Finished one playthrough! I went with the Light ending. At the end Marilith begs Mako-chan not to leave because she would rather make babies with him than chomp on the toxic magical corpse she keeps chained up in her palace basement (true story). How could Mako refuse such a charming offer? He can’t, ‘cos she holds on to his arm until the gate closes up and he misses his chance to return to the real world. And so he stays behind and they go on to have lots of super-powered babies who protect the world for many centuries to come. And they all lived happily ever after, the end.

I wonder how this ending plays out if Mako-chan is female. I’m not curious enough to replay just to find out, so the matter will have to remain a mystery forever.

That’s not to say I won’t be replaying the game at all, of course. I said I would be going for all three endings right from the start. Because. Because I like to kill nicely-drawn monsters in nicely-drawn dungeons, okay?

Next time I’ll play in Normal Mode, because Beginner Mode was just a little too easy. Just a little. You don’t feel it so much in the earlier stages when your party is so frail a sheep could knock them over, but there’s a definite lack of bite in the mid-game to endgame. The last boss killed me once, but that’s only because I went in unprepared because I didn’t know it was the final battle. My whole party went in poisoned, unbuffed and with almost no healing items at all. When I came back pre-armed he didn’t stand a chance.

He doesn’t exactly look like he’s taking this battle seriously, though.

As a tip it really helps to have a dancer with the Tri-Use skill to act as your chief buffer/debuffer. I brought like 20 of the book that casts Multi-Hit and had him spend two turns casting it, which made my hits start connecting pretty well. It helped that my chief attackers had 23-25 AGI as well. Agility really is the master stat in Tsurugi no Machi no Ihoujin. You also need Fake Dolls, Magic Dolls, Miracle Dolls and anything else that keeps your party members from being taken out of battle.

It’s also super helpful to have the Light Veil divinity skill, which blocks physical attacks from enemies in the back row. The last boss likes to hide behind some weak enemies and spam Genocide non-stop, so it’s actually in your best interests to put on the Light Veil, keep at least one mook alive and hurt him with long-range/multi-row hitting attacks. That said, I did my best damage to him when he came forward and I hit him with that 十字 II attack where everyone just wails away on one enemy. It’s more satisfying that way too.

After that I was itching to jump straight into New Game+, but the game wouldn’t let me. Instead I first have to go through a bonus dungeon and then, if I’m lucky, they’ll think about maybe letting me possibly play New Game+. It’s sort of fine with me ‘cos I was going to do the bonus dungeon anyway, but I was hoping to save it for later, like as a separate savefile or something. This requirement has sapped my momentum a bit, so I think I’ll play something else first and come back later to do the bonus dungeon + replay. I need a short break after 61 hours and 42 minutes anyway. (EDIT: Seems I don’t need to finish the bonus dungeon to unlock New Game+, just talk to Dransark at the entrance with some blood crystals)

But before that, after 60 hours of killing and being killed I think I’ve earned the right to give a few more opinions on the game. General thoughts on Tsurugi no Machi no Ihoujin:

1. It looks and sounds amazing for the most part. I love the detailed drawings, and everything from the music to the simplest sound effect just adds to that mystical otherworldly feel they were going for. I could and frequently did stare at the game all day. The only letdown is the voice-acting. The acting itself is pretty hammy and the quality of the sound is rather poor. Some characters sounded like they speaking through a tube or from a distance, though it might just be my speakers that were bad.

2. Not enough dungeons!!! And the existing dungeons were too small! I remember stages in Entaku no Seito that took ages and ages to fully navigate, which was exactly what I wanted. I guess Tsurugi no Machi no Ihoujin has shorter dungeons to mitigate the difficulty of not being able to save anywhere but still… ehhhhh I want mooooore. And more gimmicks too, not just sliding floors and a few pitfalls and poison floors and a lightning floor that didn’t even activate. When I play a dungeon-crawler I really want to get that dungeon feel from it. This wasn’t much different from Bravely Default or your garden-variety FF.

3. Not enough bosses. Lots of mini-bosses but not enough strong enough to give me that “Hell yeah!” feel I got from beating the Behemoth last time. Though I guess this is another side effect of playing the game on Easy. -__-

4. Most monster designs and some dungeon designs are reused from Entaku no Seito. It really cuts down on the excitement of playing a new game when you’re fighting the same old insects and orcs and kobolds you fought last time. At the same time the link between Entaku and Tsurugi isn’t really clear. Same world? Different world? Different part of same world? Another era? I dungeddit.

5. The Auto-move system is awesome. Open up the map, click where you want to go to and the characters move there by themselves. Of course you have to have gone there before, and it won’t work on puzzle floors, but it still takes a huge chunk of the hassle out of navigating older maps. All dungeon crawlers needs an auto-move system, no exceptions! 6. The menus need some work. There’s a little too much clicking as it is. Needs more streamlining so you don’t have to click and click to find out what special properties a weapon/piece of armor has, or click and click to set skills, store items, sell items, etc etc. An Auto-Equip option would be nice too.

7. Aiieee, the penalty for death is steep! I could somewhat afford instant resurrection by the end, but filling up a characters Life Points was sooo expensive. Next time I’m going to go with characters with 3LP instead of 2 so I can have a little leeway before I have to heal them or they go poof! At one point almost everyone in my party was hospitalized, and it was much cheaper (i.e. free) for me to just create a new Cleric and a new Ranger and hobble along with them for a few stages than to pay for insta-Healing. This is as it should be, though. It’s a nice middle ground between the harshness of instant permadeath and the DBZ-style “dying is the new living” softness of most RPGs. I’m not complaining at all, no sirree!

8. I quite like the Ambush system for getting equipment. It does limit your farming efforts in the beginning, but by the time you have like 55 divinity points they start to largely refill themselves. It’s also nice to know what kind of treasure a chest is going to drop before you bother fighting for it. “No, not another potion!” None of that here. The system also encourages you to keep moving instead of camping on one spot and grinding forever, which is okay with me. But then I was playing on Easy so I didn’t really need much equipment anyway. 9. The story was… pretty non-existent. Which is also as it should be for a dungeon crawler. Sadly what little story exists is pretty unpleasant and a little hard to follow. Basically everyone in the other world is a huge jerk focused on keeping everyone else down. The only good one is Riu and she ends up getting the short end of the stick most of the time because being nice in a nasty world is a one-way ticket to tragedy. If you like stories where you can’t really root for anyone, this should be right up your alley.

10. I’m somewhat disappointed that the routes diverge so late. All three routes are the same for 99% of the game with just the final battle differing, it seems. They should have diverged earlier and there should be a clearer sense of whose side you’re on and what the consequences of your decision are. Dungeon crawlers don’t need stories, but if they insist on having one then they should at least put some effort into it. “This world is rotten to the core!” “Yeah. What can we do about it?” “Nothing, let’s go home.” What a waste of a fine premise.

Basically Tsurugi no Machi no Ihoujin looks and sounds great, the gameplay is okay if a little dull (on Easy) and the story doesn’t live up to the promise behind the idea. I enjoyed it anyway just for the atmosphere alone, but it didn’t quite live up to the internal hype I’d built up for myself. Still a pretty satisfying experience all around. I’m going to take a break to finish Bravely Default and try one or two other things, then I’ll be back.

Related posts:

Tsurugi no Machi no Ihoujin, the early days Updates on all the games I’m playing Tsurugi no Machi no Ihoujin, the middle days Still playing Sakura Taisen 3 & Stranger of Sword City