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No. 14117
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Despite the sale price for the full game being $1.99 at the time I'm making this post I decided to play the demo for Chantelise: A Tale of Two Sisters.
The story, as far as I got, was that a red moon shone and turned Chante, the eldest of the two, into a fairy and the two need to find the witch who did this and revert the spell.
As for character actions, it's pretty basic so far in what Elise and Chante themselves can do. Enemies drop crystals of different colors which can be used in the order you picked them up so Chante can perform spells. Elise herself can move in eight directions, jump, do a basic combo attack, a jump attack, lock-on, and do a sliding dodge in any of the eight directions she can move in. Sometimes she gets what looks like a critical hit as well though I don't know if that's random or if there is a certain trick to doing it on-command. I don't know if there is more they can do later but that is what is available so far.
The game is quite dated in more than just the way it looks but I'll start with the graphics first. To me, it looks kind of like N64 graphics in it's environments. The environments are often rather barren with grass and trees scattered here and there and a grass texture put on a lot of land to travel if you're in a grassy area. It's a nostalgic look and one that I really miss.
The characters have sprites instead of 3d models which is something that I found myself liking. I think the intention by the devs was for it to look like an actual anime that tends to feature detailed backgrounds but the characters having the simple and classic anime art style and I feel that it works well.
The camera is at a set level and can only be moved left or right. No zooming, panning, first-person, or anything like that. This is the first of the conveniences that I miss and have gotten used to because I like being able to look at all of my surroundings, high and low. I can't change around controls so I have to go without inverted camera controls. A minor inconvenience but something I feel is worth stating.
The voice acting is alright. I was never very good at gauging the quality of Japanese voice acting but I think it does it's job well-enough. It doesn't sound any different from the usual Jap voice work I hear in anime, at least.
Unfortunately I did not play this without some gripes or at least nitpicks. The most minor one I have so far is that A is attack and B is jump which is definitely something I'm not used to. The controls aren't exactly the best for combat as the sliding dodge can not be performed in the middle of an attack meaning that combos need to be committed to. I'm not sure how reliable it is since a boss I just lost to can hit you in the middle of it if but their landing attack, which normally has a wide damaging radius, can be avoided entirely with the dodge.
If this were the kind of game that was easy enough to not even need it then I would be fine with that but for me it didn't feel like it was. While my own lack of skill is the most likely cause a problem I feel this difficulty stems from is that healing items aren't always a guarantee and enemies tend to stick around in groups and sometimes merge together in such a way that what looks like one bug is actually several because of the sprites behind them. Sometimes another problem I can run into is attacking one of them only to be attacked by another. It's not always so likely considering that your attack prevents their attack from even beginning but it is an annoyance. It also doesn't help that when you die you get sent right back to the town and have to start the dungeon all over again, puzzles included it looks like, which can get very tedious if you die a lot.
I also don't want to expect too much from a doujin studio especially since the game was made in 2006 so I doubt doujin studios were very far along in the kind of games they could make at the time and match the fluidity and convenience of modern games then but it really does feel a little clunky in it's controls.
Overall I want to like Chantelise and I can definitely see why people enjoy it, but it's something of a deceptively inconvenient and somewhat unforgiving game to play that is certainly fun until you run into it's problems or die for the first time, realizing that you would have to do everything again and letting you see it as less of an adventure game and more of an arcade beat-em-up once you realize you have to run through everything and defeat every bad guy again. While I don't know the series at all since I've never played it and I really hate to make this meme of a comparison, it reminds me a little of Dark Souls in a way since enemies can be threats if you aren't careful and bosses are damage sponges that really do require you to be careful. Losses are punished and may leave you to try and make changes to your equipment.
I neglected to talk about money but the bulk of your useful funds will come from selling any treasures if you find any though I didn't pay attention to that feature as much.
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