Nancy Plays Time Princess

There is a mobile game called Time Princess: Story Traveller and I have many thoughts about it.

[nancy-plays-dutp]

My Pitch for Saga of Viera Part Two

Can you believe we're getting a Saga of Viera part two? It's been so long I've honestly been thinking that these unfinished books were going to stay that way forever, but if I could pick one to have a sequel it would be this one. It's been quite a while since I read the first part, but I remember really loving the protagonist and the story, and finding the ending rather upsetting as it's such a big status quo upheaval and it really felt like the story was building up to a resolution that we didn't get to see. UNTIL NOW!

I've been thinking about a theoretical part two for a while, and the best part about these unfinished books with sequels is that you can fix whatever you didn't like in the first part in the bit thats coming next. If you don't like a character, or think a plot point was weak or confusing, it will all be explained or improved in the sequel. Which conveniently only exists in your mind, so whatever you think is best is as canon as anything else. So before I have my hopes dashed by whatever actual sequel we get, I figured I might share my thoughts here!

Spoilers for Saga of Viera part one below the cut. Kind of, because it's been so long and I'm certain I've forgotten some details, but I'm going off my recollection of the events and characters and the way I thought the plot was going. I don't want to reread this book because its a waste of stamina. While it's free to replay stages when you've passed the dress up portion, it's not free to make different choices, even if you've gotten 100% on the entire book, which I wish they'd change. But on the plus side this means that most people probably do not remember the specifics of Saga of Viera either, so maybe that will work out for the best.

So let's start off with our recap, and my biggest point of speculation! You notice how in the above loading screen for Saga of Viera there is a dragon? Unless I am going crazy, there is no dragon yet in this story, so clearly they should introduce the dragon in part two.

The story thus far has followed Zoya, a con artist seeking a magical cure for a family curse that will kill her once she reaches a certain age. I do not remember what that age was, but I seem to recall its in her 20s and she's only got like a year or two left. To find a cure she ends up getting the Holy Maiden to agree to swap places with her, so a disguised Zoya is now part of the human embassy going to visit the elves!

While there we pick up on some tensions between the light and dark elves. As in, the dark elves appear to be fighting a guerilla tactic style campaign against the light elves and have been banned from living in the elf cities, and have their own secret underground society. You can choose to befriend the dark elf Salvia, or you can side with the light elf Reuel and seek to stop the dark elves from their nefarious plot, whatever it may be.

At the end of the story the elves have a wonderful tree ceremony that goes horribly wrong, and depending on your choices this is more or less your fault. Essentially the magic tree that appears to form the centre of the elf's religion and power is blown up by the dark elves, and the story ends with you in the middle of that chaos. The endings part two will start from are the endings where you swear to find the dark elves and avenge the tree, or where you've teamed up with Salvia and presumably are now running and hiding from light elf society. You are no closer to figuring out your curse, but you do have a whole international incident now! So let's discuss how this could continue.

A key part of book two is going to be the motivations and plans of the dark elves being revealed. Currently we know very little about them, so I'd expect either story path to give us more backstory. I'll start off with my theoretical continuation of Salvia's route, because I'll be able to explain it from that perspective.

Remember that dragon? My theory is that dragons are what caused the split between dark and light elves. Dragons were this huge powerful magical creature, and light elves sought to destroy or harness that power while dark elves wanted to cooperate with the dragons and live in harmony. But then the light elves found a way to siphon the power from a dragon egg, and ended up trapping it and making themselves powerful enough to defeat and banish the dark elves. The dark elves have been covertly trying to find this stolen egg and rescue it, and also have their own cache of dragon eggs kept hidden from the light elves, but they can't hatch them. I'm thinking some magical crystal or water or something is the hatching ingredient only the light elves have, and they've been controlling it, so the dark elves have all these eggs and nothing to do with them.

The way this leads into the main plot is the tree that you just exploded at the end of the last book. The tree has actually grown around that stolen dragon egg, and that's how its the source of power for the light elves. By blowing it up I want the dragon egg to hatch so we can get a dragon, or at the very least the dark elves have swooped in and stolen the egg. This means its now top priority for the light elves to find the dark elves and steal their egg cache so they can power themselves up again.

If you choose Salvia's path, then you get to learn all this information. I think Zoya should be a little upset that the plan has been kept from her for so long, especially since exploding the tree was pretty destructive and shocking. Zoya complains that the elves haven't trusted her, and Salvia can defend herself by saying that if Zoya knew they were hatching a dragon surely she'd have backed out, because that's really scary and she a human cannot possibly understand the risks they've had to take. I'm fairly certain Zoya's been living with her Holy Maiden disguise up til this point, so I would like Zoya to reveal her identity and con artist past to Salvia, which shocks and surprises her. Then we can have Salvia grow as she admits she should have trusted Zoya more, and been more willing to divulge the plan, and apologize for treating Zoya like a tool rather than a friend.

This path is going to continue with you and Salvia teaming up for the dragons, and Salvia can tell you some nice stories about her past and trusts you more. At one point Salvia will take you to the dragon nursery where they've got all the eggs. Maybe Zoya can figure out the missing ingredient and hatch a bunch of eggs, so now they can show up to the light elves and demand peace while riding an army of dragons. It's mandatory that we have at least one album picture of riding the dragons, and one of you meeting the dragons for the first time a la the How to Train Your Dragon movie, and also an explicitly romantic ending with Zoya and Salvia.

Now onto the other side of the coin! I will have to start off here with a bit of a serious retcon, but it's absolutely necessary. Reuel has been a rather poorly utilized companion, and he's got no good conversations with Zoya. He's always been stiff and formal to her, and even a bit rude at times. There's this power dynamic where Zoya is kind of in awe of the elves, who have been very haughty about it. This all makes it difficult to see Reuel as a viable love interest. To fix this, I propose we do a reveal in my second book, where we use what I call the "Mr Darcy" method.

Akin to Mr Darcy, while we think he's been rude the whole time it turns out he's actually desperately trying to stop falling in love with Zoya. She gave him a book and offered him some food once and he's fallen irrevocably in love, and is absolutely terrible at flirting. I'd like him to break down at some point and confess that he's tried not being in love with her but he just can't do it, she's too kind and her smile makes his heart race and he does not know how to deal with these agonizing feelings so would she please love him back! And Zoya gets to think back over all their previous interactions and see them in a very different light. They're not going to kiss right then, because Zoya is not in love with him yet, but now that his shell is cracked we can have more conversations with him and actually get to know him, and fall in love along the way.

Essentially we're going to get to learn that Reuel is actually just really bad at expressing emotions, and works hard to seem stoic and polite at all times. Maybe part of this can be because he's half human, as shown by his non pointy regular human ears; I'm not certain if this was confirmed in the actual story or just on a social media Q&A, but I do remember hearing this canon at some point and want to do something with it. Maybe he's been teased about being overemotional for so long, and is tired of being called an improper elf so he's learned all the etiquette and is determined to be the Best Elf. He also looks up to elf society and has not really questioned it before, and thus has been kind of naïve about the whole dragon egg thing.

The tree exploding has kind of put a huge damper on Reuel's worldview, and really shaken his beliefs that the light elves are as powerful and good as everybody thinks. Zoya too will be shaken, and also be realizing that maybe they're not the all wise people she thought they were. Together they can do a covert operation to investigate what was up with that dragon egg. The good ending here is you guys getting to defeat the elf queen together. I've attached her picture below to emphasize that I want her design to be exactly the same, because she looks like a disney princess and I think it would be really fun for her to be evil. She can justify the elves' actions by saying dragons are too dangerous and only the light elves can control their power, and it's going to good use this way, and they're the wisest and best and how dare Reuel and Zoya question them. To which Reuel can stand up and defend you and also all humankind, and say the elves have made some serious errors and cannot magic those away, and he's learned a lot from humans and can no longer blindly support the light elves.

You may remember that in this story, the MC Zoya has a curse that is killing her. Fear not: I too have remembered this, and it's going to be tied into this plot. Especially when doing research with Reuel, you can learn about why your family was cursed in the first place. I'm thinking one of Zoya's ancestors was actually hired by the light elves to steal that dragon egg and put it in the tree, and promised great wealth and power if he did so. Unfortunately after he was successful he got cursed, and all of his descendants too, and the light elves kind of just kicked him out because they didn't want to deal with that, and also didn't want any humans running around talking about their hidden dragon egg where they're getting all their power.

This allows Zoya herself to kind of redeem her family's history, by being a thief and trickster who ends up stealing the egg back for the dragons, and righting that wrong her family was complicit in so long ago. She can find a cure that can be brewed with a dragon scale, one that's given to her at the end of the good endings. But we can also throw in some temptation here, and give Zoya an opportunity to steal a dragon scale (either off a live dragon or off the ground) to try and make this cure. It won't work though, because the magic only stays in the dragon scale when the dragon consents to giving it away, and this is because thematically you can't undo theft by stealing more from the wronged party. Only by selflessly returning the dragon egg and reinstating the dragon's freedom is Zoya and the rest of her family healed.

In all these cases I think it's best if the light elf society crumbles, at least a little. The light elves have sequestered themselves from dark elves and also humans in pursuit of power, and have put themselves on a pedestal they must be knocked down from. Maybe now the humans and light elves can live together in peace, and depending on your choices the dragons and dark elves can also be a part of your society, or maybe they get their own country and you've just got delegates but they're not willing to be neighbours yet. And there has to be at least one path where you get to bond with a baby dragon and have it as an animal sidekick, like Corey from The Sacred Beast. Cute dragons are always popular.

Is this actually how SoV part 2 will go? Probably not. It would be a very satisfying story, but quite often DUTP has gone in directions I have not anticipated. Because those directions are bad, not because it's a pleasant surprise. I'm going to be very annoyed if at the very least the dragons don't figure into the plot, and I hope they address the elf superiority complex, but I really have no idea. I haven't even looked at the promotional material for the sequel, and I also have no idea how mechanically this will work. Will we have new lantern characters? How many new outfits will we get? Will they update the previous Saga of Viera book to be longer, or have a new one you need to unlock, and if so how are they going to set stage requirements so you can't play these stories out of order? Will they provide a recap for the first part?

I feel like I always look forward to the new DUTP releases with a mix of curiosity, eagerness, and dread. I really hope this second part is good, at the very least because a bad conclusion will probably ruin the beginning for me. But no matter what I've built my own story, and I can always come back to this if I'm dissatisfied with the actual canon.

Thank you for reading this far, and I hope that this new story fulfills your expectations, whatever they may be!

[nancy-plays-dutp]

The Problem With DUTP Updates

On March 6 2023, the app Time Princess received a major update. It added major new game features, and was even delayed from the initial release date from March 5 and received a hotfix a few days later. This update had new clothes and a new story, but more significantly introduced new game mechanics and a new type of gameplay into the app: the Story Kingdom. And I can think of no better feature to use as a perfect example of the strange and fascinating development of this little app, from the perspective of a player who may have a slightly large number of thoughts about this sort of thing.

Why do people play video games? Not in general, but the specific games that they choose to put their time and effort (and money) into. To put it broadly, video games have two ways to motivate you: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is the game giving you a reward: experience points, in game coins, achievements, and unlocking new areas and skills. The game gives you something to signal that you have, in some way, made progress. Intrinsic motivation has more to do with the player becoming better at the game. This varies a lot according to the game's mechanics, but basically its you becoming "skilled" at playing the game, and are playing it not to change the game but to change how you engage with it. For example, if you've got a sudoku game you're probably playing it so that you get better at solving those puzzles, and not because each puzzle solved will bring you closer to unlocking a new colour of game board.

Games that use one or the other kind of motivation are not inherently better; it depends on the intended experience and player expectations. (I've learned a lot about this from SuperEyepatchWolf's video on Shenmue 3, which I will link in the comments .)

The basic pitch of DUTP involves both types of motivation: players obtain clothing and use stamina to play through stories. The collecting clothing and receiving awards for scoring highly on stages is extrinsic motivation: the game is giving you something for performing a task. Intrinsic gameplay is more subtle: while there is some skill involved in styling an outfit, usually that goes out the window when you're playing stages because of the tag scoring system. Instead the intrinsic motivation comes in the form of the choices the player makes through the story as they work to find all of the different endings, and the satisfaction that comes from finishing a story. In game features like crafting clothes and playing minigames similarly have both motivations: you might craft an outfit to unlock a new level or get a higher score (an extrinsic motivation), but may also use this outfit piece when styling a look that you find more visually appealing (intrinsic motivation). Minigames likewise give rewards that are used in other portions of the game, but also involve some degree of skill and can allow players to improve.

There are also some incredibly unbalanced areas of DUTP gameplay, and these things I often personally find frustrating and limiting. For example, the lantern gives mainly extrinsic rewards: you unlock new levels, you get gift boxes and diamonds, and you unlock achievements. The only intrinsic motivation lantern companions provide are their voice interactions, which are pretty limited, and the three letters you unlock pretty quickly when levelling them up. I suppose you might also enjoy spinning their model around, but these are pretty low rewards for the very high cost of crafting more gifts and continuing to level the characters up, especially since most of these intrinsic benefits are unlocked right from the start. Anybody levelling their lantern companions past certain levels is almost assuredly doing it not because they enjoy it, but because they want the reward the game will give them for doing so. There is also no skill involved, beyond rudimentary resource management, so it becomes something to grind through to get the extrinsic rewards rather than a feature that people enjoy for its own sake.

So what is the Story Kingdom? Upon opening it after the update I was quite fascinated and confused as to what this was meant to be. I knew this was going to be a continuation of the Mirage Forest storyline, which explains the framing device of the magical book we use to travel in different stories. The gameplay loop of Mirage Forest very closely resembles a game like Animal Crossing, where you have a map that you run around in to complete quests and unlock collectables. By using energy you can harvest these collectables, which are flowers and berries and crystals, which you can spend on unlocking new areas with new collectables and the occasional story stage.

It's easy to spot the extrinsic motivation in this gameplay: you are collecting resources, which unlock more resources. Eventually you'll get enough resources to purchase clothing items, or unlock new resources to gather, and there's even achievements for each type of resource that you can collect. Yet a lot of these resources are already oddly disconnected from the rest of the game: there's a new kind of energy, and the rewards you gain in Story Kingdom can only be used in that specific map, or in the specific shop where you can redeem a few clothing items or crafting items. These items appear to be limited to the ones used to level up relics and fashion academy: these are score modifiers that make it easier to pass levels and get high scores, which is not a matter of skill.

As for intrinsic motivation, Story Kingdom is severely lacking. The gameplay is more tedious than fun, as it is made of waiting through timers to get another resource. There is no skill, no nuance, and no way for the player to engage in any deeper level of gameplay. The story is an attempt at intrinsic motivation, but it's quite shallow and has an incredibly loose narrative, mainly consisting of scenes where you "purify" a shadow demon with relics.

There are very few customization options for your stylized avatar, and there are no choices in this story. You appear to be investigating why there are shadow monsters, but the story takes quite a while to work through on account of all the timers, and you don't really form a deep understanding of the world or characters. The shadow monsters also appear to be caused by bad feelings. I honestly was expecting this kind of quality from this story, but the problem is that this remains the most intrinsic motivation the Story Kingdom offers. While you can style your characters with the clothes you earn through this story, they are incredibly expensive and may take months or years to unlock, creating a system with low rewards and a lot of effort.

And now let's discuss the fishing. There is a fishing minigame that must be played to earn fish, which function like any other collectible in completing Story Kingdom quests. The main difference is that it costs double the energy for a single fish, and upon completion of the minigame you get a random fish. As far as I can tell there is no way to raise your chances of getting a required fish, so you're often left spending quite a bit of energy to amass the required fish to progress past this roadblock.

Mechanically, this fishing game is a reflex game. The fishing bobber slides back and forth on its scale, and you must tap the "reel in" button when it's in the dark blue "target" range. This is a personal concern, but I find this game incredibly frustrating. I have uncontrollable hand tremors, which leads me to avoid games that require fast reflexes. The other minigames that require reflexes are optional games, but this fishing game locks Story Kingdom progress. There is no other way to obtain fish aside from playing this.

There are three kinds of bait that you can use to fish, one of which is 10 energy, one of which can be purchased with diamonds (you can get a free one every day through quests), and finally you can buy bait with money. The target gets larger with each type of bait, but it's still possible to miss. And if you miss? You get absolutely nothing.

There was a hotfix update released very quickly after the original update, which changed this minigame so that losing did not consume energy. But the difficulty of the minigame remains the same, and the random aspect of fishing is still quite frustrating. Not to mention that it can be possible to "win" but fish up a completely useless item, like a soggy boot or seaweed, which as of right now has no current use in the game.

So why is this bad? Overall the Story Kingdom weighs down the rest of the game. It adds new materials and incredibly shallow and repetitive gameplay, which requires grinding for long periods of time at games of luck to get what few rewards there are. It's also disappointing considering the state of many other neglected features of the game, such as the custom contour mechanics that allow players to dye and pattern certain clothes (with extremely limited options), or the limited range of player character appearances.

I'm not saying they had to work on improving these aspects of the game, but I do think it's strange that so much effort, time, and money was presumably put towards developing Story Kingdom, which fails to build off any previously established elements and offers nothing compelling in its own right. It even makes aspects of the game more difficult: players have long complained about the lag and hefty memory and storage requirements for this game, and Story Kingdom only makes these problems worse.

How could we fix this? There's plenty of opportunities to make Story Kingdom better, and it honestly baffles me seeing how so little effort was made to integrate this feature with the rest of the game. It wouldn't be too difficult to add Story Kingdom energy to the minigame rewards, or add better rewards to the Story Kingdom shop.

The fishing is the most frustrating aspect of the Story Kingdom, and it really doesn't need to be. For starters, many games with this kind of fishing game will have more than one "target" range, with increasing probability at getting a reward, and a lower chance of failure. Additionally it would be nice to see some kind of trading mechanic, where you could swap certain types of fish for ones you need, or even a "fish market" where you could buy or trade fish with other players. Perhaps there could be different types of bait with a greater chance at attracting certain types of fish, and they could all be bought with energy, or crafted from those garbage items that are currently doing nothing in my inventory.

Finally, I see a huge missed opportunity in Story Kingdom. To me, a lot of DUTP's appeal lies in the customization options. It would be nice to expand those through Story Kingdom, such as unlocking new dyes or stamps or patterns for outfits. (The story even takes the character through a dye shop...) The items you gather could perhaps be used as ingredients to craft dye that you could then use to alter clothing items.

I honestly don't think we even needed the Story Kingdom map, as it seems like that took a lot of time and effort to create and animate, but is ultimately wasted space. I'd recommend instead focusing on the current in game map: the bedroom from which the player accesses stories, minigames, crafting, and so forth. The bedroom we have is part of the game's meta narrative about us journeying through stories, and often will have new accessories or lighting based on seasonal events, but players have no options for customizing this space. If we could get a new bedspread, or choose which items are displayed on our shelf, or buy different hanging lights, I think that simple aesthetic change could really enhance the game experience. Such options are intrinsically motivated, since we're doing it for our own enjoyment of aesthetics rather than an external game reward. It could also be a feature that could be fleshed out, with event specific bedroom items, and perhaps new bedroom themed backgrounds for taking selfies, and options for displaying achievement trophies in the room to further a sense of accomplishment.

There is one thing that can change in the static Story Kingdom, namely the player character's appearance. Because it's a new art style and new character model, I do understand why the options are so sparse. But more than the "Default Look" options, I find the "Set Look" category to be quite interesting.

If you choose "Set Look", your character will take on the appearance of the chosen companion. You can unlock more companions through levelling them up in the lantern. I find this somewhat hilarious and quite sad, because it must have taken a good deal of effort and time to create these models, and I simply cannot see the purpose of them. There is no official way to take photos of these avatars, so you are limited to screenshots if you want to display them, but the customization options are so few that it holds very little appeal.

It's easy to dismiss these choices as "fanservice," but I think that's too simplistic. It's fanservice that fails to understand what fans of the game enjoy, and its at best superfluous features that will not be used by most players. Unlocking the companion set looks is extrinsic, but doesn't have much to offer for intrinsic motivation. And I think it would be relatively simple to add intrinsic motivation; if the static map of the Story Kingdom could be populated by companions from stories, then it would be much more engaging. Perhaps you could unlock a certain number of slots to place companions, and companions according to which stories you've played and your relationship levels. Perhaps each unlocked companion, once placed in the world, could have a couple of voice lines when you interact with them, and maybe they'd even have a chance to give you some resource or more energy. This would create actual rewards for progressing in the Story Kingdom narrative, and allow the map to be customized. It would also theoretically be easier to create, since you'd only need to model each character as a static character, or perhaps with one idle animation, instead of needing to give them all walk cycles and the ability to turn around, face new directions, and play a fishing game. Players would also be able to show off which companions were populating their Story Kingdom.

I only play games, and I don't create them. I don't know how difficult it would be to implement these changes, nor do I know the reasons for the choices DUTP has made with this update. But from my perspective, it seems like the developing team has put a lot of effort into the wrong features. They've created many new assets but failed to provide sufficient reasons for players to want to use them. Games don't need to have compelling narratives or engaging mechanics, but they still need some intrinsic motivation to encourage players. This update is indicative of poor management and design choices, and I have to wonder if the DUTP team believes "new" is automatically better. Players often ask for improvements on existing features, but each update appears to deliver new stories and event clothing without building on what was established previously. I can only hope that DUTP shifts its development and begins to look critically at the current game features and work towards improving them, rather than tacking on new half finished features.

[purpledragongifs]

Xiaojing & Huo Lan ~ Ancient Dreams Time Princess ~ IGG, Inc.

Gifs made by purpledragongifs. All gifs are 220px wide.  Please do not delete credits.

[nancy-plays-dutp]

Moving Mountains Review

If I had to sum up my feelings about this book in one sentence, it would be “mixed”. There’s certainly a lot I enjoy, and with some minor adjustments I think this story could have been one of my favorites. But other aspects of this story really let it down, and change my perspective of this narrative to a more negative one.

Moving Mountains is two chapters, and the pacing is noticeably better than the last story, Code Whalefall. I also admire the clothing designs, but here we run into our first big problem.

Much to the frustration of many DUTP players, every single handheld in this book is a Jerry item. This means that you can only complete two outfits without Jerry spins, and a bunch of outfits that SHOULD be fully craftable are not. The in game statistics will allow you to get 100% without winning the items from Jerry, but this honestly just felt petty to me. There’s no reason why those items couldn’t have been blueprints we obtained in the story, and Jerry is an awful system to work with at the best of times given the element of randomness. Especially since many recent Jerry outfits have many four star items that don’t even look good, like plain white socks, and you’re much more likely to win multiples of those items than a single desirable item. I miss when exceptional items were the norm from Jerry, not the exception.

I mention this so close to the top because the outfits are the main appeal of this story. I’ll do a further breakdown of the characters and plot, but honestly if anything about this story appeals to you, there is a better story with those aspects. The premise of this one, that the MC Wen Rou does not want to get married, is something so simple that it can be seen in plenty of other stories as a subplot. I would recommend the Perfect Storm for an MC taking control of her fate and chasing her dreams. And if you’re here for the cultural aesthetic Ancient Dreams and Gourmets Journey have very similar styles and much better writing, along with grappling with themes of family responsibility and expectations. So I guess you can play this book if you want, but play those other books first. They’re much better, and don’t do this frustrating Jerry item stuff.

Now for the plot, which will be under the cut because of spoilers. I can’t decide if the spoilers will really affect the progression of the story, because it’s not set up as a mystery but the summary was so general I have to assume that to some degree they didn’t want you to know what you were getting into. But I honestly don’t think that spoilers will really change your perception of this story.

The main storyline has Wen Rou attempting to prevent an arranged marriage; unfortunately a powerful official attempts to blackmail her into marriage by tarnishing her father’s reputation. To repair it and save her family Wen Rou takes charge of the flooded region her father was working in to save both the people there and her own chances at freedom.

Starting off with the positives, I really enjoyed how much of this story was actually about flood management. I loved how you actually got to make decisions (in some paths) and change things for the better, and how project management was an actual skill that our MC was trained in and allowed to use.

I also cannot describe the delight I felt upon learning that we actually got to blow up a mountain. I would have loved to be more directly involved in that process, or at least have gotten a CG, but I do appreciate the fact that the title reveal was quite literal.

Character wise, I really enjoyed the MC’s relationship with her mother. Although you have opposing views it’s clear that she cares about you, and having that resolution at the end where she accepts your path and expresses her desire to see you happy was lovely. Too often I see these types of stories simply paint the parents as Evil, and it was nice to see it acknowledge that she wants you to get married because that’s the best way she knows to keep you safe.

Companion wise, Shen Jiaojiao was my favourite. The scene where she helps you out by funding your escape was one of the most impactful, and I adore how relying on her is what allows the story to continue rather than forcing you to seek the help of one of the love interests. I do wish that she’d been able to be more present in the second chapter and find it odd how one ending path doesn’t have you seeing her again at all, since her role as your friend and supporter was so vital to the first chapter. It’s also the best link to the theme of this story, the empowerment of women, since it has a character who does fulfill the traditional role she’s expected to, but she still shows spirit and courage and seeks to help you break out of those constraints.

Finally, on the list of things I like is actually the start of Chapter 2, where we have one stage mentioning the MC managing her period cramps. It’s so minor, but menstruation is such a taboo topic and I appreciate it being shown in such a natural light. It also serves the theme well, since this is something that could appear to make women “weaker” but the MC isn’t stopped by it, and more importantly we see Gu Yin offer sympathy and try to take care of her. His actions don’t come across as condescending but rather the assistance of a friend of equal status, and it was a good subtle moment for his characterization.

You might have noticed that I’ve barely mentioned the LIs until this point. This is because while I didn’t hate them, I also have some critiques of their writing. I cannot emphasize how strange it feels to me, having a story where the pitch is “the MC doesn't want to get married” and then barely having an ending without a romance path. The only one that could really qualify is the chapter one ending where you just straight up leave everything behind, which I did enjoy but clearly is not what the story is building towards since it’s so early on in the playthrough.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having romance in a story, but I couldn’t help but feel that it was a strange choice in this case, especially since the LIs often felt extraneous to the plot. Admittedly Luo Jiuhua was treated the worst in this respect; while he’s supposed to be a childhood friend the writing fails to convince me that such a friendship was truly impactful or necessary, and his route actually involves doing so much less for yourself that it’s rather frustrating.

When Luo Jiuhua was first introduced I honestly thought there was going to be a plotline where we had a fake betrothal just to appease the MC’s family, and then you’d be working together and slowly fall in love and get engaged for real at the end, after being able to prove your worth and accept your family’s blessing to make your own path. It would have also given Luo Jiuhua some much needed personality, making him an interesting foil to Gu Yin by characterizing him as somebody willing to bend the rules and play around with tradition. Since this was clearly not the plan there were still things that could have been done to improve on him. Perhaps he’s the reason why the MC was able to begin learning from her father, and she’d been encouraged by him to pursue education. Perhaps he’d taught her martial arts, which as a fun bonus would open up the opportunity to have a sparring match with him and build some tension. 

I especially found his role towards the end of the story frustrating, as whenever the MC ran into difficulties he’d show up and throw his money around and instantly win the trust of the people. It’s always the MC failing and him succeeding, which removes her agency and creates distance between her and the final success. This is culminated in how in this route she doesn’t even think of the blowing up the mountain plan herself, instead overhearing it from somebody while distributing soup and stating the extremely obvious “well why don’t we try that?”. It would have been better to see the MC actually work with Luo Jiuhua, perhaps thinking of inviting him specifically because of his ability to soothe crowds and using that to her advantage, or asking him to look into previous flood mitigation efforts by talking with the citizens he knows so well. Letting her see these strengths and utilize them would reinforce her skill as a leader, instead of just passively letting her friend take care of the problems she faces.

Gu Yin was likely the author’s favourite, as that relationship gets far more time to develop and even starts off with quite the intriguing premise of being enemies. The support he gives you, especially in Chapter 2, is quite touching and well done, and I could realistically see their romantic ending as a fair culmination of their journey together through the narrative. Yet there are still weak spots that could have been improved, most notably the transition between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.

Upon initial confrontation with his regressive ideas about the role of women, I fully believed we were going to be disguising ourselves as a man to join him on the trip and then have a dramatic reveal. Alas, such a plotline was not to be, and you instead convince him to bring you along. Which reveals an interesting bit of nuance to his character, as it’s clear through the way that he treats you that he doesn’t actually see women as lesser. Yet the story never addresses this discrepancy; it would have been interesting to see him speak about conforming to the ideals of society even if they’re not sincerely held, and the compromises he makes to secure his position of power because he believes he can do more good by making less waves. It would set him up in contrast to the MC, who refuses to adhere to standards she doesn’t believe in, and their relationship could allow them both to grow, with Gu Yin admiring Wen Rou’s bravery, and her learning from his temperance to be less reckless and choose her battles wisely. It would have also gone well with his backstory of growing up in a poor family and obtaining power, and he could have discussed the prejudices he himself faced and how that has impacted his worldview. Instead that backstory appears to not matter whatsoever, as he never even connects with common people or shows any knowledge from said background, nor allows it to motivate his actions. He doesn’t aim to prove himself or earn his place, nor does he try to advocate for those who were born in similar circumstances as he was. In my opinion the element of growing up poor could have actually been entirely given to Luo Jiuhua, since he’s the one who ends up connecting to the commoners far more often and is more sympathetic to them, and it would really make no difference to Gu Yin’s character.

It also would have made their partnership more impactful, if we saw him overcoming ingrained prejudice or fear, or if he represented the system that was holding back Wen Rou. If they’d let Gu Yin be from a rich family and kept his prejudice, he could have grown through the story and come to realize the error of his ways, and his arc would have represented the larger change that Wen Rou comes to have on the world around her. This is where the “dress up as a man” plot would have worked particularly well, since he would have been treating her as an equal and respecting her opinion before realizing she was a women, and then could reevaluate his own internal prejudice. Although he might not have been as nice during the story, I think it would have been fascinating and a good way to connect their relationship between the two chapters.

This brings me to my main problem with this story: what’s up with all the poor people? Chapter one sets up a theme about those in power being abusive and dismissive to those without official positions; we constantly see examples of corrupt officials and are meant to empathize with the citizens living under their governance. But whenever we actually interact with these citizens they’re portrayed fairly unsympathetically. Most of them do not have names and form simply a faceless mob; the MC is unable to appeal to reason in most cases, and must resort to lying to them to get their cooperation. The story struggles with this part of the narrative, with the MC being frustrated over being unheard, and while some of the dialogue and writing attempts to address this by pointing out how they have valid reasons to be distrustful of authority, this is never really resolved in the course of the story. The citizens trust Luo Jiuhua, despite him also being a wealthy noble and present in the area during this abuse, while seemingly arbitrarily disliking the MC for the exact same reasons. It could be a fumbled plot about disliking outsiders, but this doesn’t mesh with the MC’s stated past of knowing the area from having grown up there. If Luo Jiuhua was the character who’d grown up poor and then risen to prominence through the luck of fortune this would make much more sense, as he’d then be viewed as one of the citizens despite his new power and explain why they’re so receptive to him.

It would have also been nice to see the MC actually overcome this difficulty in communication. Perhaps by appointing Luo Jiuhua to be the intermediary, or setting up an internal council run by the village to petition for their needs; some way she could have listened to their concerns and allowed their voices to be heard. The most baffling parts of this plotline are how one of the bad endings literally has the MC being killed by a senseless mob when they believe she is trying to run away, especially when in the other ending she is STILL appearing to leave the town with little explanation but somehow the people trust her this time; also the plot point where you can choose to whip the mother who stole from you to feed her starving child, and it appears to have no affect on the story. I honestly thought that was going to come back at the end, perhaps with the commoners now distrusting her at a crucial moment (perhaps when she’s leaving to go find the delayed delivery of explosives), but encountered no such thing in my playthrough. Perhaps it was there and I just didn’t unlock that path, in which case it’s still strange that something like that could happen and have so little effect on the story.

Built into this is the ongoing conflict of education for women. The MC mentions how she’s been fortunate to learn from her father, and its implied that most other women are restricted to flower arranging, with Wen Rou’s interest in the book festival being something her mother disapproves of. At a pivotal point in the story Wen Rou gains support by promising a mother that her daughter will receive an education (although I do wish the dialogue in that scene made me feel less like she was threatening the future of this child if the mother failed to comply, and she would be separating them permanently for the benefit of the daughter’s education; I suppose schools in this world don’t allow you to go home to see your parents). In of the main endings Wen Rou opens a school specifically for women, to try and educate others and give them the opportunity to change their society as she has. Yet once again the theme is muddled and unclear, resulting in this school becoming kind of a weird note to end on, at least in my reading experience.

Opening a school for women to follow the same path is hardly something new to DUTP books; most recently we’ve seen this in The Perfect Storm. But in that book the lack of education of women is a theme that is commonly built on; the protagonist comes into conflict with her parents over learning, and repeatedly laments the fate of women who are forced to marry and give up their dreams. She’s fully aware that she’s a symbol of female liberation and embraces it. Here Wen Rou seems only vaguely aware of her role, acting dismissive towards other women and taking her own education for granted. It’s not mentioned why her father taught her, especially since it appears he did not expect her to follow in his footsteps; was teaching his daughter just a hobby? Luo Jiuhua’s past with her could have been used very well in this situation; perhaps her father was originally teaching Luo Jiuhua and mourning the lack of a son to educate, and Wen Rou was allowed to sit in and quickly excelled at the classes, surpassing Luo Jiuhua and gaining a lifelong thirst for knowledge. 

This is especially stark in Wen Rou’s interactions with other women. On one hand we have those in high society, who she refuses to mingle with and enjoys frustrating by pretending stupidity. The exception to this being Shen Jiaojiao, who you do empathize with and who does help you, but it would have been nice to see an acknowledgement that even those who you disagree with aren’t just vapid drones, happy to blindly follow the societal constraints you chafe against. It portrays the MC as very “not like other girls,” which then only is amplified in the second chapter as your education is what sets you apart from all the poor commoners who can’t understand policy and must be lied to, lest they form an unreasoning mob.

Wen Rou has a very interesting position, as she is currently fighting against a system that does oppress her, but also has a degree of privilege many do not. This book fails to address these systemic influences on the world; it’s never discussed what the norms are for education for women and those in poverty, nor how that correlates to positions of power. We aren’t explicitly told of rules that are in place preventing women from being officials or going to school, at least until the very end when Wen Rou can choose to ask for one of these rules to be dissolved. Others seem mostly unaware of these influences; perhaps one of the poor people in the second chapter could have been a women with great influence in her community, and Wen Rou could propose giving her an official position of leadership, and we could learn that this has been withheld from her due to her gender. It would connect the damage of the floods and the negligence of the officials to the conflict about the oppression of women, and deliver the narrative that everybody benefits when barriers are removed and people can use their talents despite not meeting traditional gender expectations. Even the widower we met could be grieving the death of his wife, and we could learn she was an important member of the community who advocated for better living conditions, and her death negatively impacted everyone. If you wanted to be especially brave you could include a subplot of her dying of an easily treatable illness, but she couldn’t afford such treatment due to her poverty, which was because her work was going uncredited and unpaid for.

At the heart of Wen Rou’s story must be the acknowledgement that she is not special. She has a position where she can make a difference and she does deserve that, and she does have talent and has worked hard to reach this point. None of that is taken away by pointing out that there are other equally skilled women, women who can also be leaders, women who also search for innovative solutions and long for more, and women who are simply not given the same opportunities as Wen Rou. This is how real oppression works in real life, perpetuated by people who mean well but cannot understand the barriers that others face, especially when they themselves have overcome barriers. And here we could tie this conflict into the story title and flood management; people have tried to stop the floods before, the same way that people have advocated for social change in areas of injustice. And they’ve been stopped, or change has been insufficient, or new problems have arisen. Then the conclusion shows that it’s important to keep trying, to let new people come up with new solutions, to push onwards and seek new ways of understanding and reaching those who have been ignored and left behind. Moving mountains takes more than one day, but it can eventually be done, and the fact that its hard doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.

[nancy-plays-dutp]

What's your favorite storybook out of the ones you've played so far ?

Picking one favourite is very difficult, so I'll give myself two! The Perfect Storm delivered everything I could ever ask for in a pirate story, and went above and beyond my expectations. And Phantom of the Opera is the story that got me into DUTP in the first place, and still has a place near and dear to my heart as one of my favourite adaptations of that story.

[thecollectibles]

Time Princess by micha ji

[nancy-plays-dutp]

Moving Mountains - First Look

A new book has come out, and I’m excited to play it! This won’t be too spoiler heavy but just in case I’ll put stuff under a cut once I actually get into the story content. Also it’ll start getting long.

Moving Mountains is the 33rd book to be released. It is set in the fictional country of Yuanning, a feudal monarchy that takes inspiration from China. I’m not a historian and have received no details on the dynasty, so I can’t comment on historical accuracy, but it appears to be fairly grounded with no fantasy elements.

Listed under “Adventure,” “Romance,” and “Healing” in the bookstore, the summary indicates that our protagonist, Wen Rou, is struggling between the education given from her father and the expectations society has from her state as a noblewoman. I do think this is a rather simple premise, but it can still be a good story if the characters and writing are done well. Especially after the last story, Code Whalefall, being so incredibly confusing and hard to follow, a simple story can be a treat. But it could also risk becoming forgettable, especially since it’s working with an aesthetic easily compared to so many other books, like Gourmet’s Journey, Tang Hunter’s Dynasty, and Ancient Dreams, all of which I consider to be high quality stories; Moving Mountains has some work to do if it wants to distinguish itself.

Keep reading

[nancy-plays-dutp]

UPDATE

So I’ve read more of this story, and I was enjoying it. And then, innocently scrolling through the album pictures so I could see which outfits I would complete first, I made a terrible discovery.

Do you see that? That “chance to obtain from balloons”? A Jerry item in a craftable set? At first I was certain there was a mistake. But the nightmare was only beginning, as I quickly discovered two more culprits of this heinous crime.

If you’re keeping count, this means that EVERY HANDHELD is a jerry item. There is not a SINGLE craftable handheld in this whole book. Not to mention this ensures that three of the outfits I thought were craftable will now be incomplete without lucky jerry pulls, leaving only a pathetic TWO sets craftable. That’s three hundred diamonds, gone. I am simply astounded that they’d make this move.

Look at those items, hanging out so innocently in the Lucky Jerry Points shop. Only 1250 nuts each, meaning 750 Gold Balloon Pulls. Unless you have a lot of golden tickets lying around, this could cost a player up to 750 000 diamonds. An absolute disgrace.

I’m also upset because I was ready to say so many positive things about Moving Mountains, and now this decision has irrevocably tainted this book for me. Only buy it if you’re looking forward to this massive disappointment. For shame, DUTP. I hope there’ll be enough of a kickback to ensure that this never happens again in any future books, because this is unacceptable.

[nancy-plays-dutp]

I just think that maybe we could use less of these events. Because I hate them.

(Image ID under the cut)

[Image ID: Two panel meme format; the first has a person, labelled as “DUTP Player,” eagerly reaching out to a yellow balloon labeled “Beautiful New Outfit.” The second panel shows the person, now concerned, being grabbed from behind by a large pink monster labelled “Blind Box Event”.]

[nancy-plays-dutp]

Moving Mountains - First Look

A new book has come out, and I’m excited to play it! This won’t be too spoiler heavy but just in case I’ll put stuff under a cut once I actually get into the story content. Also it’ll start getting long.

Moving Mountains is the 33rd book to be released. It is set in the fictional country of Yuanning, a feudal monarchy that takes inspiration from China. I’m not a historian and have received no details on the dynasty, so I can’t comment on historical accuracy, but it appears to be fairly grounded with no fantasy elements.

Listed under “Adventure,” “Romance,” and “Healing” in the bookstore, the summary indicates that our protagonist, Wen Rou, is struggling between the education given from her father and the expectations society has from her state as a noblewoman. I do think this is a rather simple premise, but it can still be a good story if the characters and writing are done well. Especially after the last story, Code Whalefall, being so incredibly confusing and hard to follow, a simple story can be a treat. But it could also risk becoming forgettable, especially since it’s working with an aesthetic easily compared to so many other books, like Gourmet’s Journey, Tang Hunter’s Dynasty, and Ancient Dreams, all of which I consider to be high quality stories; Moving Mountains has some work to do if it wants to distinguish itself.

Moving Mountains is two chapters long, with 33 stages and 43 stage events, making this story more linear than average with less stage events, which are the meaningful choices you can make throughout the story. With 46 new clothing items this also is on the low end, which is not necessarily a negative thing. All the outfits do appear to have thought and care put into them, with many details and subtle touches, and I quite enjoy them. This being said they are remarkably similar to the outfits in Gourmet’s Journey, so while they’re beautiful they’re not exactly anything new.

Displayed are three of my favourite outfits from the story; the middle one is a Jerry outfit while the other two are craftable, and while the Jerry outfits are more detailed the craftable ones are certainly not lacking in style. The first outfit I especially enjoy as it reminds me of Mulan with the red and the sword, which raises my hopes to dangerous heights for this story. I do hope we get to use a sword.

One thing that was rather interesting about the clothing in this book is that two of the six encounter items are only one star; usually one star items are rarer in the game, with many stories having no one star items at all. I haven’t graphed this but I believe this may make these the lowest stats for encounter items. While I haven’t unlocked enough blueprints to evaluate crafting costs it’s likely this will not be a cheap book. I do commend the restraint shown for Parvens shop, with only seven blueprints (especially when compared to Code Whalefall’s nineteen), and among those only one costing over 300 diamonds.

There are three companions in this book: Gu Yin, Luo Jiuhua, and Shen Jiaojiao.

Design wise the men are nothing remarkable, resembling the companions we saw in Tang Dynasty Hunter and Gourmet’s Journey. If anything they have even less to set them apart from each other than usual, seeming to share the same kind of stature with a different hairstyle and color robe. Shen Jiaojiao fares slightly better and it amuses me how similar her dress is to one of our craftable outfits, but just as before there really isn’t much to distinguish her design from the protagonist. Theoretically this is on purpose, to characterize her as a kindred soul, and I have no real complaints about this. I simply find it amusing how female companions usually get unique designs while male companions look alike so often that I have a difficult time telling them apart.

Personality wise, Gu Yin is set up to oppose you, telling you to mind your place and believing that you can’t accomplish all that you claim. Clearly he’ll be won over by your skill and charm throughout the story and admit the error of his ways. His backstory has him rising through the ranks of society from poverty, and claims that he’s more open minded than most.

Luo Jiuhua is your childhood friend who you’ve been reunited with; although you lost touch many years ago in the story you are reunited and rekindle the relationship. His family is rather wealthy, being merchants that have found some degree of success. I suspect he’s going to be somebody who might end up using his status to help you; I’d really like an arranged betrothal leading to real feelings stemming from your friendship, but I don’t know if we’ll get that arc.

I haven’t met Shen Jiaojiao yet, so I only have her bio to go off of; it would appear that she’s reserved and gentle, the perfect lady of society, and I guess that we’ll befriend her and help her open up and be braver about her desires. 

I mentioned that I hadn’t met Jiaojiao yet; I am currently three stages in to this story, so will just be able to comment on the setup and speculate on where the story might go. The protagonist has a strong personality and feels trapped by her mother’s desire for her to get married; she loses her Nanny who tells her to be brave, and decides to chase her dreams. She’s characterized as quite intelligent, having taken lessons from her father and seeking rare books to buy, and even mentions having taken martial arts lessons in her youth. There is also a subplot about a terrible flood in the southern provinces of Yuanning, where her family is from, and her father has been sent to aid the situation, but refuses your request to accompany him and help where you can.

Three chapters is not enough to form a definitive statement on the entire book. I do think this could be quite a good story, but hope that the protagonist is allowed to take some major action to choose her own path. Disguising herself as a man to travel to the flooded areas and help, for example. Court intrigue and marriage arrangements have their place, but I enjoy it when protagonists get to do more active things, and a disguise would lead to some interesting situations. But since we’ve already met most of our companions at home I doubt this will come to pass.

One thing I enjoy is how the mother is being written so far. She’s stern and insists that her daughter must get married, but it’s clear that she’s doing so out of concern. I will say not too much depth is being given to this plotline at the moment, other than saying “I’m not like those other women who want to marry” and “Don’t be silly, you’re a woman. Of course you want a husband,” and I do hope that these perspectives can be fleshed out a little. I’m not arguing for every woman to embrace an arranged marriage, but I just think its interesting to consider what societal constraints might place a woman in a position where she feels that’s her best option, whether financial or social or political or a combination of all three. The protagonist’s assumption that a woman gives up her dreams when she marries is something I’d like to see challenged by a character in the narrative, maybe one who sought an advantageous marriage to gain enough wealth and power to pursue her dreams and interests. 

The reason why I am coming up with these ideas is simply because I’m looking for what this story can offer that would truly be unique. We already have several stories featuring a female protagonist escaping marriage and seeking her dreams, and while they’re of varying quality I tend to find that it’s better when she actually has a dream to pursue rather than just a desire to not be married. For example, in The Perfect Storm you escape your marriage to become a pirate, and while that past does come back most of the story is spent being a pirate, which I found highly enjoyable. Wen Rou has said that she wants to be free, but hasn’t expressed what she’ll do with that freedom; I’d enjoy it if she decided to masquerade as a man to save people, or if the story allowed her to be more of a scholar and seek out knowledge, or perhaps a shrewd businesswoman who’s skilled at running an estate. This could easily happen in the story, and I do hope it lives up to the potential I see in it.

I’ll be playing through Moving Mountains for the next few weeks and compiling more statistics on it, so I can do a full in depth analysis of the themes once I’ve completed this story. In summary my current stance is that this could be quite an enjoyable book, but it needs to go beyond the bare minimum to really set itself apart from the many books it resembles.

[nancy-plays-dutp]

Theme in Code: Whalefall

Aight, lets talk about Code: Whalefall and Theme. I really think this story had so much potential, and just wasted it all. I will be discussing various theme inconsistencies; if you saw the story a different way you are valid, and feel free to tell me about it! Keeping in mind that this story was very confusing to read I'd like to establish that if I get any of the actual facts of this story wrong, then that's still a fault of the narrative for being unable to get its point across. There were lots of plot threads that to my recollection were left hanging, so if they were resolved and I just missed it then that is also bad and absolutely was not a good resolution. But I honestly think a lot of the stuff was just dropped. Trigger warning for discussion of suicide, ableism, human experimentation on children, child abuse, and slavery. This is going to go through the entire story, with very many spoilers, so I'm going to put most of it under a cut. This will also mainly just discuss theme; my other thoughts about this book are found in this review. If you haven't read it but you're okay with spoilers (and I don't really recommend playing this story or feel like the element of surprise is important, but its up to you) then feel free to read on!

The premise of CW has the amnesiac MC searching through an unfamiliar sci fi world for clues about her past. This isn't the most original of concepts, but it can be done well and lead to very interesting stories.

There are three types of enhanced humans who are introduced. Cyborgs are humans with electronic enhancements, binoids are robots made to be as human as possible (with implanted human organs), and androids are robots that look like humans but are still robots. There are also just ordinary robots, which do not look human and have programming and serve different tasks. Now, any piece of sci fi that introduces robots automatically introduces questions about what it means to be human. Usually it allows for themes of free will and choice to be explored, as well as nature versus nurture. Are you who you were born/ created to be, or are you who you choose to be? What does it mean being able to choose? If robots tend to have personalities and free wills then it starts to become an allegory for enslaved minorities who are viewed as "less than human." It can also be common for sci fi narratives to discuss disability, as cyborgs could be viewed as humans with advanced prosthetics, and many robots are written to have characteristics that are also common in people who are neurodivergent (such as not understanding sarcasm, talking with mainly facts, inability to process  emotions, and awkwardness in social situations). Whether a narrative does these themes justice is an incredibly complex topic and one that I am not discussing today. I am simply pointing out the themes that usually happen in sci fi stories with the elements present in CW.

Is it possible for a story to have these elements and not discuss these topics? Absolutely! CP30 didn't have an existential crisis about free will in A New Hope. But CW sets itself up to discuss these themes by constantly reinforcing narratives about control and autonomy, and technology versus nature. 

This is most obvious with the MC, who in the first chapter is imprisoned and wears a "white jacket", a high tech suit that controls her actions and prevents her from taking any action to free herself, and its stated that this jacket was used on people undergoing cyborg experiments. The binoids that help her are not free agents, and are "employed" by the lab (but no clarification is given about what choice they have in this employment, nor what benefits and payment they receive). Although these are institutes dedicated to the creation and study of cyborgs the scientists and managers in charge are all non enhanced humans, with cyborgs working under them.

As for androids, the most impactful character we meet in the narrative is Yukari, who works as a dancer in a hidden theatre. She appears kind and caring, and the MC frequently points out that she has no real feelings, and can't be trusted, and is not actually human. In response Yukari agrees with this and alludes to a past where she was treated as an object, and not being a "real person." 

With that kind of setup I expected her and the MC to realize that in the ways that matter Yukari is a person and deserves to be treated as such. She as written as well as any other character, with dreams and desires and motivations to match, and thus to the reader she is a person. This makes the conclusion of her arc that much more disappointing.

The story reveals that Yukari is an android assassin, who is currently hiding out in this theatre as a dancer. Yukari does not appear to enjoy her career, and indeed seems haunted by it and wishes that she didn't have to kill people. She expresses a desire to protect the MC and keep her from being hurt, and repeatedly begs her to run away with her to somewhere far away where their pasts can never catch up with them. Her dancing career is entirely unrelated to her assassin career and she appears to have taken it on out of genuine enjoyment of the art; the circumstances surrounding who her owner was and how they feel about this job are left very unclear. At the end you find that Yukari has destroyed her energy core (the heart and mind of an android) in an attempt to resist being controlled. I believe she was ordered to kill the MC, and her resistance cost her everything. We actually get an album picture of this, with the caption "Only Choice- we can't choose how our journey begins, but we can choose how it ends."

Thematically, this shows that Yukari had a self beyond her programming and orders, and fought to preserve that. It has her as a tragic figure, with an oddly fumbled death. All of this conflict happens off screen, when it would have been a more compelling story if you'd actually gotten a chance to be present during this struggle and try to save her. Of course I would have loved a path where you could actually save her, but if the storytelling demanded it she could also have been left with just a tragedy. Having all of this struggle happen offscreen detaches it from the player and makes it feel incidental that you were there, like you're looking into a story that you don't belong in. This is made worse by the fact that the MC recovers very quickly from this death and doesn't remember Yukari after that stage, and none of her experience really impacted the end of the game or any decisions or beliefs the MC had. There is no reflection on Yukari having free with and making a choice to defy her programming, or any awareness of what this could mean for androids at large if they can feel emotions and want to make choices but are enslaved to the will of their owners and treated as objects. It makes Yukari a baffling figure because she doesn't really add anything to the story, being either an obstacle who attempts to keep you from the main plot or an incidental anecdote where you see things happen to her but ultimately fail to have any actual affect on her life, and she on yours. Every stage with Yukari could be replaced with very little consequence, as the only plot point she serves was letting you hide in her theatre, which easily could have been just an abandoned hiding spot.

As an aside, I suppose there's also one point where she releases you from prison, but there's nothing about that scene that guarantees it needs to be Yukari. I don't remember it ever being explained how she got in, and while it could have been her security clearance another character could have easily "hacked the system" to get in. In essence her character could have meant a lot, but ultimately lacked a resolution and had no impact on the main character arc or storyline.

This is made all the worse by the inclusion of the binoid characters. As robots with human organs and thought, they are regarded as "more human" than androids. We don't get to know any binoids very well, as they serve to mainly feed us meals and deliver instructions while we're at the main labs, and honestly could have easily been androids. Worst of all is at the very end of the story, when the MC has destroyed project cyborg and is escaping the ruined lab, there's a brief scene where she comes across a group of binoids who are sitting around in the collapsing building. She urges them to get out but they tell her that they can't, because they are binoids and their programming keeps them here. They seem to be quietly grieving their fate and happy for those who got out. And here the MC delivers a baffling speech about how the binoids are simply hiding here waiting to die because they're afraid to live without instructions. Since all the scientists are dead they have to start making choices for themselves and don't want to, which is also why they chose to work here for so many years. So to reiterate, the MC tells a group of characters who are often read as an allegory for slaves that they are only in this position because they choose to be, and can simply break out but are too scared to. And their response indicates that she's CORRECT, as they talk about how scared they are of living their own lives. Not only is this strange given the allegorical implications of binoids, but it also directly contradicts Yukari's death. If they could simply "choose" to not follow their programming, why did that same decision destroy Yukari? Could she also have chosen to not be an assassin, and just decided to die? I suppose that's the difference between an android and a binoid, but no such difference is ever present in the narrative. And what does that mean, if some people are born just wanting to be servants while others don't but can't escape that fate without dying? It's a thematic mess, and the kindest thing to do is just assume that it doesn't mean anything. The androids and binoids are just window dressing and have nothing to do with the narrative themes of the story. So lets look at our main cast for our themes.

Roni should have been in the main cast so I'm covering him here. He's a small spherical robot sent by Z to help you. He takes the R2D2 approach to robot characters, as in he never expresses a sense of self and is simply there to help you. At one point in the story the MC discovers that Roni is actually being controlled by a human, which is played as a huge betrayal, and then we never learn who was controlling Roni. And just to be clear, the robot didn't do anything. Somebody else said "you know there's a person controlling the signal of that robot" and that was the betrayal, not some action Roni took to hurt you. So the betrayal is explicitly misunderstanding that Roni was not being controlled by a human, but without any kind of reveal there is no resolution for that. So I suppose the frustration could be the fact that the MC didn't know, which would lead to a broader theme of secrets. Lets explore that one!

Both of the love interests, Z and Mitchell, are keeping secrets and information from the MC. You have no memories at the start of the story and gradually uncover them, and there are multiple points where you have to lie and hide your mission from a companion so they don't just leave you behind and go to complete your mission for you. This serves to actively rob you of your agency, since you're reliant on these other characters to explain what's happening and you also can't rely on any of them to help you make a decision. The MC's meltdown appears partially influenced by frustration over this lack of information and trust from those she's come to rely on.

This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you how this is resolved. I have some bad news instead. The story decides to reveal that there is somebody speaking to you from inside your mind compelling you to be upset, and if you give in to that voice you go berserk and "lose control to your programming." This is never explained in the route where you resist the voice and decide to not kill everybody. Then the story just continues on to its end. The characters express that they care about you and then you can pick to go off into the sunset with Z, Mitchell, or Roni. Never at any point does the MC bring up the lack of information and how that affected her agency. It's partially acknowledged in the Roni ending, when the MC states how she's now comfortable with not knowing everything and needing to discover her life, but she was only not comfortable about that when she was also being used as a pawn by others, or being trapped and physically unable to seek answers! She actually spent a while hanging out in the theatre with Yukari and seemed pretty content with not knowing about her past, and only left when people started hunting for her.

Is this theme hidden in the past that she discovers? If you take a specific route Mitchell tells you that your mother was involved with an incident where a meteorite exploded and infected people with Element Q, which gave them superpowers but also cancer and killed everyone. But your mother was pregnant with you, so you survived and were born. And your father is a lead scientist at the Cyborg project who was searching for a way to make sure you won't die, so you went to a planet with a different time flow for 10 years your time and grew up while he researched things, and now you're back. Apparently Mitchell wanted revenge on him so that's why he kidnapped you, but he's changed his mind. So to summarize, everything that is special about you is because of events you had no control over that happened before you were born. You have no relationship with your parents and don't even seem to express a need for that, as the MC expresses fondness for her grandfather who raised her. You also lived for an entire decade on another planet, and either regain no memories of this place or find none of them important enough to recount. This backstory is a muddled mess that delivers absolutely no character; you made no choices that brought you here, and have all the value of a highly sought after family heirloom lamp.

This could be rectified if the MC reacted in some way to this throughout the story. During the part where you meet up with the roving bands of Rough Riders, the MC could ponder joining them permanently and living life on the road, with no rules or expectations and nobody to control her. She could actively express a desire to leave this planet behind and seek a way to return to her homeworld. Or she could be curious about this place and seek to gain new skills, like hacking or mechanics, that could help her here. She could even take a side in a huge conflict that splits the world, since we're introduced to several.

The story shows us the Oasis, which is a place where technology is banned. Robots and cyborgs are not permitted, and the MC notes that this is the only place with children. People talk about the Oasis saving them from the evils of a society filled with technology. The story also states that most children are created in a lab called the Nursery, because the human birth rate has dropped (the cause of this is contested in the story and is never resolved). Perhaps the MC could think of the ways that technology controlled her and decide that the Oasis is the right place to live; by contrast she could think about Z and Roni, a cyborg and android, who helped her, and decide that the people are unfairly prejudiced against technology and seek to resolve this. Neither thing happens. She ends up being vaguely suspicious in the same way that she is of everyone, as in expressing distrust but rarely letting it affect her actions or deciding on her own course of action. She stumbles across the titular plot, Code Whalefall, meant to assassinate the leader of the tech city, but the actual objective is to destroy the lab (including the Nursery) and thus the MC decides that maybe she should try to stop the devastation of the entire human race.

Lets take a look at the two villains we're given in this plot. We have Mr X, the scientist head of the corporation and a shadowy figure. He remains that way to the very end, because the confrontation with him doesn't even have a proper sprite. He gives a speech about transferring his mind into a computer and then vaporizes himself and is never mentioned again. Ms Marsh is the villain we have more interaction with; she used to be a scientist at Zeta labs, but after her adopted son was killed in an experiment she went mad with grief and decided she needed to destroy all science.

Is the lesson here that technology is good or bad? Because the MC never takes a side. At the end of the story you're met with a choice to help Z destroy the Project Cyborg lab or help Mitchell save the tech in it, and you decide on a compromise of destroying equipment and keeping the data, and running experiments with oversight. So there is no clear answer here, only a grey area, which wouldn't be bad if your MC didn't happen to start in that grey area. Neither Z nor Mitchell ever expresses any change in their beliefs about the value of technology. And the baby thing is not mentioned again either beyond saving the Nursery. In Mitchell's path you decide to name the babies together because he'd only given them numbers, which honestly sounds pretty dystopian to me. But we're never given a resolution on this, nor on what will happen to the Oasis now that their leader has gone mad and absconded (I think she was thrown out and then she was killed but its honestly hard to remember), nor on what the research for Project Cyborg will be used for now.

There is one more thing that could be a theme in this story, and that is trauma. Both your companions have gone through awful things in their past that have shaped their life, from Z feeling regret for being unable to protect you and your grandfather to Mitchell witnessing cannibalism on the streets as people starved. This leads Mitchell to kidnap you and seek revenge, while Z... protects you, which I suppose is meant to be a bad thing but nothing bad comes of it. One could argue that towards the end Mitchell becomes more optimistic about human life, hence naming the babies, but it certainly doesn't feel like that was a character arc you helped him go through considering how you barely talked to him about his beliefs outside of a setting where he was actively holding you captive. Most of this change took place while you were at the Oasis and he wasn't even there.

In the case of Z this actually ties into the one traumatic memory the MC recovers, of the death of her grandfather in a fire that appears to have been started by Z. He doesn't give a straight answer until the end of the story, when he tells you how your grandfather had taken Z in but made him promise to destroy the lab and all his work if the government ever showed up. And as if in a comedy movie, guess who immediately shows up and forces Z to torch the place. Despite his best efforts the grandfather perished in the flames. The story makes you go through a "character arc" of forgiving Z for his actions, but given how vague your memories were in the first place and how Z has literally done nothing but help you I had a hard time believing that the MC was really betrayed by him. But she acknowledges her grandfather's death was not her fault, letting go of her trauma. While Z... does not change. I guess he doesn't have a character arc, unless it was learning to tell you what happened, but since he doesn't really give a reason for not telling you and that's never discussed it's not much of a character arc.

Ms Marsh is a more compelling character for recovering from trauma, since it makes her want to destroy all of humanity, but then she's defeated. I suppose the MC could be set up as a foil to her, but their situations are incredibly different. Ms Marsh was a scientist conducting experiments on children who'd been taken from an orphanage, and she happened to grow fond of one of them who was then killed and refused to face her mistake, deciding that technology must be to blame. There is objectively nothing the MC could have done to prevent the death of her grandfather, nor did she take any action that lead to it, and she doesn't even blame herself for it. Is the foil Z? But once again he's a child who cannot be held responsible for the situation, who did exactly what the trusted adult in his situation ordered. He absolutely could be traumatized by this because he blames himself, but the story never resolves it. There's never a moment where he decides to live for himself and forgive himself for what happened, and his entire life still revolves around protecting the MC to make up for the past.

Not to mention how trauma is actually used as a positive thing in two other plot points in the story. The first actually happens with Z, as he was being made into a cyborg and had to watch his friend be murdered in one of the experiments which was the catalyst for him becoming the most powerful cyborg in the world. It's stated that this trauma allowed him to "break through his human limitations" and "upgrade" his mind as well as his body, and he's continually acknowledged as skilled and capable explicitly because of this trauma. The argument of these scientists is that the pain these children were subjected to was worth it because of the results of the cyborg project, and this is never something discussed in the narrative. In this case Z did not overcome trauma and that was actually good for him.

The other case of this is Cora, a side character who you meet in the Oasis. She's a young mother who is non-verbal, reportedly as a result from trauma from her life before the Oasis. Yet when the Oasis becomes evil her baby is stolen from her, which makes her angry enough to start speaking again so she can give the MC some exposition and help her escape. Which to me is insulting both because I was very excited to have a character with a disability be treated with respect and instead got a magical cure of the power of motherhood, and also the MC had absolutely nothing to do with this. It was just a coincidence she happened to be around to witness it. But the idea that Cora was able to overcome her trauma with more trauma just doesn't sit right to me.

Cora, when combined with Yukari and the binoid problems we discussed earlier, seems to indicate that one can just choose to overcome trauma if they care enough. And maybe that's the lesson of the story. Yukari and Ms Marsh didn't care enough to overcome their difficulties and so they died, while Cora did so she can talk again. The binoids need to care otherwise they can't overcome their programming. Z cared about his dead friend but apparently didn't care enough about telling you the truth. And because Mitchell fell in love with you and now cares about things he's willing to give children names instead of numbers. If you can't tell, I'm not a fan of this conclusion. Which is also because it doesn't even make sense. The MC cares a whole lot at the start of the story about uncovering her past, which leads to nothing. She actively can't overcome her difficulties with the power of caring a lot, and neither could Yukari or Z, which you could probably tell from this conclusion making them terrible people.

Ultimately Code Whalefall baffles me because not only do I not understand the theme, I can't even tell which theme they were attempting to go for. Every theme they bring up or establish is directly contradicted or offered no resolution, making me think I was reaching when I saw that theme in the first place. But what are we left with? An MC who took down two powerful leaders? Is the lesson that leaders are terrible people? But you immediately appoint Mitchell to lead the labs, so I guess leaders are good as long as they're people you trust, which is an incredibly simple theme that we didn't need a three chapter book to explain. Is the theme about being your own person? If you look at just the MC deciding to not care about her past then maybe, but that's not something seen in any other part of the story, and is actively contradicted by Z's resolution of continuing to live for you. The theme isn't even about being open to discovery and learning things about a new world, because most information is not learned at all, and what little information they get has little to no impact on anything.

I do think this story could have been good, if they'd just picked one theme and expanded on it instead of trying to fit in as many elements as possible. For a story that was so long they sure did fail to explain so much, and the pace was terribly slow. Agency and meaning had all been stripped away, leaving nothing but an empty shell in desperate need of some drastic rewrites.

[nancy-plays-dutp]

Code: Whalefall

The saddest thing about this book is how much I wanted to enjoy it. I really love sci-fi, and was so excited to see the DUTP team tackle a story type that they’d kind of only briefly touched with Hela’s Compass. But as soon as I started to play this book there were so many problems.

The premise is already a bit of a hard sell for me. The MC wakes up as Maya, having been captured and taken to a strange research lab on a different planet with no memories of who she is or how she got there. I find that amnesia can sometimes lead to a slow start and give the MC a lack of agency, because she lacks the knowledge to make meaningful decisions. This was no exception, and most of the book is spent with Maya being dragged around by various characters and told what she should do or think.

There were a lot of problems with theme in this book, but I think that needs to be another post. Suffice to say the writing was very messy. I ran into characters who I’d never met but Maya acted like she’d known them for ages, and many character motivations and plot points appeared to happen in some alternate universe and were never explained. Major character deaths and changes in allegiance happen offscreen and without your input. Combined with an incredibly confusing and anticlimactic finale, this book left so much to be desired.

At three chapters this is a longer book than what DUTP has done in a while, and the pacing really drags. Stages appear to stop in the middle of conversations and stretch out events longer than necessary, and clothing changes are abrupt and seemingly random. There were a few without even an attempt at a transition, no “I should change clothes before doing this”, and the screen just fades into the dress up portion, which I found kind of funny.

The clothes are another problem in this book. Although the designs are great the crafting costs are obscene, on par with some login clothing sets that I’ve seen give six star outfits, but here they’re all four star and lower. There’s also a higher concentration of Jerry outfits and outfit pieces that need to be purchased in Parvens for diamonds, making this one of the most expensive books. A minor thing that I found frustrating was how long it took for main outfit pieces, like tops and pants, to be obtained. Their blueprints were mostly in later chapters and stages, and since this is only the second sci-fi book that we’ve gotten there are very few clothing items that match the aesthetic of this story. This usually ended up with me wearing period gowns and glowing futuristic earrings in the first few levels.

I’ll discuss more spoilery things below the cut, but suffice to say I only really recommend this book if you don’t have anything else to do. Crafting costs are high for little gain, but this story didn’t actively frustrate me. Just confuse me.

I did enjoy the companions in this book for the most part. Z, a cyborg with a mysterious past who goes out of his way to protect you, was enjoyable. I like him more as an older brother than a romantic love interest but the interactions between him and Maya can easily be interpreted either way. His design was great too; the only thing that annoyed me was how often we had to lie to him to keep progressing the story, but that was a fairly common writing pitfall and not limited to Z so I will not hold it against him. I just wish we were given more choices to help him and build a relationship, instead of just alternating between listening to him and choosing to not trust him and yell at him.

Yukari was both the best and worst companion. Her design was my favourite and she had so much potential, as the only non human character in the main cast. An android who appears to develop human emotions is one of my favourite storylines, and she has a very interesting role in the story as a dancer hiding from her past who helps protect you. But as the story progresses we’re once again run up against the same wall that we have with Z, where we’re not given the opportunity to work with her and must abandon her for the sake of the story. The conclusion to her arc left me questioning why they added her at all, since she seemed to serve little purpose other than undermining what few themes the story had about choice and free will, and was mainly a very tragic figure.

I didn’t really like Mitchell. I think this might be a hot take since I’ve seen some people out there who enjoyed him, but for me he alternates between bland and creepy. His design is nothing unique, his motivations are a mess, and I honestly can’t understand why Maya chooses to trust him at all, much less fall in love with him during their romantic subplot. He seems to constantly be hiding things from Maya and has some pretty messed up actions that are never really addressed or resolved. This was one of those things that confused me the most, because in one chapter he’s an enemy and suddenly he’s my ally and working beside me, with absolutely no progression in between. If you like him I’m happy for you, feel free to have him to yourself.

Most damaging of all is the lack of any real character arc for the MC. Despite the rather simple premise of wanting to understand her identity Maya is left with more questions than answers by the end of the three chapters, with no real understanding of why these things happened to her or who she is or wants to be. Her motivations appear to mainly be to get away from people who want to trap her or hurt her, which while understandable really means she doesn’t have much agency as an active character in her own story. What little exposition we did get on her backstory turns her into a McGuffin, something that's desirable for no merit of her own, and she rarely grapples with ideas about her identity or the world around her. Most of the plot points in the story fall flat because Maya never has the chance to get invested in any mission, cause, or relationships beyond her own extremely simple motivations to save herself and prevent the extinction of all humanity.

One of my favourite parts of the story was towards the finale, when Maya discovers another betrayal and goes absolutely berserk. This was such an interesting path and the story even took a while before making me reign it back in under the threat of dire consequences, so for a stage Maya gets to smash and destroy everything around her while she declares she wants revenge on the world that turned her into this. There’s a kind of tragedy to Maya’s character in her lack of agency and understanding, torn from the world she knew by no fault of her own and used as a pawn by all manner of people, and in that stage of destruction I felt like she had more personality than in the entire rest of the story. But this story was not prepared to analyze or resolve this storyline, and entirely fails to acknowledge it once the moment passes. As the plot wrapped up to a mediocre finale that moment of connection stuck with me; like Maya I too was trapped in this story with little understanding or explanation, and was powerless to change my situation. Although our moment of catharsis was pleasant it ultimately changed nothing, and for me Code Whalefall was doomed to become its ending: a strange disappointment that I may never truly understand.

[nancy-plays-dutp]

The Perfect Storm

I figured I’d start with one of my most recent favourites. In my opinion The Perfect Storm (PerSt) is one of the best books in this whole game.

The MC becomes Cordelia, who runs away from her family to become a pirate in search of a legend passed down from her grandmother. The whole aesthetic of this story is very Pirates of the Caribbean, and the outfits are all detailed and interesting and very fun. The writing in this book was also a highlight for me, from the witty dialogue to the plot progression, and kept me engaged the whole way through.

This book is two chapters in length, and near the beginning you get to pick which type of ship you want to buy. This affects most of the path splits in the rest of the story, as different ships require different strategies for overcoming obstacles, and I really enjoyed this. It was very immersive and really felt like I had agency in creating this story, and allowed the world and characters to have more depth because you got to see the same situation with a different solution.

Cordelia was a delight to play. She continually comes up with creative ideas, and her heart for adventure and discovery really shines through her actions. Her mission is not just to discover the truth behind her grandmother’s stories but to discover herself; in an interesting nod to the first book, Queen Marie, the MC actually ponders why she’s become Cordelia and decides that its to help her take that first step into her own adventure. While she’d been constrained before by her parents expectations for her to marry well and be a docile, quiet wife, Cordelia grows a great deal throughout the story in courage, experience, and wisdom. One thing I found especially touching is how much she believes in those around her, finding it easy to bolster and encourage those she travels with, but she needs to find that same confidence for herself.

There are three companions in this book, and they all help Cordelia with her character growth and are well written characters in their own right. Mary Read is your first mate, and throughout the story she struggles with depression. Cordelia helps support her and encourage her, in a way that I personally found very realistic and touching, and Read’s character arc was honestly one that I wasn’t expecting. I thought she was just going to be the dependable guide who’d help teach you about sailing, but getting to see her work together with Cordelia and see them both grow from that relationship was amazing.

Your ships navigator is Keats, and he’s a scholar who wants to get some practical experience so he’ll be recognized for his skill. I will admit that I have a weak spot for scientists, and his design is fantastic. But he did not disappoint; I found it delightful how his discoveries move the story forward, and how much joy he takes in them. His relationship with Cordelia was also fantastic, as she grows to understand that under his posturing is a deep insecurity, and he grows to trust her and let himself simply exist with her without unrealistic expectations.

Finally you have Charles Vane, your pirate rival. After he attacks your ship and you fight him off there’s an electric relationship between the characters, and their dialogue perfectly reflects their battle of wits and wills. You’re introduced to Vane as the worst of the worst in the pirate world, but gradually come to see his core values of loyalty to those he cares about, and you both make sacrifices for each other and aid each other during the story. Also he calls you “Lady Nemesis,” which I found amazing.

As for side characters you have a whole ship crew and various merchants that you interact with. The standouts here include your grandmother, remembered through flashbacks, who still has a strong character and a legacy left behind. My favourite part about her was how they handled the “reveal” that she was the Pirate Queen of old. Cordelia doesn’t seem too shocked about it, and its clear that this is because before that title she was her grandmother, and that loving relationship matters more than anything else. Flashbacks can be a hard sell for me, since they can really slow the story down, but I thought the use of them here was well done and appropriate.

The surprising side character for me was Governor Hamilton. He originally seems like just a mentor figure who sends you on missions, but getting to know him throughout the story reveals so much more background and he truly becomes a grandfather figure. His past is compelling and his character truly reflects his wisdom and maturity.

One aspect of this story that really surprised me was how much pirating was actually allowed. Some DUTP books have a bad habit of punishing you for taking opportunities to fight or cheat your way through problems, but no such thing happens here. I got to live my wild pirate dreams and I loved every moment of it.

The riddles and prophecies throughout the book were also very well done. The sea is a mystical fantasy world, and you encounter krakens and mermaids and hurricanes, and each thing is as awe inspiring and terrifying as it should be. Most of the backgrounds for this book were set on your ship, which I really enjoyed seeing as it really helped with that feeling of being out of the ordinary and exploring the unknown.

Finally, the ending: I hesitate to discuss it because I really think that discovering it yourself is an unforgettable experience, so feel free to come back to the next paragraph after you’ve had a chance to play through this book yourself. I don’t think it will destroy the experience but it’s hard to describe just how meaningful it is without having played it.

The Abyssal Lantern is the object of legend that gave your grandmother her legendary Pirate Queen powers, and throughout the book you find various map pieces that lead you to it. The map pieces also had a beautiful riddle, and the solution to it was very clever and lead to one of my favourite album art pieces I’ve ever seen. And then they did something very brave: they let the Abyssal Lantern be about the journey. In the story you’ve already done many things attributed to the Pirate Queen, so upon finding that the lantern is fairly ordinary Cordelia realizes that she’s made herself into a legend. The lantern doesn’t give her power, but it has the power of legends because she herself holds it. I find this to be the perfect way to avoid invalidating all the struggles and trials she’d gone through before by giving her a magical power up, and a nice twist on the Abyssal Lantern legend that fits well with all the clues leading up to it. In another story it might have felt like a cop out but here it was a relief, because Cordelia has everything she needs to succeed by just being herself.

In summary The Perfect Storm really is the perfect book. Everything I wanted in a pirate book and more, it surpassed my expectations and gave me a satisfying and well crafted story with beloved characters, engaging twists, and gorgeous art and outfits. I highly recommend playing it as soon as possible.

[nancy-plays-dutp]

General Book Stats

A chart showing the number of stages, amount of clothing, and number of events of each currently released DUTP book, updated up to Code: Whalefall. The books are shown in order of release.

Some outliers in this chart are very obvious. Gotham Memoirs is the only book with four chapters so naturally it also has the most stages, events, and clothing, while one chapter books like Saga of Viera, Princess Sissi, Swan Lake, and Hela’s Compass have some of the lowest scores. The introductory books, Queen Marie and Magic Lamp, both score high on events and clothing because they serve as tutorials and help new players fill out their closet. Within these patterns we can see a few outliers.

Ghost Manor and Ancient Dreams were both surprising for the amount of stage events, surpassing even the introductory books and being second only to Gotham Memoirs. Some books have quite a spike in clothing items, such as Have You Seen Claudia?, Ancient Dreams, Golden Age, and Code Whalefall; for newer books this can be partially explained by new types of clothing items (the bracelets and gloves being separate slots is the biggest culprit) but for the earlier ones it appears to be an indicator of more effort being put into creating unique outfits.

Keep in mind that these statistics are meant to show general patterns, not make specific judgements on a book being “bad” or “good”. More factors go into a book’s quality than what I can graph. I just find it interesting looking at the patterns across DUTP’s development.

[nancy-plays-dutp]

About TP

This is intended to be a quick summary for people who might not be familiar with the game and still want to read this blog. If you would like more information please visit the wiki, check out the DUTP socials, or send an ask. 

Time Princess: Story Traveller, hereafter referred to by their earlier name Dress Up Time Princess (DUTP), is a mobile game that combines elements of a visual novel and dress up game. Players have a certain amount of stamina every day that they use to play stages, earn blueprints, and craft clothing, which is then worn to pass stages. Most stages will offer choices, ranging from flavor text dialogue choices to significant choices that will unlock different endings and drastically affect the storyline. 

In the game the story is that your character, hereafter referred to MC, is transported into different worlds through a magical book. Romance is a common element across most of the stories, with story companions being fully animated and needing to be interacted with daily to level up the relationship and unlock certain blueprints and stages. The app is rated G for General Audiences but individual stories may delve into more mature subjects; this blog will provide trigger warnings based on topics discussed, but as a rule topics such as character death, injuries, and non graphic violence are discussed and will not have warnings. Feel free to send an ask if you have questions about these trigger warnings, either in game or in this blog.

There are currently 41 main stories released. Their names and acronyms are listed below the cut, in order of release.

Queen Marie (QM)

Magic Lamp (ML)

Gotham Memoirs (GM)

Swan Lake (SL)

Helen of Sparta (HoS)

Romy and Julius (RJ)

Shadows of London (SoL)

Little Women (LW)

Phantom of the Opera (POTO)

Taishō Adventures (TA)

Saga of Viera (SoV)

Tang Dynasty Hunter (TDH)

Si-Woo’s Sight (SWS)

Princess Sissi (PS)

White Snake (WS)

Dancing on Ice (DoI)

Have You Seen Claudia? (HYSC)

Whispers of the Rain (WotR)

Cleopatra (Cleo)

The Sacred Beast (SB)

Ancient Dreams (AD)

Ghost Manor (GhMa)

Kingdom of Beasts (KoB)

House of Horrors (HoH)

Spring Sonata (SoS)

Trendy Times (TT)

Gourmet’s Journey (GJ)

Miss Kitty’s Antiques (MKA)

Hela’s Compass (HC)

Golden Age (GA)

The Perfect Storm (PerSt)

Code: Whalefall (CW)

Moving Mountains (MM)

Sisters of the Sea (SiS)

The Apothecary (Apo)

Lunar Legends (LL)

The Moravia Express (ME)

Dominic’s Disappearance (DD)

Heartwood Mysteries (HWM)

Mysteries of Zentico (MoZ)

Showdown in Glitter Rise (SGR)

[nancy-plays-dutp]

About Me

Call me Nancy! I’ve been playing the game Time Princess for nearly two years; when I began it was still called Dress Up: Time Princess so I use the acronym DUTP when referring to it.

I’ve started this blog mainly as a way to record my thoughts about this game and these stories. I am not being paid for this in any way, and I have no affiliation with IGG Games or any other gaming company. And since this is a hobby, I will likely not post consistently or on every topic. I’m just here to ramble on about things I find interesting.

I also will have opinions here that might be different than yours. And that’s okay! Please know that I truly do respect your right to consume this content in whatever way you please, and disagree with me as much as you want. The reality is that this is a mobile game, and while I find analyzing it to this extent fun, if it causes you stress it should absolutely not be a part of your life. I’m a strong believer in using unfollow and block buttons to curate a healthy internet experience and suggest you do the same. My thoughts here are not meant to be a personal judgement on yours; if you enjoy something I hate, then more power to you. If you hate something I love, then I’m sorry you had a bad experience and hope you can find something better. TLDR: These are opinions, and I’d appreciate it if we could all be really chill about that.

Finally, some background: I play this game for free. This is a personal decision and not a judgment on anybody else, but it will affect how I see certain events, and it does mean it will take me a while to finish new books. All images I use here will either be from my own gameplay or publicly available on wikis or DUTP’s social media. If I ever refer to the DUTP community at large, it will be a general observation from my casual scrolling through the social media accounts, and may not accurately reflect your experience. I will not name specific users and sincerely hope nothing I post here will be taken as cause for any form of harassment, either to players or to the development team. This is a game, and my greatest wish is for all of us to have fun with it!