waist deep in the trash (Natural Doctrine)

so the short order news is that US retailer HASTINGS is going out of business come October, so every local hastings joint has been slashing prices to absurd degrees. that’s what let me pick up about $80 worth of comics and books this last Thursday for about $20 dollars instead.

NATURAL DOCTRINE is a game by Kadokawa Games. I don’t know who they are and honestly I don’t even really care to research them! They probably publish a bunch of hentai or something. Gross.

NATURAL DOCTRINE is described as a Strategy-RPG based on Natural Selectionl. I don’t know what that means, because the only selecting going on in this game is all of the fucking menus I have to scroll through to do anything.

Screenshots make this game out to be similar to Valkyria Chronicles but it is nowhere near as polished or easy-to-access as that game is. It has origins as a PSVita title, which for some reason makes me think the large amounts of menus and stats and information being presented on the screen is specifically for the type of Neckbeard that bought one of those for Anime Games (its gonna be me)

NATURAL DOCTRINE sort of plays instead like…Yggdra Union, The battles from Valkyrie Profile 2 and uhh I dunno even. Basically, the game presents each of the maps (3D) as a series of squares of different sizes that are either empty, occupied by you, or occupied by the enemy. They come in BLUE and RED varieties. Blue are things your squad can occupy, red is ones the enemy occupies.

The other system at play is the “link” system. When multiple allies are occupying the same or distant squares and attacking enemies in the same formation, they get a “link” bonus based on how they’re positioned relative to the rest of the squad. You can set up a guy all the way at the back of your square, for instance, to attack an enemy soldier all the way at the back of yours. Put another dude or lady up front and they get a silver stream of light connecting them that increases their damage and hit %.

But wait also: The top of the screen lists character initiative, which makes no god damn sense as far as I can puzzle it out. All I know is when initiative comes up, it’s not a turn for the single character listed, but a turn + possible turns of all nearby soldiers. You can postpone soldiers turns too, to save them for later. If you do that and then kill the next enemy before it’s their turn, you get a bonus turn where you can do extra things.

(I have no idea what’s going on here)

IGN and a bunch of other review sites gave the game low marks for being frustratingly and also sometimes impossibly hard apparently: What I’ve read characterizes the game as being completely without worth for anyone who plays videogames that aren’t firmly in the Anime Strategy genre.

Most of this difficulty also apparently comes from needing to balance your characters to fill roles in your party without really knowing what’s coming up ahead in the next map. You can assign skill points between all of the Guys’ you get pretty much freely. If you cock things up at some point you can back out of any mission and re-equip and re-distribute all of yours skills. (pretty nice. A+ )

I’ve yet to put more than about five or six hours into the campaign of this. What’s waiting for me is apparently battles much larger in scale - one of the draws of the game is massive squads of Dudes’ and Guys’ pressing up against eachother in Beefcake Battles.

Really I’m wanting this game to get into the TRASH. There’s not that much story to speak of: there are goblins and grablins and they wanna get all up in your human settlements. You play KNIGHT MERCENARIES (landschnekt!) who’s job it is to get adventuring all up in other peoples grills.

There’s apparently the option to date (!) either a RED WOMAN or a BLUE WOMAN The red woman is really dumb and plays the air-headed little sister role. I will not date her. You can expect BLUE WOMAN GIRLFRIEND TIME to happen in this game at some point unless I get dissuaded by all of the anime bullshit.

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what the hell, this looks awesome

i love that first screen

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The aesthetic of this game is somewhere between Fantasy Anime and Warhammer.

Honestly in the first post I tried to avoid using words that I felt SelectButton would like; but there’s a lot of things people here would enjoy on this game. Most of the early tutorials highlight that victory is gained through planning and pre-preparation, not just having the best Guys’

yeah I was vaguely curious about pre-release coverage of this and then I tried hard to read things that would let me justify getting it but there was no way

I would love to read your playthrough

I seem to recall that it had a slider for how much animu you wanted in the story???

Well that’s a useless feature because obviously I want as much anime as the game can possibly throw at me.

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It’s just how anime the character portraits are

there was some cool stuff in this game but the interface gave me a headache, interested re: how your playthrough goes

the soundtrack is hilarious

If I turn the slider all the way to “Western” do my characters look like the boxart versions of RPG characters on NES games?

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I know this is your natural doctrine thread but I’m going to post these details from siliconera about the new saga game here instead because they are amazing and probably of interest to the same audience:

  • Urpina: A young lady with a cheerful personality, who can be a bit airheaded at times but has a strong sense of Justice. Born to the noble house of warriors, known as the Uranius, who are experts at the arts of dual-wielding swords that she has yet to master.

  • Leonard: A farmer who is skilled with various farming tools and other tools. HE’s difficult to approach, and isn’t one of many words. One day, after hearing a woman from the village who passed out saying “to Ai-Khanoum,” he sells his land and makes his way towards the legendary city, Ai-Khanoum,” on her behalf.

  • Taria: A woman of ceramic arts. While working on her ceramics, she senses distortions going on in the world, which have been causing distortions in her own work. She decides to face those distortions by going out on a journey to find out more on its cause and origin.

  • Balmaint: A courtroom’s executioner. He carried out the executions for the Cohan Castle administrator Sigfrey, who has given the sentence to many people. And after Sigfrey was arrested by an opposing political leader, he, too, was executed by the hands of Balmaint. Prior to being executed, Sigfrey had a prophecy—“I will revive seven times, and justice will be carried out.” Balmaint will go on a journey to decapitate Sigfrey seven times.

now that PS4 remote play works reasonably well and I can play these nutty jrpgs in a window on my computer I might have to get this

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Biggest problem: I don’t have a capture card and I didn’t get this on the PS4, so there’s no way for me to do a reasonably decent let’s play

I just remembered that this was the game I forgot I pre-ordered and it arrived on my doorstep one day. I still haven’t played it! I love how the screenshots make the game look absolutely daunting without context.

This is probably one of those games that has some interesting and unique ideas but there’s a lot of bad design and user experience laid on top.

Wikipedia says the credits theme is “In the court of the crimson King” by King Crimson.

The new SaGa is Vita only though, unless you were talking about ND.

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my god what a disaster

did the barkley guys write this

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Looking at those screen shots above it looks like the text on the colored arrows is oriented according to the facing of the character, with the character’s left-hand side being “up”. So if a character is facing left on the screen all the text on their arrow is upside down. (See: almost everything in the second screenshot)

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I think it’s actually choosing between using the CG model portraits or the 2D hand drawn portraits.

yo wait
the new saga is on ps4, not just vita? and it’s definitely coming out in english?

okay so let me explain what’s going on from top to bottom. the top bar displays characters initiative turns. the blue bars between them show those characters are linked. that’s what those bars are between characters - they have to be spaced out a certain distance to get linked together. The further a character is from one they’re linked to, the better the link. The game encourages you to do really wacky formations, because it also takes into account character placement as cover. If you put a gunner behind a soldier, they can’t be targeted as easily

neither but I can hope

@ToruMasuda Toll if given the choice between “more” anime and “less” anime what do you think my god given responsibility is

also: dear: re: selectbutton

Realized that this game is dependent on positioning your strongest guys further away from everyone so they do the most damage, feel like there’s good possibility here for you guys

I still want to play this game at some point, even knowing there is no way I will finish it.

Okay so there is a plot to this game.

So this screenshot illustrates something I’m dealing with now: See that little blue circle on the right there with 0.0g in it?
That’s the measure of a resource you collect in the game from killing enemies and opening chests.

That resource is the resource that lets you cast spells with your magic users: I think the fact that the game ties Spellcasting (all of the spells do lots of damage) as some like, ridiculously otherworldly force that is tied to a finite natural resource is the only time I’ve ever seen anything like that in a videogame.