Suikoden Tierkreis – Finished long ago

I remember mentioning long ago that I was playing Suikoden Tierkreis. I finished it way back in August/September thereabouts, but never posted about it. And now I can barely remember what it was about.

Let’s see, something about the hero going on a mission with some of his friends, and then suddenly some ruins pop out of nowhere. His friends think they’ve been there all along but the hero knows differently. Lots of ups and downs (and lots and lots of characters) later, it turns out they’ve been fighting some destroyer of worlds known as the One King, who is trying to take over the multiverse. They fight him, kill him and live happily ever after.

Something like that really. It was actually kind of fun. Had a number of sidequests to do and several locations to visit. I liked the art as well. For some reason it reminded me of Rune Factory, especially the way the characters waddled around on the screen. The world did feel a bit bare and empty, though, as characters kept popping into and out of existence the whole time.Vast parts of the map are just made of up empty space or desert or forest. It’s a bit depressing, but maybe that was the point.

I only got about 90 out of the 108 stars required, so if there was some super-good ending for getting all 108, I didn’t see it. Come to think of it, this is a good time to look it up on Youtube. Ah, here it is. Watching, watching, watching….too long and boring to watch the whole thing. I skipped to the end and it seems you get to see Atrie again. That’s my reward for getting all 108? Well, whatever. All’s well that ends well!

Speaking of Suikoden in general, it’s one of the RPG series that I think I’m a fan of, but that I haven’t really played much of. The same goes for Wild Arms and the Saga games. I’ve only played Suikoden I and Suikoden Tierkreis from beginning to end, and I’ve played most of Suikoden III but I’m not impressed. I guess I only think I’m a fan because I liked Suikoden I so much. I wanted to play Suikoden II after that, but copies were going for over $100 at the time (they’re still that high even now. New copies go for $250+) so I never got the chance. More recently I went online to look for a new copy of Suikoden V and it was selling for $78.00 on Amazon. Seriously? I don’t want to play it that badly, you  know. I’ll have to obtain them by alternate means later.

In the meantime, there are other, more reasonably priced games to play and enjoy. Including the remake of Saga 3 that came out on the DS a few weeks ago! Gotta finish some other games before that, though.

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!