Saturday 9 February, 2008

First off, I had technical difficulties submitting the first log, so there was a bit of a delay.

GAMEPLAY:
I got a bit farther in the game. I got to the point where I was impatient with my reading skills (or rather, lack thereof) and would just glance at the speech bubbles before going on. Also, I turned off the music for a while, because it got really annoying. I turned it back on for the battle, though.

A little more background. Angelic Layer is set in (more or less) modern-day Tokyo, but an alternate reality where Anglic Layer is a super-popular high-tech toy. It involves putting on a headset to control a doll to fight other dolls. The main character is a young girl just getting into it.

I found it a bit frustrating, since it took me a while to figure out the controls for the battle... moving the character, the doll, was easy, but the attack and defense controls are odd, and I couldn't fully understand the instructions.

DESIGN:
This game is very very linear. The player is, at least thus far, confined strictly to the bounds of the anime's story. It's pleasant enough, and it means that even with my poor Japanese I can still follow the plot, but it's a bit frustrating. It is a common choice for licensed titles, though.

The battle system is odd. I can't say I've ever seen anything exactly like it. Superficially, it does resemble Megaman Battle Network, as I said in the previous entry, in that it takes place on a similar 3x6 grid and is loosely turn-based, but the attack system is different. The doll, Hikaru, only has fairly short-range martial-arts type attacks, but she (?) has a pretty free range of movement. When you attack, a bar comes up on the bottom with an indication of what key to press, and it moves sideways. When it reaches a marker on the screen, you're supposed to press the button. If your timing is good enough, you make an attack. The guard system is similar - depending on what button you press, you can either try to guard or escape (oddly, written in English) and avoid some (perhaps all) damage. Also, if you screw up, your "concentration" score goes down, but I have yet to see this affect play, and it goes up again fairly quickly. You can win a battle either by reducing your opponent's health to nothing, or by knocking them out of the battle arena (the "Layer") which you do by hitting them with a strong attack while they stand on the edge.

I'd have to say the battle system is the most innovative part of the game. It somewhat resembles the various rhythm games (of which I know Dance Dance Revolution the best), but has to disadvatage that the button presses are not in time to the music. I may start to like it better as I continue to play, but for now it seems a bit awkward... it definitely doesn't have the draw of a game like DDR.

This is all right, though some of the second gameplay section would go better in the summary (talking about the setting, for instance), while the section about the battle system in design is more about gameplay than analysis. A better analysis would be to talk about why the battle system works and any problems with it. It's an all right GameLog, as I said, but it could be better.

Amy Leek (grader)

PS - Yeah, kanji are a pain on low resolution screens. I feel your pain, fellow handheld import gamer.