Mary Skelter: Completed + Thoughts

You might be like, damn, that took you a while, right?
I'll cover that too, but anyways, finally completed 1 after beating 2.
My thoughts below...

First, the general system is more or less the same as 2. Obviously.

However, you don't have stuff like Critical Cut-Ins and the overall UI feels less polished than the 2nd game. I guess that makes sense. The only thing that 1 has over 2 in the game system is the fact you can accept as many requests as possible, instead of only one at a time like 2. 

The bigger question is why 2 made it so you couldn't accept more than one at a time though.

As for the story... What is there to say. It takes the first game's story, and then adds an epilogue that allows you to finish 2's story. While there are some bittersweet parts to the story (Mamoru and co. are technically dead and Hikari is... angelic, which must make everyday conversations awkward), an overall happy end to the story.

The first game also covers a lot of stuff not covered in 2, such as where the girls came from and why there is even a Jail and all. So that was interesting to learn about.

As for why it took me so long...

Let's just say, the game is extremely hard. Frankly, it is more unfair than hard.

Imagine what I said about 2, how it was only hard when the enemy spammed AOE attacks. Now imagine if it got worse. The enemies hit harder, and the ones that hit a single target also hit really hard.

Now also imagine that your ATK-lowering skill only hits one target instead of all of the enemies.

Yeah, it's bad. And the final boss and hidden boss will sometimes move twice in a row, both times using AOE skills.

I retired the girls by 80 levels to boost their stats and then leveled them back to 90 (which is why it took so long, also started playing Pokemon), and I was still barely able to survive both hits. My characters sometimes couldn't survive both hits!

As for the hidden boss, despite my almost maxed-out level, I could not survive both hits unless I lower his ATK. For the hidden boss, I got ATK-down from the roulette, which seemed to have permanently lowered his ATK greatly for the entire battle. This was pretty much the only reason I was able to win.

But hey, I beat the game on the highest difficulty, so I'm satisfied.

As for whether I suggest the game or not... If you bought 2, the remade 1 comes with it anyways, so... it really isn't an option. You'll just get both at the same time.

BTW, the ending I first got was Gretel.

Assuming you got every girl's affection to max, the ending you get is whoever is in the front of your party, which just happened to be Gretel. But I think I like her the most anyways.