Continuing my public service to the internet by providing witty prose about Japanese only games that no other English speaking person in his/her/popular-gender-neutral-pronoun right mind would play, here's part 1 of
Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu. Fucking finally! I managed to slog, mostly half asleep, through this game, part of
DS Dengeki Bunko series aka "oh wouldn't it be cool if the DS was like an ebook reader?" (The answer: not really.)
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| Kindle? Pfft, not nearly enough moe |
While I normally play all my DS games on my New (not actually new) 3DS LL (Jhipster for XL), for games in TATE mode, the heavier model puts too much strain on my delicate gamer wrists so I usually bust out my regular 3DS for these occasions. For those not up on gamer terms, TATE is the weeb term for vertical screen（縦画面）primarily for shooters or shmups as the expert Youtube "gamers" (hoarders) call em. Speaking of shooters, this game comes with one in the form of a mini game that uses the touch pen to target enemies.
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| Extra weeb cringe if you pronounce TATE like Tater tots. |
It was ok, about as good as you'd expect for a mini game hidden in a sound novel. I wouldn't exactly rave about it as some awesome shmup "hidden" gem to
BUY NOW BEFORE PRICES SKYROCKET!! Or actually maybe I'll do exactly that as I'm looking to purge this one out of the collection. Anybody want my copy for the super fair price of $99.99?
There's also an annoying quiz mini game with questions about the story. Making even ONE mistake requires you to start over and while you can skip 5 questions they come back around again basically requiring you to memorize every single question anyway. Getting a 100% perfect completion is a fucking ordeal but it unlocks an extra side chapter. I know this because I played through the stupid quiz more times than I'm willing to admit to do a perfect run.
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| I actually read the whole thing and completed this quiz. Yes, I have no life. |
All of the mini games are unlocked by finding cards that are hidden by tapping certain words of interest in the story. The cards naturally can be used for a card battle game that apparently supports up to 4 player multiplayer competition action. I would guess that 4 people with 4 copies of this game unlocked all the cards and got together to play against each other probably exactly zero times in this universe.
As for the meat of the game, which is the book, you can
read it for yourself free, provided you're fluent in Japanese of course. I did like the artwork which is primarily the reason why I bought this game in the first place (yeeaah, I need to stop buying shit based on the cover). Unfortunately, the music and sound effects are unremarkable and totally forgettable. In fact, I forgot about them already.
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| I should've checked Metacritic first (pfft, ya right) |
While the reviews are pretty good overall, personally this story was just not for me. It was perhaps too slow paced or maybe a bit too unrealistic for my tastes. I don't know what it is but it did serve as an excellent way for me to knock myself to sleep faster than popping some Benadryl. I really wouldn't recommend this one unless you want to waste 20 hours of your life. Or you can just watch the OVA anime through the magic of Youtube. (Content ID so totally legal, right?) In the end, I really regret wasting my time on this... Alrightly then, onto part 2!!
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| I'm not sure if I was awake the whole 18 hours... |
Score: 2.0 but does it support TATER tot mode?? out of 5 (18 hours to complete)
Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely
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