Marenian Tavern Story (Android)
Dec. 22nd, 2019 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAn important lesson: If you meet the God of Poverty on the road, you apparently shouldn’t feed him, because he’ll follow you home and ruin your life. Fortunately, his power can be defeated by stuffing him full of food and then building a new restaurant through the power of friendship.
This is a remake/sequel to Adventure Bar Story, with a number of new twists. The daily sequence of “go out and explore, cook, eat to gain levels, set a menu and open the restaurant” remains the same. But now menus/customers are more complicated, with preference trends. You can’t just load it up with the most expensive food every day. They also slow down the tavern level-up sequence by putting various restrictions: You can only rank up once a week, and only if you’ve made a certain amount of money, satisfied the God of Poverty (with food), and gotten through certain plot events. There’s a weapon enhancement system added, a simple fishing minigame, a local farm you can get additional ingredients from, and “search skip cards” that let you get all the gather spots from an area without actually entering. (In practice, the latter only get you produce and fish; you still need to fight enemies for meat and dairy.)
The once-a-week upgrade was the most limiting factor for me; there were several weeks when I ended up just short of the sales I needed for an upgrade, and then had to speed through four days of selling cheap stuff and sometimes not bothering to go out exploring. In theory this meant I was higher level (from eating during those days) but in practice it was just frustrating because I couldn’t advance the plot.
There’s a plot cutscene practically every day, mostly cute everyday life stuff. Your active party is only three people, but four more join you and you can swap them in. Characters gain levels from eating, but learn their special skills from elemental EP you get in battles; so you really need to pick a party and stick with it. There aren’t that many equipment upgrades comparatively; it’s often better to stick with a weapon with a special ability you like rather than upgrade for a few more attack points. Most of your success against bosses comes from levels and tactics, anyway.
The biggest negative change is that they upgraded the graphics to a smoother DS-style, and that leads to way too much loading. You’ll have a few seconds of loading for every new area, but also before and after every battle. (I suspect that this might run better on something more advanced than my five-year-old tablet. I see things get a bit janky, but that may not be everyone’s concern.)
The recipes are interesting in that you can get something like 70% of them with the 80% of ingredients you can get in the first few areas. After that, it’s mostly upgrades. Recipes are generally either “same stuff with a different main ingredient” like jellies, juices or pies where you can just swap in a different fruit and it’s a new recipe (and that’ll work for every fruit); there are a few fruits saved for later areas like pineapple or mango, but you can mostly make all of these early on. The other approach is “upgrade everything that uses this one ingredient” where you’ll have a dozen different styles of food that all use eggs, and you can remake them with Garuda eggs and also Dragon eggs. The same is generally true for mushrooms → pine mushrooms → black mushrooms, crab → emperor crab, salmon → king salmon, and aurochs meat → dragon meat. There are also a few ingredients that are clearly just for completionists: You unlock mistgrass in a late-game cutscene and it’s only used for one recipe; and the rare drop aurochs tongue (and the upgraded dragon tongue) only appears in two recipes.
Random translation note: Apparently “sea chestnut” is a possible translation for an urchin? Because the ingredient is the former, the recipes call for the latter, and that stymied me for a while. (Also, there are a few extremely Japanese moments in the game, most notably when the evil bank manager tells people you’re having a free buffet, and you…throw a free buffet to save face. As an American, I feel the proper response to people showing up for a free buffet you aren’t having is, “Sorry, that jerk lied to you. Maybe you should stop banking with him, as he clearly isn’t trustworthy.”)
Once you’ve gotten the tavern up to level 10 (at which point, sales don’t really seem to matter anymore), you go into a few weeks of endgame sequence where you rescue your father, then need to collect four unique ingredients to make Mystery Soup (which require 500,000 gold, 10 aurochs tongues, and beating two powerful bosses), then need to get through a final dungeon that’s a full 15 levels stronger than the ones before it and beat a two-stage final boss. I ran from almost every encounter in that dungeon, squeaked past the final boss, and call myself done despite the existence of a completionist postgame. At that point, I had found all the recipes and made my tavern great, and that was everything that had appealed to me.
Overall: The technological “improvements” versus the first game weren’t great, but the game itself was pretty decent and I had fun with it. It wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was entertained.
This is a remake/sequel to Adventure Bar Story, with a number of new twists. The daily sequence of “go out and explore, cook, eat to gain levels, set a menu and open the restaurant” remains the same. But now menus/customers are more complicated, with preference trends. You can’t just load it up with the most expensive food every day. They also slow down the tavern level-up sequence by putting various restrictions: You can only rank up once a week, and only if you’ve made a certain amount of money, satisfied the God of Poverty (with food), and gotten through certain plot events. There’s a weapon enhancement system added, a simple fishing minigame, a local farm you can get additional ingredients from, and “search skip cards” that let you get all the gather spots from an area without actually entering. (In practice, the latter only get you produce and fish; you still need to fight enemies for meat and dairy.)
The once-a-week upgrade was the most limiting factor for me; there were several weeks when I ended up just short of the sales I needed for an upgrade, and then had to speed through four days of selling cheap stuff and sometimes not bothering to go out exploring. In theory this meant I was higher level (from eating during those days) but in practice it was just frustrating because I couldn’t advance the plot.
There’s a plot cutscene practically every day, mostly cute everyday life stuff. Your active party is only three people, but four more join you and you can swap them in. Characters gain levels from eating, but learn their special skills from elemental EP you get in battles; so you really need to pick a party and stick with it. There aren’t that many equipment upgrades comparatively; it’s often better to stick with a weapon with a special ability you like rather than upgrade for a few more attack points. Most of your success against bosses comes from levels and tactics, anyway.
The biggest negative change is that they upgraded the graphics to a smoother DS-style, and that leads to way too much loading. You’ll have a few seconds of loading for every new area, but also before and after every battle. (I suspect that this might run better on something more advanced than my five-year-old tablet. I see things get a bit janky, but that may not be everyone’s concern.)
The recipes are interesting in that you can get something like 70% of them with the 80% of ingredients you can get in the first few areas. After that, it’s mostly upgrades. Recipes are generally either “same stuff with a different main ingredient” like jellies, juices or pies where you can just swap in a different fruit and it’s a new recipe (and that’ll work for every fruit); there are a few fruits saved for later areas like pineapple or mango, but you can mostly make all of these early on. The other approach is “upgrade everything that uses this one ingredient” where you’ll have a dozen different styles of food that all use eggs, and you can remake them with Garuda eggs and also Dragon eggs. The same is generally true for mushrooms → pine mushrooms → black mushrooms, crab → emperor crab, salmon → king salmon, and aurochs meat → dragon meat. There are also a few ingredients that are clearly just for completionists: You unlock mistgrass in a late-game cutscene and it’s only used for one recipe; and the rare drop aurochs tongue (and the upgraded dragon tongue) only appears in two recipes.
Random translation note: Apparently “sea chestnut” is a possible translation for an urchin? Because the ingredient is the former, the recipes call for the latter, and that stymied me for a while. (Also, there are a few extremely Japanese moments in the game, most notably when the evil bank manager tells people you’re having a free buffet, and you…throw a free buffet to save face. As an American, I feel the proper response to people showing up for a free buffet you aren’t having is, “Sorry, that jerk lied to you. Maybe you should stop banking with him, as he clearly isn’t trustworthy.”)
Once you’ve gotten the tavern up to level 10 (at which point, sales don’t really seem to matter anymore), you go into a few weeks of endgame sequence where you rescue your father, then need to collect four unique ingredients to make Mystery Soup (which require 500,000 gold, 10 aurochs tongues, and beating two powerful bosses), then need to get through a final dungeon that’s a full 15 levels stronger than the ones before it and beat a two-stage final boss. I ran from almost every encounter in that dungeon, squeaked past the final boss, and call myself done despite the existence of a completionist postgame. At that point, I had found all the recipes and made my tavern great, and that was everything that had appealed to me.
Overall: The technological “improvements” versus the first game weren’t great, but the game itself was pretty decent and I had fun with it. It wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I was entertained.
