mercoledì 25 marzo 2015

The Witch and the Hundred Knight

Currently listening to: Basically all of this

Here's another game that received the shitstorm treatment.
I remember I was pretty excited about this when it first came out. Not only it was from NISA, but most of the people who matter staff who worked on it are from the Disgaea team (I think?). And it was something new, on top of that! How to not be excited?

Metallica herself is quite charming too, ain't she?
But then the reviews begun.
Well, they're all pretty similar, and I think they can be summed up with this:

The Witch and the Hundred Knight has an incredibly dark sense of humor, at times borderline morbid [...]. Not to mention [Metallica is] incredibly foul-mouthed.
 (From Siliconera)
Oh, they also all said that the gameplay was quite average and there were no particular strong points.

After reading all this, how could I resist?
So after a year and some months I decided to buy it at a very convenient price to finally check it out.

The first problem I encountered was like 3 minutes into the game. No, that's not because it's that bad, but because the following choice is always rather difficult for me:
" Select voice language:
> English
> Japanese "

What I usually do is select English, watch the first scene of the game, then go back to the start screen, select Japanese, and stick with it until the end of the game.
The Witch and the Hundred Knight was no exception to that.
Although I have to admit that the English dub was quite decent from what I've heard.

Now, why did I just spend almost 10 lines to say an apparently useless thing? You'll have to wait a bit more, but if you're smelling a Checkhov's Gun, then your nose is pretty good.
The next thing that hit me, as it sometimes happen, was the soundtrack. Pretty much all the tracks in the game scream "Tenpei Sato", and that's undoubtedly a good thing for me.

Saeval, that's nice and all, but this is becoming a wall of text and you really didn't say anything significant what you think of the game still.
I know, my impatient friend, but don't worry, the main part starts now.
So, as far as the gameplay is regarded, I have to say the reviews are unfortunately correct. It is quite average, being kind of a fast-paced-Diablo clone. There are some other, different things, but they really aren't that necessary to understand since you get lots of EXP just wondering around, which makes you overleveled for the most part of the game. 
About the whole dark humor thing, first of all, I have to say that I clearly don't speak Japanese, but thanks to all the time wasted watching anime I do have some (extremely low) level of comprehension of the language. As I said above, I played the game with Japanese dub and (obviously) English text. Doing so, I kinda had the impression that it was NISA's localization to make things more vulgar than they are natively. In a lot of dialogues Metallica's words on screen didn't quite match the translation I had in mind, being the former always meaner. Yeah, I'm aware I might be completely off with this, but blogs are about personal opinions, aren't they?

All of that said, mostly also thanks to Tenpei Sato's work it's not really a problem to clear the game, even though it is quite long. But I do have a few big complains:
  1. The trophies don't make sense. Well, the reason for me saying this is mainly because of the ridiculous amount of time I spent 100%-ing almost all the maps, just to find out later on that between all the secret trophies (which are, like, all of them or so) there is none related to map exploring completion.
    Think of the kanjis as censorship of my curses.
    That's how I felt.
  2. The ending. There's probably no need to be this cautious, but I will avoid spoilers anyway.
    Basically there are 3 endings. The normal one, which... well, isn't really worth more than a mention. Then there's the true ending, which is the one I got when I didn't even know all this. Finally there's the bad ending. My complain here is that the normal ending does kinda-sorta fit the game, but it just sucks. Hard. It's definitely not the kind of ending you want to see after 40+ hours, and it just makes you want to throw the pad against the screen.
  3. So, the normal ending isn't really a thing, the true one sucks. What about the bad one?
    Heh, I wish I could answer you, dear reader, but the fact is that to unlock the bad ending you have to go through chapters 12 and 13.
    Saeval, what's the problem with that?
    Do you remember when I said the game is kinda easy because EXP basically rains from the sky?
    That still applies. You get a shitload of EXP during chapters 12 and (I think, since I never got there) 13 too.
    Too bad it doesn't matter. The enemies are always at your same level regardless of whatever it is. As if that weren't enough, the equipment you get up to chapter 11 is extremely underpowered considering the enemies you have to face.
    The result of all of this is that you need several hits to defeat any of the common enemies while most of them one-shot you, or at best, two-shot you. And if two-shotting ain't a verb, I don't care.
    I did try to ganbatte and not give up; I even defeated two of the (at least) five bosses of the chapter, but the third I tried to take on is simply crazy and the only advice I can find on the internet* is "go farm". Yeah right, as if that were useful.
    But man, the true ending sucks. I guess this is the part where Youtube comes in handy.

    *: Speaking of which, this game must have sold terribly bad, because you can barely find anything about it. Most of the times I got stuck (which didn't really occur much often) I found just one or two gamefaqs threads, if anything at all.

    And that's all.
    tl;dr : Is The Witch and the Hundred Knight as bad as reviews depict it? Probably not. I can see why it got such poor votes, but if you're used a bit to the Japanese style you'll probably end up liking it, or at least not minding it. If you're not though, stay away from it. But maybe do give the soundtrack a chance.