Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 3rd Story – First impressions

Bwahahaha! All your Fujiyama Arashi are belong to me! Mwaha!

He was a piece of cake. Since there were no guides or wikis out when I started Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 3rd Story, I had to go with my gut, and my gut told me that the sporty guys are always the easiest to get. You just work your sports stat up as high as it will go, keep the rest of your stats up (everything was at least 130 by the end) and date him regularly until he’s all over you. Oh, and join the judo club when he asks you to. I also chose to work at the Habataki Pool where he also works, which was kind of fun.

Sad thing is, unlike Shiba from Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side 2nd Season, Arashi didn’t do it for me at all. I don’t like his stupid hair or his dorky face, his voice is blah, almost nothing happens with the sports club, you almost never get to see him blush, his sense of fashion is boring and repetitive, etc, etc, over and over again. I got him because he was easy, but I’m not satisfied!

Unfortunately I’m also not satisfied with most of the rest of the game either. Most of it is because I replayed TMGS1 extensively last year, so a lot of the locations and events in the game are very familiar to me. I should have let at least two years pass between replays, because after the first year the whole thing was one giant snoozefest.

Much has been made of the two princes you get to woo in this game, but in my humble opinion…they’re both pricks. When I compare their assholish lines and behaviors to dear, sweet Kei Hazuki in the first game, ahh, what a difference. He was a little cold in the beginning, but he was a really cool, decent character. Saeki Teru was a jerk too, but at least he wasn’t a borderline crook like Kouichi and Ruka in this game. These guys are slimeballs.

Having said that, I can kind of see myself going for Kou. He reminds me a lot of Shiba in terms of being mean-looking but probably sweet when you soften him up. Near the end of my game I somehow found him liking me (gotta pinpoint the stats he’s attracted to and go for him), plus I know his tastes are rock-and-roll and motorbikes, so it shouldn’t be too hard to date him. He showed up three whole times at my workplace to sneer at me and by the end I was thinking “Oooh, just wait till I get my hands on you!!” Ruka’s just a creep though, so forget about him. Sakuraaaaaiiii!

Other last impressions: I really like what they did with the girl friends in this game. I hated the two-faced, backstabbing cows in the previous two installments. “Hey, we’re friends, right?” “Right, until I want to get my sticky hands on your man that is.” I really hated them. In my game I got to be friends with Miyo and Karen and you get to hang out with them and have sleepovers and stuff, call them on the phone, make Valentine’s chocolate together, etc, etc. It’s a lot of fun and they seem to genuinely like you, which is really cool. I just wish there was a second pair of friends you could get, that would be even better. Btw, Room #6 is really cool, I want it.

Last thought: Your class teacher is GROSS. Even his name is gross, Oosako Chikara. Sounds like a fish or something. He looks all of 12 years old, his voice is weird and you don’t even get to date him (or do you?) so I don’t know what he’s in the story for. What were the Japanese thinking?! I can’t wrap my mind around this one.

Gotta go, I’m going to play something else for a while and then come back to get Kou later on. He WILL be mine!

ASH – Archaic Sealed Heat

More like Archaic S–t Heat. I only made it through an hour or so of this game before giving up, a new record for me. It’s sad because I really wanted to like this game, based on who made it (Mistwalker). But the controls are just, just too clunky and annoying.

Everything has to be done with the stylus control, not using any of the buttons. I’ve never played a game where this was comfortable and ASH wasn’t the game to buck the trend.

The character portraits are tiny, tiny, tiny.

The story is…hmm. From what little I played, you’re Aishya, the Princess of Millinear, and your whole kingdom is leveled by a fiery dragon on your 17th birthday. But then your retainers, who had been turned to ash, start coming back to life and fighting with you. Creepy… so anyway, your mission is to figure out WTF is going on, stop the fire dragon from killing any more people, and generally just run away in the worst battle outfit since Lusso in FFTA2.

The gameplay is hard to describe. I’ve seen something similar in Shining Force Feather and Stella Deus: it takes a certain number of points to do anything, whether to move or to attack. In this game it’s called AP. So if you start the battle with 40 AP, you can either hold still and gather more AP, move (reducing AP), or Battle, which takes a whopping 50 AP to commence. Apart from your loyal retainer Bullneq, all the other characters appear to be generics: white mage, black mage, fighter, etc. I presume you’ll learn some new classes as you go along.

See, it doesn’t look so bad on paper, but when it comes to actual execution on the field, it’s sloooow, clunky and boring, and the first few stages being made up of nothing but tutorials does NOT help. Furthermore, you attack in teams, right? So if they had made it like in Revenant Wings or something, where, say, Aishya can have a team of black mages under her, and Bullneq can have a team of fighters under him, etc, etc, that would be okay. But it doesn’t seem to work that way, it’s just…messed up. Well, after 1 hour anyway. I don’t know if I’m ever going to continue Archaic Sealed Heat because it’s really dull, but we’ll see.

Shin Megami Tensei – Strange Journey

I didn’t finish Strange Journey. Instead I watched the ending on Youtube. But I was going down the neutral route so I was right outside Mem Aleph’s door when I got into Summon Night and forgot all about this. In fact I went in and fought her once, but she kicked my ass hard so I left to regroup and never did come back. IIRC I was level 78, so with a bit of grinding I should have been able to level up a bit and teach her who was who, but somehow the spirit just wasn’t in me.

Did I enjoy the game? Hmm, it’s complicated. Like most Shin Megami Tensei games I’ve played, Strange Journey went up and down regularly in terms of quality. Sometimes the story was fast-paced and the action was cracking and everything was really interesting, couldn’t wait to get back to it. Other times it was so dreary, slow and boring that I literally fell asleep behind the DS. The repetitive “fetch-questy” style of play didn’t help at all: go to this sector, explore it, kill this guy, get this item. Repeat for next sector. Repeat for next sector. I mean the details of who to beat and what the dungeon looked like differed quite a bit, but the core was exactly the same. So the story parts were good, but since each piece of plot progression was surrounded by 10 hours of only fairly-interesting dungeon-crawling it was hard going sometimes.

On the plus side I liked having tons of demons to fuse and summon, I really liked the creepy soundtrack, the characters didn’t exactly piss me off (not even Zelenin, who I thought I’d hate), and I enjoyed making new items and weapons out of monster parts, Atelier-style. Not to mention my favorite fiends from Nocturne are back, and the difficulty of the game was just right so I didn’t die too often, and all around it’s a very solid game.

Would I play it again? …Uh…I dunno… Gee… I think I’d have to let some time pass between replays. And it really depends on what you get to carry over and what you don’t. I don’t mind if I don’t carry levels or items over, but I insist on my compendium, etc. etc. Then again I got the only ending worth getting, ‘cos chaos is stupid and law is downright insulting, so I don’t know exactly what I’d be playing for. Short answer, no, I won’t play it again. But it’s not a bad game at all.

Summon Night DS

I’m on a Summon Night roll! Since I liked Summon Night X ~Tears Crown~ so much, I went out and downloaded the remake of the first Summon Night for on the Nintendo DS. I like isometric strategy RPGs anyway, so this was right up my alley. But then I loaded it up and UGH! The character designs are FUGLY! Right from the main character you select, everyone in the game looks like they were drawn by a third-grader! And the battles are slow, you spend half the game walking towards the enemy because they’re standing on the other end of the field and usually won’t move unless you come into their range.

And the story is YYY and the music is XXX and this and that…and before I knew it, 26 hours had gone by and I had finished the game. Just like that. Definitely one of the most painless game progressions I’ve ever experienced in my life. Long before I had time to start getting bored or start wondering where the story was going and who did what, it was over. On one hand, that’s called a shallow, simplistic story, on the other hand after several “deep” storylines in a row, it was a real breath of fresh air. If I had to summarize,

Pros:

– Very easy after the first few battles. Keeping everyone alive is kinda hard in the beginning, after that it gets way easier
– But not too easy: you have to do free battles if you want to keep everyone equipped ‘cos they’re very stingy with money.
– Lots of characters join your party and most of them are pretty useful
– Characters are automatically healed and revived after battle
– “Brave” system rewards you for not being overlevelled by giving you special party abilities.
– Game isn’t too long and isn’t too short. You can finish a first playthrough in 20-30 hours even if you grind.
– Lots of different beasts to summon, some very powerful, some very useful. Experimenting is fun!

Cons

– Fugly character designs. The cover art is a lie!
– Boring, cliched story. The original is over 10 years old, so that explains some things.
– Music is nothing remarkable
– Battles are really slow and take forever to finish.
– Battles are very repetitive, the same thing every single time: kill the boss/kill everyone, game over if your MC dies. Every single story battle, all the time.
– Trying to get new summons using summon stones is a crapshoot, and virtually useless in battle.
– No items to refill MP with makes using summons inconvenient in the first half of the game.
– Too many characters means you’ll be at a loss who to use and who to toss aside in the latter half. I just picked a party and stuck to it, since the game is easy enough.

So anyway, that was actually pretty fun, as far as strategy RPGs go. I was thinking of playing again with a different MC instead of Aya, but maybe I’ll wait a bit before a replay. In the meantime I’m playing Summon Night 2 DS!

Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth

Or, in short, “Quercus Alba is an idiot.” Obviously, endgame spoilers follow. There’s nothing wrong with the Ace Attorney Investigations game itself. Just like all the previous games, the last two cases dragged on tremendously, but the bad guy was gotten in the end and there was much rejoicing. This is much better than Apollo Justice and the third PW game, at any rate. Kay >>> Trucy > Maya, and Agent Lang >> Klavier (especially since you get to put paid to him in a most satisfying manner). And of  course Edgeworth = Phoenix (ooh, it’s a real toss-up) >>>>>>>> Apollo, so it’s all good.

But more than any of the other bosses before him, if this last boss had just kept his head down, stood his ground and DENIED EVERYTHING, he would have walked away a free man. There was no reason for him to cooperate with them at all once they’d caught Shih-na, ‘cos he was in plenty of trouble at that point. Deny, deny, deny, man.

Huh? My plant sticks were used as crossbows? Oh, how horrible, who would do such a thing to my poor flowers? Please find the real killer at once!

Huh? Mask Demasque II? It wasn’t me.

Huh? Loading a pushcart with a body? If someone did that, shouldn’t the suspicion be on the Steel Samurai and his staff? Anyway, it wasn’t me.

Huh? Putting the cart in the reservoir, etc, etc, etc? Shih-na and her mystery accomplice must have done that by themselves, I’m just a weak old man. Anyway, it wasn’t me.

Huh? A knife in my bouquet? Why, so it is! Or the handle, anyway. Please have the florist and my staff investigated at once, or maybe the Steel Samurai snuck it in when I wasn’t looking. Anyway, it wasn’t me.

Huh? Me and Manny in the car together? Okay, you’ve got me, I was there. But that doesn’t mean I knew anything about a so-called smuggling ring or the murder of that poor, poor girl. I was just hitching a ride with Manny to go to the doctor, what with my bad back and all. Anyway, it wasn’t me.

Huh? The fake Primidux statue somehow found its way into my office? What would that have to do with me? I have no motive, and you can’t prove I knew the counterfeit plate was inside. Seeing as Manny was the smuggling boss, maybe he or Ambassador Palaeno did it to make Allebast look bad! Anyway, it wasn’t me.

Huh? “Early Summer Rain Jab”? What can I say, I snuck a peek in the dressing room because I’m such a big fan of the Steel Samurai. Big deal.

Huh? My blood on a box of samurai dogs? Well, you can prove it was my blood, but you can’t prove it got on the box while it was in the dressing room, or that it wasn’t planted there. You say you got this from the Pink Princess? I suggest you investigate her and the Samurai one more time, their timing is especially suspicious. Anyway, it wasn’t me.

Basically you guys have got nothing on me except a bunch of wild guesses and random speculation. You can’t detain me because I’m not going to stick around long enough for you to get my diplomatic immunity revoked. So long, suckers!

Oh, and by the way: It wasn’t me!