Psst, Squeenix

[ungratefulninja]

Unless you are Animal Crossing, I'm not going to plan my week around your game.

I really want to like TWEWY. The plot is interesting, the combat mechanics are compelling, and the characters aren't completely flat. (For a JRPG, this is high praise.) But I can't quite get past all the niggling gameplay problems:

• One attack growth mechanic requires

Comments

[lula_vampiro]

I found ways around this stuff. Hit me up.

[ungratefulninja]

You mean besides "set level to max and switch to Easy, then burn through the remaining storyline in a couple of hours", right? Though, seriously, I'm unlikely to play the game after I finish the story unless I can play under week 1 rules -- Beat's combo mechanic is irritatingly slow for building up fusion stars, Joshua is made entirely out of tissue paper, and the bullshit chain attacks start around the midpoint of week 2 and never really stop. So blazing through the rest on Easy is fine by me.

I'm also waiting for the day Square stops including terrible minigames: Tin Pin Slammer is a complete waste of bytes for the same reason that Mingle XP is impossible to get unless you live in America Japan.

I'm looking forward to finishing this so I can be frustrated at Professor Layton & The Diabolical Box instead.

[lula_vampiro]

Wow, you did this exactly the opposite way I did-I kept the level at 1 and the difficulty at Hard pretty much the entire game. It was annoying at first but I got used to it after a few in-game days.

It is almost never worth it to look at the top screen; usually just picking a direction and tapping it regardless of combo stars works best.

Re: healing: do you have the shield healing pin yet? That one is a lifesaver for a lot of the battles.

You get Mingle PP rather surprisingly fast just leaving the thing on and waiting for aliens. I used to do it before bed and just leave it on all night.

It's been a while since I played this game …

[ungratefulninja]

I played through all of week one and all but the last day of week two at level 1 normal before the bullshit chain attacks finally got to me. I've been playing at level 10 since, which is mostly overkill. Part of that was bad luck on available pins: most of the touch-and-hold psyches are a waste of a slot, because they take too long to activate -- I'm including the Dragon Couture fire-trail pins in that, too -- but those were the ones I had on hand and not already maxed out at that point in the game

[foxfour]

especially interesting given japanese people's general disinclination to talk to devices in public, compared to (north) americans' relative willingness.

[ungratefulninja]

It's less "talk to the device" and more "leave it turned on in your pocket, in wifi mode, running down the battery". Mingle experience comes from picking up wifi signals from other DSes and from Nintendo kiosks (and from random bundles of free bonus XP, meant as a sop for people who don't live in Japan). See nobarking's post below for an indication of how well that works in practice.

[foxfour]

well, it sounds like a great terrible idea.

[nobarking]

The only time I ever managed to get Pins leveled up in Toronto was during Play! Live two years ago in Dundas Square -- then I was getting max xp every 10 seconds and had to reset. Since then, walking around all day with it turned on = 0 encounters. Urf.

I love that game so hard, but it angers the OCD in me as there's no way I'll ever get it 100% complete.

... mic-related attacks really DO make you look insane in public, too, but no less so than the AGGRESSIVE scribbling that game requires, good grief.

"It seems to get really sniffy about what constitutes a circle."

[ungratefulninja]

Yeah, I've pretty much settled on three activation types I actually like:

- Tap the screen like a demented pigeon in a Pavlovian mind-control experiment,
- Slash the screen like a demented pigeon et cetra, and
- Click the nice friendly icon at the top of the screen and hope to god I don't get interrupted before the animation finishes.

A bigger problem for me, and this isn't TWEWY-specific (but TWEWY's controls do aggravate it) is that my hands are freaking huge, so holding the DS by the cross pad in one hand and scribbling with the other gives me a wicked cramp in my cross-pad hand in about half an hour. Growing up in the NES era has given me a ridiculous tolerance for controller-induced hand cramps, but the DS is the only controller that's ever cramped *my pinky finger*.

I'd get a DSi, but I actually *use* the GBA slot.

GAARRRGH.

:3

(And you know what they say about guys with big hands...)

Re: "It seems to get really sniffy about what constitutes a circle."

[nobarking]

THEY WEAR BIG GLOVES? ;)

I love my DSi but am mourning the loss of the GBA slot like you wouldn't believe -- I've actually busted out my Advance SP to play a couple of games and miss being able to do so on a decent system, heh.

A friend of mine is actually getting the DSiLL for exactly the same reason, his hands are HUGE and he doesn't mind a rather large console in his pocket, ifyouknowwhatimean.

I miss TWEWY, I should play it again! I learned to love one of the "scribble" pins, although it took some getting used to -- set stuff on fire by scribbling, raar. Slash and tap are definitely my favourites, though.

Re: "It seems to get really sniffy about what constitutes a circle."

[ungratefulninja]

I'm torn between "hey if you want to exploit the everliving shit out of mingle XP let me know" and "aaah don't encourage me to keep playing TWEWY after I finish it, I have a billion other games to play!"

Also, what is with putting a camera in every single piece of portable electronics?