Continuation of my previous revised game play thoughts post.
I’m now on August 9th in the game (34th day out of 84 on the island). The pace of events and quests have picked up and I have to thank those initial Japanese players who crowd sourced all of this information into this ongoing guide. It’s not 100% yet. Do note that you still need to have an idea of where certain places are in the game (for ones not noted on the map).
I normally like to play adventure games like this by discovering the objectives on my own. To be fair, some quest objectives are straightforward but others are still vague. Like I wouldn’t have known that I would need to go back to the police koban to talk to Ayukawa (the police woman) 2 more times after the initial one (which started the quest to find Shigeru who is lost). And at least 20 minutes has to pass on the in-game clock for each of those to happen. The 3rd one is important since she gives you the keyword (blue cat).
These keywords are of course supposed to be used to talk with other NPC’s (the right ones) who can clue you in on more details (likewise, you can come across the final objective on your own without talking to these NPC’s since it spawns in the game once you have these keywords). Also, this particular quest once initiated, needs to be completed by 18:00 on that day (some quests are like this while others can be discovered earlier, but are only completable at a later date).
Trying to do that (playthrough without any guide) in this game where you are dealing with a 84 day (technically 83 since the final day is basically what ending you get) calendar along with days that start off at 13:30 at the earliest and ends at 19:30 except for those few evening ones (unless you buy that overtime extension ticket for 200,000), would mean multiple re-plays of the same days with a lot of trial and error.
In some respects, parts of this (trial and error) does remind me of when I played Wizardry in the 80’s where I had sheets of graph paper to plot out the dungeon (especially where traps, pits, teleporters, stairs, elevators, areas of darkness, one way doors, and turn tables existed). This was years before the commercial Internet existed so deciphering games were often a personal exercise until you found a gaming user group or similar dialup BBS where other players shared their findings. I did have access to the early Internet (which was primarily military and higher education) so I also had access to UseNet newsgroups where I eventually found someone had created a LaTeX document of all 10 floors graphed out (at the time, I had graphed out up to the 5th floor. Current day versions of these maps are much better since they also show where some of the key items are located.
Natsuiro High School requires some strategic play when it comes to getting around. There are many short cut paths including the winding road areas where you do not have to take that pinhair turn. Opening a door consumes 1 minute (so this is something you only want to do when required or when trying to eat up time to get an event/quest to trigger). 5 minutes in game (just standing/running around) is equal to 1 minute real time (yes, in the name of science, I used a stop watch). Events and quests also may have their own time advancements during and at their conclusion.
Once you’ve gotten the quest where you are able to take on part-time jobs (arubaito) to earn money, each of those have their own specific windows (when you can do them) as well as the amount of time it advances. The majority of these job giving NPC’s are in the town (except for the cow milking one).
Thus knowing where places generally are and the shortest path to them can make a huge difference in being able to take on and complete everything. I always use the open walkway on the 3rd floor (when leaving the journalism club room) if my next destination requires going down to the 1st floor or other location since you can just jump down ( I don’t use this however if I have a quest where one of the heroines is following along). And sliding as a movement speed increase is a continued must as is using the bike when necessary. Just don’t run into other NPC’s by accident since that will shave off some of your reputation points.
As noted before, all one needs to do now is hold down R2 to pedal. But to pedal faster requires spamming R2. Once your character has its head slightly lowered (to indicate faster pedaling), you can just hold down R2. But continuing to spam R2 will yield the fastest movement speed since doing that yields a slight but noticeable increase over just holding it down.
The game does offer some open dates that can be used to initiate and complete missed quests and events that occurred a few days earlier. Some of these do not follow exactly what is noted in the above linked Japanese guide if you have any sort of game play deviation (since again, there may be some flags that other players had such as their reputation rating that allowed some of these to trigger earlier/later).
Alternate hair styles are available from the barber if you utilize the final option (where the barber randomly selects a hair cut including ones not initially available). The barber also offers quests where you take a photo of someone with an interesting haircut and return back to him. After that, he gives you that hair style and it becomes unlocked. The samurai style can be purchased at the antique shop for 150,000.
The antique shop also sells a good luck omamori (charm) for fishing which probably helps with getting more larger fish catches (which is where the bulk of your currency will come from). I haven’t bought it yet but I notice the biggest catch I’ve gotten is the large size; never the extra and very large sizes which is probably where the possession of this charm will help. The music CD’s you also catch unlock background music that can be changed using the smart phone. So in what I consider a very surprising move, it looks like they aren’t going to bother offering much DLC’s (even though there is a Shop button) since they would’ve released some by now (the game as far as being streamed has fallen off a cliff just two weeks since launch).
So now that I’ve played the game much more, I get the intent with the systems they went with. The keywords were meant to allow more engagement with NPC’s. The problem as I mentioned in my initial posts, is that this starts at the very beginning where the game takes it easy on you by giving you only a few events and quests to deal with. But you still end up spinning your wheels trying to find the right one (and that initial impression of the actual game play cements itself where many including myself, did not have very favorable ones). And those first few days are still only priming you for the real madness that is to come. As I noted in my first revised thoughts post, that pace of quests and events along with their respective NPC’s begins to pickup.
Long dialogs do represent a bulk of the content for events and quests; there are some that do require you to actively take part in something (like the before mentioned bike riding challenge), one that requires you to fish at a certain spot for around an hour (and there are several of these later in the game), one that requires taking a photo of a particular flower (which happened to be on the south side of the island where the winding roads are), another that requires you to find/pickup 30 seashells within 30 minutes (game clock), one that requires you to help find a girls lost bikini at the beach, one where you cleanup the park by picking up 30 pieces of trash, and probably more that I’ve yet to encounter. Quests that require you to find an item are of course those very faint light orbs that can be hard to spot until you are nearer to them.
The most interesting one to date was the quest initiated at the tourist office (after this quest, the town NPC’s began offering part time jobs) where successful completion required going around the island and taking photos of the noted locations (a little over 20 places). I had gotten all of them except one that required taking photo of this mountain (which is viewable from near the train station closer towards the marina where there are benches). I was already near the end of the day and no matter what angle and zoom level (with the mountain top in the viewfinder), couldn’t get the flag to go off. Worst of all, I could only take 8 more photos (you are able to only take 100 photos each day) as I had burned through over 60 trying to get it to take and had no time to truck it all the way to the school (to use the computer in the journalism room to delete some photos), and then back to town. I eventually got it with only 2 more free shots left (and less than 2 minutes in real time before the day ended) when I had repositioned myself just a little to the left of where I had been standing.
My point is that it turns out the game has a mix of dialog based content and actual activities to do; but some players were so frustrated early on that they quit playing/have a very poor impression of the game play, and aren’t going to bother. As usual, it’s more of an execution problem at the game play level than the intent of design itself. With the above linked guide, the games playable content actually isn’t as bad as I initially felt (and this is still with a little more half of the game play remaining). I would’ve preferred just playing it the way I usually do (without guides) though.
As I also found, there are designed branches in the game where doing some events will cancel out your ability to do the other. That is where strategically placed game saves (the game allows only 20) come into play if you want to capture all quests and events (and potentially alternate endings) without starting over from the very beginning.
One thing I am not certain about is how your reputation rating plays into the conditional flagging of certain events and quests. The antique shop does sell a 100,000 item that wipes out your “past poor record”; something that can happen if you just messed around early on in the game like running into other NPC’s by accident/on purpose, getting caught by the school counselor or police too many times due to poor behavior, selecting the”incorrect” response in a conversation (incorrect is in quotes because some alternate endings will require purposely lowering your affection level for a particular heroine).
I did give the game a very generous C- (realistically, my initial impression was just between a D and F) in my initial game play posting. I put this around C+ now while the actual content around a B. I’ll reserve my final grades once I’ve completed a playthrough. Note that I haven’t engaged in the novelty parts of the game since that is going to mess with my reputation level (and I want to get as much quests and events completed the first time around).
June 26th Update: Revised Thoughts #3
