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Post by toei on Jan 31, 2021 18:12:27 GMT -5
I'm on the final boss of Spiral Chaos now. As expected, it's some bullshit. Would you expect these twins to be 20x more powerful than anything you've fought before?: Yes I would, because one of the rules of anime is that the smallest, weakest-looking villains are usually the strongest. They look like two seven year olds, so they must be strong as fuck.
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Post by Ex on Jan 31, 2021 21:49:03 GMT -5
Should have just watched the OVA. Man there's a lot of Queen's Blade anime out there. I've seen the first season, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Not sure why I never watched the rest, might not have had access to it at the time. They look like two seven year olds, so they must be strong as fuck. You are correct: Enough griping, time to put the nails in the coffin.
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Post by Ex on Feb 1, 2021 0:33:23 GMT -5
Enough griping, time to put the nails in the coffin. And it's done... Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos is a 2009 PSP SRPG, developed by Banpresto and published by Bandai Namco Games, exclusively in Japan. (In 2015, a 99% complete English fan translation was released.) In 2011, another Japan-only sequel released entitled Queen's Gate: Spiral Chaos. This sequel remains untranslated into English at the time of this writing. QB:SC and QG:SC are both licensed titles, derived from an anime series, itself derived from an art/gamebook series (that remain Japanese only). QB:SC absolutely assumes its player is familiar with the source material, as no attempt to inform the player of the characters and medieval fantasy world is made. The basic premise is that a bunch of sexy women warriors are battling for the top spot in a worldwide combat tournament. In the anime, and this game, as characters battle there are many moments of ecchi fan service. The creators know full well that this one carnal aspect sells the product. Players know full well too, and that's why they'd bother playing this game, or watching the anime series in the first place. As an SRPG, QB:SC is very rote. Forget such complexities as terrain effects, positional facing advantage/disadvantage, or even mission start unit placement. With units, there are at least equipment slots for protective gear, consumable items, and bonus enhancing gems. That said, the combat system is super basic, with one caveat. The female warriors' armor is destructible in a piecemeal fashion. If a player continues to attack an enemy's breastplate for instance, it will eventually break. When an armor piece breaks, the player is treated to an ecchi image of the act. This is known as a CRUSH. Successfully CRUSHing a piece of armor, allows the attacker to have a bonus attack. So chaining together CRUSH attacks is how one destroys an enemy in a single turn. If the player manages to destroy a female enemy's entire armor set, without depleting her life to zero, then the player gets to see that enemy's ultimate ecchi humiliation image. Male enemies and monsters do not have destructible armor, they just have a single life bar. One might think that it'd be wise to choose to CRUSH enemy armor all the time. Unfortunately that becomes highly tedious. You see, the attacks in QB:SC are very long multi-hit combos. These combos look amazing with excellent animation and great special effects. But they also take quite a while to view, especially when the player is doing multiple hits in one turn. Franky it's incredibly tedious and time consuming. So after the player has seen all that attacker's combos, and all the targeted enemy's ecchi shots, there's no compelling reason to watch everything involved. As such the player will likely just start skipping all the offense animation and smutty screens entirely, just to make battles take thirty minutes as opposed to two hours. In that situation, the player is now simply grinding through a mediocre slog. Which of course is what QB:SC actually is, if you take the sheen away. +Outstanding visuals, especially the animated CGs, attack combos, and ecchi stuff.
+A great sense of humor continuously permeates the "plot". +Fun dialogue keeps character interactions entertaining.
+The OST sounds nice (though too limited).
+The English fan translation is well done.
-This game is three times as long as it should have been.
-The combat system is not deep enough for SRPG veterans.
-Difficulty balancing issues galore with zero respect for the player's time.
-Mission composition, base enemy designs, and bosses are all extremely repetitive.
-The overarching plot is lame, boring, and asinine to say the least.
There's plenty more I could say about this SRPG, if I wanted to drill into the nitty-gritty. I don't. I can only recommend this game to a very narrow demographic. Specifically, horny 15 year old high school boys, who are big fans of Queen's Blade, and still play PSP games. Since that demographic doesn't actually exist, I can't recommend this to anybody after all. Oh well. My inner horny 15 year old thought he wanted to play this game. At first he really liked it. But as the hours wore on, and my patience wore through, and this game's chrome wore off, the ugly truth started to emerge. Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos is yet another weak licensed game. Well, what did we learn? In the future, is it best to avoid licensed games, or is it best to avoid naughty games? After over thirty hours of monotonous grind and panty shots, I have my answer. I'll avoid licensed games for a while.
Ex's time to beat: 27 hours 50 minutes (official clock time - real time probably 31 hours) Ex's score: 5/10Last bit of silly screenshots: - That wraps up this month's theme for me. I only beat one game yeah, but it was a long one.
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Post by Sarge on Feb 1, 2021 0:37:14 GMT -5
I think that's my concern with both licensed games and ecchi stuff - most times, the license or the titillation is there to mask gameplay deficiencies. As usual, finding a diamond in that rough can be a challenge.
Good job pushing through. I wouldn't have wanted to leave it undone after that time investment, either. I've got a game that I need to finish off that has some ecchi tendencies myself: Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier. But that combat system gets awfully grindy, and you better not mess up combos...
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Post by Ex on Feb 1, 2021 0:48:33 GMT -5
most times, the license or the titillation is there to mask gameplay deficiencies As a general rule, I agree that's true. There are of course exceptions (as always). I can generally deal with titillation games being less than ideal gameplay-wise, insofar as they are brief. This game was not brief. Yeah, I was complaining about this game to my wife yesterday, while we were walking our dogs. She said the same thing she always says, "If it sucks then stop playing it." I respond, "But I've already invested over twenty hours into it." To which she replies, "So what?" From there as usual I struggled to explain why I prevail against a known sunk cost fallacy. "It's uh, it's a gamer thing I guess."I put some time into that one when it released. The extremely long combo attack system, which made every battle an absolute chore, pushed me away quickly enough.
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Post by toei on Feb 1, 2021 0:52:56 GMT -5
I think that's my concern with both licensed games and ecchi stuff - most times, the license or the titillation is there to mask gameplay deficiencies. As usual, finding a diamond in that rough can be a challenge. Good job pushing through. I wouldn't have wanted to leave it undone after that time investment, either. I've got a game that I need to finish off that has some ecchi tendencies myself: Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier. But that combat system gets awfully grindy, and you better not mess up combos... Dragon Knight 3 aka Knights of Xentar is legitimately good, for some reason. And it's not just ecchi, it's straight up eroge. But if all eroge RPGs were that good, I'm sure we would know by now. Ex I don't think the sunk cost fallacy really covers it, at least not for me. If I'm 70% into a game and it sucks, I don't expect it to turn things around if I just keep playing. It's more that it feels like an open folder I need to close, and I can't easily move on until I do. I've done it on occasion, but it usually takes a few days before I can start playing another game. I just feel compelled to finish what I start, otherwise it feels like a personal failing.
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Post by Sarge on Feb 1, 2021 1:03:43 GMT -5
I have this feeling myself. Why else do y'all think I jump back into half-completed runs of JRPGs on occasion? It bothers me. As terrible as it sounds, it's more like a job not finished, which of course isn't what gaming is supposed to be. But at the same time, I've finally finished some excellent games because of it - often when I quit, it's more distractions than a game being outright bad. Shadow Hearts comes to mind.
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Post by Ex on Feb 1, 2021 1:03:52 GMT -5
if all eroge RPGs were that good, I'm sure we would know by now True enough, though I'm a fan of the Lightning Warrior Raidy games. But those are DRPGs to be specific. That's a more succinct way of explaining it.
It's one thing if you start to hike up a mountain, and you immediately notice said mountain is made of putrid turds. Even if you spent thirty minutes hiking up that mountain, it's still not great loss to just leave the stink behind. But after you've been hiking up such a mountain for a good dozen hours, only to realize that it's not actually mud you've been trekking through after all, but something else brown instead... it's not so easy to just bail. Not for me it isn't. At that point you start to feel like retreating means the mountain has beaten you. Even when you damn well know the mountain is a pile of shit, and not worth your time to scale. I don't remember every game I've ever beaten, not by a long shot. But I remember every game I put significant time into, then dropped. They haunt me still.
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Post by Xeogred on Feb 7, 2021 16:20:21 GMT -5
Went ahead and ran through Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon (1995), took about 51m.
Incredible graphics, strange but still decent music, and okay "feels" in the combat here. Kind of lacks a little more omph to the hits, but it's alright.
I watched the first season of Sailor Moon a few years ago, very slowly since it's so episodic and not the usual kind of show I go for in general. I honestly can't remember much of it already, so I couldn't tell exactly what was authentic or nods here at all.
One thing is for sure, this might have hands down the easiest final boss in a beat em' up I've ever seen. It was so easy to just stun lock her and short jabs while not fully stringing together the full combo. But the boss couldn't do a dang thing.
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Post by Sarge on Feb 7, 2021 16:33:20 GMT -5
Yeah, apparently I'd have had a much easier time if I'd just done that instead of playing normally. Played that way, it's absolutely brutal.
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