THIS POST CONSISTS ENTIRELY OF GAMEPLAY AND STORY SPOILERS FOR THE WORLD ENDS WITH YOU
SERIOUSLY. I WAS REALLY NICE ABOUT STORY SPOILERS LAST TIME, BUT I WON'T BE ANYMORE.
oKAY. lET'S...
Sorry. Caps Lock. :P
Okay. Let's get started.
Combat's getting harder. That's partly my fault because I always chain as many fights as possible and refuse to raise my level above one. So I'm basically in day five of the game fighting leveled up enemies, who get progressively more powerful through each fight I chain, while I'm still at level one. And I'm mostly kicking their %$*ses. But I can feel the tide turning. They're starting to attack a lot more. Super Spam Offense is beginning to fail. Now I'm picking my battles a bit more on the lower screen. I'll jump in, spam hand to hand attacks, then jump away and spam ranged attacks. So there's still spam, but it's tactical spam. Tactical Spam Offense.
The top screen is becoming a problem, though. I'm paying enough attention to it to realize that I really don't pay any attention to it. To clarify, I'm finally paying enough attention to it to notice that I'm often jamming on the D-pad in the wrong direction. So even my offense on the top screen sucks, and things are getting difficult enough that I need to develop the facility to use both offense and defense up there. This is going to require a lot of practice. I mean, I play a lot of Jam Sessions on the DS. I have five songs I've learned (some better than others) and practice them almost every day. I sing, and I play. It's hard when the rhythms don't match up. Learning to fully manage combat in TWEWY is kind of the same thing. It's like trying to learn an instrument and sing. Except the instrument is trying to kill you.
Long story short, I have a lot of work to do to kick as much %*@ as I want to kick. I could just turn up my level, but where's the fun in that? This combat system is crazy complicated, but somehow I have this intuition that tells me I can learn it. It can be mastered. And when it is, I'll be one more kind of awesome. This is not a chain of reasoning I expect lay persons to understand. :)
The plus side of such difficult combat is that I'm gathering great XP. I'm routinely pulling down the highest possible ranks, which garner three or sometimes even four times the base pin XP. I haven't broken the three digit barrier yet, but I'm very close. Just to put this in perspective, I only get 144 pin XP if I leave the DS off for twenty four hours, so grinding is something like ten thousand percent more efficient than just leaving the DS off. It was an interesting concept. Too bad it was only relevant for six hours or so of the game. :P
Also, I'm finally fighting foes cool enough to drop combat pins. So far, this isn't really so great as it's the same pin (Marasume) over and over, it doesn't sell for very much, and it fills up my inventory. Oh yes, and unlike money pins, where you can sell them all at once, I have to drag each and every one to the sell icon manually. After a few dozen, this loses it's charm.
Unfortunately, the heavier fighting is making some of the problems in the touch screen combat system more frustrating. Dodges are still hard to pull off. And with all the new pins I'm getting, some of the attacks are as well. Some attacks use the same gesture. Some attacks that seem to use different gestures don't work predictably. The designers seemed to understand this and attempted to provide a workaround. The game allows for making certain pins only work when one of the shoulder buttons on the DS is held. But trying to attack on the touch screen, hold a shoulder button, and jam on the D-pad at the same time is just not practical, so the effort is mostly worthless. Also, one pin which required me to draw a circle to activate only seemed to work about a third of the time.
On the plus side, it turns out food isn't as much of a pain as I thought. I can still chain fights even if I don't have the food for all the fights. I don't know what happened yesterday. I'm thinking it may be because I held down the stylus. Maybe they must be tagged then released to actually chain. Regardless, it's working now. The problem is finding places to buy food. Every day puts me in a different part of Shibuya, so I'm learning to stock up on whatever food I can find, in case the food in the new area sucks. This also gives me better standing with the food merchants. But all the items that unlocks require quest items I just don't have access to yet.
The shops in general seem like a waste, currently. At first I thought clothes were like pins, able to be twice as effective in their favored districts. But I really didn't notice much difference even when I was wearing complete outfits for the district I was in. It sucked. And even more annoying is the special ability unlocking mechanic. By wasting a lot of money at a store, the clerk becomes your friend. The number of items the clerk can unlock for you increases. But they don't know about all the items from their own shop, and they do know about items from other shops. Today was the first time a clerk unlocked an ability from some other shop for me. It turns out I have to wear all my unidentified items into every shop to unlock their powers. And with many of them having powers that make them less effective in combat, this whole exercise feels like a trap for OCD gamers.
That's about it for the gameplay. Now we spoil the first major twist in the story.
The Reaper Game is some weird kind of stage between life and death. All the players are dead already. Supposedly they can live again by winning, but by the end of day four, only Neku and Shiki are still in the game. Rhyme died saving Beat, who is assumed to be in Mr. H's protective custody. (Mr. H has a full name. I just don't remember it.) I believe a dozen players started the week. So that's nine deaths, two alive, and one in some sort of limbo. And we're only a little past halfway done. And I accidentally read that there's at least one more week after this one. Brutal.
Anyway, the other main twist in the story is that Shiki has some dark secret related to her friend Eri. Eri designs clothes. Shiki sews them. To join The Reaper Game, contestants must give up what matters most to them. The boss Reaper for Day 5 said Shiki was jealous of her friend, which explains her penalty. I don't know what that means. I made some guesses and then shot them all down. We'll see.
A running theme in the game, that Noise (the invisible monsters) are attracted by "bad feelings" was made explicit near the end of Day 5. The supernatural therapy puzzles still feel pretty contrived. But they're quick, so who cares?
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