This is a game I've heard quite positively talked about for a good while, and it being a Zelda-like game, it's absolutely in one of my favorite retro genres, so it was always one I've planned to get around to. I was excited ages ago when I heard it was coming to Switch Online, and then I promptly forgot about it as I always do X3. Then yesterday I accidentally rediscovered that it'd been added to the service! I launched it up and started playing, and before I knew it I'd just wound up finishing the game outright I'd been having so much fun x3. It took me about 6.5 hours to finish the game in English via the Switch Online Genesis service, and I never actually needed to save or anything (managed to not die a single time ^w^), so I never actually ended up using save states or rewinds or anything.
Crusader of Centy follows a young boy (whose canon name is amusingly enough, Corona) who is given a sword and shield on his 14th birthday as is the custom in the kingdom of Soliel. He sets out on an adventure to save the kingdom from the resurgent monster threat! It's an interesting enough premise, and while it does have some major twists in the narrative, I don't think it succeeds exceptionally hard in what it's going for. It falls into the pitfalls that a lot of pro-tolerance/pro-peace games do where the anti-violence message/goal is still, nonetheless, achieved through the power of bravery and violence (not to mention the bigger takeaway messaging of what actually happens in the conclusion is truly quite ghastly if you try and apply it to real world analogues in any way ^^;). The story really isn't the big reason to play the game, granted, but it made me do a "wait a minute, what the fuck???" double take hard enough that I couldn't omit mentioning it here x3 The real meat and potatoes of this game is the gameplay, and as mentioned before, it's a top-down action adventure game very much in the mold of The Legend of Zelda. The big gimmick here is your sword. While the sword itself may have kinda abysmal hit detection, that's not so much of a problem at the end of the day (and not just because the actual combat difficulty isn't terribly high). You very quickly gain the ability to throw your sword like a boomerang, and slingshotting your sword around towards and back through enemies makes for a quite satisfying combat experience despite the bad hit detection. Additionally, while this game doesn't have sub weapons or proper items, it has animal companions you can befriend along the way. You can equip up to two at a time, and while some of them have active effects, most of them just augment your movement speed or sword abilities in some way. Some animals even give special effects when the two of them are equipped at the same time~. They're both neat systems that make for a fun and satisfying adventure that's also just different enough from stuff like Zelda to help set it apart. The overall dungeon and combat design is, as mentioned before, not terribly difficult. It's not an especially easy game, mind you, but if you're a veteran of the genre, you'll likely end up dying only once or twice if ever. The biggest places you'll likely die at are the jumping puzzles, however. Most of the bosses aren't terribly difficult, but the true place the game will shave away health is with all of the bottomless pits. The dungeon and gameplay design overall has a quite heavy puzzle focus compared to most Zelda games (which gave it an almost Alundra-like feel at times), and while the puzzles were challenging but solvable enough that I enjoyed them while never having to look anything up, platforming is still unfortunately a meaningful part of these puzzles. Now mercifully, the platforming isn't nearly as unforgiving or dire as a game like Beyond Oasis's is, but there are still more than a handful of really mean pixel-perfect jumps that I was really not a fan of. The dungeon and boss design is overall quite good, but those bad platforming bits really take away from some of it. Like with the bad hit detection on the sword, this is another small but important misstep that takes what could've been a great game feel only just good enough instead. The presentation is by and large very good. Coming out in 1994 and published by Sega, they clearly had the resources to make a game that looked and sounded very pretty, and they did it. The graphics are very nice and colorful, and while there are perhaps a bit too many luxury animations here and there on things like your turning circle, it never felt like it was getting in the way of the gameplay at least. The music is also very good, and it has a very Sonic-y feel to it (and not just because Sonic has a cameo in the game x3). Honestly it feels like Sega gave them a lot of sound samples that the Sonic games use, because there were even quite a few sound effects that even a relative Sonic non-fan like myself could recognize from the Genesis Sonic games x3. Again, not a complaint, really, but something fun to point out. The only real presentation criticism I have is for Atlus's localization. It's honestly a pretty solid localization for the time, but there are some very sloppy mistakes here and there like text boxes that cut words in half or words that are just outright misspelled to begin with. It thankfully never makes any puzzles unsolvable or confuses the narrative or anything, but it's still a bummer to see such glaring localization mistakes in a product at least in part from Sega themselves. At the very least they're quite funny mistakes when they happen, which is a bonus of sorts~ x3 Verdict: Recommended. While the weird hit detection and difficulty of the platforming will definitely turn off some, if you're a fan of 2D Zelda games or just 2D action adventure games in general, I think you'll probably really enjoy your time with Crusader of Centy. It's not perfect, but it's got a good difficulty balance and just hard enough to be challenging but not frustrating puzzle design in a way that'll add a good adventure to your weekend or afternoon~.
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Continuing my playthrough of PS2 Atelier series games, I have now at last completed Mana Khemia 2 (the 10th mainline Atelier game). With this game completed, that finally bridges the gap between the older and newer ones I've played, so that's Ateliers 1~13 all finished~ :D. After enjoying Mana Khemia 1 so much, I had very high hopes for the sequel. Those hopes ended up being misplaced in many ways, but in many ways my expectations were met regardless, thankfully. The game has two routes, and doing both of them gets you a little extra final dungeon & story bits. I played through the boy protagonist's route and then the girl protagonist's, the first one taking me 51 hours, and the latter taking me 46. All in all, it took me 102 hours to finish both routes and the extra stuff at the end for the big extra ending, and I did it in Japanese on real hardware.
The titular "fall of alchemy" is in fact literal, as a decline in the power of Mana (the elemental spirits of this game, not like magic points) during the time since the end of the last game has caused the magic that allowed the academy of Al-Revis to float has failed, causing it to fall to the ground. They've since restructured significantly, now instituting a one-year degree system instead of a three-year one as well as opening up their course options to those significantly beyond just alchemy. Roze (the boytagonist) as well as Ulrika (the girltagonist) are both enrolled there, but they don't really get along. In fact, much to my surprise, their routes only actually ever intermingle if you complete both routes completely and go through to the extra mode at the end, so each protagonist has an almost entirely separate story detailing the events of their year at the academy. The writing in those routes, extra mode or no, leaves a LOT to be desired, however. Given the amount of the main scenario writer's work that I've played outside of this game, this is a remarkably poor showing for him, and I can only really assume that the production timeline of this game must've been absolute hell for it to end up in this state. Roze's route is overall alright. This game does a far poorer job than the first in tying the side content to the main story content, and that combined with generally quite filler-y feeling character quests gives the game quite bad pacing overall. However, Roze's route still manages to stick the landing. The comedy therein has some *PROBLEMS* in where it draws its comedy from, but there are still a lot of good jokes and gags beyond that, and they stick their landings well enough most of the time. Roze's route is certainly disappointing and a bit too filler-y to really hold a candle to this scenario writer's other games for Gust, but it's ultimately pretty good. Ulrika's, on the other hand, is fucking atrocious. Ulrika herself is easily one of the worst main characters I've ever seen in an RPG, and her completely illogical selfishness, stupidity, and impulsiveness makes her a very difficult character to like very much. Add on top of that that, unlike most of the side characters or even the other protagonist, she lacks a character arc of any kind (she ends the narrative exactly as she starts it), and you have a character who routinely ruins every scene she's in as a matter of course. I have my other hypotheses as to why her route is *so* inferior to the other one, but regardless of the why, her route is what it is and there's nothing changing that. If her route were at least similarly good to Roze's, I could recommend playing either or both, but as things stand, I can really only recommend Roze's route at all. This is the first game in a long, *long* time that I can remember genuinely making me outright angry with how it ended because the writing was so awful and despicable in its handling and messaging of certain things, and if that isn't damning enough of her route's writing, I don't know what is XD The actual gameplay of Mana Khemia 2 is, thankfully, an all around enhancement on its predecessor in most ways. You still have an overall school/project system that works very much like the first game. You have big story events at the start and end of terms, and in the in between you have class projects to complete. The better you do on class projects, the better grades you'll get, and the sooner you get all the grades you need, the sooner you can stop doing projects and start getting free time. Once again, free time is used for character quests, and unlike the first game, you can actually do all of the character quests in one playthrough this time! Whereas Mana Khemia 1 restricts you to only one person's final character quest (do one person's last one and it locks you out of the others), this game lets you do all of them and then you pick whose ending you want by a dialogue choice near the end of the game. Mana Khemia 1 really got something good down with how it handled the overall gameplay loop, and the sequel here really takes a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach that I really like. The alchemy and other assorted mechanics also work more or less exactly as they did in the last game. The main exception is that, where in Mana Khemia 1, you could pick the sub-skills you wanted put onto weapons and armor, here you no longer do that. Higher grade weapons and armor simply have better skills/passives, and each item has its own respective skills/passives for better or higher qualities. The other slight change is that the character you have help you make something is now no longer optional. Now you *have* to have an assistant when you make things, and depending on whom you pick, you'll get different passives applied to the alchemy mini-game you're playing. It's all around a much better system than the first game, and I really appreciate it. It's not all steps forward though, sadly. The system that the last game had of "make X item with Y character to unlock the recipe for Z item" has been broken into just a system where it tells you a particular item needs to be made with *someone* helping you to unlock that new recipe. It makes for a lot of annoying save/loading trial and error, and it feels like a very pointless bit of obfuscation given that, even if you weren't save/loading for the right character, this game has no hard time limit. All it'd take to get more materials to make the thing again is your real life time, and it feels like a very needless waste of the player's time at that. The other main mechanical changes are that in battle you now usually have 5 party members in total instead of 6, so you need to choose when you do support attacks much more deliberately than you used to in the first game, as well as a major change to how leveling works. Where in the first game, the growbook system was basically an alchemy powered FFX sphere grid, now it's just a big list instead of a tree you go down. Additionally, your max HP and MP have been divorced from the growbook's upgrades, and now it seems that, as you gain more AP (the thing you use to unlock stat boost nodes in the growbook), you gain invisible character levels that, once reached, just boost your HP and MP independently from unlocking stuff, which I liked. The only sorta downside to that change towards one big list is that this game has enough new items, many of which craftable all at once, that it can often be very difficult to actually tell what new armor or weapons are actually worth using, and during the later game when you have a HUGE library of crap lying around, it can be hard to tell or remember what's even a new item in the first place ^^;. The game is thankfully not *quite* hard enough to make that a really significant problem, but the game's got a pretty stiff difficulty curve in the first place, so it's still stuff absolutely worth keeping track of at any rate. Presentation-wise, Mana Khemia 2 is a little bit of a step up from its predecessor, but not by very much. Areas look a bit nicer, and the 2D sprites mesh with their 3D environments a fair bit better, but overall it's more or less the same. The sprite work, animation, and character portrait art/expressions are still as excellent as ever, of course, but there's just not a very big jump from the previous game. Again, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Same thing goes for the music. Same composers as the last game, and once again they do an awesome job. No complaints on aesthetics at all, though I did prefer the somewhat more 90's-ish style of the first game's character art over this one (if I had to choose one over the other). Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as Mana Khemia 2 is only "three steps forward, one step back" in terms of its mechanics, it's narrative leaves SO much to be desired that it's a much harder sell than the first game, and a real bummer ending to the Atelier series on PS2 (as this was their last game on the console). If you get it and play Roze's route, I think you'll likely have a pretty good time as long as you don't expect anything quite as good as the first game's stuff, but Ulrika's route isn't worth doing at all (let alone doing like I did and doing both routes). I don't ultimately regret my time with this game, but gods damn do I still wish it'd been better TwT Having finished Grand Phantasm, it was onto the ninth game in the mainline Atelier series: the first of the two Mana Khemia games. This was another sub-series I knew basically nothing about as well. I knew it had something to do with an academy, and I knew it had some sort of time management system of some kind, but other than that it was as big a mystery as ever just what these games were. On top of that, it’s always a fascinating time starting a new Atelier sub-series, as there’s never any telling just how the gameplay systems and setting elements they’re using could’ve changed since the previous entry. But I was very surprised to discover during my time with Mana Khemia something about Grand Phantasm (the previous Atelier game). With the systems and design features that Mana Khemia has, Grand Phantasm is shown to be much less the third Atelier Iris game and more like a retroactive Mana Khemia 0. I did just about every character quest and unlocked nearly every item I possibly could, and it took me about 61 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Mana Khemia is first and foremost the story of Vein, a young man with few memories who lives with his cat in the woods with very little human contact. Everything changes for him when a professor Zepple finds him and recruits him as a new student to their university of alchemy: Al-Revis. The story then follows Vein’s journey from his start of school through to his graduation after three years studying there, over which time he makes many new and exciting friends at the atelier he’s press-ganged into almost immediately upon leaving the entrance ceremony. As far as anime-ish fantasy sorts of stories about one’s time at a high school, this will likely not blow away anyone very familiar with the genre, but I for the most part really enjoyed my time with it~. After Grand Phantasm was such an *almost* great story, I honestly didn’t have much better hope for Mana Khemia. As such, I was very pleasantly surprised by just how much I ended up enjoying Mana Khemia’s story. It all made a lot more sense when I actually looked up the person who wrote the game (as well as its sequel) and discovered that it’s not only the same guy who wrote a lot of the quests (the best written parts) of Grand Phantasm, but he’s also the same guy who would go on to write what I consider to be easily the best written Atelier games, Atelier Rorona and Atelier Totori. Mana Khemia is a very well written story about growing up and discovering who you are and who you want to be, but it’s also a story of finding acceptance in a new and unfamiliar space. It’s a story about how you’re never nearly as alone as you feel as long as you have a community around you who can help pick you back up when you’re down, and it was just as effecting a story as I’ve come to expect from this writer (and while it doesn’t quite top Atelier Totori, it comes damn close for me). I personally went with Nike’s ending (“Nikki” in English), and while I’ve heard very mixed things about the English translation of this game, I enjoyed all the characters and their character stories very much (save for Muppy who is awful and I wish wasn’t in the game XP) and almost hated to see the story end with just how much fun I was having. As far as gameplay systems go, Mana Khemia does a very clever job of ironing out the biggest design issues in Grand Phantasm very well. Where Grand Phantasm had its story quests and big Story Events TM that’d get activated after doing enough of them, Mana Khemia has semesters (of sorts) where there are electives (I have no idea what they translate /kadai/ as) you can do during them. These electives either introduce new mechanics, or are just general tests of ability and resourcefulness at a particular task, and they even have some story or lore tidbits tucked into them as well quite often too. Depending on how well you do on these two to four electives per semester, you’ll get merits that fill up a bar on how many merits you need to complete that semester. Once you’ve filled up that bar to the required amount, you can use the rest of the semester for “free time” that you can do part time jobs (quests, and as many as you want!) or a character quest if you want to. During technically any time (free time or elective time) you can go and explore dungeons to your heart’s content and time will never pass into the next week, as such. Instead, time moves forward upon either completing that week’s chosen elective or after you’ve completed a character quest for someone. The character quests are entirely optional (all seven characters have 5, save for Muppy who has 4, with only one person’s final quest doable per playthrough, though you thankfully have more than enough time to do everyone’s non-final quests in one playthrough as I did), and you can even just go back to your dorm to sleep through free time if you want, but the overall construction of the character quests and electives make for a far better paced experience than Grand Phantasm’s guild system ever did. It’s not time management as the Atelier Arland games or the original five Atelier games do it, sure, but the opportunity cost of which electives to do, how hard to work at them, and which character quests to pick and when also made for a more engaging experience despite ultimately having enough time to do everything and then some. It also helps that the character quests as well as the big Event Quests at the end of each semester tie into the main themes and narrative better than Grand Phantasm’s ever did, but it was very nice to see such a promising yet flawed system get the refining it clearly deserved, not to mention refining to such great effect. For the battle system, we have something very straightforwardly an evolution on Grand Phantasm’s systems, and also a significantly more challenging one as well. While this isn’t quite something to the level of SMT, this is easily the most difficult Atelier game they’d ever made at this point in the series, particularly at the start when you don’t quite have all your tools available to you yet. Carried over from Grand Phantasm, we have a party of three facing off against enemies with a turn counter at the top of the screen that you’re encouraged to manipulate to your advantage as best you can. You also still have the burst gauge you can activate for when you want your biggest, meanest damage to be dealt. However, there are some very significant changes introduced since Grand Phantasm that make an already fun and snappy battle system even more fun to play with. Now our party size is eight, and up to six of them can be in battle at a time with three active and three in support. Swapping in different characters as either defending or attacking supports gives battle a really great feeling of momentum, especially once you unlock more advanced supports later on. We’ve also ditched the party-wide MP pool for a character-by-character MP pool, and one of the things that makes the early game so difficult is that the main time you mostly recharge your MP while you’re in the support pool during battle, so you’re a bit MP-poor for the first few chapters of the game. Even still, having six characters to choose from per battle instead of the weird job system Grand Phantasm had makes Mana Khemia’s battle system way more fun and engaging, and that’s also got this game’s leveling system to thank for it as well. The leveling system that’s here really isn’t a leveling system at all, as such. Taking and, in my opinion, enhancing another idea from Final Fantasy X, Mana Khemia instead as a sort of sphere grid via its Grow Book system. Each character has their own personal grow book (not one giant grid like the sphere grid), and each time you make a new alchemy recipe for the first time, there’s an almost guaranteed chance that somewhere on some character’s grid, you’ve just unlocked a new node. Each node has one to three sub-nodes on it, and unlocking these sub-nodes can give you anything from permanent stat buffs to new passives to even new spells/abilities to use in battle. How you unlock sub-nodes is by spending AP that you earn from doing battles, and earning AP (as well as unique crafting ingredients as well) is the main reason to do battles, not earning EXP (as that doesn’t exist). It’s a bit annoying that sometimes you’ll just be really stuck in someone’s (or everyone’s) tree because there’s some recipe you just haven’t been able to make yet or haven’t found at all yet, but it’s nevertheless a very fun and cool system that takes the idea of “making something for the first time!” and blending it with the rest of the gameplay in a very clever way. The alchemy itself is still somewhat similar to Grand Phantasm, but it’s taken a good few steps forward towards being like alchemy used to be in the first five games (and would very soon be again just two games later). Items once again have universal similarity amongst one another (you make a +magic hat and then the same hat again with +defense, now ALL instances of that hat are +defense), but now items have quality levels again. These aren’t decided by a random chance upon pickup like how other games did/would do it (again, all instances of an item are identical). Instead, what items you use to craft something (higher numbers give higher numbers) as well as a little timing mini-game as you craft things determine the quality level. Generally higher is always better, but if you’re aiming for specific qualities to put onto something you’ll then make into armor or weapons (crafting bits which don’t have that mini-game alongside them), you might occasionally be aiming for a more middling or even “low quality” item to get a specific quality. I’m not a huge fan of the timing mini-game, myself, but the overall change to the alchemy system is definitely a step in the right direction for making the whole thing more engaging than it used to be. The only real negative about the design other than the occasional annoyance of the grow book being a tree you can get stuck on is in how they’ve changed exploration. No longer do you get kicked out of sub-worlds that you go to after a certain amount of time. The sub-worlds are even almost entirely connected amongst each other in case you want to go between them that way (not that you generally would), and instead time passing in levels just makes it go from day to night. Now, not much actually changes as night (save for the very seldom crating ingredient only available at night) other than monsters getting harder. Far FAR harder. I’m talking like 1.5 to 2 times multipliers on their stats. It makes it feel like you may as well just get kicked out at night time, because monsters are SO much more horrifying at night (not to mention faster on the over world so they’re much harder to dodge) that you may as well just go home at that point anyhow. What’s even still is that there’s no penalty I ever found for just standing in one place and waiting for dawn so the monsters just get weak again. The day/night mechanic is neat, but it’s easily the most poorly thought out aspect of the gameplay loop and it’s just more annoying than anything. At the very least, bosses mercifully do not benefit from the night time stat boost other monsters get, so no need to worry there~. The presentation of the game is very good, in usual Atelier fashion for the time, but I especially liked a lot of the presentation of this game in particular. Battle and world sprites are detailed and fun, and environments are very pretty. The 2D sprites in 3D environments do look a little funky and fisheye-lens at times, but it’s mostly very nice. Character portraits are very detailed and expressive, and they all have a delightfully retro aesthetic to them, almost feeling like 90’s designs despite being in a game from 2007. The music is also really good, at least for my tastes. This game is the first to have the composer who would go on to do the excellent music for later Atelier games (such as Rorona and Totori), and he’s flexing his musical muscles here big time too. Lots of great character themes, boss themes, and even the main school/atelier theme was one I enjoyed a lot and was just in my head constantly even when I wasn’t playing x3. I also wanna give a shout out to the voice work in this game, because it’s some of my favorite done stuff I’ve seen in a game in a while. It brought the characters to life so well in how they let the voice actors, well, ACT. They don’t just phonetically speak the onomatopoeia that indicate things like laughing, crying, sniffling like SO much other stuff does (save for characters for whom it makes sense to do that). There are even a few lines where the VA goes a little bit beyond what the line actually calls for in the text, and it’s all great! Gunnar and Nike were my two personal favorites, but the whole cast just does such an excellent job, this is easily one of my favorite voice acted games I’ve played. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I didn’t think I’d ever play another Atelier series game that came anywhere close to dethroning my favorites. I thought that at best I’d be getting games like Atelier Iris 1, where it’s good, sometimes great, but overall a bit too rough and flawed to really approach the quality of the first couple PS3 entries, but damn if this hasn’t come damn close to being my new all-time favorite in the series. It’s certainly one of my new favorite PS2 RPGs ever, that’s for sure. The writing and mechanics really come together to make one of the best RPG experiences that I’ve played on the console. While I can’t speak to the quality of the English translation personally, this is definitely one to check out if you’re a fan of the series or just want a fun PS2 RPG in general~ |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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