Continuation of my previous post….
I’m now on August 26th (51st day out of 84) and the amount of overlapping events and quests that have been occurring since around the August 16th has my own game play diverging from the Japanese guide. Some quests advance the clock by a large margin which results in the inability to catch all events and quests that may also occur on the same day.
This is clearly an intentional design since I’ve only completed 44% of all the quests at this point and there are some heroines who no longer offer events per the guide (meaning my own flags are causing the game to take a different route).
As it turns out, the game actually does have a considerable amount of content (both dialog type and things to actually do) packed into the narrow period of time. The problem is as what I noted before; the slow initial pacing with the lack of conveyance that progresses into a near frenetic pace as you head into the home stretch where there is literally not enough time in the day to do everything.
And there are clearly different routes to playing through the game. You can just ignore trying to get any alternate endings with the each heroine or any alternate endings with some of the other NPC’s and just shoot for completing as many quests as possibles. Events are more pertinent as a tool (along with some key quests) to achieve those alternate endings. In a nutshell, the games content in terms of its decision tree is not as shallow as I originally opined.
The game play is the issue where you need to figure out the pieces of the puzzle that happen to be vague (like when it isn’t clearly spelled out in the quest objective checklist). So even if the game were localized into english, players are still going to be running around futilely without having played through it at least once or like in my case, using a guide.
I’m hoping to capture at least 75% of all the quests during my first play through. To be honest, I wasn’t even expecting to get this far even using a guide as I thought each game day would be fairly repetitive in its nature (to the point where I would need to just stop playing since there is a point in any game where I just cannot do the same thing over and over again – case in point is why I often have to stop playing something like Diablo 3). But it turns out there is a good mix of events and quests (some that happen on the school ground, others that initiate in town, ones that have a set deadline on the day it was initiated, others that are started earlier and need to be completed by some later date, etc).
Given that I almost put this game aside, I can now say I’ve actually gotten my yens worth out of the game play so far being just a little over the half way point. And I initially mentioned there was no way I could see myself trying to play for the alternate endings; I’m actually warming up to that idea once I finish the first play through.
July 18th Update: 1st Playthrough Completed
