VN - Others - Completed - Wizard's Climber [v1.10] [SofthouseChara]

A "Classic" Game as it is kind of Old so some amount of jank with less handholding should be expected.

What should be understood first is what is the Goal of the Game as a Game.
Since it's an "Auto-Battler" Combat with a Raising Sim Management aspect and no direct control outside of some behaviour scripting.
That should give you an idea that it is about making Builds and Strategies and Testing them.

Now you can still do some amount of micromanagement, especially in the early stages and it might help you figure out how the behaviour works. You can put it on Slow and try to analyze your Character's actions and the opponents actions and see what would be a good strategy to counter that. If you die it means you have a problem with that encounter so you need to figure out how to handle it better. Once all encounters are handled well with a build that works for most that's when you can set things to Fast and press Ctrl and watch as Towers are Conquered easily.

For the whole multiple playthroughs thing, that might lead to another misunderstanding so it's a good idea to know what to expect from a First From Scratch Playthrough.

You might have noticed that initially you do not have much Mana for spells so for the first playthrough you need a Weapon.
They all have their advantages and disadvantages and some may be better than others.
There might be some obvious traps like if they have too little uses with low damage and no AoE so don't expect to clear towers with them, but they can be great for Duels in the Tournament.

The Tournament also has enemies that can give you an idea and what kind of builds are good and their weapon advantage that you can try.

For my First Playthrough I have gone with a Hammer Build and I had no problems with clearing towers and it also has some good High Damage Skill and even better AoE later in the skill tree at the cost of some mana, although kinda slow and not as nice for Duels.

Although you won't be winning the Final Tournament in the First Playthrough since Viola is Hard to Defeat, you should not have a problem with the rest.
Once you can reliably farm the Queensbell Tournament you will be racking in the cash and stats. It's also necessary for unlocking Elle and the Adept Mode with better inheritance so that is a good Goal for the first playthrough.

Some extra tips:
Take all the level 1 passives you can, some give you 5 stats at level 1 of the skill like Defense.
Set most of you Skills to Off and experiment with the Distance Range as most weapons work better at some, only enable what you need for that build and strategy and maybe set abilities that use mana to Secret.
Bosses in Towers are a Stat Check, either you kill them fast or they do, so do more grinding for health, defense and attack.
For later Towers, you pretty much need a certain magical skill to sustain you.

If your build is screwed in this run which is possible depending on the skills you invested, you can try again in the next playthrough with at least 30% bonus and respec. A Respec is a good way to think about it.

Overall (4.5/5):

Probably goes in my top 10 games or close to it. I usually dislike games on a timer like this with so much that is easily missable, but this game just does everything so well that it's an extremely rare exception for me. The VN stuff doesn't bog you down or overstay its welcome with long drawn out scenes and is balanced well with the gameplay time. The characters are all really charming and fairly unique, of course the main girl gets way more focus though.

This is not a normal rpg game, you've barely even started the game by the end of your 2nd run. Every run will feel different story and gameplay wise. I'm at the end of my 6th run and I still want to keep playing and wish there was more. As long as you're patient enough with the awkward combat ai and obscure story progression, you will be rewarded with a really unique/amazing game.


Story (4.5/5):

Can't really complain about much here. Every time you play you get alternate stories/personalities/dialogue and even additional characters. The game really does a great job of showing you alternatives to the original story as you progress through different difficulties. Stuff that was hidden in your first runs becomes apparent in future runs. Sometimes completely new events take place. It's really fun seeing the main girl Celes' progression in particular. Her personality changes are great. The other girls get much less attention sadly, but they do have some of their own mini story arcs/alternatives.

The game skips scenes quickly if you've already seen the scene, making future runs so much quicker. That helps the story and gameplay balance tremendously. The only thing that might irk some people here is many alternatives and unlocks are rather obscure. This is the type of game where you'll almost need to look at unlock conditions for extra difficulty settings to advance in a timely manner. If you just play to be efficient, you may never reach some of the unlocks naturally.


Gameplay (4.0/5):

The gameplay, especially the combat AI is something that can be really offputting at first. There's a pretty large learning curve when it comes to how to use the AI properly. You need to know what to avoid and keep things fairly simple. The more options you try using, the more likely the AI will fuck up. It will also take time to figure out what skills are worth using, thankfully runs don't take too long and you'll be able to retry fairly soon if you fuck up.

The game is designed in a way so there aren't a lot of ways to autobattle safely early on without worry and it can get repetitive micromanaging Celes in your first runs. In at least your first couple of runs, the game is basically turn based as every movement needs to be used properly or you'll get wrecked. Nothing worse than Celes running into melee range and getting surrounded for no reason until you have a proper build for that. Eventually you'll be able to automate more and more battles as you progress in runs until you can just turn your brain off and glide through pretty much everything, but it takes time. The game is designed well to bring that to you eventually, but if you're impatient, you'll have a hard time continuing.

Something really interesting/special here is that the ability progression is designed so well that you will end up going through many different playstyles in all your runs. It helps keep the game fresh through so many playthroughs. Pretty much every playstyle and weapon type is viable once you know what to grab from various skill trees.

There is a nice variety in game play as you continue playing with all the difference in towers and tournaments and quests and such, but it takes time to get to a lot of it. You'll often get the feeling like "I'm too weak for this, I can't wait to retry this when I'm stronger", and the sense of satisfaction when you can come back to something you failed the first time and succeed in a future run is sublime. I wish there was even more of that.


Art (4.5/5):

Nothing bad here. The characters are all really attractive and well designed visually. About the only hit to it is that it can seem a bit dated as it's a bit older of a game, but it's quality for what it is is great.


H Scenes (3.5/5):

It's kind of "vanilla" and follows a similar theme throughout (Kinda rapey at times even with consent). There is a ton of variety when it comes to characters and H scenes but it's widely spread out and many H scenes are hidden behind obscure requirements. I haven't even unlocked most of the scenes yet in my 5+ runs, I know there are many scenes hidden behind certain jobs. The H scenes are less the focus in this than most H games, which might put some people off. It has at least as much or more H content than most games though.

Having now 'finished' the game 3 times I have a pretty good idea what this game is about and I applaud it for what it tries to do.

Basically, this game is a loop and you keep replaying the story in new modes, carrying over more stats, money, gear and furnishings from your previous times and learning more of the overal gameplay mechanics. I have yet to beat what appears to be the final boss, but I got them down to half health before losing this last time. I still have a few more retries to go.

if you pay attention and *learn* from our failures, this game isn't nearly as hard as some folks may want you to believe. There's also a bunch of ways to conclude the story, and most don't require you actually winning the final battle.

The game doesn't hold your hand and expects you to pay attention and figure out how best to play it. There's actually some pretty interesting synergies between magics, weapons and skills.

There are not that many H-scenes, the ones that are there are not that great and figuring out how to get all of them seems to be nigh impossible. Yet I still managed to find more enjoyment in this game than 90% of the instant-gratification, heroine-corruption and cash-grab patreon games that litter this site.

TL;DR

Not that great a porn game. Not that fantastic a game in general either. However, it does try some very interesting things and there is more to it than meets the eye. A very, very rough diamond that I managed to enjoy far more than I expected to.

After Playthrough #3 I finally managed to delete this for sadly, this at best is a time killer but not really a fun one. The H is by no means worth any effort I had to see when I found out just where most of the hardcore H scenes are: Unrelated short stories inside the story.

So first regarding the H: Short scenes, rather Vanilla albeit rapey, aged badly (big censorship, little CG variation) and you won't find much of it. The Base HCG count of 47 might sound like much but several are wasted on a scene that is shorter than a modern single HCG scene.

The story and characters also suffer from way too short scenes which may be a plus... since you will see those scenes a lot. Blame the gameplay.

The gameplay basically demands you to play the game 5 times at least and further wants you to figure out how to romance the characters in time. Sure, that could be called depth but the game is too swallow and frustrating to make such a depth enjoyable.

Crafting a strategy for your bot-tess to follow could be neat but only if you could trust the auto-gameplay to do as you told it to and display basic intelligence but approaching an enemy first and then casting a buff? Casting a heal over time instead of an instant heel when gravely injured? The game is full of such stupid AI decisions that a 10/10 tactics skill won't redeem.

Trial and error learning in entertainment should be an experience for oneself, finding one's own mistakes and improvement (rewarding foresight), not about avoiding the mistakes of others. RL has enough of that BS which one has no power over.

Ya want that tragic heroine be like-able and cute? Well, she is paying your rape back with being a bitch in battle. So as an advice for anyone who dares to try: Keep it simple, go for passive skills. Even buffs and debuffs must be used sparingly.

On a side note, I'm actually tempted to be a bitch and go for the lowest rating because the deafening dying sounds of enemies, you will hear many from, is nearly unavoidable. You better mute the game when you CTRL through the floors.

In a word, this is bland.

As the other review pointed out, you can't do much in a single run and if you go for multiple runs you only get to keep some of your progress. Even if you cheat and give yourself a ton of money (which is possible, but tricky) it doesn't give you a huge advantage in the tournament or dungeons. I think without an exhaustive walkthrough followed several times through the game it's not possible to get what might be considered 'true routes'.

Also the sex stuff is sort of tacked on with a stereotypical plot device.

OK, good points: There are a few nice bits of humour in the game. The reactions you get when you are a 'magic user' who kills everything by punching them to death or using your sword is fun. The graphics are professional. Can't really recommend though, unless you don't mind walkthroughs and patience.

Have really hard time writing this review. Plot is really solid, CGs are excellent, there is a varied cast of nice girl, battle is fun (but quite random), started this game full of hopes because I enjoyed bunny black series.

After first run something was not right, seems you can only do as much in single gameplay (that takes 3-4 hours to complete and you need to start NG+ to unlock more content). Here when two major problems started:
* you lose your progress keeping only 30% of levels (which increases as you progress but it's still loss)
* game has a lot of events that are time gated and have various prerequisites
This means there is not even possible to get through single gameplay trying random options to watch different event because you need to grind back loss cause by starting new game. I really enjoyed games like bunny black, kamidori or rance 6 because they had no time pressure - I could just wander around and grind random crap or watch events or do whatever I liked without losing anything. Here to get good run I probably would need walkthrough or just take fucking notes to know who has birthday when to trigger appropriate events.

To sum up I feel cheated. I was prepared for a grind but current implementation is frustrating - I don't like losing my progress. Feel it artificially prolongs this game and serves no real purpose. Would be solid 5/5 if not this.