/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Finished playing Souten no Celenaria.

I found the story and characters pretty weak. The setting and history seemed interesting at first, but it’s really left mostly in the background – apart from vague fairy tale interludes between other scenes – while the main story itself just focuses on the heroines taking huge detours helping out different people with their mostly separate issues, and the majority of villains leaned strongly on the cartoony side as well. Lots of developments rely on allies swooping in from nowhere. It’s pretty much shounen anime.

The last chapter in particular felt really rushed, and unless I fell asleep while playing the game never really explains even some of the pivotal plot stuff, f.ex. why the Puseeru are so special for operating the big machines or the 緑色秘本, latter of which conveniently don’t even matter in the end for the main villain’s master plan because he already has a disposable former, despite the books being the driving force of the whole main plot and the reason the protagonist and co. get chased in the first place. The ending really just managed to provoke a simple “that’s all of it?” kind of feeling.

Gameplay:
tl;dr it's not Sunless Skies / 10, so why bother?

One of the biggest issues is that the gameplay and story simply do not mix: gameplay focuses on trading and hauling cargo or people around – simple ”buy low sell high” and using routes that usually have better weather for lower fuel consumption, with a bunch of random events thrown in the mix – but the story is a linear ride about exploration and characters trying to find one person. The gameplay sections amount to nothing but "and then they went to the next place" between actual story. I was first expecting the game to start with a small beginner area and slowly expand the map, especially because sometimes towns want items that aren't available in the current chapter, but no, every chapter has its own new, completely separate area with their own new towns and trade routes. There's never even any main plot objectives in gameplay, it's all inconsequential busywork. The devs went out of their way to implement a map, ship upgrades, grid inventory management, different trade goods, collectibles and such but none of it matters, apart from unlocking few pieces of concept art if you manage to find and buy all the 思い出 items and have them in your cargo hold at the end of the game. And while the story’s focus is on exploring an unknown world and meeting new peoples, all of the points of interest barring hidden ship upgrades and collectibles are already marked on the map (even before you ask around in a town for general directions) so you’re not even really exploring, though it's not like the very limited fuel system that most of the time is only enough for strictly flying from point A to point B would allow for that.

So, you’d be inclined to skip the unfun mess, right? However, like the start of the game warns you there's some scenes during the gameplay portions as well, meaning that choosing to skip the game part would apparently skip them too. It’s just a handful of scenes but sometimes there’s some more important stuff like characters leaving the ship etc. so it’d be silly having them be skipped as well. If the devs were to properly remake this, they should've either reworked the game portion from scratch so it’s actually fun and meaningful, or since it feels like such an afterthought to the story, just trashed it entirely and put the few missing scenes that it has in between actual story parts. The remake letting the player skip the game part on first playthrough feels like a shoddy band aid solution. My suggestion for anyone planning to play this is to not skip gameplay, but just fly to the already marked end point without bothering with any of the boring side quests or trading so you get the handful of more meaningful scenes.

There's NG+ and you unlock two final ship upgrades from game completion, but the gameplay simply isn't fun enough to warrant one and there's no new content or stuff to do unless you missed some of the largely meaningless collectibles. I'd rather much preferred a scene select, especially for the fairy tale parts to catch up and see if shit makes more sense in retrospect. Or even an in-game encyclopedia.

Apparently, all the later entries in the series are much better in terms of story if not in gameplay, but this was just a lukewarm mess on all fronts. Art and music were pretty unremarkable as well.