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Blood of Calamity (Android)
In a Japan-flavored setting, Kenshiro is the prince of one of the four clans, and he’s a dunderhead who cares more about chasing women (badly, he’s a perv and obvious about it) than actually managing his country’s problems. His trusty retainer is the only reason he seems to stay on track with anything at all. Fortunately, he’s a half-decent fighter, so when yokai attack the village and steal his father’s blood, he’s willing to go out into the world to stop it from becoming a calamity.
This is one of the last Magitec games I hadn’t yet played, and I got it for a dollar!
…and I’m glad I did.
The game itself just feels “clunky;” the menus aren’t well designed and you spend a lot of time swapping and tapping through things to try to get to the things you actually want. Credit where it’s due: There’s an easily-accessible “reminder” system of what’s going on in the plot and where you’re supposed to go next. I just wish that pulling out an antidote when you’re poisoned after battle was nearly as easy.
The initial difficulty is pretty high; monsters do a lot of damage and you aren’t taught how to raise your stats (or allowed to buy new equipment) until you beat the first boss, and the grind doesn’t get easier after that. After grinding up enough to get through the first sidequest the difficulty leveled off for a bit, but the battles remain slow and clunky and you don’t really have enough MP to be wasting skills on random battles unless you’re grinding close to a healing fountain.
The skills system is deceptive: You get to distribute you stat gains at each level up, and it seems like, oh, if you load up on strength you’ll get attack skills and the like. No, you actually just need to raise all of your stats fairly evenly, and you’ll get new stacks of abilities when every stat hits a certain threshold. Nothing in the game tells you this; I found it out from a walkthrough. The other battle gimmick is that you can assign “mandara” to each of your (three) characters in battle, which give them small stat boosts depending on which one you pick. In practice, I didn’t see much benefit from them.
There are standard “kill a bonus boss” and “kill 10 of X monster” sidequests in some of the towns. The map is actually really open, but if you try to wander off the plot path your characters will remind you where you’re supposed to be going and make you turn back. I’d imagine this makes navigating in the late-game easier, but in the beginning it’s just annoying.
The graphics are mediocre. Like, they’re fine, 16-bit stuff, but the battles are stiffly animated and the minimap is often useful in telling what’s an obstacle and what isn’t in the dungeons.
But the fact that I find the protagonist unpleasant is the icing on top of this. Like, I could handle the totally routine plot (go to each country, meet a new party member, solve a local problem but discover it’s part of the wider conspiracy, etc etc) if the characters were entertaining and the dialogue was witty. It’s trying to be, but it’s not—Kenshiro isn’t funny, he’s just a lazy asshole and a pervert who needs to be shepherded into trying to save the world. I don’t want that as my viewpoint character, and I don’t care about the anime-trope women reacting to his bad behavior in equally immature ways.
Overall: Alas, KEMCO/Magitec flubbed this one. I gave this three hours in several segments, the last after having played a few other KEMCO games in the interim and that just made the slow systems and annoying characters stand out even more. It’s a very “routine” jrpg with lousy characters, the innovations didn’t really work, and they didn’t do a good enough job making it pleasant to play.
This is one of the last Magitec games I hadn’t yet played, and I got it for a dollar!
…and I’m glad I did.
The game itself just feels “clunky;” the menus aren’t well designed and you spend a lot of time swapping and tapping through things to try to get to the things you actually want. Credit where it’s due: There’s an easily-accessible “reminder” system of what’s going on in the plot and where you’re supposed to go next. I just wish that pulling out an antidote when you’re poisoned after battle was nearly as easy.
The initial difficulty is pretty high; monsters do a lot of damage and you aren’t taught how to raise your stats (or allowed to buy new equipment) until you beat the first boss, and the grind doesn’t get easier after that. After grinding up enough to get through the first sidequest the difficulty leveled off for a bit, but the battles remain slow and clunky and you don’t really have enough MP to be wasting skills on random battles unless you’re grinding close to a healing fountain.
The skills system is deceptive: You get to distribute you stat gains at each level up, and it seems like, oh, if you load up on strength you’ll get attack skills and the like. No, you actually just need to raise all of your stats fairly evenly, and you’ll get new stacks of abilities when every stat hits a certain threshold. Nothing in the game tells you this; I found it out from a walkthrough. The other battle gimmick is that you can assign “mandara” to each of your (three) characters in battle, which give them small stat boosts depending on which one you pick. In practice, I didn’t see much benefit from them.
There are standard “kill a bonus boss” and “kill 10 of X monster” sidequests in some of the towns. The map is actually really open, but if you try to wander off the plot path your characters will remind you where you’re supposed to be going and make you turn back. I’d imagine this makes navigating in the late-game easier, but in the beginning it’s just annoying.
The graphics are mediocre. Like, they’re fine, 16-bit stuff, but the battles are stiffly animated and the minimap is often useful in telling what’s an obstacle and what isn’t in the dungeons.
But the fact that I find the protagonist unpleasant is the icing on top of this. Like, I could handle the totally routine plot (go to each country, meet a new party member, solve a local problem but discover it’s part of the wider conspiracy, etc etc) if the characters were entertaining and the dialogue was witty. It’s trying to be, but it’s not—Kenshiro isn’t funny, he’s just a lazy asshole and a pervert who needs to be shepherded into trying to save the world. I don’t want that as my viewpoint character, and I don’t care about the anime-trope women reacting to his bad behavior in equally immature ways.
Overall: Alas, KEMCO/Magitec flubbed this one. I gave this three hours in several segments, the last after having played a few other KEMCO games in the interim and that just made the slow systems and annoying characters stand out even more. It’s a very “routine” jrpg with lousy characters, the innovations didn’t really work, and they didn’t do a good enough job making it pleasant to play.