黒い瞳のノア～Cielgris Fantasm～

This is a game I added to my SRPG list because I thought it might be the same kind of “Simulation”RPG style game as the Atelier series. While the game is clearly following off the success of Atelier Marie, it’s much more of a regular RPG in an unusual style, rather than a simulation with RPG elements. Ultimately the game is pretty smooth and easy, but also has a lot of wasted potential — there was a sequel for WS or GBC planned but it was cancelled.

The game begins with a story opening — Noir and her friend Destin live in the rural village of Shamul. They are exploring one day when they accidentally unseal the Dark Lord, who turns Destin to stone but for some reason leaves Noir alive. She is visited by the goddess Nil, who grants Noir magical powers. Noir decides to go on a journey to find out how to save Destin.

The game has a calendar system, although the only things that take time are travelling and resting the night. At the beginning there is no clear purpose to the system, but eventually Noir learns that if she does not save Destin within 3 years, he will be permanently lost.

At first there’s not much to do except travel around and accept jobs from the inns.

The jobs are mostly of three types: beating a monster in the area, escorting someone to another town, or delivering a package to another town. The jobs all have time limits. As you travel around to the different towns, you will start seeing event scenes with various characters — Bernal the adventurer, Duran the priest, and other people.

You also fight monsters.

The system is pretty standard, each character has the yellow bar that fills up according to their speed, and when it’s their turn they act. You have attacks and spells, as well as defend. The big feature of the system is that almost any monster can be captured by Noir and then it will be in your party.

6 is the maximum party size. You can hold up to 64 monsters. They level up and learn spells, and after some events you will unlock a place that you can upgrade the monsters with items or teach them spells. You can also buy spells for Noir. There’s no equipment for anyone.

Fairly quickly you will learn the main goal of the game — find the seven sealed magics left behind by the goddess Nil, which you can then use to defeat the Dark Lord. Each of the magic is in a dungeon, most of which you have to find through events.

The dungeons are as above; you explore them, fighting both random monsters and set monsters. The set monsters, as well as the treasure chests, go away permanently once you deal with them, so you can make several trips into the dungeons. One annoyance is the inventory limit; you can only hold 64 items, and there are a lot of items of unclear purpose and no way to store them.

Once Noir recovers the 7 magics, it’s time to go to the final dungeon and defeat the Dark Lord. I might have been somewhat underlevelled but I managed to defeat him with my last MP as everyone but Noir and one monster were dead.

There are eight endings to the game. Two of them depend on you completing the game in 3 years — this is quite easy, I wasn’t using a walkthrough and I finished the game in less than a year and a half. If you do this, Noir is able to save Destin, and you can either choose to immediately get married and end the game. At this point Noir and Destin go off adventuring together.

If you choose not to do this, you can play the game for another 3 years and then there will be a separate ending. I’m getting the remainder of this from a walkthrough site:

The second set of endings happens if you defeat the dark lord after 3 years but before 6 years. In this case, if you have the “jewel of revival” (which I had), Destin is revived but catatonic. If you don’t have it, Noir decides to give up her life in exchange for Destin’s.

The third set of endings happens if you still haven’t defeated the Dark Lord in 6 years. If you don’t have the 7 goddess magics, the game ends and you lose. Otherwise, the goddess will immediately transport you to the Dark Lord to fight him, and in this case he will have a second form (Dark Dragon). If you lose to the Dark Lord (first form), the game ends and you lose.

If you lose to the Dark Dragon, Noir has to give up her life to seal the Dark Lord, or if she hesitates, one of her companions (with a high friendship rating?) will appear and sacrifice their life. If you defeat the Dark Dragon, he self-destructs, killing Destin. Noir is so upset she goes on a journey.

My overall reaction to the game:

As usual for Gust games, the art, music, and general presentation is great. I like the monster recruitment system. Exploring the dungeons is fun, and the battle system is fast and streamlined while still offering the possibility for more than just mashing attack.

My main criticism is how empty the game feels overall. It’s almost like a skeleton of a game that never got fully implemented. Completing the game in 3 years requires virtually no planning, making the calendar system kind of pointless — I know some people don’t like a calendar at all, but if it’s going to exist, it should have an effect on the game. I would rather see a game where on your initial playthrough you will probably get one of the 3-6 year endings, and then you can replay to be more efficient to get the best ending.

There are a lot of places to go and events with various side characters, but they don’t have much of a purpose. The characters don’t join you, give you useful items, open up additional endings, or anything like that. There’s no “extra” menu like the Atelier games have where you can view all the pictures you’ve seen during the game. There are whole locations (like the interior of the king’s palace) that seem to have no purpose.

So this isn’t a bad game, but it’s not a particularly good game either.