Luminous Arc 3 – Eyes review

Finished it! With 45% completion! I got both [spoiler character] and [spoiler character] to survive, and went for Inaluna’s ending, which was both blah and bittersweet at the same time. My percentage would have been higher if I’d chosen to view the Kopin theatre, but I hate kopins, so screw that. I probably should have done more of the hot spring battles as well. Popuri (yes, that same Popuri from Luminous Arc 2) creamed me good when I got to her, but I think with the use of those 100% status-effect items, I could take out her kopins and take her down in no time at all. Will try on my next playthrough.

Anyway, Luminous Arc 3 was fun! Easier and more fun than LA2, and the story was just as bad as the previous two so no complaints there. The girls get less and less pretty with every game but the gameplay gets better and better so no complaints there. I also liked the soundtrack, so all in all it was a good experience. I liked it so much I went to look up who composed it, and found out it was Yasunori Mitsuda. Aha, no wonder! I don’t always swoon over his soundtracks (Sands of Destruction‘s was meh, for example), but when he’s on top of his game, he’s one of the best.

MVP: Yuu. You HAVE to use Yuu! His magic stat is phenomenal and hits a very wide area, though you really have to watch his HP.
First runner up: Eruru. Her healing saved the battle for me at least 50% of the time, especially once you can improve her speed with a lapis. Also she struck the final blow on the boss for me, which was awesome.
Second runner up: Inaluna. By herself she’s a rather mediocre unit, but her Haste spell makes it possible to get really good use out of Yuu and Eruru in the second half of the game, so banzai!

Honorable mentions: Refy (post class change), Ashley (in the first half before being overshadowed) and a certain spoiler character who joins your party and has reasonably good AOE magic.

Fun game, I think I’m going to play it again in a bit. But first I got a bad ending in Lina no Atelier (which isn’t as bad as I thought) so I need to replay it for a better ending.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne

I finally finished Digital Devil Saga 2, and it was a complete disappointment (more on the whole game if and when I can ever be bothered). Also finished one round of Lina no Atelier. Although I didn’t get a good ending, it wasn’t that bad after all. More on that as well later.

However, I just picked up Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, I’m only 2 hours in and I’m having a great time! I missed fusing personas/demons from the later games, and the Magatama system looks remarkably fun. It’s not that hard either, so far anyway. I’m guessing part of the legendary difficulty comes from the fact that it was the first SMT game for a lot of people. That, and if you throw a skill away it’s gone forever. I’ll have to be careful about that, but Fire Emblem Path of Radiance was kinda like that and I managed it just fine, so I think I’ll be okay.

But I like the post-apocalyptic landscape so far, and the relative lack of NPCs is fun too, especially the lack of dumbass party members slowing you down, whining, bitching, moaning, leaving your party at the worst time. This game is awesome! Well, 2 hours of it is awesome anyway. So if you don’t see any posts for a while, you know what I’m getting up to.

Lina no Atelier = Fail

[Note, this is not my real opinion of Atelier Lina. This was published before I’d played the game properly, and my final conclusion can be found here, helpfully titled “Lina no Atelier is Awesome!” As for why this post appears out of order, I really don’t want to talk about it.]

*sigh* I think Gust is losing their touch. Whoever they’re farming the DS Atelier games out to is making a royal mess of them. First there was Atelier Lise, which was horrible in every way, shape and form. Then there was Atelier Annie, which wasn’t a bad game but had a really kiddy story and too much talking. Third time’s the charm, right? That’s what I was expecting when I started Lina no Atelier: Strahl no Renkinjutsushi, but nooo, it’s just as bad as the others.

I haven’t gotten that far in, but this game could turn out to be the one Atelier game I don’t finish. Two things bother me. One, it’s brought back the crazy money requirement from Lise. I HATED that thing, and you know with a money requirement like that there’s almost no way to make that kind of money in one playthrough unless you have a FAQ. That’s highly unpleasant and totally unfair.

Secondly, and more importantly, it seems that buying and selling will be a more important part of this game than alchemy will. I already made a few items in my atelier and it was awful: even simple items take forever to make with a low, low chance of success. You don’t have time to waste, so I don’t see myself spending much time on alchemy. DAMMIT. What’s the point of an Atelier game if you don’t get to synthesize?

You know how else I can tell the focus isn’t on alchemy? Because even though you need money in this game, when you suffer and suffer and complete a store request, they don’t give you money. They give you scavenger items! If you spend time on synthesis, you’ll be BROKE! When you waste 10 cole to check rumors, they tell you about item prices, not about the latest forage areas. Arrgh, I hate this.

Oh, and the incessant talking from Atelier Annie is back. The talking that made that game the bane of my existence, that made coming back to my lab torture every single time. Yes, that talking. I knew I should have written a protest letter to Gust when that happened.

Phew, anyway. Guess I’ll keep plodding away at it. I’m also slowly plodding towards the end of Saga 2, and starting to really get under way with Dragon Quest 9, so it’s not like I’m trapped with this awful game alone. Time to play!

Dragon Quest IV – Chapters of the Chosen

Everyone in the world must have played Dragon Quest IV by now, so I won’t bother writing too much about it. I killed both Psaro the Manslayer and the bonus boss yesterday and had a great time too. Take that, Pstupid Psaro! That’ll teach you to wipe out the heroine’s village! I was really quite annoyed that the entire bonus chapter consisted of helping him get his girlfriend back so he could be happy. What about my village? Or Maya and Meena’s dad, why couldn’t we resurrect him instead?

The bonus dungeon was kind of fun though. Not the killing Platinum King Jewels part (which is easy enough with Psaro’s Hatchet Man attack and the Sands of Time) but the fighting Chow Mein and Foo Yung part so you can strip the picture naked and get Psaro’s best equipment. I lol’ed my head off when they ripped off the Yggdrasil leaf and left the pic standing there naked, heheh.

Apart from that, I don’t have too much to say about this game. I never played the original NES or the PS remake, and this is only the second DQ game I’m playing after Dragon Quest 9, so I went in with an open mind. And you know, I quite enjoyed it. I’ve played other games where you control different parties and bring them together at the end (most notably Suikoden III and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn) and this was one of the better-executed versions. The overall story with the “chosen heroine” is old school (duh) and overdone, but the different short-term objectives in the early chapters stopped me from getting bored too soon.

Running around the world collecting the Zenithian items didn’t bother me, and neither did the fetchquests. I don’t mind such things in principle, it’s only when they’re boring, or there are too many of them that I start to complain. Something I really liked in Dragon Quest IV, though, chests! I love RPGs with lots and lots of chests to open. I honestly think putting just enough treasures and chests in an RPG must be a science. Too few and dungeon-crawling becomes a painful chore and a tedious crawl. Too many and the player doesn’t appreciate the rewards, especially if half the rewards are potions and the like. I think DQIV got the balance just right.

What didn’t I like? Not much, I thought it was a great game. Not too long, the music was okay, the remade graphics were nice, the difficulty was just right, and grinding was easy if you felt weak (hello 8 liquid metal slimes in a row), once you were strong enough you could cast the ‘Holy Protection’ spell to eliminate weak random encounters, etc etc. It’s a well thought-out system. The three main things that bothered me were:

1. Helping Psaro at the end – I only did it because I felt sorry for Rose, really. Oh, and you know, you never do get to see Rose die or anything. One moment you hear she’s been captured, the next moment she’s in a grave. What happened? Who killed her? Why? That didn’t make any sense. **speaking of which, what happened to the people in Zamoskva castle? They’re all back during the ending sequences (funny thing, they’re back at the end of C5, gone again in C6, and back again in C6 end), but where were they all this while? Mystery!

2. The fact that your party members join and instantly lose all thought and personality. There’s the ‘Talk’ button but you always get the “There’s no one to talk to” response even if there are 3 people directly behind you. I couldn’t figure out why they had the Talk button there, so I went investigating. It turns out you are supposed to be able to talk to your party members, but that option was cut out completely in the localization process and all their dialogue was erased! Seriously! I read a thread blaming the localizers (Plus Alpha or something) for it, but I’m about 99% sure the decision was made by Square-Enix themselves, either to cut costs or to shorten the localization time. I’m really disappointed though, I wanted to hear more of Alena, Borya and Kiryl’s ‘English’ haha.

3. On the topic of broken English, some of the ‘English’ accents were a bit much. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what townspeople were saying most of the time, but sometimes it was just an annoyance. Especially since most of them have nothing important to say, so essentially they’re just wasting your time with semi-undecipherable text. I hear it’s been toned down in subsequent games, so I probably wasn’t the only one who didn’t like it.

So! Since Dragon Quest IV went so well, I’m thinking of trying DQV next. My brother has it and is always talking about his bride and stuff, so I might borrow it and give it a shot. Right now, though, I’ve gone back to Tokimeki Memorial 3 and am working on the Junpei route. You’ll hear from me when I’m done.

Stella Deus – The Gate of Eternity

Or The Catacombs of Eternity, as I came to call it. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

Stella Deus is a strategy RPG released in 2004. Developed by Pinegrow (I feel like I’ve played another game by them but I can’t remember which) and published by Atlus. Many have heard of it, few have played it.

I’ve had it in my collection for a while, but I always found something else to play when it was time to choose a new game. Then one day, shortly after finishing Persona 3, I looked at the cover and thought…wait, these character designs really look like those from P3. Really. So I did a little digging and yup, Shigenori Soejima did the designs for both games. And that’s what it took for me to finally put this game in and play it.

I’m prone to making snap judgments about games in the first few minutes. Sometimes that proves to be wrong, but often I’m right. Rarely, very rarely, I am both right and wrong at the same time. My initial impression about Stella Deus was that it was bland, boring, preachy and colorless and had some of the worst voice-acting I’ve ever heard in a video game in my life.

That’s all true, to a great extent. I’ll give the game props off the bat for the cast. Apart from the dull, goody-goody Spero, the barely-there Gallant, the annoying Tia and the idiotic Lumena, most of the cast is lively, funny and interesting. The overall voice-acting is so flat and awful it’s also easy to forget that a few voices are really well done, Grey’s and Adara’s for example. The battle system is also decent, definitely won’t disappoint fans of the strategy RPG genre. Plus the story is very simple and straightforward, which might be a plus or a minus depending on what kind of gamer you are. Since the story takes place in a world that is gradually being swallowed by a strange mist called Miasma, even the washed-out color palette is strangely appropriate.

Where does Stella Deus go wrong, then? Pretty much everywhere else. The story about trying to revive a fallen world is disgustingly cheesy and preachy. Much of the late-game dialogue is the usual “We’ll never give up!”-”Humans are brave and resilient!”-”Never give up hope!” stuff that you’ve heard about 5,000 times before. As usual the enemies are extremists who have lost all faith in humanity, and then there’s the usual evil deity…who wrote this scenario? Was s/he even trying? *yawn*

The music is meh, so I won’t even talk about it. Over the course of the game you get to visit a lot of towns and cities, but you never get to explore them and you almost never get to interact with ordinary townspeople. You know, the same townspeople you’re trying to save? Might be nice to get to know what they’re really thinking, get them on your side and stuff, don’t you think? What’s more, interacting with the world around usually leads to greater immersion in the game, giving the player more incentive to save the world and finish the game. As it is, it’s very easy to lose motivation and stop playing, because you really don’t care.

Most of gameplay time in an SRPG is made up of battles though, which is why it sucks when the battle system is really slow (FFTA2, I’m looking at you) or excessively complicated. Thankfully Stella Deus’s system is neither of these. In particular the enemies don’t waste time thinking, so their turns move relatively quickly. The system works like a regular one with a twist: every character starts their turn with 100 Action points that deplete when they move on the map or select an action. When they run out, you can’t move/act any more and have to end their turn. In the beginning it feels really restrictive, but once you get used to it it adds a fun element of planning and strategy. Will you spend your whole turn approaching the enemy? Will you approach, hit, and retreat? Will you hit them with magic, hit them physically and then heal your ally? There’s a lot of thinking to be done once you get into it.

Then there are combos you can do with your party members, some of them extremely powerful. Before too long, your regular attacks will be hitting for more than the combos, but it’s still fun and flashy. Then there are Zone Effects, which are buffs and debuffs or status effects you automatically use on any enemy/ally who gets in range. By equipping ZSkills, you can, for example, boost the evasion of all allies in range/heal them a set amount every turn/cast darkness on enemies/cast Fear on enemies…etc, etc. etc. On top of all that, there are other stat-boosting/reducing skills you can equip on yourself to get stronger.

As you can tell, I had a lot of fun with the battle system. So much so that I quickly abandoned the main storyline to focus on the 100-level Bonus Dungeon called the Catacombs. It’s just 99 battles against powerful mooks, but somehow it’s the most addictive thing in the game. Seeing as it’s automatically unlocked right from the beginning, I believe the game makers anticipated that players would get into it really quickly. How else do you explain the fact that unless you’re a level or two higher than every boss you face, they will usually wipe the floor with your face?

Off to the Catacombs I went then, happily fighting my way down each level.  Some of them were tough, I tell you, especially the oddly designed ones and the ones where your party is spread out all over the map. Whew! But clearing each level gives you a sense of achievement that the battles in the main game rarely do, plus you later get all these cool weapons and armor that you can use in alchemy. …Wait, alchemy? Why didn’t I mention that earlier, you ask? Because…alchemy in this game sucks. Without buying or downloading a guide, you won’t be able to make most of the good stuff except by chance. Also since you can only make goods one at a time, you’ll be selecting, deselecting and reselecting items over and over and over again until you’re sick of it. But it’s the only sure way to get really good weapons if you plan to go beyond level 50-ish of the Catacombs, so you have no choice. Blerrrrgh.

I had fun playing this though. The main game was below-average, but I got into the bonus dungeon and the battle system with a vengeance, so it was a worthy purchase. If you like SRPGs, like endless battles, like grinding and don’t mind bad voice-acting, I actually recommend this game. I don’t want a sequel, but I hope to find other games like it soon.