sickle
Jungle Girl
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2012
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First thread I make in like 20 years of lurking, so the chance of me screwing up something is somewhere around 200%. Sorry in advance.
Anyway, Twilight Scramble.
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(download link removed because I don't want the loli police to come baton the ulmf servers)
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Probably better save from my post belowFan translation patch
Images:
Story
You're a magical girl. You discover that, because while walking home one evening a slime girl restrained you and started sucking out your magic power — while gloating about the fact that she is sucking out your magic power.
Well, you've discovered your powers and managed to chase her off. So now you've got to go through a series of dungeons — where everything wants to restrain you, drain your magic power, or often restrain you then drain your magic power. Occasinally, while gloating about it.
Fetishes
Primary fetish of the game is restraining. There's also a lot of energy drain. Game has multiple dungeons, and the monsters have neatly ghettoed themselves by preferred method of restraining you.
- Restrained / drained by slimes
- Restrained / drained by tentacles
- Hardening (petrification or freezing)
- Swallowing / draining while enveloped
- Adhesive / drained while struck.
- Greatest hits of all of the above.
Every dungeon boss (and a couple other fights, such as the tutorial battle) have a game over scene where you get cgis of yourself getting — you'll never guess — restrained and drained of your magic power, except slower and more throughtly, and with more elaborate gloating, until you get detransformed.
The gallery is fairly interesting. It's in your hub, and you can reach it about one hour in the game after clering the first dungeon. You'll unlock all enemies in the dungeon you've beaten, and you can choose to unlock every individual dungeon's gallery right when you reach the hub if you prefer. You can watch the animations, or the bosses' cgi, but also repeat the whole fight — which is far less useless than it might sound, since you'll get the dialogue and the "narrative element" of the fight, plus several attacks are missing on the animation gallery — for example, the boss of dungeon 2 seems to have only one grab in the gallery, but she's got plenty more in the fight, that use or combine tentacles you fought previously.
Edit: There'a second, more complete gallery that you can access in the "debug room" -- only after finishing the game, I assume. It's unlocked in the save I linked above, more details in my post below.
Gameplay
Game is actually fairly playable and enjoyable. I feel that the dev took effort in the game part, too.
There's an easy mode, but normal mode is fairly balanced, where if you strategize / hit enemies with the correct elemental weaknesses you can clear a fight relatively easily, whereas not picking on the right strategy or failing restraint mini-games will get you in progressively more resource-taxing and hard to escape restraints, until you have no choice but to watch your bars empty up in the defeat animation.
There's a resource-management element, too. Should you use up mana to easily defeat this opponent, or just stick to regular attacks and hope you can avoid/evade/endure the grabs so you use up less mana? But then you risk getting grabbed, and he might heal at the expense of your HP or drain more mana than you'd have used to fight it…
As enemies are visible on the map, and choosing to avoid them or fight them later is an important part of the strategy.
Eventually, you will get restrained. And by "eventually" I mean "every time an enemy gets a turn" — you'll be restrained more turns than you aren't, you'll forget what your life was like while you were not restrained. Then you'll have to go through a minigame to end the restraint, either as a reaction to the enemy's attack or through a dedicated action on your turn (usually while your hp/mp is sinking). While the game starts off with the classic "click fast enough", so far as I've gotten it's introducing new minigames.
Exploring the dungeon will give you items that will allow you to progress, incuding usables or equipment that will allow you to defeat previously undefeatable monsters. There's also often shortcuts or hidden treasure. But beware because there's also traps, which will… tar and feather you! No, obviously they'll restrain you and drain your magic power, that's your life now accept it.
There's an easy mode, but normal mode is fairly balanced, where if you strategize / hit enemies with the correct elemental weaknesses you can clear a fight relatively easily, whereas not picking on the right strategy or failing restraint mini-games will get you in progressively more resource-taxing and hard to escape restraints, until you have no choice but to watch your bars empty up in the defeat animation.
There's a resource-management element, too. Should you use up mana to easily defeat this opponent, or just stick to regular attacks and hope you can avoid/evade/endure the grabs so you use up less mana? But then you risk getting grabbed, and he might heal at the expense of your HP or drain more mana than you'd have used to fight it…
As enemies are visible on the map, and choosing to avoid them or fight them later is an important part of the strategy.
Eventually, you will get restrained. And by "eventually" I mean "every time an enemy gets a turn" — you'll be restrained more turns than you aren't, you'll forget what your life was like while you were not restrained. Then you'll have to go through a minigame to end the restraint, either as a reaction to the enemy's attack or through a dedicated action on your turn (usually while your hp/mp is sinking). While the game starts off with the classic "click fast enough", so far as I've gotten it's introducing new minigames.
Exploring the dungeon will give you items that will allow you to progress, incuding usables or equipment that will allow you to defeat previously undefeatable monsters. There's also often shortcuts or hidden treasure. But beware because there's also traps, which will… tar and feather you! No, obviously they'll restrain you and drain your magic power, that's your life now accept it.
Gameplay hints
- If a fight seems unwinnable, you're probably supposed to find/use an item, use a specific spell, or to equip a spellbook and then use that specific spell. Good examples are the large red slime in dungeon 1, which you need to throw an item at, or the golden tentacle in dungeon 2.
- Remember that the "click fast" QTEs can be cleared quicker by using both the mouse and the Z button. Wish I didn't discover it only halfway through dungeon 3.
- Several useful spells and powers don't use up your turn. The 50 TP ability that cures your MP can be a lifesaver, and you can also shorten grabs by using the "resist" spell — if it's not working, you're triggering a particular event that is overriding it. Refresh and clean up, which you can get with tomes, will clear statues that might be automatic defeats otherwise.
- If you're stuck, there's a walktrhough in the game folder. Just find the folder with the text files numbered 1-7 and throw it on Google Translate, and then go get that pesky item you were missing.
Language barrier
Basic gameplay is fairly accessible even with little to no japanese — fight options are relatively self-explanatory, and a lot of the dialogue is fairly simple, you can get away with mostly katakana and trial-and-error.
Issue is that even relatively small things can be issues if you don't get a specific hint — I've just recently spent an inordinate amount of time trying a different useless thing and then getting double-restrained then draind by a golden tentacle because I didn't bother to labor through a sign at the start of the dungeon that said "you can't defeat golden tentacles, if you see one run".
It's more of a pity that you don't see the dialogue — I mean, most of it is fairly cheesy "oh no I've been restrained, now they're gonna drain my magic power" stuff, but I mean that's why we're playing this sort of game, isn't it? Hopefully, being an RPG Maker project, it's translatable, and a thread such as this one might be a place where the information about such translations might eventually hopefully end up.
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