Yeah, I know, I know. Dang, I was gone for a long time.
There just haven't been many interesting games to play, as Nintendo is saving up for the Switch 2 launch. And if Nintendo doesn't do anything, CS games are like dead fish on land. But I blame third parties for wasting years on gacha games and AAA games, also known as the genius "Spend more time to make them, but sell less" strategy
So anyways, finally beat the game. I realized that I totally would not have the time to play this once Xenoblade X comes out, so I finally got myself to play the game.
Look, there is a reason I didn't really like playing the game. I will explain it, but it really made the game a pain.
So, let me just get the worst part out of the way. And I found it really bad.
Imagine playing Pokemon, except you can't use Fly or even have a Town Map. Yeah, something games 20 or 30 years ago had, a world map. This game doesn't have that. Do you know how much of a pain that is?
I am literally staring at walkthrough sites with some kind of maps to figure out how to get to my next location. And once I get to that location and do some stuff, I have to go back to the main "Home" town. Then from there, I have to go to another location that I've heard about and been too, but can't remember how to get there, so more looking at maps.
BTW, there is an item that allows you to teleport back to the home town. Except some parts of the story forces you to return to the home town, WITHOUT the item. So more figuring out where you are and running back.
Just to be thorough, technically, the game does tell you the area a path leads to. Except it only tells you when you are at the edge of the map and right about to go to the next map. So it doesn't help.
Also, the map doesn't show treasure chests, but I don't care too much about that.
It's pretty annoying, to say the least.
It doesn't help that this game is pretty grindy. You do not have equipment like other fantasy RPGs, but instead
1. You equip orbs that have special effects, like increasing specific stats or increasing your resistance to an element. As you can see, this takes the place of equipments.
To get these orbs, you have to collect materials dropped by enemies.
So figure out what enemy drops the item (you sure can't tell in-game), run to the location (whereever it is), and then you finally get to grind getting enough of the material
2. Each character have what you can say are battle styles, where different styles gives you a boost in certain stats and can equip different numbers of orbs
Battle styles can level up and the increase to your stats also grows. However, that means that if you ever want to change battle styles, you start back at Rank 1 and need to fight and fight and fight, or use rare items, to level it up. So let's face it, you are gonna pick one style and never change. Way too much of a pain
3. If you don't grind between each boss, you will suffer quite a severe level difference. Boss to boss, their level really jumps. However, there are OP strateies in this game that allows you to brute force through it. So you can still beat battles with a 20-level difference.
4. Only the characters that enter combat get EXP. Anyone else gets nothing. So if you ever want to use another character near endgame, they will still be at their default level.
There is an Orb that allows the character to gain EXP even if they weren't in battle, but of course, that means grinding for the orb. Also, only that one character gets the EXP, meaning you need to grind and create multiple copies of that orb to equip to all of the remaining 4 characters if you want all of them to keep up with the main 4 characters you use.
This isn't that big of a problem if it wasn't for the fact there is one part of the game where you are FORCED to use two characters, only those two characters, and both are guys and you probably never even used them. So that means their battle style is ALSO at the default level. This is ENDGAME, so you are gonna have to grind a lot. This was such a pain that this is the only part of the game I changed the difficulty to Easy.
And I still had to level up a lot. By gobbling a bunch of healing items during battle to brute-force my way, I did manage to beat it after leveling like 30 levels!
So yeah, really makes you not want to play the game.
Now, aside from that, the game was... fine. It wasn't particularly well-made, but it did what it set out to do. It is made by Sega, and usually goes on sell. So if you buy it cheap enough and like Tony's artwork, it is an okay play.
The story is for better or for worse, typical. But like I said, it sets out to do what it wanted to do.
Basically, you play this game to date cute Tony-design girls and on the way experience a generic fantasy story. No, you can't have sex with them and frankly, despite you being able to choose to end up with a girl if her affection is high enough, the ED is pretty lame. The protagonist and girl you choose kinda just talks about staying with each other. Child's play!
Go play Mizuiro or Fault or something if you want to have sex with Tony-design girls. The stories for those aren't that good either though, it seems. Good ol' Tony games being mid.
I chose Rinna, BTW. Revealing clothes, acrobatic movements in battle, simply because she can cheese a lot of battles with her infinite range homing magic, elf girl, genki. Yeah.
Graphics are... fine too. Yeah, normal. Although most of the dialogue is done through the game character models, there are a few cutscenes where the characters actually move freely
Audio-wise, fine.
You do have quite a number of songs, because that is a theme of the story, done by popular seiyuus like Hayamin, but none of them really stood out to me.
I think this is because there isn't that many times you really stood around to just listen. The characters are singing during the story, so dialogue is still going on while they sing. Or maybe you are in-battle, so it is super-background.
Now, there are a couple of things I will compliment about the game.
One is that I actually like the battle system. Or rather, I like how unique each character is. Their movements in battle are actually pretty fun to watch, and each character feels pretty different in what they can do (outside of a few characters sharing healing skills).
Your allies CPU is fairly stupid, but the overall difficulty of the game isn't too high due to cheese strategies. Mainly using Rinna's infinite range magic + Kirika to heal + spamming healing items. This gets especially prominent in late-game, because Kirika learns a move that revives ALL allies, FULLY heals ALL allies HPs including status ailments. Thanks to this, you can really save up revive items (you can only carry 10 or so) and focus on reviving and then using MP-healing items to spam healing moves and magic
Second, Tony girls. You get to pick through the classic range. Genki, Loli, Polite, Normal.
Also, you have outfits their models can wear and color variants of those outfits, including sailor uniforms and swimsuits. So you get to enjoy dressing them up. I think these were originally DLC though, eww.
So, that's about it, I think. If you put aside how annoying it is to move around, it is an okay game to buy and play if you see it on sell. That's what I did.
Just to let you know, the Refrain version is basically the original game + all of the DLC (holy crap how much DLC did the original game have, ugh) + you get to use two characters that take a major role in the story but you never get to use (there is no story for why you can use them, they just show up in your party).
Obviously, you are gonna buy the Refrain version, but I just want to show my disgust at how much DLC the original seemed to have.
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