Shining Blade – Confusing for Shining Hearts fans (spoilers)

shining blade frontIt’s a bit of a stretch to call myself a Shining Hearts fan after all the things I said about it, but I didn’t exactly hate the game either. The bread-baking gimmick was great, so much so that I was inspired to bake my own. The result was more b-r-i-c-k than b-r-e-a-d, but the process was fun and the texture was…original. :-p

I also liked the battle system a lot. There were plenty of good ideas in there, enough to populate three or four JRPGs. It’s just that the enemies were too weak to force you to take advantage of the system. Shining Blade suffers from a similar problem, although the combat here is 100% different. It’s got this turn-based action (or is it action turn-based?) strategy combat thing going on. Sounds like a contradiction in terms but Sega does their best to make the system work. Short of giving it anyone worth to work against, that is. But that’s a discussion for a different day. Besides, it’s early days yet. I took some screenshots and have been playing for almost 15 hours, so I can explain if anyone’s interested.

Today, though, I want to try and puzzle out the story behind Shining Blade as it relates to Shining Hearts. It seems clear enough that Blade is a prequel that will eventually explain how Rick came to wash up on the island with amnesia in Shining Hearts. This is why neither Rick nor Neris ever regain their memories in that game, because that would spoil the plot of the prequel. The only thing that suggests that Hearts might have come first is the size of Shin, the little elf girl, and with the differences in character model, she could very well be the same age in both games.

The things that are confusing me – and that may become clear as I continue – are the following:

Do please go on, this is most interesting →

Aargh Rise Fantasia – Final Push!

-ryfia-cecille-adele-leslie-hd-wallpaperThe world is in danger. There’s an evil continent on the rise. Only L’Arc can save mankind! And he will, because he’s the hero. But first, he’s got to feed these puppies…

And chase these choirboys, and bug these maids for their autographs, and all the other hundred little tasks a hero can only do when the world is on the verge of destruction.

Of course no one’s forcing me to do any of these things, but I can’t help but marvel at the timing. I went for long stretches of Arc Rise Fantasia without a single sidequest appearing and then suddenly twenty at once when the world needs me most.

I’ve done most of them now anyway. Fed all the puppies, harassed all the maids, delivered all the stupid packages, upgraded my lightship. Now I’m chasing down a flying griffon thingy in the sky for the EXP and WP. It’s a Rogress, so it’ll probably be added to my collection afterwards, but the Rogress gauge fills so slowly and is so limited that I don’t expect to get much use out of it.  So why am I still doing it? Because for all its many, many flaws, I quite like Arc Rise Fantasia and I’m not ready to say goodbye just yet. It’s not a game I’m likely to replay (in fact I almost never replay RPGs) so I’m going to milk it to the last drop.

There should be only one or two dungeons left after I finish fighting Marshmallow. He gave me a good walloping just now, but that’s because I went in with my ‘B’ team (Ryfia, Leslie, Serge) instead of my ‘A’ team (Rastan, Cecille, L’Arc). I’ll probably use a L’Arc/Ryfia/Rastan combo for this fight because he likes to spam magical attacks. Once he’s in the bag I’ll see about hunting down Kudoan and Allul before the end.

Story-wise I don’t expect any more twists or reveals, another reason why I’m not in an hurry to finish. It’s mostly cleaning up lose ends and killing people I should have killed a long, long time ago. Speaking of which, around the 50-hour mark the writers suddenly declared “This story isn’t emotional enough!” and killed off two characters just for excrement and guffaws. What might have been moving events in the hands of a more skillful craftsman was, as usual, ruined by stiff dialogue, melodramatic overacting and the terrible, terrible voice-acting. It didn’t help that those characters hadn’t been seen in a while and clearly showed up only to die.

No matter, we can discuss these issues further once I’m done. I think I’ve done enough blogging about this game, now it’s time to finish and round everything up so I can move on.

Tokyo Mono Hara Shi – Not ‘too niche’, just ‘too boring’.

tokyo mono hara shi_frontTokyo Mono Hara Shi: Karasu no Mori Gakuen Kitan, to give its full name, is a spin-off of the Tokyo Majin Gakuen series. I’d never even heard of Tokyo Majin before I tried this, and apparently none of the games in the series have been released in  the west. This despite the fact that they contain many of the same elements that made Atlus’s Persona games so popular: high school kids, relationship building, occult happenings and dungeon crawling. If Tokyo Mono Hara Shi is any indication, the reason this series has stayed in Japan might be because it’s far too dull, slow, wordy and ultimately unrewarding for the average gamer.

Dungeon crawling (i.e. the good bits)

Wikipedia describes Tokyo Mono Hara Shi as “a combination of visual novel and dungeon crawler.” Any time a game has “visual novel” anywhere in its description, that means 95% visual novel and 5% whatever the other thing is. If the ratio was any less, it would just be a normal RPG, yes? Good. So I knew what I was getting into.

Do please go on, this is most interesting →

Duel Love – Koisuru Otome wa Chotto Kimochiwarui

Duel_Love_cover_artIt’s 3 a.m. Do you know where your daughter is? If you live in the world of Duel Love, she’s in some basement somewhere pawing at a naked, sweaty guy. Don’t blame her; blame yourself and your complete lack of parental supervision.

Failed parenting aside, Duel Love is way more fun than I’d expected when I picked it up. It fit all the things I like in an otome game: dialogue-based progression, some amount of gameplay in the form of mini-games, affection-based, not flag-based, an easy way to check affection, the art is a bit iffy but manageable and I found at least one person (Nagao-kun!) to pursue. I just got his ending, and it only took me 3 hours and 45 minutes.

The “Duel” part of the title refers to a school-sanctioned martial arts tournament that takes place in the school the MC just transferred into. After watching one match, MC barges her way into the locker room and insists on rubbing her hands all over him helping the fighter cool down. If she hangs out with the same guy long enough, one thing leads to another and she ends up barefoot and pregnant as his second, helping him train so he can win the tournament.

Do please go on, this is most interesting →

Unchainblades EXXiV – Pretty good all around

UnchainBlades Exxiv74 hours and 49 minutes there-ish. Got the Hilda ending, which was kinda meh. Ryuga x Dianne = One True Pairing. I’ll have to be more careful next time I play this kind of game.

Story: Silly people wasting their once-in-a-lifetime wishes on very silly things. The goddess Clunea has been sealed, and wishes help to revive her. Also – stop me if you’ve heard this before – there’s a sealed evil guy who wants to take over the world. Unchainblades EXXiV‘s story gets one bonus point for allowing us take the fight to him instead of letting him succeed like we usually do. That 1 bonus point gives it a whopping score of 3/10.

Why so low? I’d like to avoid spoiling too much, but 1) 80% of the game is spent helping morons fulfill idiotic wishes. 2) Far too much time is wasted on shoehorning romantic dialogue and events in where they don’t fit. The one character who does have romantic chemistry with the main character has no story relevance. 3) The bad guys are a joke. Zero menace, zero seriousness and zero loyalty to their cause. Once you defeat them, they join you so fast it’ll make your head spin. They shouldn’t even have been in the game. 4) “The bonds we have made will allow us to fight evil if we work together!” Shut up.

Do please go on, this is most interesting →