If anyone is familiar with the old Atlus RPG from the PS1 era called "Thousand Arms", I'd really love it if that game existed in a more ideal, perfect form, because damn that game was awesomely fun and unique, and it'll live on in my memories forever, but damn if I just wish I could retroactively remove all the flaws from the game that detracted from it.
For anyone not familiar with it, it's basically Harem Anime: The RPG: The Dating Sim. You play as Meis (pronounced 'Mice'). You travel the world and meet a bevy of interesting young women, each representing a different Element, and you date them in order to practice your sword forging skills, which requires the use of love magic in order to power up your weapons and learn new skills.
And the game is fun! It has a cool art style and a lovably cliche story, most of the dialogue is fully voice acted (a rarity for games of that era), and when I first played it as an prepubescent boy the main heroine was my first Waifu. The RPG portion however revealed a lot of fundamental flaws with the game however. Fighting is extremely rigid, lacked a lot of variety, special abilities were cool to use but harshly limited so they were relegated exclusively to bosses, combat had this unique system where all your characters were lined up in a row, but only the person in the very front could attack while everyone behind him could only use the *very weak* magic and items available to them.
Moreover, your main character isn't the best character to place into the front to do all the fighting, nor is it any one of your *extensive* roster of capable female companions. No, the best person to place into the front line is your MC's best friend, this hulking older twenties man who is both not date-able, can't be used to date with, and in fact is actively afraid of women, falling in line with the comedic stereotype of anime characters that are deathly allergic to vaginas. I can't get over this one point, even after like two decades after first playing the game. You get him very early into the game, where he's immediately the best character to place into the front, and he remains the best character throughout the game. You cracked the game, there's no reason to ever move him period, any skill or ability exclusive to any other character is simply not useful enough to ever warrant sliding him away from the 1# spot. It's infuriating how large of an oversight it is.
More-moreover, while your MC's main profession is as a blacksmith, you actually have very little variety when it comes to weaponry. Elementally enchanted weapons never come up in usefulness, the magic you learn from smithing is both very expensive to use and honestly not very effective, and each character only has one weapon that is just altered depending on how you smith it, so while the inventory screen exists... it might as well not exist because you don't have any choices. WELLLLL you do have a choice, in that there's some joke weapons that are pathetic, HOWEVER they can be transformed into usable weapons by purifying them, and you can 'purify' those weapons at special altars, but the process of purification requires, get this, 50+ hours of in-game time. You can get the very first one, place it in an altar, and then pick it back up when you're right at the final boss of the game... and it's not even good, it sucks.
And it's only now that I realize I'm writing this entire rant, but this is honestly not the right thread for it, but yeah, I just want the game "Thousand Arms" but just BETTER so it doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth. The game Sakura Wars for the PS2 was about as close as I've ever found any game of getting to it, but I'm still unsatisfied.
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Topic: Games you wish existed (Read 926835 times)