Conception: First Impressions

June 5, 2012 by awesomecurry Leave a comment

For the lack of a better image

Yes, I realize that no matter what kind of topic I write about this game, it will sound awkward in the title. At least I’m not making Let’s Play posts (which I might be doing for some games I play in the summer, inspired by a blog full of R-18 drawings. Don’t ask.), or else it will be “Let’s Play – Conception” and get me a bunch of strange looks from passer-by anons.

Conception: Ore no Kodomo o Unde Kure! is a cross between a dating sim and an RPG, but much more on the RPG end. By that I mean the RPG elements are much better done than the dating sim elements. The game might have 12 pretty girls for you to choose from, but it’s a dungeon crawler at heart, and not a easy one either. It’s also not a short game. There’s at least 12 bosses, each corresponding to a zodiac sign, and probably a final boss as well. I’m 22 hours in, got creamed by the second boss multiple times. Basically you have 4 dungeons, each corresponding to a season. Each dungeon has a common 10 floors, and then splits into 3 paths that correspond to each zodiac of that season. The branch paths are 5 floors long, and after beating one of them, the enemies in the dungeon will get stronger so you’ll have to tackle a dungeon of a different season to balance things out. I’d imagine that after the first 4 bosses, the others won’t take as long to reach. Since you’ll only have to tread 5 floors instead of 15.

It’s a pretty forgiving game, since if the MC dies you’ll just get sent back to town with 20% of your cash lost. You can also save anywhere in the dungeon. Forgiving != easy though, as the battles past floor 10 of each dungeon get tough. Enemies become overleveled real quick, I regularly ran into level 50+ monsters when my MC was level 20. That’s a pretty clear way of saying “you need to fucking grind.”

The battle system and teaming up children is really fun. First, let’s explain the system. You and your children surround an enemy in battle, and you can choose to move to the enemy’s front, left, right, back or go to another enemy. Each enemy has a weak direction that you can hit for more damage (and boy you need to deal that extra damage). You have the turn system not unlike Luminous Arc 3’s, which means how far back your next turn gets pushed depends on your current action. Moving to positions and attacking or using skills will push you back more than simply attacking. Enemies and allies have moves that target certain directions. Normal attacks hit what’s right in front of them, but there are attacks that can hit from the left of their current position, or a combination of several directions. You can stand behind an enemy and hit it from the left. It’s fun, and actually gets strategic since enemies will hit you for a lot. Their strongest attacks also tend to target the direction of their weak point.

Your party consists of you and your 12 kids. 4 kids make up one battle unit (so like 1 party member), so their stats combine and they move together. However, they still have their individual stats and skills. Let’s say a team of 4 kids get hit for 1300 damage. The kids don’t take the same percentage of damage, so what usually happens is that the weaker kids (e.g. magician, cleric) will go into “matryoshka mode,” which is basically being unconscious. If your cleric died, that team of kids won’t be able to use the cleric’s skills. However, all you need to use are regular healing potions to revive them. If all 4 kids faint, that team of kids is removed from this battle and will be resurrected outside of battle with 4 HP in total.

The child-creation system basically forces you to experiment with different classes and combinations (or at least strongly suggest you to). You make kids with one of the girls that you’ve interacted with, and the level cap and stats of the kids depend on your relationship with the girl and her stats. You’ll get a team of 4 kids at the very beginning, but they can only go up to level 10. Increasing the girl’s affection meter will also increase their child’s level cap, as well as starting stats. You will have to constantly discard kids at the beginning due to the early low level cap, but fret not, as your newly-created kids will likely start off with better stats. Equipment also matter more than levels. Kids also level up much faster than the MC. Better starting stats unlock more advanced classes, although I’m willing to bet there’s some secret classes that have to be specially unlocked.

The dating sim part is very simple. Each in-game week you can meet with 3 girls, where you will have a conversation with them and answer their 3-option multiple choice question, as per dating sim tradition. Sometimes you can give them gifts or have a “touch communication” with them, but I haven’t encountered many of those yet since I’ve been spending too much time dungeon crawling. Unlike most dating sims where you are supposed to go after one girl at a time, affection here matters for gameplay so you’re better off going for everyone to get a wide variety of stats and unlockable jobs for the kids. I’m mainly going for Lilith/Lili (a girl with split personality), Reone (sexy nurse lady) and Ruka (tsundere twintail shrine maiden) because I like their designs and stats. Oh Reone and her ATK stat…

Interacting with girls increases your KP (Kizuna Point), which can be used to either make more children, or to make a team of your current children turn into Gassin form in battle. When you use Gassin, your 4 kids turn into a mecha, with better stats and skills. I’ve been using lots of KP making children, so I haven’t delved deep into the Gassin system yet.

Off to some grinding, because I got creamed by the second boss multiple times and some people in real life like to yell at me for running into dungeons at low levels.