Well apparently a lot of people are confused about Endless Frontier SRW OG saga, personally I’m more concerned about the gun shots and sirens in the distance but this is as good of a time as any.

Since my last post on the subject I put in a fair amount of time with the game, so far I’ve gotten 6 of the 7 characters shown in the manual but have yet to get a mecha. I was initially confused because one character’s “mecha” is in fact a puppet that they manipulate so it doesn’t actually count as one of your mecha. If I’m not mistaken the mecha might only be usable for support attacks but I’ll save that speculation since I’m probably close to reaching them for myself.

Apparently a lot of people are confused about the controls. Probably these are people who have no japanese ability whatsoever. The controls of the game are pretty simple, although I think the game would have benefited from making ANY use of the stylus. As far as I can tell you can’t use it for anything in the game which is just stupid. I have often considered that in standard games the stylus has an ease of use for menu navigation which of course an RPG like this game is filled with.

So in addition to the questionable gameplay and shoddy graphics (a lot of it really looks like SNES quality aside from the battle sprites and portraits which are probably more like PSone quality) the game has a pretty steep difficulty curve. I ended out having to use up almost all of my items in the desperate first fight against W06 (I can’t recall her name) right after getting Reiji and Xiaomu and having not saved for a while. This game could have been really improved by being able to switch out characters while in battle as it turned out that Harken, Reiji, Xiaomu, and Suzuka was a horrible boss fighting party (you need Kaguya for healing even though she’s offensively handicapped) and I had to blow through almost all my rare items to avoid game over. I kind of wish you’d have a little more indication than a save point 3 screens and likely an experience level back that boss fights are looming in this game. I also wish I had any idea what the algorithms are for damage calculation or that you’d be given any indication when an enemy is going to break off your attack or break it off and counter. It seems somewhat random although against W06 she seemed more apt to do it after support and continuous (combination) attacks. It really pissed me off because she kept doing it when I wanted to use a hisatsu waza so I ended out sitting on a full gauge until she was almost dead.

Yeah so anyway, the fact that your characters in the “back” don’t get full experience doesn’t help with the sudden difficulty increase at all. You probably aren’t likely to be forced to use specific characters in this game but you kind of want to use the different ones at different times but being forced to trade them out to keep their levels even isn’t great.

Of all things as much as the game is similar to Namco X Capcom a lot of things about it remind me of the Code Geass DS game. Mostly how in that game after you reached a certain point you pretty much had to combo attack enemies in order to take out one enemy a turn. You get better economy in this game (probably due in large part to having 4 characters instead of 3) but as it has gone on it becomes rarer and rarer to be able to beat an enemy with just a single characters own attacks. You have to add spells, use combos and/or supports in order to take out grunts. And damn it I have no idea why the normal enemies that accompany bosses are so strong. You seriously end out fighting grunts that are almost more durable than the last boss you faced. That’s not too damn fun. Back to the Geass comparison, at least you don’t have to shout out character names to do supports or something. The voice recognition in Geass is horrible and I would find myself basically blowing syllables straight into the mic to try and get things to go. I’ll write about that some other time. But at least the stylus comes in pretty handy in geass and they made fair use of the dual screens. Outside of battle the duo screens are nearly wasted. It is nice to be able to look down and see your current status and how much exp you need to level up but I think they could have squeezed a map into there too. Then again dungeons are so small in this game they probably didn’t think you’d need one. hm

Initially I had said that the character humor was the redeeming quality of the game but it kind of grates on you after a while that all the characters are constantly either insulting each other and/or calling characters nearly random names in different languages and there’s almost no acknowledgment of this whatsoever. I can’t even tell you how many times cracks are made about Kaguya’s breasts but mostly she gets called some sort of cow all the time (thinking about it her white and black outfit doesn’t help) and she almost never acknowledges this at all. In fact almost the only times that there’s back and forth between characters is when it’s Aschen (especially in her wonky acting DTD form) making comments about people or of course the “classic” back and forth of Reiji and Xiaomu. To be fair it remains amusing even as it becomes annoying but that the vast majority of the dialog in the game is pointless crap really says something about how shallow it is.

By the way to those of you who didn’t get the bonus CD with the game, it’s not really anything that special. In my case I probably really pushed it with how late I let it go before putting down the pre-order on it but that’s why I ordered it from a japanese shop. In the end I had to pay about 1.5 times the price of the game between a lousy markup (although not as bad as I thought, apparently the game was about 6,000 yen in the first place and I was charged about 7,000) and a really really horrible shipping rate (like 2,000 yen). On the bright side I got the game as soon as it came out but I frankly wasn’t in any hurry. So if there’s something you have to have as an otaku then you have to be willing to basically throw away money to get it. For me it was the bonus cd with this game. I wouldn’t have cared if I hadn’t gotten screwed on the namco x capcom bonus cd when that game came out (and I didn’t pre-order from a japanese shop but instead the cheapest and closest place I could find) but I wasn’t going to let that happen again. Even though that meant paying 1.5 times as much for it. Anyway for those that are curious what’s on it, even though it was touted as a drama cd there are only 3 drama tracks but there are 10 music tracks which seem to feature the majority of the “more or less original” music in the game. A lot of the music sounds really familiar to me and I can only assume it’s some cross between music from past SRW games and the stuff from Monolith Soft (I swear they’re playing the music they used for the xenosaga characters early on as background) but I might be imagining that. Well actually I know that some stuff is re-used, like the music for the original characters from NxC. But that isn’t on the bonus cd anyway if I recall correctly (and I might not).

Well you can expect me to continue to write more about this as the game goes on. If I figure out what the deal is with the mecha before I get close to beating the game then that will be the next “thing” (everyone knows I’ll write all kinds of other crap with it too) I write about in relation to the game. I suppose if people really wanted it I could write about the controls.

I’m not going to try and translate the game but to give you a basic plot synopsis: “what the hell is going on? let’s jump from world to world from cross gates that required incredibly powerful psychics to activate in SRWAlpha3 but any moron can use now while making new friends and enemies and fun of each other as we go along to figure it out while the girls wear skimpy outfits. So saying the line between “girl power” and “fan service” when there are 5 female protagonists, a majority of female antagonists, and only 2 male protagonists, is drawn with the outfits (lot of cleavage and leg) and dialogue suche as Kaguya being called “twin bombs” by Harken. Yeah