Everybody yell at @Rock8man if it’s not good.
Nice! My first time back in QT3 in 2021, and I run into this thread!
I played and finished (platinumed!) this game when it came out last summer. It hits all my tingly anime spots, so much more than even the new Sakura Wars game. Definitely in my top 3 games of 2020.
I’m a terrible RTS player, and the RTS part of this game is easy. There is a bit of an adjustment period at the beginning, to get my mindset away from much of the conventional RTS trappings (e.g. there’s a base, but you can’t build or add to it). But then, due to the game pausing when I give orders, I don’t get as agitated as normal RTS games. (Semi-spoiler: After the end of the game, you can play an additional set of levels that are way, way harder than before. Thank goodness beating those levels is not a requirement for Platinum.)
I personally enjoyed the story very much. I have to warn you all, though, that I have a really high tolerance of anime tropes. BUT! This game subverts almost all of them…oops have I said too much?
I thought the English voices were good and the writing was certainly more tolerable than the couple visual novels I’ve tried. It has better music than my previous experience with visual novels, no different endings wanting multiple replays, and much more grounded story and characters than I expected. It was nice that the last character’s story you experience was the most interesting to me.
I haven’t really found visual novels I enjoy, and this game caught me. I tried avoiding the story bits and doing the battles, until battles required story be done. Then, my interest switched to the story side. So, if you’re not definitely opposed to lots of text, it might work for you.
RTS feels like the wrong description of the battles. I guess because I’ve been burnt-out on RTS for years now, and this didn’t trigger that defense mechanism. The battles are pause-able, squad-based action. Feel free to bump to the hard difficulty and try out different abilities. If I remember right, the game rewards good play with more points, reducing the need to grind. Huge waves of enemies and lots of explosions felt satisfying. Somehow it seemed like Vanillaware translated the feel of Odin Sphere’s fights into the format of these mech battles. Frenetic, colorful, powerful.
Some complicated battles missed triggering auto-pause when characters were ready for their next command. I never figured out if I was causing it from something. Occurring in the most hectic battles, it felt bad.
When you beat it, there’s one final entry in the log that isn’t really advertised to you. It’s worth watching at least for completeness, basically confirming the big picture of what’s been presented.
(I remember playing Prey on PS4 last year. Those minute load times were one of my stand-out annoyances about it. I’ve seen other CryEngine games load okay, I think, so I don’t know what they were doing. But even switching back to the region you just left took the same minute to load back in. Yeesh.)
So I decided to buy this as a birthday gift for myself, and I’ve now played through the first “intro” story.
I’m into it. I’ve decided to approach this as an anime / manga in video game form and just try to dig the story. Whatever game elements may come, great, but I’ve never really played this type of visual novel before, and I’m up for the try. The sale was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I cranked the difficulty up on Destruction, which has made that mode a little more interesting. One thing I’m curious about is the multiple paths through individual episodes of Remembrance. Apparently there is (ending talk) only one ending, so I’m not sure what the multiple paths actually do. In Natsuno’s first non-prologue path, I accidentally triggered some information that led to someone else’s path opening up, but I could have easily not done that. I wonder how many ways to get through this game there actually are.
The game doesn’t actually have multiple paths. You’ll see all the scenes, it’s just the order in which you do them is flexible and this can lead to scenes coming across quite differently depending on when you see them (not because the scenes are actually different, but because you will have different knowledge).
Really? How do they accomplish that? Looking at the flowchart I see there were four possibilities from the first branch point of Natsuno’s path. The game makes you go back and see them all?
It will become clear as you keep playing, the presentation of the flowchart is a little unintuitive.
This is a very good game to enjoy in bite sized chunks, 15 or 30 minutes at a time. It would be absolutely perfect as a tablet game, actually (phone would probably be too small for the battles, but maybe).
Agreed, though it’s probably best enjoyed if you don’t space those chunks too much. If it takes too long you might forget details in the story parts that are relevant/important later.
Yep, I tend to do a battle or remembrance with my coffee each morning.
So this is the last day this is 50% off on the Playstation Store. I considered buying it, but then watched the first hour or so of a playthrough on YouTube. It strikes me that if this is really just a visual novel, if there are no meaningful decisions to make and if there’s no actual gameplay beyond the battles, why would I bother buying it instead of just watching a YouTube playthrough?
Do I have the wrong idea here?
-Tom
Couldn’t the same objection be made to any linear game? Why not just watch a playthrough of Immortals? The battles are the gameplay, and they’re actually kinda fun!
Ehh, you’re basically right about everything and the battles are a secondary activity at best. Still, “if it’s a visual novel I might as well watch it on Youtube” seems like a weird way to put it, though.
For what it’s worth, playing the game feels like browsing through an encyclopedia, even though there is only “one story”. You jump from place to place, piecing the story together with the bits you’re most interested in at any one time.
That counts as interactive, right?
Yes45.
Sure. That’s also not a common feature in visual novels, is it? I might be using “visual novel” incorrectly.
-Tom
It’s not a common feature! It’s a bit like Dictionary of the Khazars, although more grounded, which is an odd thing to say of a story involving time traveling high schoolers and giant robots.
I unknowingly seem to be playing in the optimal way. I’ve just finished the whole tutorial over the course of about a week, each day I played a new “Wave” which introduced a new character. Now that things have opened up and I can actually choose which character to engage with, I did that for the first time last night. And it was weeeeeird. And I think I kinda love it.
Um, I’ve got a Magical Gun that is meant to shoot witches? Apparently some of the characters I saw throughout the tutorial are witches? I chose this character because she talks to a cute cat, and I’ve got a thing for stockings, and now I’m suddenly not in a mecha vs kaiju anime, but rather something else?
The first hour is probably all prologue stories. There is some slight gameplay in the stories once you clear a character’s prologue.
You are shown the possible branches a given story section can take, and you have to figure out the sequence of events that triggers each one. Some are reliant on information gathered in others, some require talking to a particular character at a certain point, or interacting with an object, etc.
A lot of the interest comes from slowly piecing together the multiple paths of each character and seeing how it all fits together.
This. @tomchick , it is a visual novel at heart, but the way you approach the story is non-linear. It’s storytelling by breadcrumbs, and you’re (mostly) free to choose which breadcrumb you go for first, which personalizes the experience to yourself in a way. In the end, everyone will see the same scenes and the same story, but I suppose people with different approaches will have different “highs” in terms of reveals and what not. I find that is unique enough and elaborate enough to make this more than “just a visual novel”, and for that reason alone it isn’t something that can be replicated by “just watching Youtube”.
Well, thanks to all you jerks for costing me $30. To be honest, I would have probably buckled anyway since I love Vanillaware’s aesthetic.
-Tom