Slaves, Whores, and No Evil Magic Dildoes

November 13th, 2018

Oh my.

I was originally going to write this about both Eushully and Softhouse Chara's upcoming games since both had trials recently, but the latter's is bad. Really bad. Really, really, really bad. Basically, the whole gimmick is that it gives you the enemy movelist, in exact order, and then you have to come up with a plan to beat it. If you want to do anything other than a basic attack, you have to train once for each time you want to do it, and you get X days to train. So basically, it's like a puzzle game, where you're given the puzzle up front and then they made as big a chore as possible about going from solved to finished. And once you're done and ready to go, maybe the movelist will change slightly or you'll get an extra unique move to the fight, so hope you like savescumming too! Because what could be less frustrating than making a big affair about how you need to plan everything out to the last detail, and then change those details after it's too late to do anything? Also, you're a flying magical dildo.

So anyway, in a far rosier part of Japanese game development, Eushully's upcoming RPG, The Seal of Gracesta, or Gracesta at/of the Seal to be more precise, but… you know what, let's stick with just Gracesta. You are Judar, former slave and about to rejoin the ranks of slaveness. As always, the local empire has found a hellhole and decided to build a settlement on top of it, and guess who's going to be exploring it! It's not the most inspired beginning, but it gets right to who you are, what you're going to be doing, and a bevy of rather sadistic future-haremettes. Jud is also no Wilfred Dion, but he doesn't really rise above your standard angsty light novel protagonist either. Yes, yes, you're such a loner and brooding dude, who also believes in the sanctity of promises and the bonds of friendship. Gag me. It's weird too, because I rather like the rest of the setting and most of the characters. It really does make a convincing frontier slave town, and in more ways than there just being prostitutes literally everywhere. I was especially pleasantly surprised by the bondage elf, who despite having ornate bondage ropes worked into her silly costume is clearly a switch and practically giggles with maniacal glee in fights.

 

The core gameplay I'm less sold on. It's based off of the Ikusa Megami series rather than the SRPG/Kamidori engine. Its big quirk that it prides itself on (for reasons I don't fully understand) is that Jud's core skill is his ability to use random debris sitting around the battle to fight. In practice, this gives you extra attacks depending on the area. For example, in a cave, you get turns to pretend to be various rocks. In a camp, torches get turns. These 'items' can also be stocked and then combined with themselves or other items (set combinations only, not freeform) to power up the attacks, akin to the Brave/Default thing. Unfortunately, in practice, it more often than not means that you're going to be cycling through the 'turns' of about five different inanimate objects in between every one main one, and some of these objects, especially the sewer ones, can't be combined with anything, so all it's adding is extra time spent clicking with no intelligent choice to be made.

HP, of all things, is also something that deserves special mention. It's a shared resource, but party members contribute very little. By hiring on extra ones, you provide more targets on the battlefield so AoE attacks get especially punishing, as do party members with low defense. Add to this some wonky damage stuff and other frustrations (I'll get there), and it's not at all rare to go from full HP to critical health, or even a gameover, out of bloody nowhere. The frustration is added to by rather high critical hit and miss rates, so even if you're paying attention to the numbers, you could still just screwed over when the RNG just decides "Hey, screw you."

On top of this, the random encounter design is… something to behold. There's not only visible encounters in dungeons, but also traditional out-of-nowhere random spawns. And these both are put together. If you were trying to run past a visible enemy when you're thrown into a random battle, better remember that, because you're going to get dumped immediately back out with the thing still in hot pursuit. Now you've been back attacked and there's another gameover. If you were thinking that was the end of their bad design decisions, you're wrong. Encounters, random and visible, can also have a random number of rounds. That little cave spider? Maybe it's one cave spider, maybe it's five cave spiders and four orcs, spread out across three battles in a row. Who knows! You might be stuck in this fight for the next five minutes.

There are a few other instances of wonky design, so I'll just hit the high points. First, the loading screens. They're everywhere. You can't walk for five seconds in a dungeon without hitting a loading area. See the grey lines on the minimap? Every time you cross one, that's a loading zone. It's absurd. Second, the game economy is… I don't exactly want to say a mess, but it gives you only a tiny bit of cash to start, and severely restricts your cash flow while goddamned everything is hugely expensive. In the trial, after you've hired maybe one or two of the available party members, you can afford like, one or two tiny upgrades to equipment or skills out of the approximately fifteen hundred available. And forget hiring a prostitute, of which there are both multiple tiers AND multiple levels within each tier, and they're just there for the inclusion of porn, not for any core gameplay purpose. Inflation is going to hit this game like a sledgehammer to the crotch. I could probably do a paragraph on the item/synthesis system too, but that would require another paragraph just to explain it. Let's just say that a quarter of a century later, Earthbound's inventory management system somehow found ways to become worse.

 

All in all, at least as far as the trial goes, despite some truly mindboggling design decisions, I do think it's better put together than Amayui was, or at the very least, didn't give me the impression of a severely lobotomized version of something I liked. It certainly opens up and provides meaningful choices long before Amayui, not to mention a much more interesting world to explore and conflicts set up. There are plenty of persistent niggles though that really scream out that it needed another pass through testing and/or optimization. Seriously, I can't get over the dungeons where each screen has a dozen loading zones just literally in the middle of wide open spaces. I think the setting and characters so far do make it worth at least a look, but maybe be prepared to have some of its weird/poor gameplay decisions and/or balance issues cause grating frustration, more than enough to offset its rather humorous and constant failed attempts at English.

     

Posted in The Seal of Gracesta | 3 Comments »

3 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • bigbigdog says:

    Been a while since you last wrote about games on here. Was it a year and a half ago with Amayui? I enjoy reading these game related posts, it’s a shame there isn’t more of them! Sad to hear SHchara putting out another stinker. Playing as a evil magic dildo sounds kind of funny. I wouldn’t mind watching you demonstrate how bad the gameplay really is, though I don’t know if you still post videos to your youtube channel lol. It wouldn’t be too surprising if they closed shop soon from the sound of things. Also, Bondage Elf’s design looks hilariously silly.

  • The Phantom says:

    So I suspect this is the game main selling point? Even if it has no other gameplay purpose:

    http://tenka.seiha.org/images2018/gracesta/11.jpg