Video Game review!
I just realized that I never wrote a review of "Atelier Annie," the DS game I really wanted to (and did) play at the end of November/beginning of December. This shall be remedied!
Soo, as some of you might know, the "Atelier" series is very popular in Japan, but not well-known this side of the Pacific. The unifying feature of the series (which consists mostly of separate games which don't have a ton to do with each other) is the complex alchemy system in which you create a large variety of items, armor and weapons. Some of the games follow a story, while others employ a quest system that requires you to deliver a set number of items, sometimes with special characteristics, somewhere to either get money or advance the story. "Atelier Annie" is one of the latter games.
The story as such is relatively thin. You play as Annie, a lazy girl wanting to marry rich, until her grandfather forces her into training as an alchemist on Sera Island. On this island, a contest written out by the king is going on, with the goal to develop the place as a resort. The overall winner gets to marry one of the royal spawn.
The contest rules: The overall length is 3 years, every 6 months, specific items need to be made by the contestants. Aside from that, you're free to pursue requests by other characters, guild quests etc. and build and renovate establishments. Time is measured by the amount of time you spend in a gathering location (I don't know whether it's step- or real-time based in there), traveling across the island (set amounts respective to departure and arrival points) and creating alchemy items (dependent on item type and amount as well as your equipment).
Sadly, unless you are completely obsessive-compulsive, this doesn't make for a ton of fun. The characters are all very flat with a few gimmicky traits to distinguish them from one another, people ask you to make shit at the most inopportune moments etc.
The game could have been saved by a fun, inventive fighting system that makes you want to do battle. Sadly, the fighting system is completely generic and a chore. The fights are easy, but honestly, as much as the fighting sucks, the game might have even been better had they left it out completely. Furthermore, there is no end boss or anything like that - the game ends when the contest time runs out, and that's it.
I did play through it all the way, but I have to say that I can't really recommend it to anyone but the most dedicated item creation freak. I mean shit, I spent four to five hours getting the final weapons in the first "Star Ocean" game, and I got bored after a while.
Soooo... when Judge Ghis slaughtered the everloving fuck out of me in FFXII with the last save point having appeared half an hour earlier right before a nasty gauntlet run filled with enemies, I said "fuck it" and started playing "Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth of Destiny." In other words, have a review!
After "Atelier Annie," I was a tad worried that this would be like it and I'd get bored. Thankfully, that was not the case. The "Atelier Iris" games are the spiritual predecessors of "Mana Khemia," and it shows. There was an overlying story (even though I admit that it wasn't terribly original), an endboss and the interesting twist that you control two separate main characters - Felt, the guy who pulls the Azoth (apparently a type of sword, don't ask me where they got the word) out of its resting place, is the adventurer; his friend Viese is the resident alchemist.
The alchemy system is more similar to "Atelier Annie" than "Mana Khemia" in that, if you have the required components, the process is almost automatic. There are a few points where it differs though: For one, every mana item (the name the game uses for items you use up such as healing items, some offensive, defensive and auxiliary items) has a mana assigned to its creation - if you don't have the required mana (which Viese has to make contracts with one after the other as the story progresses), you cannot make the item (in "Atelier Annie", your level as an alchemist and your equipment level determined the success rate of making an item). For another, once you have synthesized a mana item once, you can use element essence (which you gather by absorbing element clusters and certain bits of scenery such as bushes etc) to make more of that item, even as Felt. So, unless you are extraordinarily wasteful, you will never find yourself in a situation without healing items etc. even when Viese isn't available at the moment.
The fighting system is very reminiscent of "Mana Khemia" in that it is turn-based, but with a few modifications: Both enemies and your party (up to three people at once of six playable characters) have icons on an action bar, the last third of which is the "break zone". You don't have MP or anything, you gain points for special actions by performing "charge attacks." If you want to level quickly, your better option are "break attacks" - once you put one enemy in a set back into the break zone, every hit you land on any enemy in the set gets counted in an attack chain until all enemies are out of the break zone (which you can prevent by either pushing the enemy already in it back once in a while while dispatching the other enemies, or by forcing a different enemy into it). The longer the chain, the more EXP and skill points are gained. Different actions push a character back on the action bar in different ways - using an item or guarding costs much less time than charge attacks, special skills and break attacks, in that order.
The aforementioned skill points go automatically toward skills inherent in your accessories and weapons - once "Master" level has been reached, you can change accessory or weapon and the skill is still available. Until then, you will lose the skill as soon as you take them off.
So, was this game superb? No, there were a few problems. For one, most fights were too easy (until the end boss, I never even had to revive any of my party members). For another, there was a lot of backtracking and randomly you ended up in situations where your characters were railroaded towards the next destination in the storyline, rather than where you wanted to go, which was sometimes annoying. Also, that Theodore fellow the characters were up against for a long time (although he wasn't the Big Bad) might have as well been called "Evil McEvilpants of Evilson" and had the most fucking annoying VA in both English and Japanese (that was a nice plus though, that the game came with a selector for English and Japanese voices - bit of practice, even if the spoken Japanese had nothing to do with the written English in the speech bubbles about a third of the time). And, like I mentioned above, the plot was rather generic "save the world" glurge. Thankfully, the characters were more fun and well-rounded than the empty shells in "Annie," so I was able to overlook that.
This one was pretty fun and had a good balance of item creation and actual RPG content (which "Annie" almost totally lacked). Also, you can now get it for $20 (and sometimes less) used, so if you like JRPGs and don't mind them being a tad generic, by all means check this out.
There we go, got the reviews out of the way for now. I am still playing on "Spirit Tracks" and will write that up once I'm done with it, possibly next weekend depending on how busy this week gets. YAY SEMESTER START TOMORROW *sigh* Ah well, summer's coming soon enough and then I get to laze for a few months again.
Soo, as some of you might know, the "Atelier" series is very popular in Japan, but not well-known this side of the Pacific. The unifying feature of the series (which consists mostly of separate games which don't have a ton to do with each other) is the complex alchemy system in which you create a large variety of items, armor and weapons. Some of the games follow a story, while others employ a quest system that requires you to deliver a set number of items, sometimes with special characteristics, somewhere to either get money or advance the story. "Atelier Annie" is one of the latter games.
The story as such is relatively thin. You play as Annie, a lazy girl wanting to marry rich, until her grandfather forces her into training as an alchemist on Sera Island. On this island, a contest written out by the king is going on, with the goal to develop the place as a resort. The overall winner gets to marry one of the royal spawn.
The contest rules: The overall length is 3 years, every 6 months, specific items need to be made by the contestants. Aside from that, you're free to pursue requests by other characters, guild quests etc. and build and renovate establishments. Time is measured by the amount of time you spend in a gathering location (I don't know whether it's step- or real-time based in there), traveling across the island (set amounts respective to departure and arrival points) and creating alchemy items (dependent on item type and amount as well as your equipment).
Sadly, unless you are completely obsessive-compulsive, this doesn't make for a ton of fun. The characters are all very flat with a few gimmicky traits to distinguish them from one another, people ask you to make shit at the most inopportune moments etc.
The game could have been saved by a fun, inventive fighting system that makes you want to do battle. Sadly, the fighting system is completely generic and a chore. The fights are easy, but honestly, as much as the fighting sucks, the game might have even been better had they left it out completely. Furthermore, there is no end boss or anything like that - the game ends when the contest time runs out, and that's it.
I did play through it all the way, but I have to say that I can't really recommend it to anyone but the most dedicated item creation freak. I mean shit, I spent four to five hours getting the final weapons in the first "Star Ocean" game, and I got bored after a while.
Soooo... when Judge Ghis slaughtered the everloving fuck out of me in FFXII with the last save point having appeared half an hour earlier right before a nasty gauntlet run filled with enemies, I said "fuck it" and started playing "Atelier Iris 2: The Azoth of Destiny." In other words, have a review!
After "Atelier Annie," I was a tad worried that this would be like it and I'd get bored. Thankfully, that was not the case. The "Atelier Iris" games are the spiritual predecessors of "Mana Khemia," and it shows. There was an overlying story (even though I admit that it wasn't terribly original), an endboss and the interesting twist that you control two separate main characters - Felt, the guy who pulls the Azoth (apparently a type of sword, don't ask me where they got the word) out of its resting place, is the adventurer; his friend Viese is the resident alchemist.
The alchemy system is more similar to "Atelier Annie" than "Mana Khemia" in that, if you have the required components, the process is almost automatic. There are a few points where it differs though: For one, every mana item (the name the game uses for items you use up such as healing items, some offensive, defensive and auxiliary items) has a mana assigned to its creation - if you don't have the required mana (which Viese has to make contracts with one after the other as the story progresses), you cannot make the item (in "Atelier Annie", your level as an alchemist and your equipment level determined the success rate of making an item). For another, once you have synthesized a mana item once, you can use element essence (which you gather by absorbing element clusters and certain bits of scenery such as bushes etc) to make more of that item, even as Felt. So, unless you are extraordinarily wasteful, you will never find yourself in a situation without healing items etc. even when Viese isn't available at the moment.
The fighting system is very reminiscent of "Mana Khemia" in that it is turn-based, but with a few modifications: Both enemies and your party (up to three people at once of six playable characters) have icons on an action bar, the last third of which is the "break zone". You don't have MP or anything, you gain points for special actions by performing "charge attacks." If you want to level quickly, your better option are "break attacks" - once you put one enemy in a set back into the break zone, every hit you land on any enemy in the set gets counted in an attack chain until all enemies are out of the break zone (which you can prevent by either pushing the enemy already in it back once in a while while dispatching the other enemies, or by forcing a different enemy into it). The longer the chain, the more EXP and skill points are gained. Different actions push a character back on the action bar in different ways - using an item or guarding costs much less time than charge attacks, special skills and break attacks, in that order.
The aforementioned skill points go automatically toward skills inherent in your accessories and weapons - once "Master" level has been reached, you can change accessory or weapon and the skill is still available. Until then, you will lose the skill as soon as you take them off.
So, was this game superb? No, there were a few problems. For one, most fights were too easy (until the end boss, I never even had to revive any of my party members). For another, there was a lot of backtracking and randomly you ended up in situations where your characters were railroaded towards the next destination in the storyline, rather than where you wanted to go, which was sometimes annoying. Also, that Theodore fellow the characters were up against for a long time (although he wasn't the Big Bad) might have as well been called "Evil McEvilpants of Evilson" and had the most fucking annoying VA in both English and Japanese (that was a nice plus though, that the game came with a selector for English and Japanese voices - bit of practice, even if the spoken Japanese had nothing to do with the written English in the speech bubbles about a third of the time). And, like I mentioned above, the plot was rather generic "save the world" glurge. Thankfully, the characters were more fun and well-rounded than the empty shells in "Annie," so I was able to overlook that.
This one was pretty fun and had a good balance of item creation and actual RPG content (which "Annie" almost totally lacked). Also, you can now get it for $20 (and sometimes less) used, so if you like JRPGs and don't mind them being a tad generic, by all means check this out.
There we go, got the reviews out of the way for now. I am still playing on "Spirit Tracks" and will write that up once I'm done with it, possibly next weekend depending on how busy this week gets. YAY SEMESTER START TOMORROW *sigh* Ah well, summer's coming soon enough and then I get to laze for a few months again.