Ivy plays video games

Terra Battle 2 is closing in several months, and for those who forgot to update the app before June 2018, the game is already closed, as it was removed from the stores and there’s no means to update anymore. This is all just so Terra-Battle-2-style. This is a game made of bad decisions. I didn’t like it a bit. Well, it had its strong points, for example, the UI was beautiful and polished (not so much user-friendly, but still), character art was lovely (not as great as in original Terra Battle, but still beautiful). And that’s about it. Everything else was bad. It’s very confusing, how could Mistwalker make this mess of a sequel after a clever and original Terra Battle.

This post is very painful for me to make. I was trying to write a review of Terra Battle 2 when it was released. I quit the game after several weeks of repetitive and boring map-crawling and was waiting for the news about a major update that would’ve fixed the game’s issues. It never came. After maybe two more months I launched Terra Battle 2 again to make some screenshots (because I was still planning to write a review), stayed for 3 days, was showered in free energy as a compensation from the devs for lack of game support, summoned a ton of useless creatures, and left again. After another few months I decided to give a game another chance, only to be greeted by the news of closure and inability to log in ever again, despite of the fact that a few people were still playing.

This is a major issue here. This game was made for a few players from the start. For some reason they decided to make a new game exclusively for the players of the first Terra Battle. It was a nice game, very playable and unique, but not boasting a huge player base even at better times. Then they abruptly launched a half-finished sequel and tried to market it among the players of the first game, who were not really tired of it. Even the tutorial explained the basics, assuming that the player already knew everything about the first game. 

TB2 is worse than TB1 in every aspect, except the art (the art is great in both of them). Even the base battle mechanics went from intuitive and puzzle-like to semi-uncontrollable. And then they added a (beautiful) world map that was a pain to navigate, a huge amount of indistinguishable skill, and finished with a stupid thing of adding randomly coming and going story characters to conceal all the great guardian art. And I don’t even want to talk about all those useless types of coins, or insane game restrictions what didn’t let you to freely manage your possessions. As a result the second game is closing and the first one seems to be still alive.

The awful part of this is how all the gorgeous art of Kimihiko Fujisaka and other talented people (whose names I don’t know yet, but will surely research later) was wasted on this mess of a game. They made a huge amount of graphic content, and frankly speaking, the art was the only thing in this game that was well made. I don’t know, maybe it was also an issue, maybe they thought that the art was the strongest point of the first game, and art direction stomped on other departments in the process of creating a new game, but I highly doubt it, because there was a lot of unnecessary game design features that should’ve been scrapped at prototyping, but somehow made it to release. 

And now I think Mistwalker is working on a Terra Battle 3 project and still planning to release Terra Wars. Why? They clearly didn’t learn anything from their past games. TB2 was not their only bad mobile release.

April was a good month in games for me. I finally played two games I really wanted to try for a long time, but couldn find a moment.

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony [PC] - I’m a big fan of Danganronpa series, even if it’s not meant for my demographics. It’s a mix of a guilty pleasure (when I think of how pointless most of the game is) and of actual positive gaming experience (when I remember there is not so much good detective games out there), and I love it. I spent more then 50 hours on it. Compared to previous games, I think DRV3 had a good cast of characters, pretty decent cases, rather impacting plot twists, and a very unexpected ending. I think DR1 had better cases, and DR2 had better characters, but overall impression the DRV3 left on me is strong and good. I want to use some quotes here, “This is getting way too meta”, “I’m not here for a damn lecture”, and “This ending sucks”.

Finding Paradise [PC] - It’s a third game of To The Moon series (second being A Bird Story). I waited for it, I bought it at release, I couldn’t play it in time, but not it’s finished. It was good, I guess. It’s definitely not a standalone game. You should absolutely play To the Moon or A Bird Story before Finding Paradise, preferably both. It’s not as strong as To the Moon, and not as emotional as The Bird Story. I even think it somehow diminishes The Bird Story, making it useless. It’s a bad thing to do. A Bird Story is my favorite game of the series, and I think its characters deserved better. It’s still a nice series and I will absolutely play the next game.

May was also a nice month in gaming. I finished at least one game and tried a bunch of new ones (I’ll mention them later).

Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book [PS4] - it’s probably the last Atelier game for me. They released two more already, and went multiplatform, but I’m not interested. Previous to Sophie was Shallie, and it was bad, it was not even unpolished, it was outright unfinished. Sophie is better. I mean, it doesn’t look like they forgot to put important objects in the cutscenes here, or messed up the quest texts. The scenery looks awful, no effort to make players forget for a moment that they are looking at 3D models. Character models are nice as always, but most characters along with their side quests are just very plain and boring. They even somehow managed to ruin Pamela! I was so exited to see her again after her unfortunate absence in a previous trilogy, but was discouraged completely, because its a different character from before - meek, boring, never playful, somehow badly modeled, and with a disastrous voice over on top of that. The craft system is still great, thanks for that. But I’m done with the series. Maybe I’ll go back to old PS2 Atelier games that I missed out. Atelier Iris looks interesting.