I purchased it off the PS Store on day one since it’s a game I’ve been interested in for the past while.
However, I do believe I should have a) done more research of it and b) watched WALKTHROUGH videos of the Japanese version (if they exist. Never bothered looking for them.) beforehand because I didn’t know how punishing it would be.
I’ve been checking out opinions around the Net and the general consensus seems that it’s on par with other dungeon crawlers and that the game isn’t that difficult. It’s difficult to me because I don’t have much experience with dungeon crawlers so I’m not entirely sure how my gameplay strategy should be. (The last one that I stuck with was Eye of the Beholder (the first one) on the PC. I only managed to get to the 5th floor though before losing patience. XD I did enjoy hurling food rations as projectiles at monsters though.)
Anyway, the reason I label Unchained Blades as punishing (so far — based on the Prologue and Chapter 1) is that the difficulty spikes per floor level are insane and also, you have NO WAY of replenishing MP for your skills without resorting to a run back to the inn in the nearest village. Items and equipment are bloody expensive as well although you can make money from selling off materials or products created through fusing materials harvested or mined at various locations around dungeons. The problem is that the tools for getting said materials can be expensive too. 9___9
You’re pretty much doomed to grind and grind and grind until you have enough money to get better weapons & armor and enough levels to have beefy characters to survive the higher floors in dungeons.
On top of this, you have to do some monster hunting and capturing — and I emphasize HAVE TO as certain skills are only available to you if you have certain elements at your disposal. You see, each monster has some sort of elemental affinity known as Anima. Some of them have more than one too which is all fine and dandy until you realize that you have to level up your character’s charisma stat to gain enough capacity points so you can actually attach the needed monster to the character.
Capturing monsters, known as Unchaining, can be a chore since you have to whittle their HP (hitpoints) down below the halfway mark and it seems to be random meaning that you won’t be able to unchain every single creature you come across right off the bat. However, all creatures are DIFFERENT in terms of the HP amount that will trigger the Unchain option. Sometimes, you can get them once the HP reach 50% while others can be as low as 10% (like the HP bar is nearly empty). Dragging on battles is pretty much the only way to get an Unchain at times as you have to carefully chip away at an enemy’s health to make sure you don’t outright kill it.
To wrap this up, here’s someone that wrote a post that pretty much sums up my feelings about the game so far:
This package was dug up a few days ago from the basement. It brings back memories! I was a fan of MLP way back in the 1980’s and Hasbro even had an official fan club for the toys and cartoon. ^^ Thing is, I think this was the only thing that ever came out of it. XD
Click on the images to see their full size! (They’re crappy photos though. :3)
My Little Pony Fan Club Envelope
For some reason, they sent me a French-only version of the newsletter and certificate. 9__9 Also, the ponies on the certificate were coloured by me. ^^;
My Little Pony Fan Club package with other stuff
I’m quite certain the poster and post card were a part of some party set that that had the pink birthday pony and some other accessories. ^^ I just stored them in the envelope along with the fan club stuff.
Or my translation: Shining Kairobot! (You see, the title is a parody of Hoshi ni natta Shounen (星になった少年) or Shining Boy & Little Randy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465499/)).
The game is really fun. It’s what Dungeon Village SHOULD have been. I mean, this Kairobot game is more RPG-esque than Dungeon Village! I hope the localization will be out before the end of May. Everyone needs to play it. *___*
Before I start, I should list my “experience” with Korean-made RPGs~! These are off the top of my head so I’m probably missing some: Zenonia (never finished but played late into it), Zenonia 2 (midway through), Zenonia 3 (completed first playthrough only), Zenonia 4 (completed first playthrough only), Seed 2 (midway through), Seed 3 (maybe midway through?), Inotia 2 (late into the game), Inotia 3 (finished), Inotia 4 (most likely midway through), Elphis Adventure (stuck at Jeanne d’Arc era), Destinia (midway through), Advena (somewhere in the beginning), and Illusia (beginning). For what it’s worth, I played a bit of Seed (the first one) as well but the translation was so painful, I deleted the game shortly after the character got to the harbour town at the beginning of the game. 😛
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I have a love-hate relationship for all the RPGs that Gamevil, Com2uS, and CH Games publish. On one hand, I play them because I guess I kind of enjoy mindless hacking and slashing. After all, their games aren’t known for amazing plots or characters. 😛 On the other hand, I will complain about them tirelessly on Twitter.
One of the main things that drives me insane is the fact that each company holds inventory space hostage. With the exception of Zenonia (the first one) and other cell phone ports of older games, every single fucking RPG requires you to pay for inventory space out of your own pocket. I’m a natural packrat when it comes to RPGs so only have 9 – 12 slots is really useless to me. And I pick up everything I see because, in many cases, it takes FOREVER to make money solely from grinding enemies so I need stuff to sell. Also, I’m pretty sure that even if people aren’t packrats, they’ll run of space fast because, seriously, if you’re going to be carrying around potions and alchemy material (for synthesis and stuff), you’re not going to have space for anything else.
There ARE games where money doesn’t seem to play too much of a role though — like Inotia 4. To me, you pretty much have to rely on enemy spoils and the Fusion Machine to get what you need since, honestly, enemies and selling stuff won’t get you very much. At least, not unless you spend hours slaughtering the same monsters over and over.
Oh, and that’s another thing. Incessant amounts of GRINDING. I suppose you can get by with stocking up on potions and spamming the hell out of them but for titles with item cool down times, this probably isn’t the way to go. Actually, for RPGs that have player versus player battles, I would think that’s a form of encouraging people to grind. Why can’t developers give me more substance or some other alternative to strengthening characters instead?
Adventure Bar Story, which isn’t a KRPG (and certainly not action-oriented), gets around this by implementing another system to level up characters. In that game, you eat food to gain experience and food can be obtained by cooking raw ingredients which are found lying around in various dungeons or purchased at towns. In other words, you’re not required to spend hours beefing up your party or character by enacting constant genocide on every single evil creature you come across.
Speaking about levelling, there are even games like Elphis Adventure that allow you to pay for extra stat and skill points. I am convinced that Com2uS designed it so that enemies in the game are extremely tough (offensively and defensively) just so that you would go this route and take out your credit card to pay your way through the game. Granted, if you can get into a steady rhythm of alternating between normal attacks + special attacks, you can probably get through a bit of the game without falling into the trap of grinding to level up. Unfortunately, things can get rough once you end up in France (or was it Britain?). 9__9
Another common and aggravating factor of KRPGs is the sidequest system. It is the same in every goddamn game: You have to kill x-amount of monsters, or you have to get x-amount of spoils from certain monsters, or you have to collect x-amount of materials. Why can’t these sidequests be self-contained stories that don’t involve fetching items or murdering monsters, such as solving a mystery in a town or escorting a merchant somewhere? I know those are usually main quests but honestly, they could work well as non-crucial quests too. In fact, I’d LOVE to see these implemented but I suppose it’d require more thought and writing for the designers. 😛
Oh wow. This post is getting long! I should sum up some other rage in point form!
Quest-giving NPCs that aren’t marked on a map. For some reason, there are some games where, if an NPC is in a building, you won’t see the indication of a quest (usually in the form of an exclamation mark) on the mini map. It really won’t kill you to put an “!” above a building, you know. Players aren’t so stupid that they’ll stop in front of a structure and complain that there’s no one standing in front of it to give them a quest.
IAP-only materials like scrolls needed to reinforce weapons. Yes, these aren’t necessities but given that the option is there, it’d be nice to be able to buy them in-game with in-game currency. Elphis Adventure is guilty of this. I’m not sure you can ever purchase the scrolls needed to use the Blacksmith for ANY weapons or armor customization at a regular merchant or if any enemies drop them. The hilarious thing is that you can simply dismantle equipment to get the OTHER materials needed for strengthening. WTF?
IAPs for useful items like appraisal scrolls. I forgot which KRPG it was, but unless you got them from quests or enemy drops, the only other way to get them was from an in-app purchase.
Penalties for game over. I only see this as another scheme by developers to lure people into buying those special resurrection items from the IAP store.
Not tablet optimized. The hotkeys on some of the games are not easy to use due to their positions. Unless you have giant man-hands, you have to stretch your right hand a bit to hit the furthest ones. 9__9
Naturally, I’d love to see innovation from these companies but the mindless formula sells so I really don’t see it changing any time soon.
I’m kind of wishing that people happened on my blog post about the game earlier in the year since I’m somewhat losing interest in playing. XD I’m kind of at dead end right now as my newest dungeon (top one in the screenshot below) is a killer and very difficult to complete without using up Magic Stones to continue. It’s usually not the regular enemies that do me in; it’s the damn boss monster. I think the last few were able to 2-hit my party.
I suppose I wouldn’t have so many problems if I could strategize and see + set up patterns beforehand. Oh well, I always did kind of suck at puzzle games. ^^~
Anyway, the point of this post is, well, just for the screencap since I’ve NEVER seen GungHo hold specials for every single normal dungeon before. This particular one is for 1.5x the normal drop rate and it lasts for 4 days. I’m guessing it started yesterday?
At any rate, I’m going to play a little today to get some money and monsters. Whee~! Puzzle & Dragons 1.5 drop rate event
It’s been a week since I first started playing one of Com2uS’ money-eating, wait & play games. As mentioned in an earlier post, I typically avoid these kinds of games since I know how they work; many things are cheap and have low wait times at the beginning, but as you expand your farm/building/town/street/whatever, wait times grow exponentially and the costs to purchase anything with in-game currency will skyrocket. Of course, making the virtual money necessary to afford such purchases may take several hours to several days unless you use a credit card.
If you think about it, it’s an ingenius business model since it exploits people’s impatience and desires. Sadly, I believe such exploitation is here to stay because players are giving developers the message that they’re fine with giving them money over and over just to maintain a virtual playground. After all, 99 cents for 1000 pieces of gold is doable, right? Everyone with some sort of job or allowance can afford that. But 99 cents x 50 purchases is $49.50! Is the game actually worth that much? Obviously, it is to some people. 😦
Anyway, back to the real reason for this post!
My main purpose for trying out Tiny Farm was to see how far I could get without using my credit card to buy any coins or bells (the two virtual currencies). I didn’t really set any conditions for my experiment but since I’m currently out of a job, I was able to give my farm quite a bit of attention every day.
Usually, during the daytime, I would almost immediately react to every push notification about animals that were ready to grow. This, along with all the planting and harvesting I was doing, allowed me to get to level 13 in a week’s time. Maybe with some better planning & decision making, I could have even gotten to level 14 or 15.
About the crops, I would mostly plant cotton or wheat which grow in either 30 minutes or an hour respectively. Cotton gives 200 coins per hour while wheat gets you a return of 135 coins. (For cotton, you’re spending 1200 coins per hour to get 1400 coins. With wheat, it’s 45 coins for 180 coins in an hour.)
At night, before heading off to bed, I’d plant some crops that would take either 10 – 12 hours to grow. :3
Along with constant field work, I’d also make my rounds on the world map to visit all the folks that I’ve added as “friends” to get some hearts, gold, and experience as well as spreading some love around. So far, I got 20 farms surrounding me. One thing I noticed is that I seem to be restricted to how many farms I can get visiting rewards from. I suppose Com2uS doesn’t want players exploiting this method to stock up on hearts and money. They want YOUR money after all.
So here’s what the farm looks like. (The image sizes are actually reduced here. Click on them to see their full size!):
I sold some chicken and sheep to afford the leghorns and some other stuff. My goal is to fill the farm with nothing but cute, dotty-eyed animals! The alpaca is next on my list! >:3Nothing of interest on this side but I wanted to show it anyway. XD
In terms of mastery, I only have the sheep, brown sheep, chicken, and brown chicken maxed out. The black sheep and black chicken are at 3rd and 2nd Mastery level respectively. I have completed the collection of those animal types though. ^o^
I currently have a ranger out looking for an alpaca but he won’t be back until Wednesday since …
It'll take over 62 hours to get a cute little alpaca~! I don't have 32 bells or want to buy 32 bells so I'll just wait. 😀
I’ve completed all the farm and animal objectives up to the “Breed 2 pigs” and “Buy 1 firewood”. I don’t particularly care for these silly “missions” since the rewards are hardly worth it.
Other observations:
There are level restrictions for anything that will generate money, hearts, or experience. For example, if you want to increase your fields, you have to wait until level X to buy another patch. However, you can use bells to instantly buy one. Of course, bells are “special currency” which can only be obtained in-game through special conditions, offers from Tapjoy, or via a credit card purchase.
The Tapjoy offers are mostly laughable since a good number of them only give you 1 or 2 bells in return. 1 or 2 bells are great for instantly growing crops or animals but if you actually want to buy useful stuff like fields or animal certifications, you would need to pretty much take up every single free app offer. Ambitious folks could make use of signing up for subscription-based services like Netflix to get more bells though.
More than 95% of the purchasable items are simply decorations to make your farm “look more like a farm” and therefore pretty damn useless.
A good chunk of the purchasable aesthestics can only be bought with bells.
All in all, I think I’ll stick with Tiny Farm until it gets way too damn expensive to buy animal certification — i.e. increase population amount by 1. It costs me 24,250 coins right now which is manageable. I’m pretty sure it’ll increase to at least 50,000 coins for the next one though. Of course, I may even get bored of the game before I manage to obtain enough funds to get the next few animal certifications. :E
I’ve been putting some quality time into this game. My character’s currently at level 31 and just rescued the Elder of the Steel Orcs. The boss at this part had me quite stumped since he would keep putting my characters to sleep and kill all of them that way. >_< I wish the Inotia series would have some items that can restore people from various status effects — that, and the bloody ability to teleport to towns and such. I suppose walking everywhere is pretty much a staple of Inotia so Com2uS will never change it. Bastards.
Anyway, a tip for fighting Zahad Kuruhatt: switch to Olaf and spam Rush of Anger as much as you can. Heck, just spam any skills that can stun or incapacitate the boss in some way.
Edit: I suppose if you have a Warrior, you won’t need to switch to Olaf. ^^ Kiyan is a Black Knight in my game and my party at the time only consisted of a Priest and Warlock or Priest and Archer. I can’t remember.
Read about this social game while going through some older posts at Andriasang.com today. It’s described as a simulation roleplaying game but in reality, it’s a peculiar mixture of tower defense and super simple one-touch automated RPG.
The game starts off with a brief tutorial that allows you to select a single random unit which comes in the form of a card. I think you can then draw a few more units. (I can’t remember clearly. ^^;;) And finally, it tells you to select a unit to be a leader character. Er, oh yeah, there are different types of characters like fighters, archers, and magic users. Not all units are human either since I’ve drawn monsters too. ^^
Ramza!?
The tutorial then continues with the tower defense gameplay mode by teaching you the basics of selecting a unit and placing them in a highlighted area. Each unit has a cost and every stage gives you a fixed amount of unit points to start off with. The points regenerate as you play the stage. Also, you can only place a certain number of units on the gameplay field. If you have any leftover space (and some available points, I think), you can select characters from other players to assist you in your battle.
The other gameplay mode has stages where your leader character runs northward along a very long dirt path. It seems the point of it is to collect certain unit cards. You can also level up your leader this way though. Anyway, along the path, he or she will encounter monsters or chests where you can get new unit cards. It seems that random characters from other players will pop up too? I’m not sure about this though.
Of course, there are many other things to do in the game such as trading cards with other players, fusing cards to strengthen characters, buying and selling cards + items, sending friend requests, and more.
One big gimmick about Fantasica is that both gameplay modes as well as obtaining new cards from the Gacha menu require some sort of points which limit how much you can do during a single gaming session. I believe the gameplay ones replenish after a while but getting new cards require either points obtained in the TD or RPG modes or by purchasing them with real money. There seems to be like 3 sets of points too. X___x In a way, it’s reminiscent of the Stamina & Friendship Points systems from Puzzle & Dragons.
I should note that this game requires one to register with the Japanese Mobage social community. The registration isn’t difficult but they require personal information like your gender, birth date and blood type (I wonder if all Japanese social networks ask for this. 9__9). Oh, and even if you don’t live in Japan, you’ll be forced to select a prefecture before you can finalize the registration process. If you’re hyper sensitive about allowing the public to know about these things, you’d best not even bother with the game. Or, you can quickly load up your Mobage home page after you finish registering so you can hide the info through the privacy settings.
The official site can be seen here. It’s Japanese only.
Oh, despite the fact that the product page on iTunes says the in-game languages are English and Japanese, 99% of the game is in Japanese. 😛 The English bits only come in the form of unit names and stuff.
Edit on August 30th, 2012:This post was done way back in April when the game was still wholly incomplete and new. It had an immense amount of balancing issues and required insane amounts of grinding for levelling and money. As subsequent updates pretty much didn’t address a lot of the issues I’ve pointed out, I’ve since uninstalled the game. I have no idea how things improved or degraded with the recent updates nor do I care since I’ve given up on Forgotten Tales.
I recommend people to read the comments that other players left for more up-to-date guidance. The developer has also made a forum so you can check there for hints and information on bugs and such: http://forgotten-tales.boardonly.com/
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While on my quest to find fun and engaging Android games to play, I came across Forgotten Tales which seemed decent from screenshots and with a near 5-star rating from 80+ users, I figure it was worth a shot. But after some quality time with it, I’m finding it difficult to understand how in all hell people could give the game anything beyond 2 or 3 stars. I take it they’re all just masochists with really low expectations. Here’s my experience so far:
WALKTHROUGH OF THE VERY BEGINNING + TIPS
It’s not difficult to figure out the controls although I can’t fathom why anyone would want to play the game on the default speed. I always have it at double speed because everything moves so dreadfully slow to me. (I’m using a Galaxy Tab 10.1.) At first, the game really did seem decent. I tried out the little dungeon that was southeast of the Forester and took out some skeletons. I freaked out a little that they could move so much faster than my character but after 2 or 3 battles, I managed to jet and get out of there alive. Your character regenerates health automatically so I had him stand around for a bit. Once the health bar was back in the green, I travelled southwest to Kedington Village.
An odd thing about the NPCs (non-player characters) in this game is that, although you get the little speech balloon icon if you move your cursor over them, they have NOTHING to say! Even more strange is the fact that these NPCs can disappear from the area all together if you return at a later time. Anyway, the only ones that will even acknowledge your existence are the ones that have a little question mark icon next to them.
The first character I spoke to was a man standing around in the southwest part of the village. He gives you the quest to deliver a message to his brother, a gravedigger, in the southern village/town of Ashdown. Shouldn’t be too difficult, right? RIGHT??? (Oh yeah, at some point, you can talk to the woman (possibly a hooker?) in Kedington. After you do your thing with her, you get 25 XP or something.)
Unfortunately, unless you a) did some grinding with the skeletons in the aforementioned dungeon to get enough spoils and money to afford armor and a better weapon, and b) you save like crazy, there’s a very good chance that you will DIE on the way there. For one thing, the highway bandit (the guy with a green cape) can overpower you easily if you didn’t beef up beforehand. You may also run into the ever-so-terrible-predicament of being attacked by a giant mob of spiders, wolves, and more highway bandits all at the same time. Although this is not a common occurrence, spiders DO frequently come after you if you’re within the vicinity of the signpost north of the guardhouse near Ashdown.
You don’t want to get into this situation when you’re level 1, travelling alone, and armed only with a wimpy sword.
Oh yeah, there’s a party member with my character in that screenshot. (The member = the other guy with a giant grey oval under him.) I’ll get to this in the next paragraph. XD
In Ashdown, I ran into some random guy that wanted to join forces with me to take out some mean orcs that took over the mines in the east. Cool. A party member! Maybe I won’t have to worry so much about dying all the time now. Afterwards, I chucked the letter at the gravedigger and it was off to the mines for orc hunting.
Alas, after about a minute of slashing, the one orc I encountered at the mines still wasn’t dead. Instead, my character was the only one taking damage. That’s when I decided to simply reload the bloody game.
So now, all I’m doing is running around and grinding because it takes 300 XP to get to level 3. I only mention the experience because enemies that I can actually kill only give around 2 XP. All I can hope for is that they drop gold or things I can sell. I’m not sure why wolves keep dropping their “fungs” because all they do is take up space in inventory as you can’t sell them.
I think you mean fangs. And are these needed for some eventual quest because I can’t sell them or use them in any way.
THE RAGE
Forgotten Tales is a definite work in progress. At the moment, it has extreme balancing issues and a terrible lack of direction for players. I’m all for open world games and exploration but I also like to be able to SURVIVE in them. It’s actually kind of puzzling why it was released to the public in its current state. It would make a bit more sense if it had the word “BETA” slapped onto the end.
Back to the topic of survival, see the red-headed asshole in the screen below? You try and take him down at level 2 with default equipment, or hell, even the first armor “set” and a Sabre AND with your faithful companion from Ashdown by your side. Good fucking luck.
This enemy should NOT be so close to the second village.
I’ve played my fair share of Western, Japanese, and Korean RPGs — both single player and massively multiplayer online — and generally, there’s something known as game progression. Typically, you can’t access areas with enemies that you can’t handle due to level, capabilities, etc. until you fulfil certain requirements like advancing the plot. I’m not entirely sure there really IS a story in Forgotten Tales but regardless, it ignores any sort of logical continuity and allows you to innocently wander into these particular areas.
To add insult to injury, these said areas are immediately east AND west to the goddamn fucking SECOND village.
In order to take on the enemies, you essentially either need to level up — which takes forever due to the low experience points enemies give — or grind until you have enough money to afford better equipment. Speaking about equipment, here’s a hilarious screenshot:
What is up with the prices of the armor?
This is from the shop in the SECOND village. I take it there aren’t many settlements and such in the game so this place probably doubles as “the town that’s before a late game dungeon” as well. At the pace the game is going at, I can tell you that it will be agony to even rack up 1000 pieces of gold.
Another annoyance is that NPCs don’t repeat dialogue nor speak to you again. Some of them do if you return to them after you finish the request they made. However, if you just so happened to accidentally click out of a conversation because enemies started swarming you while you were talking to someone, you won’t ever know what the hell the person was chatting about unless you reload the game.
Finally, random enemy mobs. It’s not like I’m fleeing from monsters and then running into another group of them. My party is simply walking along the cobblestone path and then BAM! Monsters from literally all directions just come out of no where and charge directly toward it. As mentioned before, this isn’t something that happens often but the fact that it can still happen is kind of frustrating and shouldn’t even be a possibility.
![[DESTINIA] French for Tea?](https://koukoupuffs.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/destiniathe.jpg?w=150)
With wheat, it’s 45 coins for 180 coins in an hour.)
koukoupuffs 