Backlog Beatdown: Fantasizing about Sweets in Sweet Fantasy. No, really.

Right…

I was actually wondering whether I should bother to blog this one, given the potentially embarrassing subject matter and the fact that it is barely even a game, but if this online tracker of my journey to beat all my games is going to mean anything, I need to be showing the worst of this as well as the best. So yeah. I played, beat and yes, completed Sweet Fantasy. 

This was the first thing to come up on
Google Image Search...

This visual novel was brought to my attention by the Co-Optional Podcast hosted by TotalBiscuit, Dodger and Jesse Cox in the release section they do at the end. I enjoy the show and it is how I hear about a lot of games, and having heard a brief description of Sweet Fantasy I thought I’d give it a go. I’d never had a visual novel game before, so I don’t know if this one was a good one to get started on. It’s about a dryad called Pumpkin, who is hopelessly in love with her mistress, Ms Amethyst, and she’s trying to make a love potion in order to get Amethyst to sleep with her.

So the question is: Is it any good? And the answer is no. The idea is puerile, but it allows an unashamed exploration into a lesbian relationship between a dryad and an elf (I’m assuming Amethyst is an elf; her ears are pointed,) and had potential. But the characters are shallower than a petri dish and it’s not very interesting at all. Pumpkin is dozy and silly, Amethyst is stuck up and arrogant, and this doesn’t vary at all through the ‘plot.’ There are other characters in it, a snail and a mermaid, but they’re all ‘One-shots’ (only appearing in their scene) and don’t contribute much more. The plot is a mixture of a short journey and confused ramblings: you either find what you’re looking for to make the potion or you don’t; it doesn’t go anywhere else. Also the localisation wasn’t very as good; the text could have used an extra pair of eyes to check spellings and grammar. I know that sounds like a minor gripe but if you’re trading on the idea of being a visual novel, we could at least expect some competency in the text!

Your first task is to find these mushrooms...

As for the so-called gameplay, that comes down to a couple of decisions you have to make with regard to how to handle certain plot points. This reminds me more than anything else of the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books, and I guess fits in with the idea of a visual novel. But there’s no skill involved; no indication of what you’re supposed to be doing, or which choice is the right one. It is guesswork, nothing more; you either get it right or you don’t. The small amount of challenge comes from remembering what the wrong choice was, re-loading the game and choosing the other option. Any game needs to have an enjoyable process and a satisfying outcome, and unless you really like soft porn slideshows, this doesn’t have much of either.

So is there anything good about the game at all? Well, the art is very well drawn, I’ll give it that. Obviously an anime style, but it works. It’s clear that this is where most of the effort went in to development, perhaps to over-compensate for a lack of writing talent. There’s no game-breaking crashes or bugs that I could see, and it was designed competently enough to at least include a ‘skip’ button for parts of the dialogue that you’ve seen before. Very useful when re-playing sections for the better ending! And at least it’s not very long; I’d seen the whole game in roughly 40 minutes.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Matt,” you’re thinking, “what did you expect? It should have been obvious what this was; an over-sexualised piece of fan service. How could you have possibly thought this was going to be any good?” Well, in fact, I didn’t. It was a dip into a genre of game that I hadn’t looked at before, and I’d never have known until I tried it. Now that I have, I feel no need to do so again.

Backlog Beatdown: Fortune and Glory with Lego Indiana Jones

I find myself playing a lot of the Lego games these days, and a lot of the points I make about them are covered in the review I did of Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga a while back. Given my preference to play games in order, and having beaten Lego Star Wars, the next step was Lego Indiana Jones, and I’ve been playing this game quite a lot over the last couple of weeks!

He doesn't always have that gun...

The premise of the Lego games are simple enough: Play through the plot of whatever property they’re based on using Lego characters, in this case the original Indiana Jones trilogy. They are competently designed, easily accessible and provide a challenge in puzzles and collectables. The puzzles are largely based around deciding which characters and their abilities to use for each level, either to progress through the story or unlock all the extras later. One slight criticism is that it doesn’t work quite as well in multiplayer as some of the other games, as this one was designed before they started splitting the screen to accommodate both players, but as this was very much a single-player run-through, this didn’t affect me.  

I wondered how Telltale Games would make it work with Indiana Jones, as at first glance there didn’t seem to be a wide-enough range of characters to make it work, but I soon found an understanding of what everyone was supposed to be doing. Indy has his whip to swing across certain gaps and disarm opponents, archaeologists have shovels and can dig for treasure, mechanics fix things, scholars can open hieroglyphic doors, Nazis can open certain doors restricted to them and blow things up with grenades and rocket launchers. The ladies in the game have certain skills that apply to their characters. They can all jump slightly higher than the men and that is as good as it gets with Marion, Elsa also has the scholar ability, and brilliantly, Willie has a scream that can shatter glass and later destroy certain enemies. I also liked how certain characters have phobias: Indy clams up when he’s near snakes, and so does Willie when she’s around bugs.

I found Lego Indiana Jones more challenging than Lego Star Wars, if nowhere near as long having only three films to cover rather than six. The enemies are harder to take down as in most cases they have to be taken out in close quarters, and will take three or four hits to drop. Guns will destroy most enemies straight away but very few of the characters have guns by default; you need to pick up guns dropped by the enemies. While this rarely gets in the way of progressing through the game, it can make certain of the collectables hard to find if you’re not careful.

Funny how this scene is so iconic with Indiana Jones,
given that it only happens for moments in the film!

This being a game about archaeology, there are a lot more traps and puzzles to get around which provide an even greater threat. It’s not insurmountable though, and there’s a nice sense of achievement when you figure out how to open a door, or disable a trap. It’s a good way to vary up the pace and fits the theme of the game perfectly.

But of course, this being a Lego game, the heart of it is all about the collectables, and this is why it took me a relatively long amount of time to play through a somewhat short and easy game – I was aiming for 100% completion. To do this, I had to do the following:

·        Beat the Story Mode: This is easy enough, you need to get from one end of the game to the other, although I did get stuck on one of the bosses at some point. It was the boxer from Raiders of the Lost Ark; I didn’t realise that the plane had guns you were supposed to be firing!

·        Post all the Mail: This was a bit of a funny one. At some point on each level there is a parcel you have to find and put in a red post box. You almost always have to do this in Free Play mode, as you need different characters to access the locations they’re in. You’re rewarded when you do by optional ‘Cheats’ you can buy – anything from faster digging to multiplying the number of studs you pick up.

·        Collect all the Artefacts: There are ten treasure chests in each level, and collecting all ten forms an artefact; an ancient relic of some description that may or may not have featured in the films. Collecting all of these opens some of the bonus areas. This provided a challenge to begin with, but it got much easier once I’d unlocked the Artefact Detector in the previous section. Some of the things you have to do to make the chest appear are a little contrived, though, and on these occasions I found myself using a guide to find the last few chests. By this time I was looking to complete the game, not get bogged down.

·        Achieve ‘True Adventurer’ on all the levels: This is a feature common to all the Lego games where you have to collect a certain number of Lego studs along the level to achieve the reward. This only becomes a problem when you keep dying, because you lose all your studs. Funnily enough this happened to me because I couldn’t work out some of the puzzles and traps far more often than getting killed by enemies. It became much easier to do this once I’d unlocked the score multipliers!

·        Beat the Young Indy, Ancient City and Warehouse stages: This is the best kind of Post-Game content; things that you don’t have to do in order to see the story through to the end but provide some fun nonetheless. The Young Indy stage takes you through the opening scenes of The Last Crusade, but there are no collectables this time; you only need to beat the level. The Ancient City is an interesting one; you have to destroy some scenery and build some other bits of scenery to get one million studs. It was challenging because there’s no guidance on it this time. It’s not a case of getting from one end of the level to the other; you have to work out what to do with everything in it and the solution isn’t always obvious. The Warehouse has the same goal, and I thought I was going to have to faff about making tracks, as that was what some of the Lego blocks were insinuating. In actual fact, if you head over to the right side of the level there is a target there which cannot be destroyed and releases studs every time you hit it; I just did this to beat the level.

Once I had done all that the game was completed to 100%, and I just had to unlock a few achievement points to get 100% of those as well. This is one of the few games I own on the Xbox 360 where I have a hope of managing it, because in this case none of the achievement points are tied up in online multiplayer. Most of them unlock as you’re playing through the game, some you have to do by destroying one specific character with another; they were easy enough. I had a bit of bother with the one where you need to kill five enemies with one explosion, but after looking at some community advice, I chucked a grenade onto a group of spiders that rush you in one of the Temple of Doom levels and the problem was solved. The ones that were hard were the ones that require you to perform same action multiple times, such as using Willie’s scream to shatter 50 glass panels, or using the Nazis to unlock their restricted areas 50 times. It wasn’t difficult, but it was a faff! I found myself restarting the City of Danger level several times, as there is an opportunity to do both right near the start of the level.

All this took me about two or three weeks; it’s nice to have a game that can be fully completed in that time! I’ve really enjoyed my time with Lego Indiana Jones, and while it will be a while before I come back to it, it’s there should I ever want to give it another go!