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Thread: [Impressions] Tales of the World Narikiri Dungeon 2

  1. [Impressions] Tales of the World Narikiri Dungeon 2

    Tales of the World Narikiri Dungeon 2
    Cosplay RPG - GameBoy Advance
    1-2 Players
    4800 Yen

    Amt played: 4hrs 12min

    Another game in Namco's popular "Tales" series, this is a sequel to a Gameboy Color game. What is cosplay you ask? Cosplay is a Japanese term derived from "costume play", which is usually in the form of dressing up like your favorite anime or video game characters. In this game, costumes are like classes. If you dress up like an Archer, your character is now an archer. The game can be described as a mix of Atelier-style framework, with the Tales-style RPG engine.

    Graphics:

    The visuals of the game vary. The town graphics are adequate.



    The dungeons are a bit uglier though, with little detail and color to them. They don't get much better than the below.



    However, the battles themselves are quite beautiful, sporting a lot of fluid animation for an overpowered SNES. The backgrounds are nice, and the foreground is constantly littered with action and spell effects.



    Sound:

    The music and sound quality are decent. They do fit the mood of the locales. I enjoyed a few tunes, but nothing exceptional.

    The sound effects are great. In battle, you'll hear the characters shout their attacks, you'll hear swords slash, arrows shoot, fires engulf, all in all about as much as you'd expect from modern RPGs.

    Gameflow:

    Basically the way the game works is, there's one town and about 8 surrounding areas/dungeons. You will need to talk to townsfolk, and one of them will ask you to fulfill a quest for them. These quests almost always involve finding a specific item, or defeating a specific enemy. Sometimes they will tell you which area to fulfill the quest, and other times you must investigate.

    Then you go to the dungeons to do it. The thing is, every dungeon has multiple levels of difficulty in them. If you start walking to a corridor where the enemies are too tough for you, your character will tell you "The monsters in this area are too strong for us." So in that way, you can not advance all the way into the dungeons. As soon as you find and fulfill your quest, you can warp back to town and tell the townsfolk you've fulfilled it. They will in turn, give you Gald, the Tales currency. You then get healed by the town church, and then talk with more people to trigger another quest, maybe prompting you to go deeper into certain dungeons.

    So the game is a series of fetch-quests that allows you to go to different locations, and then as the difficulty progresses, allow you to go deeper into those locations. Sounds a little shallow? Well, read on.

    Gameplay:

    Why would you want to fulfill tons of quests for Gald? Gald allows you to buy Items, Costumes, and Roots.

    In addition to buying items, you can actually make them using recipes, acquiring the lesser ingredients in dungeons.

    Costumes, as I said earlier, determine class... and there's 200 costumes to be found in the game, ranging from Knights to Archers to Witches to Catpeople to character costumes from the other Tales games.
    While some of the 200 are duplicated between the male and female (a male ninja costume and female ninja costume counts as 2 among the 200), there are gender-specific ones, overall a ton of costumes to be had. Each costume changes your character's appearance, attacks, and more importantly fighting style.

    Tales battles are random, but the way you fight them is pretty much like a beat-em up. There are special attacks you can acquire making it play totally like a basic Guardian Heroes but on a single 2d plane. By positioning your characters correctly and timing it, you can juggle the enemy in combos just like GH. But instead of having 4 characters to choose from, there's basically 200 in Narikiri 2. Each costume has you play entirely different than others. An archer's normal attack has you constantly running away from the enemy and shooting high, low or center at them. A knight can do very fast sword swings and can even jump. Every costume has its strengths and weaknesses, and that's basically the fun of the game.

    Levels are gained by the costumes and not the character. You can be a level 10 Chef, but maybe a level 3 fighter. Each character can hold up to 40 costumes under their belt. As you level, you'll gain better stats with that "class", and you'll even gain skills for that class as well, mapping them to different button combinations.

    Not only that, but there is a fusion system at work. You can buy "roots" which you can fuse with your current costumes to change them into other costumes. This is a necessity because most of the costumes can only be had by fusion. The "roots" can also change your elemental attack. A water ninja when fused with something, may turn into a fire ninja. Be aware, though, that once you fuse a costume, you can't change it back by unfusing. Although you could probably fuse this new costume with another "root".



    You can also fuse items with the costumes to give them permanent bonuses! There is a lot of customization you can do, but you need the Gald to do it. You will only get about 2-5 Gald per battle, so quests are the primary source of income in the game.

    Thoughts:
    Ultimately, this game is not plot-oriented. It's not heavily deep. But with 200 "classes" to mingle with, it's extremely addicting. It's fun to play with a certain "class", gain some skills, see how they're used, switch to another and start again. It's also cool how they encourage quests because that's the only way you can acquire money. And since all costumes need to be individually leveled, it keeps the need for the weaker areas of the dungeons, while allowing you to explore harder areas with your more powerful costumes. It's a great framework, but keep in mind it's all for the sake of seeing what all the costumes do, and how they play. If that doesn't sound appealing to you, you may want to pass on it. But with all the variety it offers, I am totally loving the game.

    Links:
    http://www.namco.co.jp/home/cs/gba/narikiri2/index.html Official Homepage
    http://stream.zdnet.co.jp/gamespot/m...i/narikiri.mpg 14MB Trailer

  2. Hmm, sounds interesting - a nice break from the usual Tales rehash. It didn't look too interesting to me before now, but the dress-up and class changing sound fun to mess with. I'll have to try it out.

  3. Originally posted by jiji
    Hmm, sounds interesting - a nice break from the usual Tales rehash. It didn't look too interesting to me before now, but the dress-up and class changing sound fun to mess with. I'll have to try it out.
    Tales has hardly been a rehasehed series. I think each game has been a major evolution for the series. ToD might be the possible exception, but mostly because it sucked so bad.


    I like that ND2 game returns to the LMB (the last Narikiri Dungeons had yucky turn based battles) and I'm pretty happy with the game, but it is incredibly short, and not much to the dungeons really. I kinda wish the dungeons were contnuous instead of being broken into so many areas, because I tend to get lost. But all in all it makes a good handheld pick up and play.

  4. I want to pick this one up, I hope they release it here but it is unlikely I like the Tales series and I didn't think ToD was bad IMO

    ...I wonder if there is a werewolf (or wolf) costume

  5. Originally posted by Werewolf
    I like the Tales series and I didn't think ToD was bad IMO
    As compared to the rest of the series. They really cocked up the characters abilities and stuff and threw the balance out of whack. And there were too many character, so none of them really got fleshed out well. And the story was all filler... the whole game just felt very thrown together. I still enjoyed it, and played it all the way through, but it's not in the same class as Phantasia PSX or Eternia.

  6. Sounds cool!

    I'm pretty sure I'll end up passing on it seeing as there are still so many RPG's that I own that I can actually read that I sill need to finish...

    *nice impressions btw!*

  7. Well I should mention TotW is a dungeon crawler, so not being able to read it is no tradgedy.

  8. Frogacuda:

    Am I correct to assume that TotW is about checking out all the costumes/classes, ie emphasizing the fighting aspect, whereas the main Tales games sacrifice the fighting/character variety, but give you a fuller RPG package with a plot, characterization, and better dungeon layouts?

    I'm just wondering how/if I will enjoy the main games, because I'm not a particular fan of beat 'em ups, which is how I'd categorize Tales' battles. I don't like them because they're so limited in what you do, and eventually you'll end up doing the same thing over and over (usually jamming on the same button). The cool thing about ND2 is that there's just so many different types of classes that if you get bored of one, you can just switch. But in a normal Tales game, since you keep the same characters, does it get really repetitive using the same attacks and specials?

  9. Originally posted by Tsubaki
    Frogacuda:

    Am I correct to assume that TotW is about checking out all the costumes/classes, ie emphasizing the fighting aspect, whereas the main Tales games sacrifice the fighting/character variety, but give you a fuller RPG package with a plot, characterization, and better dungeon layouts?

    I'm just wondering how/if I will enjoy the main games, because I'm not a particular fan of beat 'em ups, which is how I'd categorize Tales' battles. I don't like them because they're so limited in what you do, and eventually you'll end up doing the same thing over and over (usually jamming on the same button). The cool thing about ND2 is that there's just so many different types of classes that if you get bored of one, you can just switch. But in a normal Tales game, since you keep the same characters, does it get really repetitive using the same attacks and specials?
    Narikiri is a d-rpg spinoff. The focus is very different. Also, TotW is made promarily by alfa System, and Wolfteam only supervised it. Also the format is very different. ND had random dungeons, and you can't freely explore towns and such. It's not a real part of the series. IT's a d-rpg thing designed to be a fun pick up and play on a handheld.

    To categorize Tales battles like a beatemup isn't really correct. I haven't gotten too into TotW but it seems more prone to button mashing that Tales of Eternia. Tales of Eternia's battles are often quite difficult, and you need to develop some skills with comboing if you expect to progress at a decent pace. Also, the game does have all the strategic elements of a traditional battle system in place, but many of them are mapped to AI by default (I like to turn this off). I find ToE's LMB to be one of the deepest battle systems outseide of s-rpgs. I should mention that to properly enjoy the combat you need to change the control to manual.

    As for the level design, it's really night and day. The Narikiri games are ment to take up time and they're basically a big maze. ToD and ToE and to a lesser extent ToP have very well layed out dungeons. Some of the variety and puzzle design found in Eternia is really the best I've seen. The dungeons have drastically different structures. Some have random battles, some you can see the enemies, some have no enmies (just puzzles). ToD even had one where you had to blow up enemies on a grid a la bomberman, and another that played like Tower of Druaga. The level design in the main series is second to none.

    As for the lack of Narikirishi, no it doesn't get that repetitive. There's more skills for each class, and you spend more time honing your skill and learning to time your combos and magic and such. I really enjoy the combat in ToE, and what I've read of ToD2's system sounds awesome as well.

  10. I don't know... no matter how I slice it, the system in Tales of the World, at least, is like Guardian Heroes lite.

    If Tales of Eternia has strategy to it, what is it about it that gives the battles depth? I mean... what kind of strategy is there to be had aside from just juggling the enemy as much as possible? Am I missing something?

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