Arc Plays Games: Nora to Toki no Koubou: Kiri no Mori no Majo (NDS)
(apparently in English that's something like "Nora the Time Witch")
I'm gonna try something and try to keep track of all the games I play this year. First up is this extremely cute little that honestly got me through being sick as hell over the holiday. It is kind of perfect as a game for your brain at 40%.
Nora is a DS game that has better "Cozy" feel than most games under the cozy game genre. Basically, Nora (the character) is a chronomancer, so she can do time magic. She's a rookie so she's supposed to be learning how to get good at chronomancy. She's sent to a lil cottage in the woods to bone up on her skills.
The house and garden are extremely precious. You can redecorate the cottage, move furniture and crafting items around, change the walls and floor. The garden has friends and you can lure in cute creatures.
The main loop of the game is in three parts. First is making items to fulfill requests for townsfolk and friends. You'll be asked to make a certain item, and have to figure out the best way to do so with time magic, dismantling raw materials, and processing materials into new stuff. You start off with just a work table and the time magic thingie, then get more and more crafting options like sewing tables and smokers and stuff.
Then you turn in those items and get other items in return and make people happy!
There's also foraging, bc obviously you need materials to make stuff.
There's a whole map with multiple places to go and each of those locations has different materials to gather.
When you arrive at a location, there are interactable things that will give you different materials. Some are sparkly and also give you random effects, like increased rarity, more items, or monsters.
You might want to grab the sparklies first to try and booth the number of materials you get, but on the other hand you might find a monster instead.
Battles are the third pillar. There are a SHOCKING amount of party members, and you can pick and choose teams depending on what you want.
Want to make sure you survive really tough monsters? Go with the errant knight lady and the big friendly city watch guy. Want to get more materials? Go with the soft-spoken clinic worker who can spot more herbs of the 12 year old shop girl who fucking LOVES rocks and can find you more rocks. But the clinic girl isn't great in a fight, so you gotta be careful.
Party members include: a weird mercenary dude who just wants to be the cool knight lady, the buff city watch man who has tea parties and tries to kill monsters with stale bread, the clinic lady who secretly can deadlift a tree, aforementioned 12 year old who thinks rocks are just soooooo cool, the hot knight lady who i think has the hots for Nora but i'm not sure, a Capitalist, a thief who kinda sucks, and a mascot character.
I weirdly ADORE the economy/shop system in this game.
Sometimes when you are selling off old equipment or excess materials, the shopowner will counteroffer your request for money with rare items instead.
YOU CAN DO THIS TOO. Most of the stock in the shops can be bought outright OR you can choose "Buy with items" and offer up stuff in exchange for the item you want.
Shops have normal stock but also special stock you can only get by trading the right materials. The armory guy has swords and stuff BUT if you want the good shit, bring him a dragon scale instead.
I bounce off a lot of these kind of soft, cute games because they don't feel like they have depth but this game sooooo does. I would say the only downside is when you struggle to make a certain items or find a certain material, you... sometimes just gotta figure it out, because this game was an oddball Japanese-only Atlus title and the fan translation isn't super well-known, there isn't a robust wiki to refer you. Just figure it out!
Anyway, solid fucking 4 out of 5 on this game. If you can emulate DS games, you can locate this one pretty easily if you know where to look. (And if you don't know where to look, send me an ask off-anon and I will direct you a bit.)
gd i maybe need to try an atelier game...........
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