Yo guys! This is my weekly blog about videogames and visual novels! Well, mostly weekly. Last week real life kicked me in the face and, due to my rule of not talking about my real life problems; I really had nothing to talk about. If you want to know what happened, this happened, and that’s all I’m going to say on the issue.

SO ANYWAY, back to regular gaming and... novelling? I guess that works, sort of.

Half Minute Hero

So Half Minute Hero is a game I’ve been meaning to play for quite some time now. I don’t know why I never actually picked it up, but I managed to steal a copy from a friend of mine, so yay videogames!

So for people who don’t know, Half Minute Hero is an RPG game in which each adventure is 30 seconds long. At the start of each level you have a pretty clear goal and also a few bonus objectives to do. Walking around the map can trigger random encounters and causes the timer to go down, while chilling in towns pauses the timer, and there you can buy stuff like new weapons or heal your health or pray to the time goddess to reset the time back to 30 seconds. The levels are, rather predictably, really short, but super addicting, causing me to blast through 20 or so without even realising how much time I was spending playing the game.

In each level you get graded on how fast you beat the level, which usually just boils down to how many times you had to reset the timer, but it’s the other objectives that give you a surprising amount of choice on how to tackle the level. For instance, in an early level you can easily just grind for a little bit to get your level greater than the bosses level (which the game kindly points out to you as soon as it happens) or you can go find bug swatter that will kill the boss in one hit. There are several different people you can recruit or help along the way that will be added to your ‘party’ for that one level, which also has its benefits.

I haven’t checked out the other modes just yet but I’m enjoying myself so far, it’s a great game for just playing in small bursts, even if those small bursts turn into huge bursts and eat up entire days at a time oh well!

Jetpack Joyride

In an attempt to keep up with everything that current with iOS gaming, I decided to play Jetpack Joyride. That’s what everyone’s into right now, right?

Jetpack Joyride is one of those one button games, you press and hold the screen to activate the jetpack and fly upwards, and then everything after that is just simply avoiding lasers and electricity and shit like that. You collect coins that can buy upgrades and you can get vehicles which operate slightly differently (such as a Gravity Suit in which the one button tap flips gravity).

The game is incredibly basic with the only real goal being how long can you survive. The game is one hit kill when you’re not in a vehicle, and one hit to get from vehicle back to the jetpack, much akin to a Mario mushroom in that regard. Though on top of the ‘how far can you do’ there are mini objectives, some as ‘get this far without collecting any coins’ or ‘high five scientists’ and stuff like that. These mini objectives are what give the game a lot of life for me, as it’s a lot of fun trying to achieve as many as possible in a single run, even if the end result is just simply more coins to buy different outfits.

Again this is another one of those games that you can just play for a few minutes at a time, yet it can eat up a lot of time without you really realising it, and therefore it was relegated to the game what I play when I was bored in university lectures for a while. It’s a lot of fun and, much like Half Minute Hero, it’s weird that I waited this long to actually try it out. Like, with this one I’ve actually had it installed on my phone for months but never bothered to actually load it up. Then again I guess a lot of my iPhone games are regulated to that fate.

Hoshizora no Memoria -Wish upon a Shooting Star-

This week I played the rather recently translated Hoshizora no Memoria. I’ve been looking forward to this one for quite some time now an absolutely had to jump on it as soon as the fan patch was released. So hey, I’m being slightly relevant for once in my visual novel selection, and not just “hey this game from 12 years ago doesn’t have the best art you guys”. Well, more relevant, I guess, they are still porn games after all.

This game stars You, Kogasaka You that is, who returns to his hometown. He and his sister left his hometown seven years prior to the start of the game thanks to his mother getting a job transfer, and moves back after her death. He has fond memories of watching the stars at night with a girl who he promised to that they’d meet again. However, he has no means of contacting her, and therefore the only way he keeps hope of meeting her is returning to the observation platform they hung out at as kids. When he gets there, he meets a girl who looks like the girl from his memory who calls herself Mare, a grim reaper who reaps nightmares. After several interactions with Mare, she reaps his nightmare of remembering the name of the girl from his past. And now with even less knowledge of who he’s looking for, he joins the Astronomy Club to continue his love for watching the stars, and hopes that that will help him in his journey.

The weird thing about the story is that entire set up is sort of brushed away for the majority of the time playing, and is instead focused on Kogasaka interacting with the members of the Astronomy Club and making new friends in the usual high school environment. These friends include his sister, Chimani, who has a habit in talking in third person, Asuho, a friend from Kogasaka’s primary school, Isuzu, Kogasaka’s neighbour, and the twins Komomo and Kosame, who are complete polar opposites. The characters themselves work really well and all integrate into the story, all building up toward a rather interesting plot twist and revelation. And then the game continues for another like 5 hours.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the next 5 hours, but the game is structured weird. You’re introduced to the characters, and then that all play into a big story in which things happen, and then the main character is all “yeah it’s cool brah” and you get launched into whatever route you triggered flags for. Sure a lot of other games do this too, but here it just feels a little bit weird considering how big of a twist the common route takes near its conclusion. It also doesn’t help that when replaying the game to see the other routes (which are good, don’t get me wrong) you have to go through the entire common route again, which is incredibly long.

The routes are pretty standard, some being better than others. They all follow a rather simple structure of helping the selected girl’s ‘nightmare’ (some of them being more literal than others), but at the same time that can result in interesting story arcs. Each route you complete adds a little bit more to the common route too, eventually culminating in a ‘true’ route, which is predictably where the initial set up of the game comes into play, you know, 50 hours in.

Then again, the complaint of “there’s too much good content here” is a strange complaint to have, I really enjoyed my time with this game and I’d recommend it, just know if you want to see everything you have to be incredibly committed due to the sheer quantity of story that exists in this game. It’s worth it though, as the true route at the end of the game easily outdoes the rest of the routes in terms of quality.

And I guess that’s this thing over with! Hopefully I’ll be here again next week, so look forward to that I guess! Or don’t, whatever, I’ll just be here watching Adventure Time from start to finish.