This has been the weekend for completing RPGs for me. First, I finished The World Ends With You on the Nintendo DS, and then I finished hosting my first Dungeons & Dragons adventure as the Dungeon Master.
The World Ends with You was the only game I’ve played for the month since my friends from the United States brought it with them. I wanted to finish the game before I moved on to something else with a story so that I didn’t get confused. The game is very linear, and it’s almost impossible to get lost as it turns out. This strenghtens the story to a degree, but weakens the replay.
The game play remained strong throughout the entire game. There was always a carrot for me to try to reach. Either a new pin would level, my character would level, or my battles would consume the food that would boost my stats. Even when I didn’t play the game, I earned a few points to level up as long as I touched the game in seven days. That’s a really nice feature.
Now that I’ve completed the game, I’ve unlocked the final mode and can tackle any of the levels in any order. There is some sort of secret you can unlock by playing the difference sequences and finding the correct path or whatever. I’m not going for 100% completion, so I don’t think I’ll be diving into this mode any time soon. The ending does the typical “Final battle that does follow the regular game mechanic” routine. In the story it made sence, but when I actually went about trying to beat the final three bosses, it seemed like I was just randomly flailing about, not really winning. Otherwise, the game mechanics were great.
Today was also my first attempt at trying to Dungeon Master in D&D. I am very weak on the mechanics, and I think I made a few mistakes. I’m a little too willing to reveal information, and I made some strange decisions with a particular creature that the players dealt with in a surprising way. I advanced the plot of the larger game without intending to because of one of the “hooks” I set up in the game to explain the characters being in one location. The next DM will probably also do a “side quest” sort of mission, and the main story will catch up in a month’s time or more. It’s cool that I added to the overall story with a throw away dungeon crawl adventure without intending it. I’ll have to wait and see how much the plot of my story is actually mentioned in further adventures, if at all.
I think I need to improve on the mechanics of the game a little more and also need to make better decisions dealing with monsters and attacks. I also need some clever traps. I’d also like some confirmation that what I was doing wasn’t bad or completely strange. I have zero ideas for a follow up adventure, so I really want someone else to take over for me. Luckily someone else has something set up, more or less.
My next game is Shiren the Wanderer on the Nintendo DS. It’s a roguelike with randomly generated dungeons and has a close relation to the Pokémon Dungeon series.
