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Wakamoto.... Must play......
And I suppose the graphics couldn't be worse than Umineko.
奇跡の魔女
I think if you can slug through Umineko's graphics, you can pretty much tolerate any other VN's graphics.
I'm at the final mission. This is almost too easy; Aselia and Yuuto are pretty much eliminating everything in sight, plus Orpha is finally being useful.
Geez, Aselia is so... HNNNNNG~
And dammit, I can't keep Uruka's Mind below 80; I can't use her awesome support skills because of it. Same with Yuuto's Frenzy II, which I already removed for Connected Will. What's more annoying is how Mind-hungry Aselia's skills are.
edited 31st Mar '12 9:06:41 AM by LiberatedLiberater
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I miss Yuuto's first sword but more Wakamoto characters can't be bad, I suppose.
Tokimi. The conditions required to get onto it are surprisingly difficult since it requires another character to have a really low mind score and the game throws mind at you at every opportunity.
edited 31st Mar '12 9:20:32 AM by Arha
The only way to lower your mind score is to use abilities that either have -mind on them or to have them get killing blows. Well, there are one or two story decisions that lower mind but nothing relevant. On the other hand, if you release a mana crystal, if you take a village, if you use a +mind score ability* or if you just complete a map you get mind back. If you complete the map with the maximum bonuses, you get even more mind back.
It's one of the reasons why late game Orpha isn't as good as she could be. She gets some monstrously powerful skills, but they require a mind score that's practically impossible to maintain if you're already doing well. Thus, half power. Apocalypse is still overpowered though.
edited 31st Mar '12 9:29:32 AM by Arha
I somehow ended up on Uruka's route first, after which I think I went Aselia, Lesteena, Kyouko, Esperia and then Orpha. I didn't really like Esperia's route much, especially considering (spoiled for anyone who hasn't completed at least one route) I felt she made a shitty Eternal. Coincidentally, I rather liked Aselia, Lesteena and Kyouko's routes. Uruka's route felt a little disjointed. Interesting relationship there though, in a way. No real comments on Orpha.
And yeah, I don't like Esperia and Orpha either. Esperia is too passive and a few other things for my taste and I don't like lolis, especially ones that actually act like children.
edited 1st Apr '12 11:31:55 AM by Arha
I had hopes for Orpha's route, but they screwed it up. After she disappears, the stage was freaking set for her to magically age up for her reappearance, but the game does the opposite and locks her into the body of a ten year old for eternity. God damn it. I went Aselia->Kyouko->Orpha->Esperia and am starting a Super Hard Uruka route. It wasn't until I was halfway through my first play-through when I realized you can speed up the painfully slow combat by holding down the control key. Suddenly the game was improved 200%.
I have no idea.
I finished all the routes. The bonus scene attained after viewing all seven endings was underwhelming, a mere 20 or so lines of amusing harem antics. And Lesteena wasn't even present, jerks. My favorite heroine was Aselia, my favorite couple Lesteena/Yuuto. For the last three routes I just took a full team of level 60s through normal mode, as I had tired of the game-play by that point and just wanted to blow through those sections as fast as possible. The contrast between different routes was amusing sometimes. Esperia vs Uruka; Esperia has this huge conflict between her and Yuuto versus Soma, but in Uruka's route she decapitates him in about five seconds. The core three vs Lesteena; Yuuto has to hide behind his love interest in the Labyrinth of Time, whereas he goes Solid Snake in Lesteena's route and sneaks past all the dragons and spirits that can one-shot him. There weren't enough differences between the routes. The missions are always the same except for one extra mission per route. None of the characters are completely unnecessary but having to go through virtually the same game seven times just to flesh out every character is annoying. You can play Aselia and then either Kyouko or Tokimi and you've finished 95% of the game's plot. I've heard this game has a sequel that is still untranslated but is being worked on. I liked this one enough that I want to read the next.
edited 12th Apr '12 3:54:05 AM by adaira
I have no idea.
Yeah, Seinarukana is being translated. It's actually having progress made on it again.
I never did get to Tokimi's route. Every time I try it's a real pain in the ass to keep Kyouko's mind score low enough. I guess I'll just have to use her like crazy and make her spam that massive lightning attack and never ever let her capture towns. Or maybe play badly on purpose.
Not Actually Indie
I just started this, and I'm finding it incredibly frustrating that it's apparently only possible to train your characters to higher levels in the middle of battles, where it wastes valuable turns. It makes no sense, the characters explicitly train as a full time occupation when they're not on the battlefield!
Should I just not be bothering with trying to get high battle ratings early in the game?
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.
I'm not sure how much training is really required, but yeah, it does get in the way of properly being able to get the best scores possible. It's possible to start pushing with one or two groups and leave your others behind to train. There are also maps where there's no point in leaving your base because stuff is moving in to attack you first. I think the very early levels are a lot less forgiving on getting the top score, whereas later ones apparently assume you'll be struggling more and therefore if you clear out the enemies quickly and know how long it'll take to reach your destination it's possible to cram in some training.
Though there's at least one map which I can basically never get the top score on in Chapter V and and in Chapter III there's one where it's not that hard to get the top score, but almost impossible to capture all the possible towns on the way to the goal.
Anyway, just cram in your training when you can and shoot for a score of at least A or S. Don't neglect Nanaru or Orpha even if they seem to suck right now. Full party attacks are awesome.
Not Actually Indie
Well, I finished my first playthrough; managed to keep every sub-spirit alive, although it took me several tries to pull that off in my final fight with Shun.
Do you actually have to enter Hard mode to unlock the new routes? I don't really see the point of raising everyone's level caps and giving them higher level enemies if it's not actually unlocking new gameplay. I'd rather just power through everything with my endgame-level party so I waste less time getting to see the other routes.
Also, are there any scenes that you can only see if you don't keep your spirits alive?
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.
Well, the higher level stuff adds abilities and things that you wouldn't get normally. And it does seem to actually get harder. But if you just want to read the story instead of play the game it doesn't matter.
I doubt there are any scenes if your sub spirits die. Hell, you can't even get to Kyouko or Tokimi's routes without them all alive. I think.
Not Actually Indie
I'll play games at an increased difficulty level for completely new content, play bonus content that's harder than the main game, or even just pick the highest difficulty level at the outset if a game works on mechanics I'm already familiar with, but the idea of playing a story-based game over again on The Same But More mode just strikes me as monotonous.
I have pretty mixed feelings about this game. On the one hand, the combat was interesting and required some real application of judgment. On the other hand, the integration with the story mode was terrible; it's just unsatisfying being unable to keep an eye on stats, organize or view your troops or manage resources, raise levels, etc. except when you're actually in the middle of a battle. Also I found that it got less challenging as it went on, until the very last fight, instead of gradually building up difficulty.
The story took turns I wasn't expecting, and having the main character become an immortal wanderer of worlds instead of going back to his regular life on Earth plus some life lessons was kind of refreshing, but the idea that they can only fight the negative influences of other Eternals and not try and change things for the better of their own initiative seems really stupid to me. There was kind of a mixed message going on there, since on the one hand Yuuto thinks that by destroying the sword Rebirth, they're essentially changing fate, but at other times he and the other Chaos Eternals espouse a policy of "it's wrong to change the natural course of a world even if the natural course is bad." There might be some sort of coherent code of ethics that could account for this discrepancy, but not, I don't think, a sane one. I'd have been much happier if they hadn't run so far with Villains Act, Heroes React, and let the good guys have a policy of actually doing good of their own initiative.
I don't think I'd particularly want to see the sex scenes in this game, and in Kamidori they made the game about 500% stupider, but I'm still a bit miffed that I had no choice in whether or not I'd be able to see them. I guess I'm just unpleasable.
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.
Well, it would probably be really hard to get on Tokimi's route if you were trying to play the game properly. She requires you to have Kyouko's mind score really low, which is actually rather hard to do.
Not Actually Indie
Unless Mind scores don't carry over in a New Game Plus, I think the thing to do would be to go for Kyouko's route first, and then do everything you can to sink her Mind score as soon as you meet her requirements. You should be able to bring it down a lot in the last couple fights by spamming Eternal skills
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.
Eternal Skills don't work below their score level. You'd be better off using her AOE nuke ability and just having her always kill stuff while never defending or taking over a city. Plus possibly holding off on winning specifically so your bonuses stay small. That would be easier on a lower difficulty level where you don't need to pump up your troops a whole lot.
Not Actually Indie
Maybe it's different in the harder modes (although I'm not sure it can be that different since you can't make use of buildings at all in the last battle where you face the strongest opponents,) but I feel like a lot of the building features in this game are really superfluous. You basically get flooded with engineers of increasing ability, but whereas the new trainers provide a critical service in raising the level cap, the highest level structure I ever built in my first playthrough (a level 5 ether converter) can be built in the first battle in which you get access to the building function. I feel like the engineers were being pretty much wasted on the war effort.
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.
There's often little need to build anything at all. For example, I don't think I ever used the shrines or whatever and I didn't use recovery facilities and this never made a difference. Towers were only useful in one or two maps with Kyouko's bonus map being the most prominent. Damn level is hard. So basically you build a nice stockpile of Ether Converters and just sit on them the whole game. The only time you really have time to bother exploring the map and thus use Ether Jump Clients is the final map. Which isn't timed, meaning you don't really need to save time.
So, yes. In short, the building function is almost entirely useless.
Not Actually Indie
I actually made regular use of recovery facilities, since they allowed me to hold locations with one team against several groups of attackers, particularly useful when it wasn't my A team holding down the fort. But those and training facilities were the only things I built regularly, so the increasing engineer levels were useless to me.
I actually spent a whole lot of time roaming around the map before the last battle, because I decided to go dragon hunting and once you're already going to get a C for the map there's no point saving time. I killed something like five dragons in one battle, which way more than accounted for the lost ether bonuses. The extra ether wouldn't have been nearly as useful if I waited till the last battle to get it.
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.
Hello, second character voiced by Wakamoto.
This game is going in directions I didn't expect it to go. Welp.
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