Kannagi's finished, so the timing gets hung up for the moment and I'm back to one job. (Which, fortunately, is going quite well...)

Still having fun with the Naruto parody game. Nicely deep, but tongue-in-cheek enough that it doesn't clash when, say, your ninja suddenly spends a day fighting Hollows. There's an interesting multiplayer mechanic - you're (usually) a member of a village, which serves something of the same role of a guild or clan or what have you (item exchanges, building structures that give you bonuses, and what not). The villages are definitely unfriendly, and fight all the time, to the point where the only way to build up your village is to seize resources you can't produce yourself. You get cooperative monster fighting, but a surprisingly gentle form of PVP - the worst thing that can happen to you is that you're locked out of helping your village for a day, even if someone uses a Death Note on you (and oh yes, it happens - even I have a page!)

It sounds like a formula for endless predation of the largest villages upon the smallest, but in practice there's a continual cycle of villages, because of an ingenious mechanic. The ruler of a village (a "kage"... this is a Naruto parody, after all) can decide, upon reaching a certain exalted height, to trigger a series of events that -completely annihilates their own village-. And everything in it. Said ruler gets access to more content, in exchange for being locked out of ever running a village again, and everybody else gets a (quite nifty) bonus and has to find some other place to hang out from now on.

There's another mechanic that allows the game to have a quick and snappy pace of advancement without having everyone immediately max everything out in a couple of weeks. Once your character progresses beyond a certain point, you get the opportunity to move to another "season". You essentially reset in stats (though most of your neat items are retained, including practically anything valuable), and on additional run-throughs, you can access more content. You also get "theme songs" (essentially you can equip an "opening", an "ending", and a "battle" theme for certain bonuses). You can even get a "filler episode" set of themes.

It's goofy, I have to admit, but it's also fun.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:41 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 396 words, total size 2 kb.

1 I'll be looping to season 2 shortly - reached level 56 today, so I'll hit the level cap for season 1 in two or three more days.

I'll report back from the other side.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at July 31, 2009 10:53 AM (PiXy!)

2 Yeah, stinks that we don't have a BurgerNinja yet, no Knightmare Frames for us...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at July 31, 2009 01:31 PM (pWQz4)

3 Well, here I am in season 2.

I didn't quite hit Chunin on my first day due to some poor planning (ran out of stamina mid-way through part two of the Chunin exam quest), so I haven't gotten much interesting new stuff yet.  I did grab "Warbound" in the arena (gives you +2 fights per day).  I also have the Matrix of Leadership, which you get by defeating a kage in the arena; that's good for another +3 fights, so I can really rack up the rep points now.

My themes will kick in tomorrow; that will be nice.

Otherwise it all looks eerily familar.

Oh, yeah: Ryo and arena points you keep, JP are lost, and stamina seems to reset.  Wasn't sure exactly how that worked.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at August 04, 2009 07:43 AM (PiXy!)

4 Congrats on your first loop!

I've been hammering BurgerNinja pretty hard while I'm at Lemon; I figure I've got one more day of it, and with any luck that'll get me through the quest that unlocks the Greass bloodline. (With great luck, I already snagged one of the frame parts, too!) Upside is that getting the Frame would mean I could hang out a lot longer in S1 productively (not that I'd have to, of course). Downside is that the parts -don't- loop, unlike the Frame, so there's a big disincentive to looping with parts but no Frame in your inventory (the drop rate on those suckers is low).

Further downside, finishing the quest to get the Frame assembled requires a 17d17s Tai check, in the middle of a BurgerNinja mission (in other words, no allies but BN ones who don't give any Tai bonuses at all, and no jutsu). That puts it just plain impossible for me now. I figure, if I can save up for the Duelist's Aura and Eye, and maybe spend my Awesome, that'll get the range up to the point where it's worth trying; at that point I can throw probability at it for a while and hope I get lucky. ;p

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at August 04, 2009 08:23 AM (vGfoR)

5 If you go for the Letter of Marque, you can get an extra +1 range quickly.  You need all the badges, medals, and rings from the arena, and the Auras of Fortune and Experience, and then a quest opens up.

I'm still grinding towards the Duelist's items, even with 9 base figths a day...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at August 04, 2009 06:54 PM (PiXy!)

6 Got the Letter of Marque today. (Along with Sascha... and a Mark of 11DB. Turns out a buddy of mine knows the programmer and told him I was playing. Heh.)

My temporary home village will be exploding shortly, so expect me back at Turtle soon.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at August 04, 2009 08:17 PM (pWQz4)

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