#guild02

The Starship Damrey (Nintendo 3DS)

Developed/Published by: Kazuya Asano, Takemaru Abiko / Level-5 Released: May 16th, 2013 Completed: 11th June 2017 Completion: Finished it, I didn’t manage to get all of the leeches though, and I missed the one last thing you need to get a true ending I guess :/ Trophies / Achievements: n/a

The Starship Damrey is notable for being the last game released in Level-5’s Guild series in Japan, a series I began reviewing all the way back at the beginning of this blog (in January 2014!) with Crimson Shroud. Basically, it was a very excellent attempt to get Japanese developers pushing out indie-esque, bite-size games, and this one, The Starship Damrey is probably one of the weirder ones for western audiences, coming as it does from the creative team behind awkwardly-named Super Famicom “sound novel” The Night of The Sickle Weasel, Kazuya Asano and Takemaru Abiko.

(Things get a bit interesting here, actually, because on release the creators of The Starship Damrey would have been completely obscure to western audiences, but in 2014 The Night of The Sickle Weasel was translated and released on iPhones as Banshee’s Last Cry, so there actually is a chance for non-Japanese speakers to learn about why these dudes in particular were picked to make a Guild game.)

(Although, apparently, the localisation is a bit controversial, with changed images and some heavy-handed localisations akin to Phoenix Wright characters being obsessed with burgers and so on. Not sure if I’ll play it... and is it 32-bit? If so, it won’t even work on iPhones soon.)

Anyway. The Starship Damrey is pretty much a visual novel, and I’m a bit burned out from them still after drinking down Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward, but I had my 3DS with me and I was on a plane and I just sort of randomly decided to play it because I’d heard it was pretty short.

It is! Really short! Shorter than Attack of the Friday Monsters, even! It’s about as long as a Hollywood movie; not even a grossly distended Michael Bay blockbuster, just a regular one. And it's not a game with too much going on, really. To summarise the plot, you wake up in a cryo-sleep pod that you can’t escape, and so you have to use one of the few working ship’s robots to navigate the ship with the aim of unlocking your pod and finding what the hell happened on the ship—while the ship itself seems to be trying to stop you. You do this by moving the robot around in a sort of Dungeon Master kind of way and solving very simple puzzles (very simple. “Fill a can with water” simple). You pretty much can’t fail and the worst that can happen is that you’ll end up walking in circles for a while, so it’s weirdly lacking in tension, and the mystery doesn’t actually get fleshed out enough (until the very end, when you’re done) you’re not going to find yourself playing for any other reason than you started it, honestly.

Ultimately this is another really good example of why short games are a good idea, because I think this cost me like $2.99 in a sale and it so definitely didn’t outstay its welcome—some simple puzzle solving, a compact plot, the end—that I could even almost recommend it for anyone who wanted to do something other than watch a movie with a couple of hours.

You’re probably better off reading a book or something though.

Will I ever play it again? Nah.

Nintendo Download: December 25th, 2014 (Europe)

Merry Christmas, Europe. In this Nintendo Download, there are a bunch of sales on Ubisoft games as well as the Guild series games from Level-5. In addition, Duck Hunt gets re-released on Wii U for the Virtual Console.

The full list of happenings are below. Releases happened on December 25th unless otherwise noted. Descriptions come directly from the press release.

Nintendo eShop on Wii U

The…

Ultimately pretty flawed because of a few really annoying game design decisions.  I don't know who thought it was a good idea to have the most painfully irritating WHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIR sound play whenever you move your robot, but I want to lock that person in a room and have them listen to that sound for the rest of their lives till they die cause that's what it felt like playing this game.

Other problems include the really awkward controls for first person movement (if you pass a door even slightly, you have to edge up back to it) and very easily missable tiny objects hidden in dark shadowy rooms.  I only spent about three hours on the game (this includes the really tedious optional sidequest where you have to find all the tiny space leeches, but the game doesn't tell you which ones are left, so you spend way too much time searching through twenty rooms you've already searched through), but I honestly would've beaten it in barely two if it weren't for like two objects that were impossible to find without a guide.  The puzzles are extremely simple, just tedious to do, because you have to navigate your clumsy robot down these long halls and the WHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIR just won't stop ever.

There are a handful of good jump scares, but ultimately the game was not nearly as scary as I was hoping it'd be.  The final payoff and explanation of what was going on was not that great.  Ultimately, Damrey promises a lot of cool stuff, but doesn't really deliver.

Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale

As part of the ridiculously overloaded Nintendo Direct this morning, Nintendo revealed that the Guild02 games are coming to the eShop in North America and Europe!

And that means we get to play this game by Boku no Natsuyasumi creator Kazu Ayabe, about being a 10-year-old boy living an everyday life in a small Japanese town... that is overrun by kaiju every Friday afternoon.

Other games in the collection include Bugs vs. Tanks, a shooter about a tiny, tiny tank by former Mega Man series producer Keiji Inafune, and The Starship Damrey, a suspense adventure game by the Kamaitachi no Yoru creators, in which you're an amnesiac who wakes up in the dark on a spaceship. Man, the Guild series is so eclectic! That's awesome!

If you're missing out on any of the previous Guild games, they just happen to be on sale this week! And if you're interested in Ayabe, you should maybe look forward to Scroll #10!