Episode 32: Conception 2: Children of the Seven Stars—The One With The Boobs

Episode 32:  Conception 2: Children of the Seven Stars—The One With The Boobs

Platform: PS Vita, 3DS

Release Date:  Japan: August 22, 2013. North America: April 15, 2014. EU: May, 14, 2014

Difficulty: Easy

Pricing: $34.99 (Vita), 19.59 (3DS, on sale). Don’t pay $34.99 for this game.

Podcast: Download, iTunes, PodOmatic

[Triche know what his priories are.]

The Good

• Granted, I had very low expectations, but Conception 2 wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. 
• The main storyline did actually keep my attention and I wanted to keep going with it to find out what happened next. The individual storylines for the heroines were more hit or miss, with some of them being well done, like Fuuko and Serina’s, and others, like Feene and Torri’s, seeing like there was very little thought put into their plots. Ellie’s storyline, about hunting down Heretics, could easily be the base for a pretty interesting game premise.
• Although the Heroines fit pretty easily into set archetypes—Fuuko is The Girl Next Door, Narika is The Shy One, Ellie is The Little Sister, Chloe is The Big Sister, etc—I did like all of them and enjoyed the character scenes with them. I also appreciated that the Heroines were all friends with each other instead of the game being one big jealous catfight over the main character.

The Bad

• If the Hero dies, it’s game over, which is the most annoying game mechanic every invented.
• The dungeons were So. Boring. They were far too long with far too many monsters. It was a mind numbing grind, running through identical corridors and square rooms to fight palette swapped monsters. I took forever to finish this game because the dungeons kept making me want to doze off. The actual battle system isn’t all that interesting either, even with your parties of various Star Children.
• The game introduces potentially interesting systems, but doesn’t follow through with them. For example, near the beginning of the game, you’re warned to talk to the NPC characters to open up options. This matters once, with getting Fuuko into the Aquatics Club, and it never happens again. Conception also could have done more with the touch event system it advertised but rarely used. 
• This is a weird criticism, but I actually wish the game has been more perverted? Despite the premise, the game was kind of tame. You’re calling yourself Conception, you’re rated Mature, and the battle system revolves around pseudo-teen pregnancy. You may as well go all out at that point instead of limiting yourself to glowy naked bodies during classmating sessions and touch events that don’t go beyond holding hands. 

The Ugly

[Chlotz REALLY likes going to bathrooms with other guys]

The Lowdown: If you have insomnia, this game is a great sleep aid. The storyline sections were interesting enough, but the dungeons were incredibly dull. And there’s a lot more dungeon crawling than there is storyline. If you really want to play this game, buy it used and try to break up your times in the dungeons with time doing character storylines. I tended to burn through all the character storyline sections—because I actually enjoyed those—and then I would go on to the storyline dungeon. I think the game would have been more enjoyable if I had used the character storylines to break up the tedium of the dungeons. Especially since there’s no consequences for leaving and re-entering the dungeons or progressing to the next day in game.

  

Music Credits

1. RPG Roundup Theme Song: "Video Game Theme," J. Arthur Keenes Band. Creative Commons Attribution License.
2. Conception OST