Merry Christmas + Early thoughts on Tokyo Xanadu eX+

Merry Christmas everyone! It’s a blessing to be able to make it to another Christmas. I’m not taking anything for granted any more these days. Any year I make it through safe and sound and with all my body parts intact is a good year! I spent today pigging out with family like I always do. It’s actually a bit hard to balance my laptop on my lap with my stomach sticking out like this |))))) but I’ll do my best!

So, early thoughts on Tokyo Xanadu eX+. Really early thoughts, because I’ve only played 5 hours. Finished the first 2 chapters and about to start the second side story. Before I started, I heard the game described as “Persona meets Ys.” I thought it was just a particularly unimaginative reviewer grasping for words, but it turns out to be a really accurate description. It plays like Persona 3 or 4 but with action RPG combat instead. During the day you go to class and make various choices to build social links strengthen bonds and improve your Wisdom, Courage and Virtue, then later in the day you go dungeon crawling with your buddies. Visual novel by day, action battler by night. I haven’t seriously played any of the Ys games, but Tokyo Xanadu plays like what I think Ys should play like when it’s not doing that unplayable bump thingy from Ys DS.

But actually the similarities are mainly limited to the concept and general premise. Instead of looking for stuff to compare the game to (speaking of which, the chapter system reminds me of Tokyo Majin Gakuen) I’m trying and mostly succeeding to appreciate it for its own merits. Such as they are. It’s a bit hard right now because the visual novel sequences are so long and the dungeons are so short that I’m not getting the ARPG fix I was expecting.

And the VN parts are CHEESY. “I want to discover true strength together with you!” “I want to use these powers to defend the people I care about!” I mean yeah, I understand what they’re saying and yeah, they’re all honorable and good thoughts to have, but when you verbalize them like that, it’s just criiiiiingy. And this is just after 2 chapters. By the time we get to the inevitable “Mankind needs no gods!” conclusion I think my eyes will be permanently rolled back in my head ^^;; Just hope there’s a proper explanation for why people around Kousaka are turning out to be Wielders left and right.

(And of course, when developers do make a game with a hero who seriously doesn’t care a.k.a Luminous Arc Infinity, people like me complain anyway so they just can’t win.)

But I like all the characters so far so I don’t mind too much. And they’re all just so nice and forgiving. In the most recent chapter, a character named Aizawa was mean and said some very cruel things to her junior Sora, but by the end it was all swept under the bridge because of the power of friendship. Man, I must have gone to the wrong high school. Back in my day, the Karate club would have broken into the Aizawa faction (“Who does that Sora ***** think she is”) and the Sora faction (“Who does that Aizawa ***** think she is”) and the rift would have continued till graduation. This is where fiction comes in handy, eh?

The combat, what little there is of it, is pretty easy because you can pull up the menu and heal at any time. That said, it took me a long time to get a hang of the controls. In fact I couldn’t play it at all with the keyboard. I had to hook up a controller and remap the controls to stuff I could remember. And even then I still forgot the command to trigger EX skills in the most recent battle and had to beat the boss normally. What was it again…? There’s just so much stuff to remember. X-Drive, EX Skill, Power skill, etc etc. I forget all the commands as soon as I stop play and then I have to relearn them in the next session.

Can’t tell what’s going on? Neither can I.

Right now my parties have low HP and really weak defence, so my go-to strategy is to hang back and hit the enemy with Ranged Attacks. For regular mooks you can just smash through normally but for bosses it’s easiest to learn their attack patterns and dodge and fight from a distance. If the boss throws up a Guard (because the developers are totally on to me) then I have to close in and smash the guard, healing as necessary. Then it’s business as usual.

Easy stuff, and the dungeon gimmicks aren’t too annoying yet so it’s all good. I actually really liked the look and atmosphere of the most recent dungeon, Moonlight Garden. Just wish the dungeons were longer and there were many many many more enemies to defeat, but that will probably improve as the game goes along. If it doesn’t, I’ll have to downgrade the game from “action RPG with VN elements” to “Majin-like harem RPG” and nobody wants that.

I’ll be back to report if anything exciting happens either in Tokyo Xanadu eX+ or Luminous Arc Infinity. Otherwise I’m sneezing a lot today and feeling suspiciously headachy so I’m going to try and rest as much as I can for the rest of the week. Merry Christmas again!

Luminous Arc Infinity – Actually it’s not so bad

I didn’t have any clear goals when I started this blog years ago, but one thing I knew was that I wanted to give every game a fair chance. I didn’t want to either rush through games or play a little bit just to say I’d played them. Sometimes a game just sucks and I have no choice, but I rarely feel good about it. So after dismissing Luminous Arc Infinity after only one hour, I decided I wasn’t being fair to it and decided to give it another chance. Verdict: It’s better than I had initially feared.

That doesn’t mean it’s good, though. It’s just moved from “Bad” to “Mediocre, but playable.” The crazy amount of talking in every single scene is still a huge problem, but I’ve solved it by skipping all the text in everything except story quests. This means I’m missing out on a lot of “immersion” and “world-building” but I hate that stuff anyway so it’s all good. So that decision alone has cut my stress in half.

Now that I’m about 5:30 hours into the game, the tutorials have all but ceased and more battle options are available so there’s more playing and less reading. These isometric RPGs are always a little slow, and at least Luminous Arc Infinity isn’t as bad as the original Luminous Arc or some others I’ve played. But I still crave a fast-forward button because it takes so long for turns to go round and attacks to play out. Pressing buttons helps a bit, but not much.

The interesting things to note about this battle system are:

1. The singing buffs. Aka “Calling” in the game. An idol stands on a spot and sings and everyone in range gets a buff. Another idol can join in for a duet, or even more for a trio, quartet or quintet. It’s good to spend the first turn of the game when all idols are clustered together getting buffed before moving out. Calling also accumulates Voice Points which you can use to trigger EX Arts and EX Attacks.

However, strangely enough, you don’t get any special music or voice sounds when the idol sings. Just the regular battle music. Which… kind of defeats the purpose of having a game about singing idols. I’ve collected 6 idols so far and haven’t heard a single one sing outside the opening sequence. Stella Glow and Shining Blade did much better in that regard.

2. Duo attacks. That means you borrow attacks from allies standing nearby. For example since Aqua is a water mage, she can’t use fire attacks. But if Xiorker is standing next to her, she can borrow a flame attack to strike an enemy who is weak to fire. Duo attacks also build affection between the girls, which does… something. I forget what. But they’re super useful regardless because elemental strengths and weaknesses seem to matter a lot in this game.

3. Brave clear conditions borrowed from the Summon Night series. You get extra items by fulfilling certain conditions. Usually it’s not healing too much, defeating a number of enemies with the idol of the day, that sort of thing. They’re much easier to fulfill than those in Summon Night but the rewards aren’t that great so it doesn’t matter if you do them or not.

4. The main character can’t fight because he’s cursed. What he can do is fondle the girls to give them stat boosts before battle and pop in with all kinds of supports whenever his turn rolls around. So far it’s just a few things like giving them VP, healing, Aura Points, etc but he’s also been learning status attacks like Sleep for the enemies. And his accessories all decrease his wait time, so depending on how things go, Xird could be a formidable ally after he grows a bit.

Lest you forget what kind of game we’re dealing with here.

5. Characters level up normally, but they also get growths through a skill tree. In theory there are 4 kinds of builds: Variety, Pure, Cool and Beauty, which affect what kind of growths and skills you get e.g. more MAG instead of ATK, that kind of thing. In practice I am told it’s best to leave everyone on their default paths so it’s not as exciting as it seems at first.

My characters are averaging level 17 and don’t feel too strong yet, so there’s still plenty of room for Luminous Arc Infinity‘s battle system to blow me away. Right now it’s just adequate, but adequate is good enough for me when it comes to SRPGs. Really, if they just wouldn’t talk and bicker so much and if they would let me fight more than once or twice an hour I would be quite happy.

Does that mean LA: Infinity has been un-dropped? Eh, yeah, I guess. I’m playing this side by side with Tokyo Xanadu eX+ but Tokyo Xanadu is not exciting enough to deserve my full focus so there’s still room in my heart for an SRPG. Unless something better comes along, I guess I’m playing these two games for the rest of the year.

Luminous Arc Infinity – I hate it already

I’ve only played an hour, but I’ve played enough of other games to know the signs so I can tell Luminous Arc Infinity is going to suck. Here are the three main signs:

Too much talking. In that one hour I played, I’ve only fought two battles. And they were tutorial battles too, so almost every step was interrupted by a lecture. The rest of the game is just talking, talking, talking.

The story behind Luminous Arc Infinity is that their world is supported by 9 Idols – young ladies who sing and offer magic up to the magna lapis that holds up the world. A shadowy organization named Amadeus is trying to kidnap the idols for unknown reasons, so after a lengthy LENGTHY discussion, the world powers decide to bring all the idols under one roof so they can be better protected. And the person tasked with doing this is the lazy main character, Xird.

See, that didn’t take a whole hour to explain, did it? So when you see a game that uses a lot of characters and scenes to say something very simple, you know it’s going to suck. Especially if they won’t even let you save during a cutscene.

Stupid touching gimmick. In between chapters you have to fondle and paw at a half-naked idol in order to “tune” her properly. These excuses get more and more inventive every time. If you’re skillful enough, she gets bonuses in the next battle. The fanservice isn’t particularly risque, but the minigame is very pointless because you’re just poking and scratching at various spots in the hope of finding something good. Also I hate touching mini-games.

Too many tutorials. You can’t even save without getting a tutorial on saving and loading. This level of over-the-top hand-holding is extremely boring so after a while I started skipping everything. Which means I’ll have to read a FAQ later to get all the nuances but whatevs. More importantly, the wealth of tutorials makes me suspect that either 1) The game is full of obscure mechanics that you won’t understand even after reading all those tutorials or 2) The game is aimed at an audience that doesn’t usually play video games. For Luminous Arc Infinity it seems to be the latter.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to try to draw in new audiences, but the question is “Draw them in to what?” From what I can see, LA Infinity has a very heavy emphasis on whole “anime j-pop idols” and the gameplay aspect is a distant second to ogling and interacting with cute girls. If this game is not aimed at gamers, then I supsect it won’t try to please gamers. It will just throw more girls and more talking scenes at you. After all, that’s what you came for, right?

Still I could be wrong (unlikely, but possible) and now that the worst of the tutorials are over and the basic story has been established, maybe things will get better. But I won’t be finding out any time soon because I really don’t feel like playing any more of this right now. I haven’t had even the slightest bit of fun in the hour I’ve played, the girls are not that cute and the lazy slacker main character kills my motivation stone dead. You can consider Luminous Arc Infinity dropped until I’m done with the other, better games in my backlog.

Update

I decided that dropping Luminous Arc Infinity after just one hour was being too rash, so I played two more hours. There’s still a ton of talking and I still hate that stupid mini-game, but that battle system is starting to open up. More idols have joined my party and they’ve leveled up a few times and gained some more skills. Battles are a bit sluggish and long-drawn out for my liking but the game isn’t so bad any more.

Oh, oh, and check this out: you don’t get a Game Over if you lose a battle. You just get to try again with all the EXP and Aura Points you’ve gained already XD. It’s like the Egress skill in Shining Force 2, but even more exploitable! If you wanted, you could deliberately one battle over and over again (easy enough because friendly fire is a thing in this game) to learn a ton of skills and gain a lot of stats very early in the game. But I won’t do that… or will I? Heh heh heh. Nah, the game isn’t fun enough or hard enough for that so I’ll just keep playing as normal. Proper update next time!

Finished Demon Gaze. It was good…

…but I liked its predecessors better. Entaku no Seito had bigger dungeons and less fanservice, Stranger of Sword City had better graphics and a more interesting setting. If you’ve played those two, Demon Gaze doesn’t have much to offer except more of the same. Which is great, because I wanted more of the same. It’s just like the way people keep buying Dragon Quest games even though they’re all essentially the same thing. I wanted to kill a lot of stuff and get a lot of loot and that’s what I got to do so I’m happy.

But I probably should have written this post two weeks ago when I killed the last boss. I was happier and more excited then, flush with the thrill of victory or whatever they call it. The reason I delayed was because I wanted to kill the bonus boss in the Black Cage first. I did it yesterday and it proved to be a mistake because:

1. The Black Cage is a boring and annoying dungeon, with all the frustrations of past dungeons condensed into one small, unsatisfying package.

2. The Bonus Boss is a pushover. If you can beat the last boss, you can beat Aries easily. She (he?) comes in at only level 11 with no abilities unless you grind for them, which sounds like a pain because there’s only one dungeon after you get her.

After you beat Aries, she informs you that there’s a true boss out there that you have to beat. Okay, I’m game. Let’s go beat this true boss… who is at the end of a long corridor… with no save points along the way… meaning if I get wiped out I’ll lose least 30 minutes of progress… and if I warp out and come back I have to beat a series of bosses all over again. Riiiiight. I’m game, but I’m not that game.

So that killed my buzz a bit. Or more like a lot. We can argue all day about the merits and demerits of long gaming sequences with no save points, but personally they’re not for me. Especially once I’ve already killed the boss and gotten the “happy” ending. Now I remember why I almost never do post-game content. It’s the rare, rare game that has anything new to offer me while the credits rolls.

Anyway, my thoughts on Demon Gaze after finishing it are exactly the same as my thoughts in my first post on the subject, so you can refer to that. The only thing I’d add is that the game is really easy! Because there are a lot of ways to compensate for bad stats like furniture, demons and equipment bonuses so your characters turn out quite sturdy and fast regardless of what you do. And accurate too!

Yeah, uh, I’ll put that on my to do list.

In some of the other games you can forget about ever connecting if your AGI isn’t high enough. In Demon Gaze even my paladin and my healer could connect against bosses with just one or two casts of Mult-Hit. And they could actually do damage because their weapons were so powerful. It’s… disconcerting, frankly. But it’s good if you’re nervous about building a character wrongly. You can’t really mess up unless you deliberately put all your points into LUC or something. Speaking of which, LUC doesn’t really seem to matter in this game.

Well enough of Demon Gaze. I’ve been too busy to start anything and we’re already a fifth of the way into December. Decembers are usually busy for me but this one looks even busier than usual. I want chocolate! I want to sleep! I don’t wanna go anywhere or do anything, waaahhh! Being an adult sucks. I think the sweet spot in life is between 5-10 years old… you’re still cute enough to be fawned over, you don’t have many responsibilities, puberty hasn’t hit yet, school work is easy and fun, you can still enjoy books and games and movies and cartoons and… you know what, I think I need a nap. See you later!

Ocean Lunch Antique – Same old, but I can’t stop playing

Ocean Lunch Antique is another simulation game from inutoneko, a Japanese indie game I’ve been sort-of following for years. Their games used to be Japanese only, but now you can find their more recent games on Steam with poor but readable translations. Worth a try if you like simple but hopelessly addictive games.

Having said that, I haven’t played most of inutoneko’s games available on Steam because I’m working through the Ishwald games in release order and haven’t gotten that far yet. The only one I’ve played and reviewed is Let’s Eat: Seaside Cafe, a.k.a. Kaiyou Resutoran Uminekotei. I had a blast with that one a few years ago and recommend it as a good starting point for the series. It’s also a prequel of sorts for Ocean Lunch Antique since protagonist Fill (also the protagonist of Haretari Kumottari N) is hired as a weekend cook for the Uminekotei restaurant.

During the week (really one long ‘day’) Fill can hang around doing whatever he wants and then on the weekend he puts whatever he cooked that week on sale for diners to enjoy. In theory, anyway. I read on a FAQ that the easiest way to succeed is to spend the first year doing nothing but researching recipes and shmoozing with adventurers. The more recipes you know, the more Life Points you get and the more stuff you can do. And the more adventurers like you, the more quickly they will join you and help you get high-quality ingredients. Strangely enough, you won’t get fired for not doing a lick of work, probably because the restaurant owner is hopelessly infatuated with Fill.

The main menu, where all the magic happens

But let’s say we want to be honest, upstanding folks. Then the task is simple. Cook stuff, put it on the menu and let people buy it. To cook stuff, you put the required ingredients together, apply a little WP and presto. The nice thing is that the ingredients needed are very flexible. If the recipe calls for dairy products, you can use any kind of milk or cheese. If it’s seafood, you can add shrimp or seaweed or fish, it’s all fine. It just affects the final quality and a few other things.

Where do you get all the ingredients? Why, from the market of course. Specifically it seems to be a professionals chefs-only market where you don’t buy food with cash but rather exchange for them with quality points. A screenshot or two will help explain.

That’s all the ingredients you can buy. The numbers outside the brackets indicate how many points you have. 1 point = 1 product. I have 18635 points for wheat, so I can buy 18,635 wheat products. The number in the brackets show the quality of the products I can trade for. The higher that number, the better the quality of stuff I can get. Let’s take a closer look:

Here I have 12824 points worth of milk products at a quality of 6.45, so I can trade for everything from Level 1 Low-quality Milk to Level 6 Specially Selected High-Class Milk. Initially, as I said, you can use any kind of milk in most recipes, but the more advanced your recipes get, the more particular they get about ingredients.

There are also a few items like chocolate, oil and curry powder you can’t get through the market, but there are a few other ways to get stuff:

•Buy them from local shopkeepers
•Buy them from other characters like Tico and Shiva at a markup
•Have adventurers randomly find them in treasure chests. Usually they bring back ingredient points only, but once in a while you get lucky.
•Forage them yourself
•Grow them in your backyard garden
•Beat monsters for them. There’s no combat in this game btw
•Make them in the restaurant’s all-purpose processor which brews, refines, presses and does all kinds of miraculous things. You can press flowers into oil, turn honey into better honey, rice into alcohol, milk into cheese. Almost every ingredient can be processed, though a large number of them will either turn into inferior products or just plain garbage. Which you can add to your dishes as an ingredient. Sshh, not a word to the health inspectors!

So what’s the goal of all this cooking and foraging? First it was for Fill to save £1,000,000 in cash. As you can see from the screenshot, I’ve achieved that handily. Even with Eve taking a cut of sale for “management fees,” almost everything you cook is popular and profitable. Eve claims it’s because she’s already done all the work to make Uminekotei successful, and I can’t really argue since I did all that work back then.

This overwhelming popularity is actually a bit of a bad thing, because it means I can ignore many of the game’s restaurant management features and do whatever you want and still come out ahead. For example, in theory you’re supposed to pay attention to restaurant furnishings and interior decorations. Those things give Uminekotei a certain style which affects which customers come and how well dishes sell. But I didn’t bother for half the game and still made money.

Sold out at 12pm

There are other things you can do like sell dishes as a set combo, e.g. a burger and fries and drinks. This should make you more money by moving more product faster, but in practice every dish is sold out by 2pm every day, so the extra boost is unncessary. Same goes for special plans like All-you-can-Drink or All-you-can-eat Desserts, special summer and winter attractions, etc. If I get plan/event tickets for free I’ll use them, but I’m successful enough without them.

So anyway, I’ve achieved my first goal and Fill is now filthy rich just from cooking a few dishes on the weekends. The next goal, which will be my last regardless of what else the game throws at me, is to make 350 out of the 500 recipes in the game. I saw a screenshot from a gamer who had achieved all 500, but some people are just crazy so we won’t go there. The trickle of recipes is already slowing down this far into the game so I have to work harder to buy recipe tickets with WP or win them through cooking contests. You get a balance sheet at the end of every season showing how much you’ve earned and learned.

This is an old screenshot. Right now I’m up to301/500. Just a little more and I’ll be done.

Thoughts on Ocean Lunch Antique

I like it. A lot. It’s simple, low pressure and hard to mess up permanently. With that ridiculous amount of ingredient points, I never have to worry about running out of resources. (Except water. I’m always running out of water) You can even set cooking to automatic so you don’t have to. My long held desire to see pictures of the stuff I’m making has finally been realized, which motivates me to keep making new recipes. And 500 recipes to discover and make is huge, there’s no way I’ll be complaining about not making enough stuff when I’m done.

The Ishwald games are as much about characters as they are about simulation. Every game features some minor character progression or development, but it really is minor between games so not much has changed between Ocean Lunch Antique and Moonlight Basket, the previous game. Shio is slowly realizing she likes Fill as more than a friend, Eve is slowly getting the point that Fill doesn’t like her, Sophia is starting to realize the Helsinki does like her.

The character art has also improved dramatically since the early days.

Ite/Otto and Eve still seem to dislike each other intensely despite being childhood friends. And it’s not the usually tsundere girl/clueless guy dynamic in anime and manga. These two really don’t want anything to do with each other so I have no idea how they supposedly got married in recent games. There’s also a movement underfoot to make Tico a little more pleasant and personable even to Ruvel, but I’m not falling for it. Oh, and Shiva has given up gambling. Heck, everyone in the game has given it up so they no longer drop by your house unexpectedly to challenge you to mini-games. I miss that, a bit. Just a bit.

Apart from the little story progress and the few tweaks to the production system, Ocean Lunch Antique doesn’t offer much new stuff compared to previous games. If you loved the earlier stuff (like I did) then you’ll love this one too (like I do). But since it’s more of the same, I got over it much quicker than I did some of the others, which is another good thing. Just a few more sessions to rack up that recipe count and I’ll be free!

Free to do what? I’m done with Demon Gaze (more on that next time). According to my schedule I should be giving DQVII another chance and then tackling Lord of Arcana seriously. But what I really want is to play an SRPG so Luminous Arc or Sakura Taisen 4, here I come!