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chuckroShiki was the guardian deity of Asdivine, until Zaddes showed up, scattered his power and kicked him out of his realm. Shiki wakes up as a mortal and needs to collect pieces of his powers in a world where history and reality have been altered. He’s joined by the usual bunch of crazy anime women, but more importantly he ends up the guardian to a traumatized child who has mysterious powers.
This feels very much like a bridge title between the earlier Asdivine games and the later EXE-Create titles; keeping the light/dark/void magic system but using the modern battle mechanics and adding things like the real-time garden plots. It’s weird, because it’s also very “oriental” themed (I’m reminded of Blood of Calamity, at least in terms of some of the graphical changes) rather than the European fantasy flavor of the other Asdivine games, and in a bunch of cases that’s implied to be changes the new spirit deity made to the world. I’m kind of wondering if this wasn’t originally an Asdivine game and was transitioned over at some point in the development process, after some of the mechanical and design bits were already set.
There’s also a major plot point that notes there are many different worlds all called “Asdivine” and each with their own deities. A light deity from a different Asdivine (who reports to some greater god called Shaddai) takes the form of a cat named Felix, and clearly I wasn’t the only one who missed cries of MEOWZERS, because they’re back.
There’s a system for making each of the party members have faith in you, and the more faith they have the better certain special abilities work, which in practice open up some bonus chests in dungeons (one can pick locks, one can cut bamboo, etc). That said, the cutscenes that raise their faith are essentially guessing games and getting the max level really requires either a guide or the +20 faith IAP gift items. This replaces most of the dungeon puzzles (besides key-in-lock stuff) with switching to the right character and watching a brief scene. Dungeons are otherwise nothing special, though the tilesets are pretty and varied among them.
A new battle element in this game is that you can both summon harbingers based on your equipped magatama; or you can transform into them, giving you three turns to use their special attacks yourself and access to a full-screen limit break. In practice, I found summoning them more useful, because that gives your party more attacks per round and more chances for a bonus “follow” attack after each one. There are also special abilities that summon “conjura” into empty spaces on the board, so in practice it’s pretty easy to fill all nine squares on your side of the battlefield.
The garden plots in this one are interestingly useful, because you can plant pretty much any item or armor, not just seeds, and most of them will either double or increase a level when you harvest them—which means a few days of play can load you up on “Ultra Jugs” that increase all of your stats, or if you’re lucky, you’ll get Ultimate Jugs which can be planted for a chance at top-level equipment and accessories. You can also plant accessories for a chance to either get two or get an upgraded version, which means turning one Attack All +15 into enough Attack All +50s for the whole party is just a matter of patience.
This has a lot of systems (not all of which you actually need to engage with) and sidequests and a decent selection of quality-of-life options, including excellent fast-travel. The unmarked islands with high-level or metal enemies are annoying (especially since the “easy” gold and metal areas are reachable halfway through the game but not actually beatable until the postgame; they aren’t useful grinding areas). Also, oddly, mutant enemies were very common but I didn’t meet a single metal enemy in a regular encounter, and I’m wondering if that was a programming oversight.
Maidam Curie runs the arena and plays a role in the IAP bonus dungeon, but that’s her only role. It might be that whoever had the maid fetish has left EXE-Create and now she’s just a cameo character.
SPOILERS: The three companions aren’t human and their memories are false; they’re actually just weapons enchanted with lost bits of Shiki’s power and given the forms of their former (deceased) owners. Zaddes isn’t really evil, just a jerk—he’s the Creation Deity charged with destroying “deviant” Asdivines because they destabilize the entire network. In the normal ending, it appears that you kill Zaddes and restore the world, and live happily with the companion you had the highest Faith with; but that’s an illusion and Zaddes kills Shiki and destroys his world. The best ending path involves negotiating with Zaddes to find a way to suppress the deviation; and Shiki becomes a deity strong enough to balance the world axis himself by traveling to the other worlds. (And the party members all get to be gods under him in the local pantheon.)
According to Mobygames, the series release order was Saga, Cross, Hearts, Dios, Menace, Hearts 2, Kamura—this is both the last game made for the series and the one people recommend playing last. I played Hearts and Dios years ago and Cross recently; and still have Saga on my backlog, which should be an interesting counterpoint.
Overall: Definitely an improvement over the other Asdivine games, possibly just as the designers got better at what they were doing and freely mixed and matched improved systems and assets across their games. I played through the postgame, which is always a good sign; and I appreciate that this made an effort to tie the universe of the series together.
This feels very much like a bridge title between the earlier Asdivine games and the later EXE-Create titles; keeping the light/dark/void magic system but using the modern battle mechanics and adding things like the real-time garden plots. It’s weird, because it’s also very “oriental” themed (I’m reminded of Blood of Calamity, at least in terms of some of the graphical changes) rather than the European fantasy flavor of the other Asdivine games, and in a bunch of cases that’s implied to be changes the new spirit deity made to the world. I’m kind of wondering if this wasn’t originally an Asdivine game and was transitioned over at some point in the development process, after some of the mechanical and design bits were already set.
There’s also a major plot point that notes there are many different worlds all called “Asdivine” and each with their own deities. A light deity from a different Asdivine (who reports to some greater god called Shaddai) takes the form of a cat named Felix, and clearly I wasn’t the only one who missed cries of MEOWZERS, because they’re back.
There’s a system for making each of the party members have faith in you, and the more faith they have the better certain special abilities work, which in practice open up some bonus chests in dungeons (one can pick locks, one can cut bamboo, etc). That said, the cutscenes that raise their faith are essentially guessing games and getting the max level really requires either a guide or the +20 faith IAP gift items. This replaces most of the dungeon puzzles (besides key-in-lock stuff) with switching to the right character and watching a brief scene. Dungeons are otherwise nothing special, though the tilesets are pretty and varied among them.
A new battle element in this game is that you can both summon harbingers based on your equipped magatama; or you can transform into them, giving you three turns to use their special attacks yourself and access to a full-screen limit break. In practice, I found summoning them more useful, because that gives your party more attacks per round and more chances for a bonus “follow” attack after each one. There are also special abilities that summon “conjura” into empty spaces on the board, so in practice it’s pretty easy to fill all nine squares on your side of the battlefield.
The garden plots in this one are interestingly useful, because you can plant pretty much any item or armor, not just seeds, and most of them will either double or increase a level when you harvest them—which means a few days of play can load you up on “Ultra Jugs” that increase all of your stats, or if you’re lucky, you’ll get Ultimate Jugs which can be planted for a chance at top-level equipment and accessories. You can also plant accessories for a chance to either get two or get an upgraded version, which means turning one Attack All +15 into enough Attack All +50s for the whole party is just a matter of patience.
This has a lot of systems (not all of which you actually need to engage with) and sidequests and a decent selection of quality-of-life options, including excellent fast-travel. The unmarked islands with high-level or metal enemies are annoying (especially since the “easy” gold and metal areas are reachable halfway through the game but not actually beatable until the postgame; they aren’t useful grinding areas). Also, oddly, mutant enemies were very common but I didn’t meet a single metal enemy in a regular encounter, and I’m wondering if that was a programming oversight.
Maidam Curie runs the arena and plays a role in the IAP bonus dungeon, but that’s her only role. It might be that whoever had the maid fetish has left EXE-Create and now she’s just a cameo character.
SPOILERS: The three companions aren’t human and their memories are false; they’re actually just weapons enchanted with lost bits of Shiki’s power and given the forms of their former (deceased) owners. Zaddes isn’t really evil, just a jerk—he’s the Creation Deity charged with destroying “deviant” Asdivines because they destabilize the entire network. In the normal ending, it appears that you kill Zaddes and restore the world, and live happily with the companion you had the highest Faith with; but that’s an illusion and Zaddes kills Shiki and destroys his world. The best ending path involves negotiating with Zaddes to find a way to suppress the deviation; and Shiki becomes a deity strong enough to balance the world axis himself by traveling to the other worlds. (And the party members all get to be gods under him in the local pantheon.)
According to Mobygames, the series release order was Saga, Cross, Hearts, Dios, Menace, Hearts 2, Kamura—this is both the last game made for the series and the one people recommend playing last. I played Hearts and Dios years ago and Cross recently; and still have Saga on my backlog, which should be an interesting counterpoint.
Overall: Definitely an improvement over the other Asdivine games, possibly just as the designers got better at what they were doing and freely mixed and matched improved systems and assets across their games. I played through the postgame, which is always a good sign; and I appreciate that this made an effort to tie the universe of the series together.
