I finally picked up the base game (I don't really want to try the expansion before it's translated), and decided to note down some thoughts now that it's over. I'll probably take a look at a bit of the postgame later, but until then, I'm curious about what your thoughts are. Did you struggle in the same ways? Am I doing something terribly wrong, or interpreting things incorrectly? Does the expansion fix any problems I mention? I wrote up a little bit on my team, too, but unless anyone is interested, I'll keep it to just thoughts on the game itself (you'll notice some references to things I never actually said, since I removed a hefty chunk of text that isn't terribly important).
Right from the start, the forced experience share played a huge role in shaping how I approached team building. For the unfamiliar, the experience share (specifically, post X and Y) provides the entire party with half of the experience gained from any defeated Pokemon, and full experience to any Pokemon that participated in the battle. This means that any experience gained is potentially multiplied up to 2.5 times if only one Pokemon participates, and is then distributed among the party. The result of this is an incredible overleveling issue, and the game becomes far too easy.
Fortunately, in X and Y, you can shut it off, but that isn’t the case in Puppet Dance Performance. At first, I hoped the game would be balanced in consideration of this feature, only to quickly be proven incorrect as my puppets inflated several levels past their peers, especially the ones with quick leveling rates. I knew this would completely suck the fun out of the game for me, partly from the trivialized difficulty and partly from not using individual puppets as often, so I came up with the plan to switch between two teams to prevent overleveling. I was worried this would still result in the latter issue, but thankfully I still had fun with every puppet I used.
...Except, as you might have guessed from mentioning it a few times, the puppets that level up quickly. These puppets forced me to rotate them out faster than the others, with meant I never was able to use them in very many battles... In the end, as much as I tried, I couldn’t fix all of the problems the experience share caused, and that forced puppets (Koyai and Boal) out of my party that I really, really wanted to use. I didn’t mention this before, but Miniki also suffered from this fast leveling issue and being unable to participate in battle very much as a result, but her few experiences in battle were, at least, good ones.
Aside from how much I strongly disliked the forced experience share... The environments in Puppet Dance Performance were very, very bland. By the early midpoint of the game, the dungeons were becoming massive mazes... And absolutely nothing more. The map building technique, for every single map, had become the most basic maze structure (one main path splitting into a dead end), and nothing more, making exploring become increasingly tedious as the adventure went on and the mazes got bigger.
The main Pokemon series usually doesn’t have this issue with maps because it includes puzzles and prizes to make exploring feel rewarding, making everything feel much less tedious than if the dungeons were nothing more than something to walk across. But other than a single sliding puzzle in an optional room, the rest of the dungeon locked until the postgame (so I haven’t explored it yet), there are zero puzzles in Puppet Dance Performance. Because of that, the lack of prizes for exploring the countless dead ends was made much more noticeable. Far, far too many times have I explored a dead end and checked every rock, mushroom, or sapling, positive that one of them will hold a hidden item, only to be sourly disappointed. Briefly, one dungeon surprised me by hiding many bits of gold dust in the rocks at dead ends, and for a short time, exploring wasn’t so dull. But that lasted for that dungeon only, and I ended up becoming so frustrated that I couldn’t help but go straight through the last few dungeons. I didn’t care about exploring dozens of dead ends and fighting horribly underleveled trainers (20-30 levels under their bosses) for three or four TMs and some healing items.
Even without using HMs (which Puppet Dance Performance does have, in the form of key items), the Pokemon puzzle designers have shown off puzzles requiring nothing more than walking, like sliding puzzles, breakable tile puzzles, and spin tile puzzles. Having a few of these spread around the dungeons and overworld, even without thinking of a unique puzzle, would have made the dungeons actually fun, and not such a tedious task of checking every corner. The maps also could have strongly benefited from a few areas that weren’t just a series of corridors... Even outdoor areas felt terribly cramped because of how rivers and trees were used to make them into just more mazes.
Anyway... One last thing I disliked was the balancing of levels and strength. As I mentioned before, normal trainers ended up stuck at the 30 - 40 range from the late midgame until the end, when I, despite using two teams, grew from 40, 50, 60, and ended in the mid 70s after completing the final boss fights. The bosses of every area, however, usually outleveled me by at least five levels with their strongest, and the fights usually ended up in one of the boss’ Pokemon KOing everything in my party in one hit until I found the one thing they couldn’t KO, and either stalled it out with Leech Seed or Toxic or KOed it with something it was weak to. Almost every battle was all or nothing with the bosses: either they KO my Pokemon in one hit, or I KO theirs (or stall them out with Toxic/Leech Seed and revives and potions if nothing else).
Because of that, and the fact that I was still matching the boss’ levels even after dividing the experience between two teams, makes the low trainer levels understandable: I would overlevel if they were higher, and the fights would be tediously difficult if they were higher. From completing the boss fights, it seems pretty clear that there is an awful unbalance between attack and defense on a mechanics level. My Minoriko in World Link was so amazing because even she could survive even super effective attacks from opponents ten to twenty levels higher, making her invaluable for enduring the poor level curve of Java, but Miniki here, despite being able to choose EV placement (World Link’s Minoriko had hers distributed randomly), still could not survive almost any super effective attacks, and even neutral ones were tough on her. It’s possible this unbalance stems from the wide variety of >90 BP moves, or under the hood damage calculations, but regardless, it is very, very clearly there.
I had much more fun in Alpha Sapphire and Silver, challenging the Elite Four and Red horribly underleveled (ten-fifteen under the champion and thirty under Red), since it forced me to use interesting tactics to overcome those challenges, instead of using my STAB and supereffective moves to sweep everything. I felt much less of that challenge in Puppet Dance Performance, since being forced to find the one doll that isn’t KOed in one hit and taking the opponent out with that was much less fun. The battles were much more black and white, hitting unfun extremes despite my levels being much closer to the strongest (the highest enemy puppet was level eighty).
Considering all of that, is there anything I liked about the game? Obviously, the dislikes come to mind more. Yes, I did enjoy using some puppets in my party, and seeing them excel, but the experience share and unbalanced difficulty meant I could have felt that more from another game. Exploring the maps made me really, really hate Gensokyo by the end (Another World did that too, for different reasons... What a shame). Any neat location (...just Hell’s core, now that I think about it) was ruined by being a bland maze with nothing interesting to see after arriving for the first time. Most Touhou characters appeared as nothing more than cameos for a brief fight, with the significant ones being nothing more than a boss fight so you can get a thing or go somewhere. Byakuren in particular forced you to fight every member of her crew and then her just so Suika could stop blocking the way to the final dungeon, and afterwards you were then assaulted by every “rival” (Marisa, Reimu, and Sanae) in very quick succession. Everything felt very arbitrary and forced, like you were being forced into a tour of a cardboard representation of Gensokyo by someone unfamiliar with the details.
...Oops, I just started talking about the flaws again. Well, the sprites did look really, really nice. All of them were super adorable. If I wasn’t so frustrated with the tedious dungeons, I would have tried to catch all of them. The idea of limiting your earned money to selling items that drop from wild dolls and trainer battles was a nice way of making that more interesting, and made for a nice difficulty I appreciated in the early game when I had to be much more stingy with my items, which thankfully ended right when the dungeons got really tedious so I could fill my bag up with repels and pump my dolls full of potions and revives in the unfun boss fights. The Prismriver’s house actually made for the only part of the game I was glad to have experienced, since... Now that I think about it, it’s the only thing the game really did anything interesting with (and it wasn’t made into a stupid maze). Exploring would have been so much more fun if there was more neat interactive stuff like that house...
The conclusion to the “villain” plot was also surprisingly neat and well implemented, reminding me a bit of how well Touhou Mother used its characters and their themes to make every participant feel important, unique, and building a really amazing new plot by the end. Of course, it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a “but”... The only interesting part to the “villain” plot was the ending, ignoring the forced cameo of another character afterwards. The build up to that never seemed significant or meaningful. The final villain showed up one single time before the final showdown, purely to bump into you, and none of the times the fairy grunts did anything in the rest of the story felt more meaningful than padding out certain sections of the game with lots of battles. If the plot was woven into the dungeons to break up the monotony of running through corridors, that could have been a much more painless, even enjoyable experience. If the final fight was more than stopping the fairies from being somewhere for no particular reason, with a feeling of an actual threat behind it, the ending could have been a bit more than, “Oh, huh, that’s kind of interesting, I guess.” So... I liked what was there, but it just makes me wish there was more of it so I didn’t have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for mildly positive feelings.
EV mechanics were significantly streamlined. Every battle awards PP, which can be either used to learn new moves (they become available at certain levels) or assigned to certain stats, capping at 64 in a single stat, and 130 total. Normally I wouldn’t mention anything this basic, but... Well, like I said in the last paragraph, I’m trying to find to find anything positive I can say about it. I really do like focusing on those, since it reminds me of those positive feelings when I get to be excited about something that amazed me, but unfortunately, this game really didn’t have many of them. It’s a huge shame. The game seemed like it would be significantly more polished than the ROM hack Touhoumon games could be, and while, visually, it is (aside from how boring and featureless the maps look), every part of actually playing the game, from exploring, to team building, to reading dialogue, is terribly dull.
