Daily Review: Chantelise

Daily Review

Chantelise: A tale of two sisters

 

 

 

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Unfinished
Currently: Frustrated, 3rd Temple.

So, to start this off, I love Carpe Fulgur for one reason, the game Reccettear. It was an amazing little combination of dungeon crawler and shop...management...thing. The localization was great, the game had a lot of style and personality, and was a joy to play.

I know this one was made prior to Reccettear, and the company overall is a Doujin game maker (usually small group making games and selling them at conventions or over the internet, kind of like Indie game designers in the West, except with usually way less budget). Given the obviously low budget, I keep having this feeling I shouldn't be too harsh on it...but...

Yeah, the game is fundamentally flawed. Now, do note that I only paid 4.99 for it on Steam due to the summer sale, and I do realize that its maybe a 5 hour game including all the extra stuff. That doesn't bother me. The areas where you would think a low budget game would fail (graphics, voice acting, writing, being glitchy) don't bother me, the voice acting (while japanese) is good, the graphics have their own appeal, and the game runs fine on my system.

All the same, it was not worth the 5 dollars I paid for it. A solid 5 hour game would be worth more than five hours if done right of course, but the game design of it falls apart rather quickly. The magic system looks like it has depth. Pick up gems, channel one or many into different spells, lob them, mixes well with the fighting. However, since you can't control which gems you use, always last grabbed first used basis, the spells you actually get are entirely random, and at times useless. Need a ranged spell to use against that bomb? Too bad, you just picked up two earth gems and there are none left in the entire stage. You get to eat 40 damage. Need a heal? Oh well, the water gems you picked up weren't one after the other, so no heal for you.

I am a completionist, my end goal is to fully complete every game I own. This game doesn't have a lot to complete, there are hidden treasures on every stage, that you have to complete some strange requirement to get to pop up. Get them all, and you get access to a hidden stage. Once I knew this, I decided to just read the spoilers to find them, no sense going through the game twice. Too bad the game declaring them 'cleared' is buggy. It is entirely likely to go through an entire stage, having to kill every enemy and clear the requirement, getting the treasure, popping back out, and...not cleared. This has happened to me twice on a bonus stage, which easily takes 14 minutes or so to clear each try, I still don't have it cleared. You get the treasure again if the game bugs and doesn't credit you with it, so its free cash or HP, but the fact that I'm accidentally abusing this bug, getting way more HP and cash than I should, and still heavily struggling with imbalanced monsters is not good. (As a side note, the items you find are at the same level as the dungeon you get them in, so you are balanced to get these first play through...just not 5 of them)/

Once you get to the second temple, you realize the rhythm of the game, which is: Go through the dungeon floors, get as far as you can, die, start over, skip all the floors you completed by running as fast as you can and avoiding enemies, complete another floor, die again. Rinse and repeat till you get to the boss, which becomes dash through the entire stage, try the boss, die, repeat until you actually kill the boss. Yes, you keep all the cash and items you find...but since there is no experience or level up system, and the only way to permanently raise your stats is gear or the HP items, there is no incentive to waste HP killing enemies for their piddly cash drops. The only good source of cash is sellable items, which for some reason they made depreciate in value for each one you sell. So that random treasure that pops out of the monster starts out valuable...and two dungeons in, now is selling for 500 when items are 20-40k or so. The only appreciable way to get cash is the above stated...abusing the treasures that don't show as cleared, selling them for 50k or so to buy 20 more HP.

In game, you get so many gear slots, based on where you are in the game, maxing out at 5. These can be used for anything from stat boosters (plus attack, plus magic, plus defense), to new abilities (auto-gem pickup, air-dash). However, given this is the -only- way to increase your stats other than HP and to acquire those needed abilities, the limited slots soon become a major annoyance. Do note, in one room of a dungeon (containing upwards of 30 monsters), you can easily have monsters who are resistant to magic, resistant to physical, and deal magic and physical damage. If you don't have a shield, you have practically -no- physical defense. If you don't have a charm, you have practically -no- magical defense. There is no way to have everything you need and the abilities, so either you constantly switch gear (which you can't do on time attack retries), or eat 40 damage from each attack that you're not defensive against. Add in a rather floaty control system, enemies who have purely annoying abilities, and a camera that while controlled, is sticking way too close to your heroine to dodge anything coming from behind, and you get frustrated fast.

Still, I plan to finish and complete this game, the writing does have a lot of personality, but I really wouldn't recommend paying more than a dollar or so for it. Also as of note, though this seems normal for the developers games: You need a USB controller. Full stop.