dreadfully boring character storyline-wise as well, so that didn’t help.

Marco – As with Rainey he has the best availability in the game. He also has a gentle personality and he’s sorta kinda cute, isn’t he? Unfortunately his physical attack is crap, his defence is crap and his magical attacks are almost non-existent. He’s a support character, but there’s nothing he does that other characters don’t do better. Stock can Resurrect before he can and Ath learns Area G heal long before he does. He does have some good buffs, but battles where buffs can make or break you are usually so tough that Marco would just get in the way regardless. His main use would be healing and then using Trans-Turn to pass his turns to an actual damage dealer, but even then you’d still have to try and keep him alive. That’s why he’s at the bottom of the list, poor thing.

And there you have my character ranking. As I said at the top you can use just about anyone and get away with it in this game. I’m pretty sure I could have taken the final boss down with Stock, Roche and Marco so this is all very much my own opinion. If you haven’t played Radiant Historia for yourself yet, you’ll get to try it out when Atlus brings it to the West in February. Look forward to it!