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4notherRandomGuy
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- Sep 23, 2021
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Some of the problems found in this thread was that V1.58 have some problem with battle lock in late game (can't continue combat), and V1.7 have some sort of day 2 action lock (can't "work"). One of the solution we were able to use to find out was merging V1.7 into the V1.58. There is a link in the OP of someone who did just that. Personally I didn't use that file, but that only because I have V1.58 & download V1.7 later, merging it myself, find that it work, and the upload merge file appear later, so I never really need it to test.
ShannonKun
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- Apr 30, 2019
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How do I clear those Common Route Tasks?
Those 2 are there from the beginning of the game and I'm nearing the end.
Edit: I also found a bug where Wednesday is sometimes treated as Sunday (you can do the sex events).
I think the trigger is to do the Maid Sex with Nova. when the buff runs out on Wednesday it happens.
Those 2 are there from the beginning of the game and I'm nearing the end.
Edit: I also found a bug where Wednesday is sometimes treated as Sunday (you can do the sex events).
I think the trigger is to do the Maid Sex with Nova. when the buff runs out on Wednesday it happens.
Last edited:
Full save for those who need it - extract to MyData folder.
Whenever I try to run the game, I get stuck on the loading screen, at around 45%. Anyone know how I can fix this? It seems like other people are able to play the game just fine (at least until they run into other bugs later in the game), but I haven't seen anyone complain about being unable to start the game in the first place (granted, I haven't looked through every single post that relates to this game, maybe this question was already asked and answered earlier, I'll look but I'd appreciate the help.)
Edit: I installed the 1.7 thing that hamtaku guy uploaded on the previous page of this thread, still stuck at 45% loading
Edit 2: was having problems with a separate game when someone recommended i check the folder name. I store these games in a folder with a special unicode character. As soon as I changed the name of the folder to something normal, both that game and this game worked.
Edit: I installed the 1.7 thing that hamtaku guy uploaded on the previous page of this thread, still stuck at 45% loading
Edit 2: was having problems with a separate game when someone recommended i check the folder name. I store these games in a folder with a special unicode character. As soon as I changed the name of the folder to something normal, both that game and this game worked.
Last edited:
Iexist
Engaged Member
- Jul 20, 2018
- 2,349
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Welp, I finally got around to playing this particular game. I found the first VN to be pretty good if not amazing, so this got in my backlog the moment I heard of it, though knowing that the initial releases were going to be buggy, I held off on playing it until I could be sure that it was more stable. Which of course meant that it took a while before I remembered it existed... >.>"
ANYway... Robolife 2 is the sequel to the first one, and that does mean something, unlike other VN series out there. While you don't necessarily need to play the first one to get the gist of the story that's happening here... Things will make a lot more sense overall if you do play it, with an emphasis on the hacker-girl route and the Mika side-content. I'll get more into the hows and whys and whatnot later in the inevitable big spoiler section.
Before that though, I will say that Robolife 2 tries to be more of a game than the 1st one. It has the familiar bits from the 1st one, the day-time parts system that's a bit more split and a bit more poorly explained, the familiar robot components of head, torso and arms, as well as the research system. It even supposedly has a deadline, like the 1st one did, but for the life of me, I have no idea when that is because I've had no issues completing any of the routes even when I viciously hunted side-content. The stats for Nova are the same ones as for Aino... and all in all, if you've played the 1st one, you'll be familiar with a bunch of the stuff in this one.
However, things are different beyond just there being a new robot girl and a new story, and that becomes fairly obvious when you notice that there's a new category of components that can be installed in Nova that wasn't in the 1st game. That component is called "chips", and unlike the other three, these are not researched. They're bought or found by other means, and on top of that, they're consumable items (don't think too hard about how that works...). They also don't affect stats in any way, instead, they allow Nova to use certain skills for a limited amount of times.
Now, skills aren't a new thing for Robolife, or rather, traits. You had them in the 1st one and they affected job performance and whatnot. They were also used in certain story-beats (Eg. needing Flight specifically to reach the Onsen). This is also the case in this game, except there's more. Nova Duty comes with a combat mechanic, and the majority of skills and traits on Nova's various components affect her combat performance, or become usable skills in battle. The aforementioned Chips add usable skills exclusively for battle, allowing you to tweak Nova's performance in various ways when needed. How much you need this will depend on what you're doing and when.
The combat system in Nova Duty is nothing particularly impressive, though the devs clearly at least tried to make it interesting. It's a turn-based combat system, where in each turn, the player can use as many skills as they have equipped, with the only restriction being whether they're on cooldown or not. They then added several elements to make things more strategic.
First of all, skills have colors. Red, Green, Blue or colorless, with the last one being fairly rare in terms of attack skills available to Nova, with varying level of appearances on enemies. Enemies also have these colors and in most cases, you'll see what they are listed on top of their health. If you hover your mouse cursor over those enemy skill icons, it'll tell you what the skill is... and in special cases, it'll tell you what happens if you counter that skill. How do you counter a skill? By using a skill of the same color of course. Doing it twice on quite a few enemy skills seals them off completely. The game then mixes it up where it adds skills that give special benefits like lowering the enemy's crit rate or evasion when you counter that specific skill... It adds enemy skills that make things worse if you counter them, and if you get used to countering as much as possible by reflex without paying attention, you might end up with some nasty surprises in some fights. Remember the Chips I mentioned before? They're basically there to add more options in terms of countering the enemy, allowing you to plug in colors that Nova doesn't have, or doesn't have enough of, depending on her components. That or adding buff skills or healing skills.
The second thing they added is the overdrive mechanic. As Nova uses skills, she builds overdrive, and when the bar is full, she enters overdrive mode which massively boosts her damage output. Now, Overdrive activates automatically, which means that you have to think about things when you use skills. Throwing out all of Nova's skills at once might seem like a nice idea, and it generally works against mooks, but it might also leave you in Overdrive mode with no offensive skills left to use, which is obviously a waste in boss fights.
The existence of this stuff basically adds another layer to your choices of components, because different components have different skills with different colors and in some cases different additional effects in terms of buffs and debuffs. For example, the cat-girl series tends to have skills that affect evasion and hit-rate. The ninja series has a very high emphasis on red skills. So on and so forth.
Sadly, the game doesn't really make that much use of the mechanic, for the simple fact that it can't. With a time-limit involved and the fact that you can't change components during an exploration event for example, it's obviously difficult to make fights challenging in terms of component choices without frustrating the player. Not to mention that in the main-game, eventually, the route specific sets end up outperforming everything else eventually and they'll be what you'll use in the final boss fight for each route. Things are different in the Epilogue, but we'll get to that a bit later.
All in all, the Combat system in Nova Duty isn't bad, but it's not particularly amazing either, and it isn't helped by the fact that the game doesn't explain what each of Nova's stats DO to her combat abilities for the most part, nor can you see Nova's exact combat stats except for her health. There's evasion, hit-rate and crit-rate, along with defense, and you have no idea what values these have at any given moment, nor what influences them exactly aside from the passives. Even there, you don't know if the values in them are additive or multiplicative or what. This means that soon enough, the game degenerates into throwing in the best parts you have for the route or side-content you're trying to do and just winging it, and maybe throwing in some chips to fill in gaps if needed. As such, the combat quickly becomes pretty boring.
They even added this thing, where, if you lose to an enemy 5 times, if you challenge that enemy for the 6th time, you can auto-win that battle. Odds are, as long as you understand the system and pay attention, you will never need this in the main-game. The Epilogue is a different story, but I'll get to that a bit later.
Now, the thing that's the most important about the Combat thing and the reason why it tends to become boring is because the combat is everywhere. Much like the 1st game, you have 3 routes that you can work on, in this case, being determined by 3 major corporations that you can work with. Also much like the 1st game, the routes are an Information based route, an Entertainment based route and a Combat based route... and yet all of them use this new combat system everywhere and all of them have a final boss that you need to fight to finish the route. Each final boss is unique to the route, but getting there is tbh still pretty generic. More importantly, this whole thing makes the routes feel pretty same-y in a way that the original Robolife didn't. The 1st Robolife had a much stronger distinction between the 3 routes, and their special mechanics were much more important.
This is not the case with Nova Duty, where even the stories have a big level of similarity between them in the end. On top of all that, there's also the issue that the side-content for Nova Duty is... a lot more streamlined than it was in Aino's game. That is to say, you can absolutely do all side-quests on your 1st playthrough without too much difficulty, regardless of the route you're going into (though it might be difficult in the so called Destiny route). In Aino's game, especially on a 1st playthrough, it was pretty much impossible to get ALL the side-content at once, which was a good thing because it was designed to be played 3 times, once for each route.
Nova Duty is also designed to be played multiple times, but it's a lot more monotonous about it, on account of the fact that the playthroughs will end up feeling fairly same-y in some ways, aside from the story... and even there, you have issues. Specifically, each route features the fact that the corporation you were working with is corrupt, and whoever is in charge is basically a super-villain... It also doesn't help that the game is very blatant about which route is the true route, because it's the one that unlocks the Epilogue. Btw, it's the 1st route, the one with Blueliant or whatever they're called, and I recommend playing it last, because the Epilogue has all the components and notes from ALL the routes you completed when you enter it, so you want to play the others first, and also do all the side-content of course.
As such, if you play the game the way it's intended to be played, it will take a while to unlock the Epilogue, which ties up the various loose-ends, for the most part, and adds in harder combat... and by that point, I was personally thoroughly bored of the combat and didn't put in too much effort in it, even using the instant-win mechanic on several fights. Though surprisingly, I didn't need too for what I expected to be the hardest boss-fights... which is weird... but whatever...
There's also the problem that the game isn't always... clear... about what you need to do to advance a bit of side-content. Not sure if that's a translation issue or what. The problem is more notable in the epilogue section. For example, there's absolutely nothing telling you that you're supposed to make Alisa horny in the morning in her Epilogue section, nor does it tell you anything about the components that make this easier...
Moving on once more, I will say that Nova Duty still has the same quirkiness and humor that the 1st game had. If you liked the writing and ridiculous stuff in the 1st one, you'll like it in this one too for the most part. It's just a shame that they tried a bit too hard to be "serious" in some aspects.
This leads to the reason we play these games... the H-scenes! Much like with the 1st game, Nova Duty is an extremely vanilla game. For all that it's a game about android girls and cyborgs, that isn't really used much aside from the looks of the various girls that the MC can fuck. The most out there it gets is with a foot-job. There's no hard rape. (Nova doesn't get raped period, but you can count some of the stuff that happens to MC as rape, lol, and some of the side-girls are in dubious consent situations.) The most you have is clothing fetishes I guess, and a small handful of threesomes where Nova is joined by some other girl in dealing with MC's dick. Basically, don't come into this game expecting anything particularly crazy in terms of kinks, because you're not gonna find any such things.
Still, the art is gorgeous, in my opinion at least, and the animations are a lot smoother and present in every H-scene. The art is also notably more consistent from what I've seen. Unlike Aino, it didn't feel like Nova's boob-size jumped around to an unreasonable degree depending on the scene... even if you can handwave it away with the "different components" logic. It also feels like there's more smut scenes in general than the original game, but I didn't actually compare them directly, so I may just be remembering wrong. The various side-girls in this game definitely get a lot more content than they did in the 1st game, that's for sure...
Now, its time for...
All in all, Robolife 2 - Nova Duty, is still a pretty decent game+VN combo. I definitely recommend playing the 1st one before anything else, everything will make a lot more sense if you do. However, by that same token, I feel like the story of this one is weaker than 1st one, along with its setup. The combat stuff tends to overstay its welcome and become pretty tedious. On the other hand, the H-stuff is more plentiful, even if still uber-vanilla.
If you liked the 1st one, you'll likely definitely want to play the second one too. It might not be as great, but it's head and shoulders above a lot of other things I could name, and worth the time to go through.
On a final note, dunno what's up with the version in the OP. I didn't use that. I bought my copy off of dlsite when it was at a major discount and I didn't have any issues with it. Dunno what people got over in the OP or why so many peeps have issues with the game...
ANYway... Robolife 2 is the sequel to the first one, and that does mean something, unlike other VN series out there. While you don't necessarily need to play the first one to get the gist of the story that's happening here... Things will make a lot more sense overall if you do play it, with an emphasis on the hacker-girl route and the Mika side-content. I'll get more into the hows and whys and whatnot later in the inevitable big spoiler section.
Before that though, I will say that Robolife 2 tries to be more of a game than the 1st one. It has the familiar bits from the 1st one, the day-time parts system that's a bit more split and a bit more poorly explained, the familiar robot components of head, torso and arms, as well as the research system. It even supposedly has a deadline, like the 1st one did, but for the life of me, I have no idea when that is because I've had no issues completing any of the routes even when I viciously hunted side-content. The stats for Nova are the same ones as for Aino... and all in all, if you've played the 1st one, you'll be familiar with a bunch of the stuff in this one.
However, things are different beyond just there being a new robot girl and a new story, and that becomes fairly obvious when you notice that there's a new category of components that can be installed in Nova that wasn't in the 1st game. That component is called "chips", and unlike the other three, these are not researched. They're bought or found by other means, and on top of that, they're consumable items (don't think too hard about how that works...). They also don't affect stats in any way, instead, they allow Nova to use certain skills for a limited amount of times.
Now, skills aren't a new thing for Robolife, or rather, traits. You had them in the 1st one and they affected job performance and whatnot. They were also used in certain story-beats (Eg. needing Flight specifically to reach the Onsen). This is also the case in this game, except there's more. Nova Duty comes with a combat mechanic, and the majority of skills and traits on Nova's various components affect her combat performance, or become usable skills in battle. The aforementioned Chips add usable skills exclusively for battle, allowing you to tweak Nova's performance in various ways when needed. How much you need this will depend on what you're doing and when.
The combat system in Nova Duty is nothing particularly impressive, though the devs clearly at least tried to make it interesting. It's a turn-based combat system, where in each turn, the player can use as many skills as they have equipped, with the only restriction being whether they're on cooldown or not. They then added several elements to make things more strategic.
First of all, skills have colors. Red, Green, Blue or colorless, with the last one being fairly rare in terms of attack skills available to Nova, with varying level of appearances on enemies. Enemies also have these colors and in most cases, you'll see what they are listed on top of their health. If you hover your mouse cursor over those enemy skill icons, it'll tell you what the skill is... and in special cases, it'll tell you what happens if you counter that skill. How do you counter a skill? By using a skill of the same color of course. Doing it twice on quite a few enemy skills seals them off completely. The game then mixes it up where it adds skills that give special benefits like lowering the enemy's crit rate or evasion when you counter that specific skill... It adds enemy skills that make things worse if you counter them, and if you get used to countering as much as possible by reflex without paying attention, you might end up with some nasty surprises in some fights. Remember the Chips I mentioned before? They're basically there to add more options in terms of countering the enemy, allowing you to plug in colors that Nova doesn't have, or doesn't have enough of, depending on her components. That or adding buff skills or healing skills.
The second thing they added is the overdrive mechanic. As Nova uses skills, she builds overdrive, and when the bar is full, she enters overdrive mode which massively boosts her damage output. Now, Overdrive activates automatically, which means that you have to think about things when you use skills. Throwing out all of Nova's skills at once might seem like a nice idea, and it generally works against mooks, but it might also leave you in Overdrive mode with no offensive skills left to use, which is obviously a waste in boss fights.
The existence of this stuff basically adds another layer to your choices of components, because different components have different skills with different colors and in some cases different additional effects in terms of buffs and debuffs. For example, the cat-girl series tends to have skills that affect evasion and hit-rate. The ninja series has a very high emphasis on red skills. So on and so forth.
Sadly, the game doesn't really make that much use of the mechanic, for the simple fact that it can't. With a time-limit involved and the fact that you can't change components during an exploration event for example, it's obviously difficult to make fights challenging in terms of component choices without frustrating the player. Not to mention that in the main-game, eventually, the route specific sets end up outperforming everything else eventually and they'll be what you'll use in the final boss fight for each route. Things are different in the Epilogue, but we'll get to that a bit later.
All in all, the Combat system in Nova Duty isn't bad, but it's not particularly amazing either, and it isn't helped by the fact that the game doesn't explain what each of Nova's stats DO to her combat abilities for the most part, nor can you see Nova's exact combat stats except for her health. There's evasion, hit-rate and crit-rate, along with defense, and you have no idea what values these have at any given moment, nor what influences them exactly aside from the passives. Even there, you don't know if the values in them are additive or multiplicative or what. This means that soon enough, the game degenerates into throwing in the best parts you have for the route or side-content you're trying to do and just winging it, and maybe throwing in some chips to fill in gaps if needed. As such, the combat quickly becomes pretty boring.
They even added this thing, where, if you lose to an enemy 5 times, if you challenge that enemy for the 6th time, you can auto-win that battle. Odds are, as long as you understand the system and pay attention, you will never need this in the main-game. The Epilogue is a different story, but I'll get to that a bit later.
Now, the thing that's the most important about the Combat thing and the reason why it tends to become boring is because the combat is everywhere. Much like the 1st game, you have 3 routes that you can work on, in this case, being determined by 3 major corporations that you can work with. Also much like the 1st game, the routes are an Information based route, an Entertainment based route and a Combat based route... and yet all of them use this new combat system everywhere and all of them have a final boss that you need to fight to finish the route. Each final boss is unique to the route, but getting there is tbh still pretty generic. More importantly, this whole thing makes the routes feel pretty same-y in a way that the original Robolife didn't. The 1st Robolife had a much stronger distinction between the 3 routes, and their special mechanics were much more important.
This is not the case with Nova Duty, where even the stories have a big level of similarity between them in the end. On top of all that, there's also the issue that the side-content for Nova Duty is... a lot more streamlined than it was in Aino's game. That is to say, you can absolutely do all side-quests on your 1st playthrough without too much difficulty, regardless of the route you're going into (though it might be difficult in the so called Destiny route). In Aino's game, especially on a 1st playthrough, it was pretty much impossible to get ALL the side-content at once, which was a good thing because it was designed to be played 3 times, once for each route.
Nova Duty is also designed to be played multiple times, but it's a lot more monotonous about it, on account of the fact that the playthroughs will end up feeling fairly same-y in some ways, aside from the story... and even there, you have issues. Specifically, each route features the fact that the corporation you were working with is corrupt, and whoever is in charge is basically a super-villain... It also doesn't help that the game is very blatant about which route is the true route, because it's the one that unlocks the Epilogue. Btw, it's the 1st route, the one with Blueliant or whatever they're called, and I recommend playing it last, because the Epilogue has all the components and notes from ALL the routes you completed when you enter it, so you want to play the others first, and also do all the side-content of course.
As such, if you play the game the way it's intended to be played, it will take a while to unlock the Epilogue, which ties up the various loose-ends, for the most part, and adds in harder combat... and by that point, I was personally thoroughly bored of the combat and didn't put in too much effort in it, even using the instant-win mechanic on several fights. Though surprisingly, I didn't need too for what I expected to be the hardest boss-fights... which is weird... but whatever...
There's also the problem that the game isn't always... clear... about what you need to do to advance a bit of side-content. Not sure if that's a translation issue or what. The problem is more notable in the epilogue section. For example, there's absolutely nothing telling you that you're supposed to make Alisa horny in the morning in her Epilogue section, nor does it tell you anything about the components that make this easier...
Moving on once more, I will say that Nova Duty still has the same quirkiness and humor that the 1st game had. If you liked the writing and ridiculous stuff in the 1st one, you'll like it in this one too for the most part. It's just a shame that they tried a bit too hard to be "serious" in some aspects.
This leads to the reason we play these games... the H-scenes! Much like with the 1st game, Nova Duty is an extremely vanilla game. For all that it's a game about android girls and cyborgs, that isn't really used much aside from the looks of the various girls that the MC can fuck. The most out there it gets is with a foot-job. There's no hard rape. (Nova doesn't get raped period, but you can count some of the stuff that happens to MC as rape, lol, and some of the side-girls are in dubious consent situations.) The most you have is clothing fetishes I guess, and a small handful of threesomes where Nova is joined by some other girl in dealing with MC's dick. Basically, don't come into this game expecting anything particularly crazy in terms of kinks, because you're not gonna find any such things.
Still, the art is gorgeous, in my opinion at least, and the animations are a lot smoother and present in every H-scene. The art is also notably more consistent from what I've seen. Unlike Aino, it didn't feel like Nova's boob-size jumped around to an unreasonable degree depending on the scene... even if you can handwave it away with the "different components" logic. It also feels like there's more smut scenes in general than the original game, but I didn't actually compare them directly, so I may just be remembering wrong. The various side-girls in this game definitely get a lot more content than they did in the 1st game, that's for sure...
Now, its time for...
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All in all, Robolife 2 - Nova Duty, is still a pretty decent game+VN combo. I definitely recommend playing the 1st one before anything else, everything will make a lot more sense if you do. However, by that same token, I feel like the story of this one is weaker than 1st one, along with its setup. The combat stuff tends to overstay its welcome and become pretty tedious. On the other hand, the H-stuff is more plentiful, even if still uber-vanilla.
If you liked the 1st one, you'll likely definitely want to play the second one too. It might not be as great, but it's head and shoulders above a lot of other things I could name, and worth the time to go through.
On a final note, dunno what's up with the version in the OP. I didn't use that. I bought my copy off of dlsite when it was at a major discount and I didn't have any issues with it. Dunno what people got over in the OP or why so many peeps have issues with the game...