RWBladewing

@Video_Game_King said:

@RWBladewing:

I was going more with decent dating advice; I'm not sure of many women who have magical powers, and I don't know what you think about me, but incest is pretty looked down upon up here.

Oh, is this the part where I'm supposed to post that Giant Bomb Dating Advice pic?

@killacam

Not sure if you can read Japanese but if not, Mangagamer has a pretty good selection of VNs that have been translated to English. Just avoid the ones with the more, uh, vulgar titles, as story isn't really the point of those. I personally enjoyed Da Capo 1 and 2. There's also a number of notable games that have fan translation patches but those tend to cost a lot of money to import.

@Video_Game_King said:

@RWBladewing:

Is that the romantic advice I was supposed to take away from the game? Because what I got was "the closer you get to them emotionally, the closer you get to them sexually."

Both really. Those would be number 1 and 2 on the list of dating sim tropes, with "every girl has a deep dark secret and/or magical powers" and "your sister is in love with you" at 3 and 4.

@Video_Game_King said:

@RWBladewing:

To be fair, that also seems to be one of the common first endings, even if I got that ending last (I think it was immediately after I pissed Hanako the hell off().

Yeah that doesn't surprise me. This game seems stricter than any of the others I've played as far as who you're allowed to talk to and when for any particular route. Though you'd think that after countless dating sim failures I'd finally understand that trying to be nice to all the girls, instead of completely ignoring all of them except one, never works.

@Video_Game_King said:

@killacam said:

Then halfway through the story, I realized it had already happened – somehow my inner desires had unconsciously come to fruition on the screen in front of me, and without the use of some jarring and unnatural choice mechanic I was amidst the blossoming of a relationship with my virtual crush. Her name is Emi, and she's awesome.

*tries to hold chortle in* Emi's the character everybody gets the first run, for some reason. Not insulting her (even though she's the start of my least favorite route), but just informing you.

Not everyone. I managed to get the "none of the girls like you" ending first, just like I've done in almost every dating sim I've played. If it's possible to be considered bad at visual novels, I am probably the worst.

I enjoy most quick looks, and even if they're misrepresentative they can still be enjoyable because of witty commentary. But there was one in particular that was outright painful for me to watch: Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3. I still don't understand why they even did that one. Spent the entire time talking about how they don't like Dynasty Warriors and don't know Gundam, while acting like they were being literally tortured playing it. And repeating that all you have to do is mash x to win while getting repeatedly killed attempting to do just that. It's not really a useful look at a game when they're so heavily biased against it before even going in and refuse to change their preconceptions even in the face of them being proven wrong.

This game has an anime art style with a young protagonist, so obviously the cover would look like this:

Was so bad they changed it before it actually released.

I'd love to recommend Colt 45 Blast as it's cheap and 1 is likely all you'll need. However it's also absolutely disgusting and is the only drink so far to have ever broken my iron stomach and high hangover resistance, haha.

I know Wii is last on your list of priorities, but if they're fine with older games they could try Secret of Mana on the virtual console. The magic/items system that causes the game to pause when you access it is pretty clunky but it's a decent co-op RPG experience overall, as long as people can work together. (My sister and her boyfriend enjoyed it but had to stop after a heated argument over where to go next, heh.)

@Jrad said:

I wanted to love Agarest War, I really did -- it seemed to be right up my alley; I like tactics games, I like (good) visual novels, and the Soul Breed system sounded great. I played it, and it wasn't terrible. It wasn't offensively bad. It wasn't great, either. If anything, it was offensively mediocre. In a word, it was just boring.

I haven't played Zero yet (though I have plans to!); Record of Agarest War 2 actually seems like it might be a decent improvement, and some of the changes (four party member limit in combat, for instance) and a slightly heavier emphasis on the dating part, could make it good. The original suffered from trying to tell a crappy story without opportunity for interaction with the heroines. Essentially, it was a generic JRPG story supplanted with crappy combat. If they'd maybe had 1/4 as many battles, the original would've been far more playable.

You may want to just go ahead and skip Zero if this is the case. It doesn't fix any of the issues you mentioned having with the first game (makes some worse in fact - i.e. they removed the time limit and then used that as an excuse for more required grinding.)

It would be better to just buy a blow-up doll and not get an absolutely terrible game along with it. This series is not worth anyone's time. It's a stretch to even say it's a tactics game or has actual dating sim elements.