by miruki » Wed May 16, 2012 5:16 am
As far as I know Gust fixed most of the big bugs they had going on the first days, with their servers and all. I got a save error about an hour after I started the game (because my Vita got disconnected) and had to restart the game from the beginning, but after quickly skipping through what I had seen already I was able to continue until the ending credits from chapter one started rolling. :>
I didn't do everything you can do yet, but so far it seems like Love Plus x Random Facebook Game x Twitter and most of the time I was just able to either watch Ion sleep, or she was out for work... or taking a bath.. or cooking. And since you can't really cancel these actions, the game can feel a little dull at times. It actually feels a lot like these facebook games, where you have to wait for stuff to finish until you can do something else (Farmville and the likes). The Twitter-like elements do annoy me a lot. And the fairies are fairly disappointing. I was hoping for a Pokemon-like vibe, where one would be all excited about scanning a new barcode because there could be a really awesome special fairy waiting to pop out on your Vita's screen from it... but there's so little variety in them. The items you can buy for them are very limited too.. tho I dunno if there'll be more content unlocked as you level them up or with the new DLC chapters (or maybe Gust will release extra fairy related DLC to get some more money out of it.... orz).
All I know, is that this game is no real joy if you aren't relatively fluent with reading Japanese, there is an awful lot to read and an awful lot of menu navigating and it certainly helps A LOT if you understand what you're doing. All cutscenes and interactions with Ion are voiced tho and the music is beautiful. And of course the game looks gorgeous! So, even if you don't know any Japanese, you can get something out of it that makes it worth importing the game, it's fairly cheap for a Japanese game as well.
I gotta say tho, that I was expecting a lot more and I was pretty disappointed by the length of chapter one, I finished the game in 3 days, most of the time I spent with waiting for my fairies to finish repairing the broken points, so I would unlock a new memory. There were around 17 of such memories, each had a cutscene that was between 5-20 minutes long, when I suddenly had the final memory I was pretty surprised, because I didn't expect the game to end so fast, not after Gust said the game without any DLC would have enough content for months... surely that would refer to the interacting with Ion stuff then, but yeah, even as cute as Ion is, and I have to admit, I have a slight girl-crush on her ;> - but, she is quite boring, or at least hanging out in her flat with her (most of the time), creepily watching her every move... I don't want to do that for months.
So, yeah, I dunno, I'll download the second chapter when it's out, since it will be for free, play that and then that's it for me and this game. ;> I'd consider buying a localised version of it, since I do believe the story is quite interesting, if you understand a tad bit more. ;> But things like immensely long loading times (due to connecting to the servers) and the flow of the game should be improved first.
