I like features that add replayability to a game as much as the next guy. At least, I assume I do; I can’t truthfully say I’ve gone around polling other gamers on the issue. But, y’know, if people have a generally favorable opinion on game replayability, then we’re in the same camp.
I like New Game+, whether it be a general, static kind as found in most RPGs, or one you can customize a bit, as the Tales of series features. I’m fine with RPGs having multiple ways to solve quests and sidequests, thus encouraging to players to go through a second time to see the other possible results of their actions, as with many western RPGs like Fallout and Mass Effect. I like it when games have multiple story paths based around the philosophical and moral stance of the player, encouraging multiple playthroughs to see each path’s events, like most Shin Megami Tensei games or Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume. I found it interesting that The Witcher 2’s second chapter had essentially 2 entirely different stories to tell, depending on whether Geralt had backed Roche or Iorveth in the first chapter--kind of like getting an entire extra third of a game for free. I’m even generally not too unhappy about the RPGs which lock significant story content behind the first playthrough, requiring you to play and finish the game once before giving you the ability to play it through to its full extent--stuff like Sakura Wars 5, which only unlocks the option to romance Ratchet after you’ve completed the game once, or the more common scenario of Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers, which requires you to play through the game twice to get the better ending.
Yes, I generally embrace RPGs’ replayability-enhancing features. I’m not exactly looking to sacrifice more time to a game than I have to, but the results are usually pretty positive in the genre.
Gurumin, however, can go spelunking in a garbage disposal.
Who the hell was the madman on the development staff of Gurumin, known here as Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure, who decided to introduce the character of Popon to the game during a second playthrough as an NPC, but then only allow her to become playable after you beat the game on four separate difficulties?
That didn’t seem crazy to anyone around the Nihon Falcom offices? When the idea of Popon was batted around for the first time at a meeting, not a single staff member spoke up to say, “Hey, maybe forcing the player to play an initially charming but, let’s face it, not especially mentally stimulating game on Easy, Normal, Hard, and Happy Mode, a difficulty setting we’re just making up right now, in order to unlock a second character is a little excessive?” No one looked at the plan to make a player have to go through the same 2 dozen levels or so 4 separate times and thought there was anything wrong with that?
To make a bad situation worse, they didn’t even implement this ludicrous requirement well. Let’s compare Gurumin’s replayability strategy to Fire Emblem 16’s, for a moment. Both Gurumin and FE16 require the player to experience them at least 4 times to get their full effect.* In Gurumin’s case, we’re talking about unlocking Popon as a playable character, while in FE16’s, it’s a case of seeing all the game’s paths in order to fully understand its lore, events, and major characters, as all the details of such won’t be available to the player on any single given playthrough.
It’s a crazy time sink either way to achieve this 4-playthrough-goal, but Fire Emblem 16, at least, is smart enough to make the journey to that destination somewhat worthwhile: the latter half of each of the game’s paths is different from the others,** allowing you to see variations each playthrough, ones which are perhaps a little more engaging than simply “this enemy takes 2 more hits to kill now.” Each path of FE16 tells the story of a different focal character, the purpose and events vary to some degree, certain important supporting cast members are given prominence, and you’re given more understanding of the game’s story as a whole each time.
By contrast, what you potentially get from your second, third, and fourth playthroughs of Gurumin are a couple different outfits for Parin. Woohooooo.
What’s possibly the worst part of this is that, if you’re mentally unhinged enough that you actually DO go and spend the time to beat Gurumin 4 times and unlock Popon...you find that she feels like a bit of a cop-out on the developers’ part. Gameplay-wise, she controls basically the same as Parin does--the only real differences, to my understanding (I sure as hell ain’t gonna put in the time and monotony to personally confirm this) are that she can’t equip headgear, and she does crazy damage during the final battle since her sword is dragon kryptonite. That’s seriously it! 4 entire playthroughs doing the same things, fighting the same enemies, with a single character...and the developers couldn’t even be bothered to code a player character who could change the formula a little!
And worst of all, Popon not only plays identically to Parin, she speaks and acts identically, too! And that’s not an exaggeration. When playing as Popon, spoken dialogue just reuses Parin’s lines! Supposedly the cutscenes even still show Parin! How fucking lazy is that? And no, this is not excused by the fact that Gurumin makes a clever little joke about it by having Parin confirm with Popon, when switching out with her, that the latter got Parin’s script for the game. The fourth wall is not there so you can get away with being lazy, Nihon Falcom!
I like Gurumin overall, but as far as its situation with unlocking Popon goes, it’s both absurdly unreasonable in its demands, and insultingly slothful.
* In theory, at least. In practice, you can totally just ditch the Blue Lions and miss virtually nothing of importance or interest.
** Yes, the Church and Golden Deer routes are virtually identical in terms of the battles you fight, and not strongly dissimilar in terms of their events, either. But there are variations, most notably character-based ones, nonetheless. It’s not a case of experiencing a literally identical game again, at least.
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