Nothing to report

I haven’t started anything new, and I haven’t played much of the few games I’m currently working on. Unless you want a long post filled with Ring Dream, Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsuji mura and Candy Crush Soda updates, that is. I’m guessing you don’t.

I said last time that I would write about Littlewitch Parfait this time, so in preparation for that post I actually started reading all those long, pointless conversations the characters kept having and you know, it’s not so boring after all. I mean it’s still completely useless as an alchemy/shop management simulation, but it’s a pretty passable “cute girls doing cute stuff” game. Plus I’m on the verge of hooking Parfait up with the reasonably good-looking prince of the kingdom so I’m getting my otome game fix on at the same time.

In other news, I’m slowly beginning to understand why mobile games took over Japan so easily. On my part at least, a lot of it has to do with physical and mental inertia. Before you pick up a controller or a handheld you have to switch into gaming mode and get a certain “Okay I’m going to drop everything and play some video games now” mindset going on. With a smartphone on the other hand, you’re just checking your emails, making a few calls, then you slide easily into a gaming app or two and back out again without having to think about it too much. Less mode switching, more game playing.

The only catch is I haven’t found any non-crappy mobile RPGs yet (I haven’t really looked, to be honest) but the same principle applies to browser games. Just tab into a game, fight a few battles, water a few plants and get back to work. I complained before about having to wait hours to play a few minutes of a browser game, but when you’re busy working it’s not like you’re just sitting around waiting for that stamina bar to fill. You’re getting your work done and getting a little game on the side, versus interrupting your work for a gaming break which is a lot harder to justify. Unfortunately the catch again is I haven’t found any satisfying browser RPGs. I’m 100% sure they don’t exist because the freemium gaming model doesn’t exactly encourage gamer satisfaction. In fact I’m not even going to bother to look.

If you’re wondering what the point of all this is, it’s all just to say I’m really busy these days and every time I think I can carve out a chunk of time for some serious gaming, something or someone always crops up. So if I don’t post as often as I used to it’s because I’m busy playing Ring Dream, Hitsuji mura and Candy Crush Soda instead. So there.

P.S. But we’re still on for 7th Dragon III later this year. My body is ready.

Ring ☆ Dream – Do you like busty women?

Don’t bother answering. Success has already decided that you do, that’s why they’ve made Ring ☆ Dream, a game full of scantily-clad “pro-wrestling” ladies for your viewing pleasure:

Ring ☆ Dream was the surprise hit of the whole Hangame x Success campaign for me (a long defunct campaign where you could earn virtual rewards for trying certain Japanese browser games). I really wasn’t expecting to enjoy a game about collecting pictures of scantily-clad anime girls, but now I find myself playing it every day. The reasons are simple and many:

1. Bright happy colors! Especially after the darkness of Pazuruka and the dullness of Eiyuu Chronicle, it’s a breath of fresh air.

2. Very, very simple gameplay. Walk around town, collect powerful cards, fuse them together and sic them on a variety of AI and human enemies. There aren’t many distractions, there aren’t any intricate leveling techniques and the tutorial takes all of 5 minutes to complete before you’re set free to roam.

3. Wrestling matches versus the AI don’t take any skills or smarts. It’s a pure numbers game, all about how good your deck is. Okay, there’s some luck involved in the boss battle roulette, but that’s about it. It makes things easy because the game usually gives you a choice of enemies to fight with their HP displayed up front. That way you can look at your own numbers, look at theirs and decide what to do. Like in the screenshot below…

…my combined deck power of 786,046 means I can do a minimum of 786,046 HP damage to an enemy. In other words I can beat those lovely 150,000 HP lasses with both hands tied behind my back. But since they’re so weak they’re hardly worth my time, so I chose not to fight them.

4. Player-versus-player battles are also mainly about luck and good decks. You can’t strategize, after all, because you aren’t given any information about your opponent in advance. The only general guideline is that players above your level have usually been playing longer than you have/spending more money than you have –> they probably have better decks –> it’s a good idea to pay 5 stamina points to roll a different enemy. The only time strategy comes into play is when you fight PC characters masquerading as PVP, since they respawn frequently and always use the same deck. Even then it’s just a matter of having a better deck, the end.

tl;dr Ring ☆ Dream is a very simple game of numbers and levels, which is just the way I like it.

5. Junk cards don’t look quite so junky. I mean it’s clear from the start that anything under Super Rare is just fodder for strengthening your main deck, but they’re still nicely designed AND the mook card characters regularly show up in skits or moonlight as sub-bosses so they actually have personalities. TBH I’ve been skipping 90% of the story because they talk too much, but it’s nice to know all the cards have a story behind them.

6. The first 20 levels really draw you in because there’s no stamina cost at all. You can play and play and play and play as long as you want… until you hit level 20 and then suddenly stamina points take 3 minutes each to refill. If you don’t know it’s coming it’s like Whoa, what happened?! The nice thing about Ring ☆ Dream, though, is that you get to decide how to allocate your bonus points every time you level up. Put enough points into stamina (my ideal is 160) and you can ignore the game for up to 8 hours at a time without feeling like you’re missing out on EXP, perfect for busy gamers like me.

I actually like the range of skin colors and body types in the game.

I rather like the range of skin colors and body types in the game.

7. The game is very generous with the paid gacha (Japanese term for valuable in-game items, can’t think of a good English equivalent), giving out free gacha tickets almost every day. I haven’t spent a cent so far, but I’ve still managed to get some really good cards from gacha spins and login bonuses. You don’t the same sense as you do from other games (*cough* Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsujimura *cough*) that you might as well not bother unless you’re a paying customer.

8. You also get a lot of money and “friendship points” through events so you can actually level any super powerful cards you get. It’s not grindy like Pazuruka where it can take hours to earn enough money and cards to nudge up one card a tiny little notch. Here you can level them up a lot and they actually feel like they’re getting stronger with every level because the numbers are on plain display.

In short Ring ☆ Dream looks nice, is easy and satisfying to play and doesn’t make too many demands on my time so I don’t feel under any pressure to play/not play depending on how I feel. The fanservice isn’t as bad as I’d expected going in either. I’d say like 50% of the outfits are just normal bikinis, 40% are a little risque and the last 10 are… well, just look at this:

Just glue some tennis balls to your chest, spray-paint some “clothes” on and presto!

Part of me thinks the game would be just as good with less emphasis on cleavage, another part of me realizes it’s a game about professional wrestling and these aren’t too different from the outfits female pro wrestlers sorta-wear so…yeah. Kinda comes with the territory. I wouldn’t complain about all the water in a sailing game, would I? At least I think I wouldn’t. Actually I’m just nitpicking to find something to complain about so I’ll seem all objective and stuff. Mission accomplished!

And with that my attempt at all 4 Hangame x Success collaboration games is complete. 3 of them sucked, 1 of them was good and that’s fine because I don’t have the time to play more than one or two browser games at a time. In more regular gaming news, I think I’m almost done with Littlewitch Parfait, so I’ll probably do a quick roundup on that next time. I also got the 3DS back over the weekend and almost started Rune Factory 4 but decided to get some sleep instead. The story of my gaming life these days…

Disappointed in Eiyuu RPG

Yes, I did say I would try Ring * Dream next, and I did just that. I ended up liking it quite a bit so I’ll probably play it on and off from now on. There’ll be plenty of time to post about it even after the Hangame x Success event is over, so there’s no need to rush. Instead I’ll focus on the last game in the event, Eiyuu RPG – Seiiki no Boukensha (Adventurers of the Sacred Land). This shouldn’t take long, because I dropped it quickly.

I was all set to like Eiyuu RPG too, since it was marketed as a dungeon crawler, and I love dungeon crawlers. It’s also a shinier, more polished, simplified and updated version of Eiyuu Chronicle, and heaven knows that game needed updating. What I’m happiest about is that they actually used a proper font for the menus now instead of going with the Japanese equivalent of Arial/Times New Roman. A good font adds a lot. Now the main screen looks like this:

And your character sheet looks like this:

Fewer stats, bigger letters, easier to understand all around. There’s still a lot you can do with your character by way of recreation, reclassing, skill point distribution and so on, but now you at least understand what you’re trying to do.

In short Eiyuu RPG looks snazzier and is much easier to understand than Eiyuu Chronicle. The question now is, does it play better? Or more to the point: does it play at all? Clunky as it was, Chronicle did at least let you fight all those SRPG battles yourself. Eiyuu RPG just makes you sit back and watch as your adventurers go out exploring/fighting/treasure-hunting. It’s much like how Ore ni Hatarake or FFCC: My Life as a King play out where your focus is on training and equipping adventurers rather than on battling yourself. Except those games were honest enough not to market themselves as “dungeon RPGs.” I feel silly that I was ever excited about this game.

Look but don’t touch!

It’s not like that kind of game is bad or anything, but if I’m going to waste time waiting for a browser game to load, waiting for dungeons to load, waiting for stamina bars to fill up, tweaking stats, buying potions and weapons and armors and skills and all the other little annoyances involved in a free-to-play game then I want a proper satisfying experience, not just “You beat some trolls in a cave, the end” kind of messages.

I’m not going to tell Success what kind of game they should or shouldn’t create, but I do know the kind of game I will or won’t spend my time on. Dungeon crawler, yes. Dungeon-looker, no. I didn’t even bother giving it a chance, I just finished the tutorial and hightailed it out of there. Waste of time. Neeeext!

Eiyuu Chronicle – Too slow, too cluttered

The second game I tried for the Hangames challenge I mentioned in my last post. Eiyuu Chronicle is an online SRPG that has you join one of five factions fighting a holy war on a certain continent. The aim is presumably to defeat the other countries and take over the world (I’m guessing. I skipped most of the story) so you regularly attack and try to take over the bases of other countries. The results are updated in real time so you can see the negligible effect you’re having on the war effort as you go.

Eiyuu Chronicle has been around for 4 years and is probably Success’s oldest browser game, which should explain why the interface and graphics lack the shine and polish of more recent games. Here, take a look at the battlefield:

Not a game you play for the graphics, that’s for sure. But that goes for SRPGs in general. And it looks better than a certain SRPG I played three times in a row that will not be named, so the look of the game isn’t a deterrent. It’s all about how it plays. Sadly, however, Eiyuu Chronicle was just too slow for me. It’s probably my fault for having a slow internet connection. First it takes 3-4 minutes for one battle to load up, then there’s a lag of several seconds every time I want to execute even the simplest attack. There’s just too much sitting around staring at the screen for me to enjoy this.

I’m not upset though, ‘cos I was only in it for the event rewards anyway. To get the reward for Eiyuu Chronicle, I had to get through the game prologue and then do the tutorial quests, all seventeen (17!) of them. It took me like 3 days to get through them all because they were just so boring and there was just so much text! Blah blah, thank for you joining, blah blah blah… then 6 pages later “Now I’m going to teach you how to hire a mercenary” blah blah.

Then they show you how to do something basic in the game and you do it to clear the quest. 17 times in a row you have to do stuff like changing your profile picture and buying a potion in a shop just to prove you know how to do it. If it wasn’t for the event I would have quit 5 minutes into the game. That said, those quests do serve a purpose in helping you make your way around the game, because the main screen is just so cluttered.

I had to take three screenshots and join them together to give you the full picture. I can barely see anything written there, and that’s at full size. It’s probably meant for people with really big screens and really good eyes, neither of which apply to me. The busyness and clutteredness extends to other parts of the game like the character status screen:

I don’t even know where to start looking at that. It’s a micromanager’s dream but a nightmare for those of us who play SRPGs because we just want to kill stuff with our friends. Now the tutorial is finally over and I’ve qualified for the reward, I don’t think I’ll be playing this game again. On to the next game, Ring * Dream!

Makai no Pazuruka impressions

Hangames is a Japanese company that hosts browser games.
One of the games they host is Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsuji Mura.
I’m a regular player of said Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsuji Mura.
The company that makes Hitsuji Mura for Hangames to host is called Success.
Success has 4 other games hosted by Hangames.
Right now Success and Hangames are holding an event where you get rewards for playing all 4 games.
I want the reward for Hitsuji Mura, so I’m playing those games.
The first game I tried is called Makai no Pazuruka.

Is that enough backstory for you? Then let’s get on with it. Makai no Pazuruka is a match-3 card battling game. You collect powerful cards and use them in action against dungeon monsters and other players. There’s no story so you just dive right in and fight anything that’s available. “Combat” looks like this:

The pieces on the right side of the chain are your pieces, those on the left are the opponent’s. Match a piece with a sword icon on it with two or more other pieces of the same color to launch an attack. Match three shield pieces to remove all sword icons from the enemy’s pieces. Pieces matched also fill up the karma gauge of monsters with the same element (blue pieces -> water, red -> fire, etc) even if they don’t contain the sword icon. When the karma gauge builds up high enough, the card monster can use a special attack, complete with a special CG like so:

Battles versus regular enemies give you three moves for every move the enemy makes. Against bosses it’s 1-1. If you’re lucky enough and one of your moves leads to a chain of 5 or more matches, you get the “fever” status that lets you move one more time. That means you need a combination of really good cards, a moderate amount of skill at the match-3 game and a good amount of luck to get far in this game. Otherwise even the best deck in the world can’t save you if you don’t even get a turn because your enemy keeps triggering fever mode. That’s only happened to me once since I started two days ago, but it’s going to be something to watch out for as the stages get tougher, especially in player-versus-player situations.

Not that I have to worry about any of that, because I doubt I’ll be playing much Pazuruka once the collaboration event is over. Although I’m fond of match-3 games due to the influence of Candy Crush, matches in this game rarely last more than one or two moves per round with only 2-3 rounds per match. It usually takes longer for a puzzle to load than it does to play it.

Even worse, the AP cost for each battle is so high and your overall AP pool is so low that you’ll only be battling two or three times per login session. At level 27, my max AP is 29 but I need 11 AP per dive into a main dungeon. So I log in, “fight” two main battles, do one super-easy monster dungeon for 6 AP then that’s it for the next 3 hours. It takes 6 minutes for just 1 AP to refill so it’s not worth sitting around waiting either. It’s really unsatisfying all around.

Also I’m not really an expert on card battlers or anything – this is actually my first one – but I can tell just at a glance that any card less than an SR is just junk and filler, created only to be fed to your SR cards to power them up. There are a few problems with this. First, your rewards for dungeon-diving are usually N and N+ cards, i.e. rubbish you don’t really want. Secondly, while you do get money from the dungeons, the amount is so paltry and the cost for fusing is so high that the whole thing turns into a grind. You can see from the screenshot below that it’s going to take half my existing funds just to power up my card once. Fight, fight, fight, save, save, save, power up your cards once or twice and then start again from scratch.

The third problem is that SR cards don’t seem very easy to get.You either take part in events, which I have no intention of doing, or you pay for “gacha” which is a lottery where you give Success/Hangames money in exchange for the chance to get a rare card. I don’t know about Pazuruka, but I hear the chances of getting rare cards in other games can be as low as 3%. Dunno about you, but I’d rather spend that money on a physical game instead. Or heck, just a nice meal and a drink to go with it, then at least I know where the money went.

Plus even if you do get a rare card, these games are set up so your best cards quickly become obsolete and you keep having to get the latest and shiniest ones just to stay competitive. You can’t win. Not that this would deter me if I were actually determined to play the game, mind you. There’s plenty of fun to be had in seeing how far you can get without paying in a “free-to-play” game. In Pazuruka‘s case, though, the gameplay isn’t satisfying enough and the cards aren’t pretty enough or plentiful enough to hold my attention. Once this event ends, I am outta here. Time to try the next game, Eiyuu Chronicle!

« Previous
1
…
57
58
59
60
61
…
159
Next »

My RPG Blog

RPGs, SRPGs and otome games

Nothing to report

Ring ☆ Dream – Do you like busty women?

Disappointed in Eiyuu RPG

Eiyuu Chronicle – Too slow, too cluttered

Makai no Pazuruka impressions