Conception II: Children of the Seven Stars

I don't like it. It took me too long to finish.

Nothing significant has changed and many things are actually worse compared to the first game.

-Graphics are worse, this seems to be a straight port from a portable
-Menus are slow but you need to go through them all the time to activate short duration buffs in dungeons
-Dungeons are just as tedious as in the first game
-Game systems like stats, elemental weaknesses and jobs are still as opaque as before. Have to check wiki just to have any idea where to find items required for rare jobs too (worse than the first).
-Quests are dumb, items needed for important gear unlocking quests are ultra rare (as in you may not find a single mob that drops them for hours).

I tried to find something good about the game (my play time says I tried) but honestly, save yourself the trouble.

i wanted to like this but too much reading

"Conception 2" is kind of a hidden gem, at least for those who reminisce for JRPGs from the days of old but can accept a more lightweight and quirky experience. The anime styling, including the use of real animation in cutscenes is inspired, and I love Spike Chunsoft for keeping this forgotten game design style alive. The game's overall set up is strange, as you have the typical "save the universe" style JRPG story mixed with a weird sexual dating sim. The game is not pornographic, but there are animations of simulated sexual positions so I wouldn't say it's totally clean, but even old RPGs like Lunar: Silver Star Story had this sexualized anime element so it's not really anything new for the genre.

This game is based on PS Vita/DS game so it's more simplified in terms of the game play and the 3D graphics are a little unimpresive, but if you can get past that you will probably find there is a decent amount of variety and complexity to the game play. You pick from 7 women to team up with and "mate" with them to create "Starchildren" which can be varied in teams of 3 out of 30 classes. The labyrinths are based off of the 7 deadly sins cliche. You go into each one, avoid and kill enemies and reach the exit. Along the way there are traps and items, but it's pretty sparse and uninspired. The walls seem like a watered down Kingdom Hearts game but the enemies have their own unique style. You attack as part of two teams and you will quickly notice early on that your starchildren are weak and get pummeled to death easily.

There is a whole second half of the game outside of the combat that involves leveling the city, interacting with the seven women and doing other rote tasks like accepting quests to kill enemies or mating at the church to create new starchildren. You can make the starchildren go independent to level the city, and early on this appears to be an easy way to exploit things to get extra cash and unlock everything on the map. There are dialogue sections at the academy that increase your bond with the girls that allow you to make new starchildren. If you want to 100% complete the game you need to unlock all of the dialogue segments and this is a nightmare if you don't know what you're doing.

You and the starchildren level up and learn new abilities and while the game seems easy at first, it actually ends up being nightmarishly difficult around the halfway mark. Your starchildren have a level cap that only increases if you make new starchildren when you and your companion are a higher level. At first I hated this, but later on I learned that you could drop them off at a day camp to level them in the background. There's also a leveling exploit with certain goofy looking Pokemon-style enemies that lets you earn 5-10 times more experience than you would normally get, and you pretty much need to use it because you need to be around level 70 to finish this game. Beyond this there are sub labyrinths that have harder enemies and better equipment, and certain items you pick up or pilfer off of enemies will unlock more powerful secret classes. In the end I settled on an Ether Sniper, Dungeon Master and Paladin class because this made my starchildren more balanced and better at dealing damage. You will definitely want to consult a guide because the game is cryptic and hard to figure out but even with that you will be very likely to ragequit if you aren't a seasoned RPG player. Bosses will kill you in 1-2 hits and the fact that the game constantly forces you to reset different classes means you can hit a metaphorical brick wall that makes the game feel unwinnable if you get too frustrated to proceed.

With that said, I didn't care for this game until the second half and then I grew to love it. I got lost in the quirky variety of the game play and while the character's scenarios are all pretty trite and meaningless, they do have unique personalities and the routine dialogue got less annoying as the game went on. Further, the JRPG-style orchestral music combined with the weird JPOP and the anime style just made for a great presentation. I sunk 60 or so hours into this game and don't regret it one bit. If you're looking for a casual playthrough or something you can skim through and move on I would say skip this one because it's very demanding and will punish you horribly if you don't learn (and learn to exploit) all of the weird game play mechanics.

I was told this had "some of the deepest character creation in JRPGs"
I misunderstood how literal they meant 'creation'.

Combat's bland, game has both 'fast forward' and 'auto-fight' options so it can play itself, which kind of defeats the point of a 'game' does it not?

It's a very fun rpg/dating sim hybrid. Highly recommend it.

Basically an introduction to the Persona series for those who never played a Persona game before.

The game spends the first several hours constantly interrupting you with tutorial popups informing you of all the systems, but none of that matters due to how easy it is to walk over enemies. The characters hype up bosses that are killed in two hits to their weak points, and there's no need to engage with the turn delay system or repositioning your squads to take advantage of bonus gauges because fights end sooner if you just deal attack damage.

You produce better squads if you have higher relationships with the girls, and you level up your base by releasing squad members (children) out into the wild. Relationship growth seems to be limited because you can only engage with 3 relationship events before you need to run a dungeon, but nothing stops you from going into the first room of a dungeon and then immediately hopping out again to refresh the 3 event limit. You can just discard your children immediately to level the city; it doesn't matter if you feed it a level 1 or a level 15 child.

Boring dungeon crawls. Boring combat. The classes of your kids and girlfriends all feel the same because you never have to use their abilities to overcome any great obstacles. I don't feel like I'm planning ahead or strategically creating synergy between my units. The girls are all standard personality archetypes. Good voice actresses, but no surprises in the writing.

Mediocre as a game and as a story.

I bought this in a bundle
it's basically Conception plus, but slower, and feels grittier

idk it just feels worse to play

First played this on the 3DS and it was definitely one of my favorite games on the system.

The grinding to get past the Envy dungeon is so long that you practically need XP boost patches to make the game remotely playable. Combat is repetitive and levels are all bland mazes with different colored wallpaper. The only reason I was trying to finish this game was on principal and now it won't even launch.

great game

its fun to play when you mastered the mechanics and gameplay of this game also I would suggest that you play this with a controller because when you play it in a keyboard you might kinda irritated but if you are persistent I think you will adapt to the controls in keyboard nonetheless the combat is okay not really excellent or great but I think it is acceptable.

Have kids with your waifu and jiggle physics. Thumbs up!