Watch Googleshng play HORRIBLE HORRIBLE THINGS!

You didn't mention the rampant anti-piracy messages either Google (But, no seriously, this game is a flaming turd)!

Seriously. The sole consolation here is that it is SO DISGUSTINGLY EASY I can play through the bulk of it without really paying any attention, just pounding out the same button rhythm. That and the fact that (again, only in the North American release apparently) you can skip the animation for... well, everything really. If you're in a rush, all you really have to sit through is running through the same cave, and all the surprisingly long load times for the animations you're skipping. L2-hammer-combat is actually kinda hilarious.

Another one I find funny: When you're in a fight, down in the lower left it shows you how many of the 4 flavors of healing item you have left (not that it really matters or anything, because again, there aren't any strategic choices to make in combat). These are not represented as numbers though, but as a little bar showing what percentage of the maximum number possible you currently have. Said maximum is something like... 5000? So, you can be carrying around 50 of the things you need for the basic can't-die auto-potion deal (enough for 10 uses), and the bar will look totally empty. Honestly, if the thing ever looks even 5% full, you can take that as an indicator that you probably have enough to last you the whole freaking game. It's not even like I'm going to have to worry about needing more per heal later in the game. It's all based off percentage of max HP. I mean, I guess I MIGHT eventually have to shift into second gear and use the "heal 50% when under 30%" one if things ever start doing notable damage, but, ooh, then I'm spending 10 instead of 5! And I'm only finding... like, 15 after every fight!

How about a game where you can do damage in the billions? If it's come to this point, why even put numbers on the screen anymore?...

There is no game so terrible that it will not be pirated.

I'm pretty sure this is one of those games that comes with a serious case of buyer's remorse, even if you are a pirate.

I got buyer's remorse just from watching a video LP of it.

... ...
BLLUURRRGH.

No one, I mean no one would blame you if you abandoned this.

None the less, you are a hero and a saint for doing this. Such bravery will surely result in a ticket to Valhalla upon your inevitable BSOD from playing this game.

... That's almost a reference to this game's gimmick. Please excuse me while I go introduce something heavy to my face.

I haven't gotten to it yet?

I have to say, one of the weirdest things about subjecting myself to all this is how many of you people are coming out of the woodwork suspiciously knowledgeable about this game.

Also, while I am still slogging through just this... total slushpile with no plot in sight and constant dungeon recycling, I DID pick up a new weapon for the main character. She can now basically kill any monster in one hit, instead of in one round. Nobody else has gotten a turn since. And not even like a really good weapon, just, not what I started with.

I also popped into a shop to look at swords and, explain this one folks:
Sword - +200 attack +100 magic attack: 1000 GP
Hunter Sword- +100 attack +50 magic attack: 1500 GP

In any other game, I would have to assume there was... SOME quality the second one had making it worth using. Here though, I would not be at all surprised if there wasn't. I mean, I have plenty of skills from higher levels that do less damage 100% of the time than what I'm using after all.

Also this bamboo sword from a dungeon with nothing but slimes with like, +400 attack.

The padding continues! And wow, was this game never properly finished!

Insanely common occurrence here:
I start a plot scene.
Some NPC asks the party to go to some place full of monsters.
Fade to black.
The party talks about having killed a bunch of monsters, and how now they're about to face a boss.
Fade to black.
The party talks about how they just killed that boss.
Cut scene ends.

I recorded a couple examples here, but I still haven't scraped together enough footage that isn't just me running around in the same exact cave you've already seen twice or having long inane conversations that don't advance the plot in any way. Which is kinda horrifying in and of itself because according to my status screen I'm about a quarter of the way through the game!

Seriously. It's like there were 2 teams involved here. Team A was responsible only for creating the dialog scenes, while Team B was responsible for designing dungeon maps and bosses and towns and general gameplay stuff. Team A finished early with time to spare, and Team B took one look at some of what Team A had thrown together and ran screaming for the hills. So... they just took their weird cutscene framework that was meant to be intercut with an RPG, left it as is, complete with all the empty "load map/battle" functions, and then took what little the gameplay department had finished and just kinda... set it to one side in the form of optional speed runs through one of the 4 maps they actually finished (but usually the cave).

Also of note! Like most RPGs, there's a label on your save files representing how far along you are in the plot. If you've been watching the videos here, you've seen a few of these already. First there was the Tutorial Dungeon, then The First Dungeon, and then after that Find The Key Fragments! right?

Yeah it's still "Find the Key Fragments!" like 20 hours in. I'm 20-25% of the way through the game in terms of total plot bits sat through/dungeons visited/monsters seen... and that's including optional dungeons, which are most dungeons. I've seen maybe... 5 or 6 that I actually HAD to hit so far. Now again, this is non-linear. There's 1 key fragment per continent. I've been focusing on just the one continent (which... I have to be almost done with if they're all of equal length), still haven't gotten the key fragment for it. So... yeah. Looks like "go collect 3 McGuffins" accounts for maybe... 90% of the whole game. And there aren't really like, side quests involved in doing so. You just have a bunch of random scenes and maybe an arbitrary requirement to "Go into that cave and kill 10 slimes." Then a couple times you arbitrarily fight one of the other console-tans (with a mysterious string of question marks for a name, which is KINDA WEIRD when they're all addressed by name in the intro, and a large number of other places).

Oh, and I still have everyone using their starting equipment except for the main character (for whom I keep finding new weapons just sitting there). Of course, now that I have enough levels under my belt to see what sort of things I can actually buy for everyone... well, you'll see when I find enough non-filler to round this recording session out.

I've mentioned it before, but I lost a bet a while back and thus got shanghied into playing it. I think I lasted about ten hours before giving it up, and no one held it against me.

I can't remember the last time I've heard of a game mechanic this bewildering. Its very existence seems to be a paradox, as the amount of bricks to the head it would take before this seemed like a good idea would kill you long before you could implement it.

Best line so far

Wow, this sounds all kinds of phoned-in.

Honestly, I think the idea of a magical girl RPG is kind of promising (and Neptune's magical girl design is nice IMO). "Secret princesses in a war not of their making!" As in the Disgaea games, you could throw in some low-key pathos as a break from constant humor.

As googleshng said, this story and its jokes could, even should, write themselves. You'd think that these folks would have a fan's eye view of the industry and a whole encyclopedia's worth of material to pull from. Instead they shoot fish in a barrel and call it a day.

I blame Killer Instinct for starting this trend but others are guilty of taking it to such ludicrous speed-like levels.

you know, has stupid as it can be at times I still think ClaDun's use of fractional damage is worse.

I would say that's just the same thing but on a different side of the decimal point.

Next batch of videos is about done uploading.

Audio's even better, and I didn't spoil all these observations in the thread already!

I thought you must be over-exaggerating the ease of this game, but the 'boss' in video 14 was hell of sad. I was like, "hey she did a lot of damage to the party...oh wait they just automatically healed it all."

Looks like you've got a couple thousand potions under your belt, huh?

Think I'm up to 3000 now! I mean yeah, each heal uses 5, but you get 8 after every fight (or a variety pack of the others), and anything but a boss doesn't last long enough to ever attack me, so... yeah, never going to start running low on those.

Also, here's what you have to realize about these boss fights here:

- Those aren't bosses appropriate to my level. I've been concentrating solely on the PS3 planet instead of spreading my attention around, and checking an FAQ, there's like... 1 boss fight on that planet I haven't gotten to. The first fight with PS3-tan there is intended as a midway through the game thing, the 3rd fight is just-before-the-final-clean-up-before-the-last-boss difficulty. Once I finished those and moved on to the Wii planet? Bosses aren't getting attacks off. I THINK the first form of Wii-tan got 1 or 2 off before dying.

- In addition to being seriously under-leveled, 2 out of my 3 characters here are still using the equipment they started the game with. I have enough money to to buy everything in the shop, (which for some reason includes 4 weapons for Neptune, 3 for IF, and like, 12 for Compa right now), which would have an astounding impact on my damage output, and probably let me kill all these bosses in one round but... why bother?

- I have way better heal skills than what I have going off here. Again, I'm just being an arbitrary cheapskate for the hell of it. I could start every fight off with a status effect that like, doubles my attack power and number of turns I get, and have everyone get fully healed any time someone gets hurt, but... healing back over 50% when I drop under works just fine so far!

- I COULD use that last-minute-defend trick to half all this damage, I just wasn't generally bothering here, because I'd have to hammer a different button.

- There's no in-battle strategy to be used. I can't tell someone to buff or heal or anything (well, I can reconfigure their skills I guess). I literally have no option when my turn rolls around besides mindlessly mashing attack. The closest there is to exercising strategy would be to set up one set of attacks to trash their guard, then another to max out my damage when it's down... I'm actually pretty much doing the exact opposite of that. Single target non-elemental attacks that never drop people's guard (except with Compa because that's kinda all she's good for).

To sum up:
I am fighting near-endgame bosses while severely under-leveled and about as under-equipped as humanly possible. I am using the worst possible strategy. I am not even looking at the screen. Nothing can touch me and everything dies in like 10 seconds tops if I skip animations.

I could probably speedrun the whole game in like 5 hours if I had auto-fire for L2 and X.

I gave up halfway into video 8. I'm sorry, but this is just too painfully stupid to watch.

But that means you missed when the dialog box just started repeating the word "boobies" like 12 times!

Between stuff like that and all the conversations that end with self-deprecating 4th-wall breaking, I'm ALMOST tempted to go back through the dialog archive at the end of the game and just screen grab all the times when the game is just open and honest about how much it sucks. But I think having to scroll through all these AGAIN would make me kill myself.

You'd think so but somehow it is leagues more annoying, especially considering your HP display doesn't show fractions.

I am now officially past the half-way point by the metric of my monster/dungeon/plot bit counters! I have the first of these key fragment deals! Still nothing approaching actual plot in sight, nor any change to my safe file titles!

Basically, I just had to go into some dungeon for no particular reason, fight PS3-tan AGAIN, not in like some big climactic showdown or anything, she's just all, "It's not like I like you or anything!" like always, but weirdly enough, just, in the middle of the dungeon... so there's no chance to heal before the fight... which would be a big deal if healing before the big fight was a thing in this game, but again, it isn't. You can be sitting on 999 healing items (and I was! It makes hideous noises and ugly red text when you step on more), but you can't ever use them out of battle... and you'll always use them the second you take damage anyway, so it's a double non-issue. Anyway, yeah. Beat her a 4th time, fight some totally unrelated who cares boss at the end of the dungeon, it drops this thing, people yammer their usual babble, back to the main menu, here's another vapid blog post, no more accessible content on this continent.

All that said though? I actually got a game over earlier! Amazing, right? Here's how it works!

So OK. Everyone has these skills they start with that go:

On taking damage, if I now have less than 50% of my max HP, restore 30% of my HP by eating 5 scooby snacks.

That makes you completely incapable of death unless consistently losing more than 30% of your HP, or taking more than 50% of your max at once while just barely over the limit. And honestly, that second case isn't ever going to come up because things don't really vary their attacks in this game. If something hits for 1500 damage, it's going to do 1500, or 750 if you block (or maybe like, 3000 if it attacks while in guard break status, but that lasts for an amount of real time elapsed, there is an on-screen initiative bar, and you can hold off on inputs for as long as you want, so it will only come up if you actively bring it about... like I did here when I game overed myself. Minimally optimal play for Science and all).

Anyway though, the point is, unless maybe you upgrade your equipment, or grind, or buy stats from the PSN store, or don't stubbornly focus on just one continent at a time, or have the presence of mind to block before ending turns, you will EVENTUALLY hit a point where that heal 30 when under 50 skill does not equate to death-is-impossible. Again, we're basically talking like, end-game bosses here. At this point you will actually have to switch over to the heal 50% when you dip under 30% skill (or one of those heal the whole party ones on a couple people). It's pretty much mathematically impossible for it to come up before you have the skill points to have 2 or 3 skills at 100% activation though (enough mandatory combat before any of these bosses, even with this game usually forgetting to require you to ever fight anything in non-optional dungeons). However...

Turns out if you have 2 healing skills equipped at once, only the first activates! That being the first in the order in which they are listed on the equipment screen. In other words, if I have skills to heal myself by increasingly large amounts when knocked under 50%, 30% AND 15%, and I get knocked all the way down to like, 1 HP? Only the 50% trigger (healing me by 30%) will activate. Which is kinda funny, because these skills are all listed in a full-on upside-down order of reasonable priority.

Practical upshot: After a certain point, you want to remove all the points you have in your frugal wimpy heal and put them in the next skill down. This will leave you with huge piles of unspent points you dare not assign.

For the record, I don't think this is an attempt at making things more strategic (because I'm pretty sure I've seen someone heal themselves, and then also use their cure paralysis skill in response to the same attack). I think it's just boneheaded sloppy coding, where it runs down the whole list one by one, checking the condition and activating effects for each. It just happens that each heal gives back enough HP to no longer qualify for the following one.

Having learned this, I reloaded, unequipped those skills, and... killed the offending boss without really needing to heal much at all, because oh hey, I don't kill it before it can act and it can actually hurt me, so, defending is good.

Oh, and another way I've totally handicapped myself: That whole hidden market share mechanic? I have totally, totally bottomed out Neptune's stats with that. Moving on to the other continents after fighting the one boss with teeth, I'm still killing literally everything, bosses included, before finishing one character's first turn.

Also, I suppose at some point I'm going to have to go back and record the scene where you first meet 360-tan. There's a joke about scratching disks if the console gets bumped while it's on! That'd actually be funny if it didn't the form of overtly sexual dialog regarding a "little boy." Classy.

Speaking of rare brushes with wit, here's a quote from the instructions about "Nisa" there: "Sometimes, she tries hard to the point where it becomes painful to watch."

It suuuuure does.

I don't think that's sloppy coding - that might have been exactly what the developers/designers intended. But I don't want to try and get inside their minds to know for sure. After all, don't the Gambits in FF12 work the same way? So don't blame the coders for doing their job poorly - blame everyone involved in making this game and whatever horrible circumstances in their lives led them there.

Gambits in FF12 work an entirely different way, whereby you set up your own triggering conditions, which cause characters to start casting spells and such, taking up their turns, which you can also just cast manually.



More to the point though, I don't think this is intentional because:

- You continue to get points to invest in the activation chances of these skills as you gain levels, despite having more than enough to put 100% into the 1 heal you can effectively have at a time, and all of the condition removing effects, long, long before hitting a point where any of this is actually needed.

- Having to unequip the baby heal skill on reaching the point where the decent heal skill becomes relevant actually requires the (one-time) expenditure of some Actual Thought, which goes completely against everything else in this game. I mean... proving it actually IS possible to die means I actually have to put some marginal effort from now on into not doing so! That's skirting dangerously close to actually having fun!



And oh yeah. HERE'S the overt anti-piracy messages. Bootlegged wii discs summon monsters, and NPC blather is just making pleas to avoid buying knock-offs of consoles without any sort of metaphor involved.

I suspect that FFX-2 is probably the game you are looking for.

I really do want to watch this, but the game audio in the second batch overpowers your voice by a huge margin. Any chance you could rebalance and reupload those?

I suppose I could yeah. First batch is doomed to sound terrible though because of how I recorded it. Is it really that bad though? I'll have to give'em another listen later.

"It's like describing Street Fighter without saying the name, then saying 'boobies' fifty times." Hee hee. boobies

Oh my god Googleshng. I was going to watch these and be all supportive of your insanity bravery, but I made it to 9:05 in the second video, and I nearly died right then and there.

NIS is the recovering addict who overcame its poor upbringing and was actually clean for a while (if a little bit morbid,) but then one day Idea Factory and Gust showed up at a house party with some Lolita Meth and now we're just watching NIS slowly but surely kill itself.