Amayui Castle Meister part one: Gameplay
Entry posted by Clephas
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I'm going to be straight about this game... if you liked Kamidori, you'll probably like this game, gameplay wise. It uses a nearly-identical battle and skill system, and it is all about gathering ingredients. For those unfamiliar with the battle system, you essentially summon your characters into a dungeon, which you explore and gather ingredients from while fighting off monsters. Your characters each fight one-on-one for the most part, in a battle system highly reminiscent of Fire Emblem games. The difference is that the exploration phase usually doesn't end after you kill all the monsters... for that, you have to use the green button in the upper right corner (present in most non-story maps) or wait until the turns run out. In each map, there are gathering points. Mineral gathering points (represented by boulders) can only be found and used by those with the 'mining' skill or tanryoshi skill equipped. Herbal gathering points can be found and used by anyone, on the other hand. Each map has certain materials that can be gathered there, and what you gather from those points is entirely randomly handed to you after you leave the map (perhaps the most annoying aspect of the system). Each map also has conditions under which you can win prizes called missions... usually involving getting to all the gathering points in a single playthrough of the map and controlling 100% of the map's territory or similar objectives.
Movement requires FP, which is used at a rate of 1 per space and regenerates at a rate of 1 per turn if you moved that turn (2 if you didn't). There are a number of ways to improve on this, ranging from skills and accessories to buildings and usable items. However, this is the basic element of dungeon movement.
Actual battles occur when you or your enemies initiate combat. If your speed levels are relatively even, you both get two attacks, if they are uneven, the faster one gets three, the slower two. There are four ways to define an attack other than elemental affiliation... physical or magical and ranged or melee. Only ranged attacks can retaliate against ranged attacks and only melee attacks can retaliate against melee attacks. Physical attack damage is based on a combination of elemental affinities and your phys attack stat versus their phys defense stat... you get the picture. It is a simple system to understand, easy to use, and it would be as annoying as hell if there was a bigger penalty for characters being defeated.
That said, it is functional, so I don't have any huge complaints about the battle system or the in-dungeon gameplay besides the randomness of materials-gathering and drops, though I do get tired of going back to maps for particular materials that turned out to be vital in large numbers later on.
Perhaps the most irritatingly relevant and at the same time annoyingly useless aspect of the game is the town-building aspect. If this were a grand strategy game, where building your capital actually had some kind of interesting meaning to it, I'd probably be more forgiving, but the system is annoyingly opaque, despite the values presented on the information screens. Some materials can only be gathered at higher gathering levels (mineral and plant kept separate), so you have to use facilities to get those levels up, and many buildings provide stat boosts when placed properly... However, since you essentially can get away with placing stuff as you become able to make it and have it work fine with only minor alterations, this feels like a forced, almost useless side-issue in the game.
I'm getting pretty late into the game, and it is becoming more and more obvious that the usefulness of land-based units is dropping dramatically with each area (more and more have obstacles that can only be cleared with certain movement types or flight). While super-fast ones like the beloved nekololi assassin Ioru are fast enough to make up for the limitations of a land-bound form, with the others I'm starting to feel I might have to resort to using the single - I repeat, SINGLE - accessory slot for one that grants flight (no jrpg of any sort should ever have less than two accessory slots). This is actually a flaw that existed in Kami no Rhapsody as well, since characters that couldn't ignore obstacles inevitably ended up getting eaten alive late in the game... or rendered irrelevant because they couldn't navigate the map well.
Look forward to my story assessment later.
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