Shining Blade – Easily the worst RPG I’ve played this year

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Sol Trigger made me rage and The Last Story had a really weak story (moar liek “The Last Story Left After All The Good Ones Had Been Taken” amirite?), but both games at least had good gameplay going for them. Shining Blade is just crap. Poop. Excrement in game form. It’s the most eloquent way I can put it. I can’t remember the last time I played a game so bright and polished on the outside and so dry and devoid of substance on the inside. Now certainly a game doesn’t need “substance” to be good. It just needs to be fun, and Shining Blade doesn’t even clear that low, low hurdle.

In the interest of fairness, here comes the obligatory “good parts” section. I played for almost 30 hours and I finished it so there must be some in there. So what does Shining Blade have?

1. Good voice acting. It should be “great” given all the famous VAs they used but first, I’ve heard better performances from them and second, it doesn’t matter how nice your voice is if you’ve got nothing worthy to say.

2. Good character designs. A little heavy on the heaving bosoms and breast implants, but apparently this is Tony Taka’s entire raison d’être. His men are covered from top to toe while his women wear negligee in snowstorms because that’s what his audience demands.

3. Nostalgia factor for fans of the older games. Except Shining Hearts fans, who will just be depressed. Each chapter drags out characters from older games like Shining Wind and Shining Tears and Shining [crass comments deleted. My apologies]. Wait, I’m supposed to be talking about the good parts.

Do please go on, this is most interesting →

Stuck in a rut

Can’t go back, don’t want to move forward. It’s my own fault I’m stuck, so don’t feel sorry for me.

Arc Rise Fantasia – I don’t wanna finish it. You can’t make me! Nooo! I’ve finished Verct Skywalk (darned Dynos battle), the game has dropped its final twist, now I just have to finish the last dungeon. Before that, I want to catch Mashgar and Allul, but I can’t get Mashgar! He keeps running away every time I get close. Oh sure, I’ve been lucky to run into him twice (and he mashed me both times) but it’s so frustrating when I try my best to approach from behind and he still bolts. I could save him for the post-game, but by then he’s bound to be too easy. Even Kudoan was kind of a cakewalk. Okay, final decision: Five last attempts at cornering Mashgar. If it works, good. If it doesn’t, it wasn’t meant to be. The end. And I promise not to post about Arc Rise Fantasia again until it’s finished.

Shining Blade – It’s like Zill O’ll Infinite all over again. I’m spending so much time on sidequests and free battles that the game is taking forever to complete. And if you’re even a level or two over the storyline bosses, they’re way too easy. End result: the game is dragging on and I’m not having any fun. At least Zill O’ll had an interesting story to keep me playing. That, and they made me pay dearly for doing quests halfway round the world when I was supposed to be fighting a war. Step out at the wrong time and you’ll return to find the city annihilated. I doubt Shining Blade has the guts to pull something like that, though. In fact I dare Sega to do it. Go on, make my day.

I should quit while I’m ahead, but I won’t. Instead I’ll keep whining about it because that’s what I have a blog for. Nyaah nyaah! But seriously, all joking aside, I need to cut out the quests and focus on finishing this thing. My time is precious and I can think of ten other games I’d rather be playing right now on the PSP alone.

I’m going to finish one of these games this week by hook or by crook.

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 →