Just reached chapter 4 and I feel like giving some expression. Or ranting about them.
Generally I'm not the biggest fan of eushully games. I do like how they keep exploring different gameplay ideas, but the stories and characters tend to not be to my taste, with Battle Goddess ZERO and Verita being the big exceptions - love those games. Kamidori I think is just dull; go play an old Atelier or Mana Khemia instead. So I wasn't expecting too much with this, but at the same time, it's also not like they aren't capable of at least adding an interesting twist here or there.
Amayui so far shows absolutely none of that. It's as generic jRPG-ness as it can possibly be, with the old "we just want everyone to be happy!" stick being the only mode of operation for all the good guys, and all the bad guys being complete "mwhahaha I'm evil" chucklefucks. You know the game has a bad case of creative death when you click on an event and it just says something like "one day we were invited to a party at (serious warrior's home)", your immediate thought is "oh, golly, she's going to be bad at cooking" ... and then of course she is. And that's the 2nd out of 5 characters that has one of the traditional cooking personality gimmicks.
Just makes me want to cry. How is it that if it's got to be following the beaten-to-death scheme of having a character with "personality + gimmick" it at least can't be a slightly different gimmick from time to time? Why is it on top of all the other repetitive stuff not at least something vaguely new from time to time? For fuck's sake Japanese writers, get a grip ...
Obv. the story doesn't offer anything of any interest either. Bland, bland, boring. Who knows; maybe it'll ramp up to something (#doubt).
Gameplay so far I quite like. The "area of control" mechanic I do actually like; but people say it's mainly an issue later on so perhaps it's just fine so far. Seems like a good additional tactical element to me though. Grind ... well, there's the magic ore bit, which you need a bunch early on, and then only relatively late get even just a 2nd location to get from, so that required replaying a map a bit, but otherwise I just avoided it.
That also meant that the main story fights weren't too easy. As far as that goes I got no complaints.
I would like to speed battles up a bit, that's probably my one concern (all those wasted battle sprites - they look nice; I'll never bother with them ^^; ). Some other convenient options would have been nice - for example if you got a mining accessory and walk on a mining resource the game could just offering to equip it for you. As you can freely change your loadout anyway ... minimize time spend in menus. More of a nitpick, though.
Anyway. Tolerable for the gameplay, rest 100% forgettable and sometimes outright detrimental.
