Yâall know Recettear, right?
That one jrpg/shop management game that everyone lauds, yeah? Well, after i proved not dead after three or so months of this bullshit, I finally decided I was going to check it out. I even got a bundle of three games for eight bucks on Steam consisting of this, a game called Fortune Summoners, and the subject of todayâs text post, Chantelise: A Tale of Two Sisters.
Now, I managed to absorb some inkling to the effect that Chantelise was a sort of prequel to Recettear, so I decided to play this first. Bear in mind, I made this purchase earlier today and I played Chantelise for about an hour. This is just barely a first impression that Iâm sharing with you today, so allow me to fill you in on the basics of the plot, visuals, and mechanics that i have come across so far:
The story goes that two sisters, the elder Chante and the younger Elise (well, that explains the title), left their home on the night of a Red Moon despite being repeatedly warned not to throughout their lives, the implication being that the fabled witch of the forest is calling them through insidious, supernatural means. They wander into the forest in a dreamlike state, and the next thing they know, itâs morning, theyâre in a familiar part of the forest, and Chante has been transformed into a fairy, wings and all. Some indeterminate amount of time later, the game proper begins, with the sisters specifically looking for the witch to make her turn Chante back into a human.
Characterization is predictably thin on the ground this early into the game, but the basics are the Chante, the older sister, comes across as rather immature in comparison to her mini-Ingenue younger sister, considering her informal and forthright manner of speech, seemingly demanding rewards for helping people in danger, and showing a willingness to impose on othersâ hospitality (though considering their circumstances it is certainly understandable). Elise, in contrast, comes across as conscientious, polite, and demure. Perhaps ironically, Chante is the mage and Elise the Swordswoman between them.
Visually, itâs great... well, at first, anyway. Character designs are reminiscent of either Madoka Magica for you lot and Summon Knight: Swordcraft Story for me specifically. Though the world is 3D, most all of the characters and enemies are 2D sprites, with the player-controlled Elise being able to move in eight directions, and having the sprites to match! It gives it a feel like the DS remakes of Dragon Quest games.
Iâll break down most of the controls here; youâll see why in a minute. As mentioned above, you play as Elise, with Chante hovering over your shoulder. Combat is a real-time, hackânâslash affair, with enemiesâ spawn positions highlighted on the map, but only spawning when you get close enough to aggro them. You move with the arrow keys, attack with Z and jump with X, being able to perform a sort of âdashâ by pressing both simultaneously. You attack with a basic three-hit-combo on the ground or a single swing in the air. The purpose of the dash is unclear; presumably it provides a quick way to escape hairy situations, but if you are getting mobbed, odds are good youâll just dash into an enemyâs attack, because it doesnât seem to provide invincibility, and if it does it doesnât last long enough to make any discernible difference. C has Chante use magic. Magic works by using gems collected from defeated enemies or destroyed barrels/torches etc. for different elemental attacks, being able to hold C to use up more gems to cast more powerful spells.
V locks onto an enemy. Pressing V while locked on to one enemy switches it to another enemy. Not necessarily the enemy closest to you, or even closest to the current target. It honestly seems to be random, and janky, too; it sometimes just doesnât respond to my presses. You hold V to unlock from the target.
V also controls the camera, sort of. Itâs incredibly hard to explain how the camera works, because it doesnât, really. It hangs behind you, but doesnât properly follow you when youâre moving, remaining oriented to the direction Elise was initially facing until you hold V, so it reorients with the direction Elise is currently facing... unless there is an enemy within an indeterminable radius around Elise, at which point youâll just lock on to them.Â
A camera with a fixed orient isnât so bad in most RPGs because many of them, especially early ones, had the âcameraâ/FOV set much further up and away than in Chantelise. For example, hereâs what Dragon Quest 9 typically looks like:
Thatâs about what itâs always gonna look like unless it wants to show off some pretty architecture or the like. Apart from that, the camera stays right where it is, and while the shoulder buttons do change the cameraâs position, itâs never as much a problem as it is in Chantelise since you can see a wide area around you at all times and your characterâs model barely takes up any room on the screen. Compare to Chantelise:
The camera is much closer, yes, but more importantly itâs set right behind the character, so you only see directly in front of you. Obviously when there are multiple enemies off-screen, specifically behind the camera, firing projectiles at you, your best bet is to use the lock-on and hope it fixes on one of the firing enemies, and not the slime next to them you also didnât see, or some other enemy that would be in your view if they werenât behind a wall. Not ideal, as you can imagine. It also doesnât play nice with the environments, either, with going up or down slopes especially being borderline nauseating after a while.
If I were playing this with a controller, Iâd apparently get to to control the camera with a joystick or with bumpers, but iâm on a laptop, so I get to eat shit, I guess.
I imagine it wouldnât be so bad if I wasnât constantly mispressing the C and V keys, too. In fact, theyâre all way too close together and awkwardly placed. If I could map them to something like, I dunno, A, S, and D for attack, magic, and camera/Lock-On respectively with Space for jump, Iâd probably have less of an issue with it. Hell, have the camera reorient be a separate button so it doesnât swing around to focus on a slime halfway across the map when Iâm just trying to figure out what iâm running into. Unfortunately, you canât reassign keys at all, so Iâm shit out of luck until I get used to it.Â
More on this when I get further into it. Until then, Iâm going to bed.
theartofmadeline
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
