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 →

65 hours into UnchainBlades EXXiV + Arc Rise Fantasia update

ubexxiv sophiaI’m trying to play both games slowly to avoid burnout, but it’s not really working. I’m not very good at this fancy new-age “self-control” stuff. So I thought, if moderation won’t work then it’s time to go the other route: play the hell out of both games. That I can do nicely.

UnchainBlades EXXiV: 65 hours, on the second floor of the Abyss Gate, the very final dungeon. My party is around level 45, all burst levels and most passives unlocked. I’m actually running out of stuff to unlock when I level up. The difficulty has risen quite a bit since I haven’t upgraded my armor in a while. I’m not in a hurry to upgrade either, because the higher difficulty suits me just fine. Plus if anyone’s going to die it’s usually Hilda, and she has an awesome passive skill that fills everyone’s burst gauge when she’s KO’ed, so I don’t shed many tears when she croaks.

As for the story, such as it is, well… I probably haven’t mentioned this before, but I don’t think dungeon crawlers need a story. If they must have one, it should be short and simple and told as early as possible so the player can get down to business. Dungeon crawlers are usually lengthy, energy-sapping and time-consuming affairs. I don’t need to deal with Bible story rip-offs and daddies who want to take over the world by impregnating their daughters and– wait, that was a spoiler, wasn’t it? Whatever, it’s not like the game is coming to the west.

Final push this week, then final roundup when it’s all over.

Arc Rise Fantasia: Forgot the hour count, but I lost yet another Rogress to Alf, then I delivered the peace treaty and now I’m fighting a hoard of zombie soldiers in Batrachi-thingy. I’d still be playing now, but I realized I only had 18 High Liquids to my name and I need at least 5 times that number to feel comfortable. I’m also kind of worried because they haven’t let me buy any new armor in a while. These chaps are really starting to reek.

Niko left my party, but he hasn’t betrayed me yet. Maybe he really was running away because he was scared? Poor thing. Come back, Niko, all is forgiven!

The story is okay, hasn’t really changed much. I ran into a bit of trouble when Prince Weiss made his big reveal: I rolled my eyes so far back into my head they got stuck! Okay, not really. But mentally, they’re still stuck. I mean, this has crossed the territory of cliche and is heading straight into parody. Are they even serious?

One thing I do like, though, is L’Arc’s attitude towards the whole gods and saving the world thing. He’s actually making efforts to think and decide for himself which path is the right one. He could stand to do a little less moping and spacing out, but his heart is in the right place. There are waaaaaay too many RPG heroes out there going “I fight for what’s right! And I know it’s right because this bimbo I met 5 seconds ago said so!”

Right, that’s enough for the update. See you next time I actually finish something.

After 45 hours of UnchainBlades EXXiV (spoilers)

I'm sorry Dianne, please stop crying.

I’m sorry Dianne, please stop crying.

I had a nice stretch of free time this week and basically marathoned my way through UnchainBlades EXXiV. I’m on the 5th dungeon, a nice beautiful sunny change from all the underground doom and gloom. I’m a little sad though, because they added some anime harem pick-a-girl crap after chapter 4, and I went and picked the wrong girl! Not only the wrong girl, but the worst girl of all – the tsundere. At least I made a save right before the choice, so I can go back some day and get Dianne’s ending.

Anything that has changed in the past 25 hours:

– I remembered the main guy’s name: Ryuga. I’m probably going to forget it again 5 minutes after I finish the game. Now I know why companies use funny names like Squall and Raguna and Crono.

– The whale dungeon really is a lovely place. I’d love to have a picnic or something there, sipping tea with one hand, looking out over the ocean, fending off monsters with my other hand…

– Scrap what I said about people not making stupid wishes in this game. They’re almost as bad as those in the previous game. We have a kid that uses the wish to cure his toothache, and yet another brother-sister pair who waste their wishes on cancelling each other’s out. It’s only now, after 45 hours of fluff and nonsense, that we’re getting to the meat of the story. Obvious padding is obvious.

– What’s even worse is that this time the main character has a very important reason for making a wish. Yes, he finally came out and told us what the curse was about. As soon as he turns into an adult, he’s going to go crazy and destroy all kinds of stuff and then die very quickly after that. The other two main characters also have fairly serious circumstances to deal with, so it’s highly unbelievable how they keep giving their wishes away to idiots who they know are just going to waste them. It was forgivable in UnchainBlades Rexx, but now it’s just stupid.

– Special sidequest options known as “Bond quests” that supposedly foster inter-team spirit. Or something worthless like that. The quests aren’t hard to complete, but all they do is unlock relatively useless skills on the Skill Map. Obvious afterthought is obvious.

– Using different designers for each character worked out okay in Rexx. I probably wouldn’t even have known if I hadn’t been told. But this time it’s really easy to see – and hard to look at. What a mess. Jeeq and Mint might as well be from different games, and Sophia looks really weird from the side while no one else has that problem, etc etc:

exxiv incongruous sophia funny face

– Game difficulty hasn’t fallen off the cliff yet, but it’s teetering dangerously close to the edge. Ever since I got all three parties together in dungeon and unlocked the second/third Burst Levels for most characters, most battles have been mere formalities. The Nahash dungeon bosses were the weakest I’ve faced in either game. But then I barged into a room with a Special Follower and Holy— ABORT! ABORT! ABORT! I’ll be back though. With an axe.

– I can’t remember whether the previous game had them or not, but UnchainBlades EXXiV has an option for combo burst attacks that give you 2x EXP for finishing a battle with them. Guess what I always finish boss battles with now? 😀 It’s kind of cheating really… or it would be cheating if the bosses weren’t so stingy with the EXP. What is it with developers designing something awesome, then expecting gamers to use it and therefore nerfing the awesome option to compensate? It seems illogical, but maybe that’s just me.

In general my overall impression so far is that EXXiV is a slightly improved Rexx. Slightly easier, a lot more user-friendly, but with a worse story (because they actually added a story this time) and slightly worse characters. There’s not much to choose between the two, but Rexx gets the slight edge because of the freshness factor. EXXiV is very been-there-done-that. I’ll save any other complaints for when I actually finish the game, which shouldn’t be long now at the rate I’m going.

20 hours into UnchainBlades EXXiV

unchainblades-exxiv_frontCleared the first two Titans (Hilda plus main character guy whose name I don’t remember), just reactivated the core in Arctus with Sophie. UnchainBlades EXXiV is not a particularly impressive game and not much has happened so far, so I’m not really motivated to write much about it. I’ll just jot down a few notes about this game in comparison with UnchainBlades Rexx, a.k.a Unchained Blades.

  • The main character is the most forgettable guy I have ever encountered. I’m not trying to be cute, I genuinely can’t remember his name, and I only saw him 10 hours ago.
  • Most likely he has so little presence because he refuses to tell us what his problem is. He wants to remove a curse. Okay. What curse? What does it do? Why does it need to be removed? He can keep his little secrets if he wants, but then he can’t expect me to support him or take an interest in his affairs.
  • Alchemy has been vastly improved. Excavation points offer up more goodies, the alchemist fails less often, the storeroom is available very early on and you can unlock and actually make a lot of the weapons and armor fairly quickly. Great changes.
  • Each party starts out with the capacity to hold 30 unchained monsters. Awesome.
  • I don’t know how to feel about the consumable charisma bars. They’re okay, I guess.
  • I don’t like what they did with unchaining. It’s too easy to stop the moving bits at the right moment (should have taken a screenshot but nvm). Even worse, you know right at the start whether you can unchain an enemy or not, so some battles feel like wastes of time. I liked having a 0.0001% chance of unchaining random strong enemies just by tapping it enough times with my weakest party member.
  • The cast is good in general. There are no truly repulsive characters like the golem prince in Rexx, and the characters’ wishes are slightly less frivolous than in the previous game.
  • Either I’m more used to dungeon crawlers now or Exxiv is much easier than Rexx, I can’t decide which. Let’s say it’s both.
  • Either I’ve gotten the hang of monster conversations or they’ve gotten more reasonable, because I manage to make them happy about 80% of the time. Actually paying attention to their personalities helps a lot.
  • Judgment battles are easier and less frequent. GOOD.

The story will probably pick up once I unite all three parties and the main character finally tells us what the hell his problem is. See you then.