Conception Plus - The weirdest first hour I've ever played.

CriticalGaming

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I was looking around for random game deals online while bored at work last week and I saw an interesting game called Conception Plus: Maidens of the Twelve Stars, a game that kind of looked like a Persona style game in which you build bonds with allies to make yourself stronger for the dungeons. Never heard of the game before, but hell it was on sale so I thought "why not?"

The game I put into my Playstation last night.....was....well let me just talk about my experiences in the first hour of playing.

You start off in character creation, though you cannot change the look of your character at all you can change their name and their birthday. There is a heavy emphasis on the zodiac sign related to your character's birthday which I suppose makes sense given the title of the game. Then the final question the game asks you before starting is whether or not you want the Maidens to wear swimsuits during cutscenes or not........ummm....ok then.

The game starts out in a visual novel style thing, where your main character describes a little bit about his life. Apparently your parents are dead and you've been living with your childhood friend. This friend has asked you to come up to the room of the school to tell you something important. The first words out of her mouth are, "I'm pregnant." In typical visual novel style you are given choices in how to respond and I asked, "Is it mine?" Because apparently this game is a soap opera. She tells me that it HAS to be my kid because we've been living together, and she hasn't been with any other boys, but our characters has never actually slept together so she's a bit confused about how it's possible. IM CONFUSED.

Then the sky turns into a portal and we are sucked into another world. Where the game puts you into a 3D dungeon in much the same way that Persona 4 does. Fully explorable, but mostly just small rooms and hallways. You run through a couple of doors and a cutscene plays where our friend screams and clutches her stomach.......where she then vomits up her unborn baby that actually is a shadow monster.

This brings about the combat. It's turn based JRPG combat with a positional system in which you can move you character to one of four positions around the enemy. This allows you to hit the front, sides, or backs of monsters, which allows for extra damage if you attack the weak side. An interesting system with some potential. Sadly this is the only fight I got to do in the first hour because before I can go back to the dungeon I have to meet up with the people of this new world I'm in and start BREEDING the maidens.

To summarize the magical world of....someplace?... real quick it works like this. There are 12 shrines that hold all the world's impurities, each shrine uses a God of one of the twelve zodiac signs to contain the impurity. Every 10 tens, one of those shrine guardians dies and has to be replaced. To replace the guardian the world summons a Star God (that's you) from the real world and creates a "maiden" in the magical world. You and this new maiden must breed a new guardian for the shrine to prevent the impurity from overrunning the world.

Where does this impurity come from you might ask? Well.....it is generate by people fucking in the world. Sex is a sin that creates monsters, but people have to do it in other to keep making new people, so this world runs on a 10 year cycle.

Except this time your childhood friend is one of the Maidens for some reason so she is with you and it turns out that becoming a Maiden causes your impurities to build within you until you expel them. This explains why she felt pregnant and then puked up her unborn monster for you to kill. By killing the shadow thing, she has become a pure maiden which you can breed with now.

Though breeding isn't quite right. Yes you breed, but it's not sex (though the innuendos are uncontrollable in this game goddamn). Instead it's a magical ritual in which you create Star Children, and you take these kids into battle to cleanse the shrines and eventually have on of them become the new shrine guardian thus protecting the world for another 10 years.

Except in this game, some calamity happened and all the shrines are fucked up. So you have been chosen to breed all the magical girls to make a shitload of Star Baby Pokemon.

With dating sim elements in which you build your romantic relationship with the girls first. The better your relationship the more powerful your kids will be.

So that's the first hour of the game as I understand it.

All i can say is......WTF?

Combat seems like it will be fun though, so I'm gonna see where this goes.
 

Drathnoxis

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Ah, good old Conception. The game to give us Classmating. I watched SGF play the demo of Conception 2 and I was a little disappointed he never did a full playthrough because it's such a bizarre concept.

But there's a lot of games with really bizarre concepts out there that you don't hear of very often. There was Pocket Masters, the mobile game that was literally Pokemon but all the pokemon are anime girls. I wonder if Nintendo ever sued them, I know they had to change the names a little after launch. It had a really fantastic translation too.

Then there was Akiba's Trip, where you kill anime vampires by forcibly yanking their clothes off so they get vaporized by the sunlight.
 

Phoenixmgs

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But there's a lot of games with really bizarre concepts out there that you don't hear of very often. There was Pocket Masters, the mobile game that was literally Pokemon but all the pokemon are anime girls. I wonder if Nintendo ever sued them, I know they had to change the names a little after launch. It had a really fantastic translation too.
I think you're getting that confused with Xenoblade 2 ;)
 

Elvis Starburst

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I played the demo of Conception 2 on my Vita (Or maybe it was free on PSN, I forget). It was one of the worst experiences I've had. Catchy as hell battle theme that I really liked, the rest of the game left my opinions exactly like yours. It didn't last more than an hour or 2 before being deleted
 

CriticalGaming

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I played the demo of Conception 2 on my Vita (Or maybe it was free on PSN, I forget). It was one of the worst experiences I've had. Catchy as hell battle theme that I really liked, the rest of the game left my opinions exactly like yours. It didn't last more than an hour or 2 before being deleted
Yeah I'm basically done with the game. The premise seems really interesting but the way the combat and the mechanics work within are just tedious unfun and unrewarding grind mechanics.

You have to max the level of your star Kids, only to grant them independence to level up the town and grant access to more features. Which on the surface is fine because the kids can only get to a certain level, and each time you bond with a Maiden and produce kids with them, the new kids will have higher level potentials. For example your starter kids can only cap at level 10. But the next round of kids will be able to get to 13 or 15, then 20-22, and so on. So I guess the idea is to level them up and get as deep as that power level will take you in the dungeons then let the go on their own and level up a new batch.

The problem is that the new kids always start at level 1, so you have to go back to the begining of the dungeon to level them up in order to progress further with them. It feels like you are constantly fucking resetting for no damn reason. And that shit is annoying, especially since the abilities the kids seem to get don't really help.

Ablities in the game feel just generally weak and wasteful when compared to your basic attacks hitting on the weak side of the enemies. This is not because the attacks don't do extra damage because they do and sometimes even apply status effects. The problem is that the abilities are fucking expensive and you'll only be able to do two or three before having to use a healing item to restore MP. Which you need the MP to cast heal spells because the kids don't have much HP and even the weakest enemies can wipe a team in a hit or two. Which means your offense is just crippled because it's not worth using spells for damage when you absolutely need the healing.

So the ideas in Conception are actually really interesting and have a lot of potential. The execution sucks though.
 

Dreiko

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Conception is one of those games I had passing interest in but not enough to import from Japan and the USA version was dub only so I skipped it. Then I read about the next game or a ps4 version of one of them anyhow being censored due to sony's brainfuck of the last couple of years so I just checked out of the series in its entirety. I already have a ton of Jrpgs to work my way through as it is.
 

Dalisclock

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All i can say is......WTF?
I mean, just by the plot description I can tell it's Japanese, because, in the immortal words of Hal "Otacon" Emmerich, "It's like one of my Japanese Animes!".

I've never played it(likely never will) but yeah, that's about all the opinion I can form of it from your description.
 

CriticalGaming

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I mean, just by the plot description I can tell it's Japanese, because, in the immortal words of Hal "Otacon" Emmerich, "It's like one of my Japanese Animes!".

I've never played it(likely never will) but yeah, that's about all the opinion I can form of it from your description.
Nobody can complain about anime having unoriginal ideas that's for sure.
 

Elvis Starburst

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Yeah I'm basically done with the game. The premise seems really interesting but the way the combat and the mechanics work within are just tedious unfun and unrewarding grind mechanics.
What I can't figure out is where the strategy is for combat systems like the one in Conception, or stuff like the earlier Neptunia games. In Conception the enemy turns and attacks, you just loop to their weak side, they turn to hit you, you just move again... What's the point? Is there supposed to be more depth to this later on? All I see is an extra step that you'd be stupid not to take advantage of while calling it "strategic." And the Neptunia style combat I've seen on the Vita titles where you move around a circular battle field and attack the enemy, again, on its weaker side, is supposed to be strategic? Unless it pulls a D&D and enemies provoke attacks of opportunity if you move near them, I don't get what the point is. You and the enemy can just move wherever, then you reposition and it makes no difference at all.

Maybe I'm missing something?
 

CriticalGaming

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What I can't figure out is where the strategy is for combat systems like the one in Conception, or stuff like the earlier Neptunia games. In Conception the enemy turns and attacks, you just loop to their weak side, they turn to hit you, you just move again... What's the point? Is there supposed to be more depth to this later on? All I see is an extra step that you'd be stupid not to take advantage of while calling it "strategic." And the Neptunia style combat I've seen on the Vita titles where you move around a circular battle field and attack the enemy, again, on its weaker side, is supposed to be strategic? Unless it pulls a D&D and enemies provoke attacks of opportunity if you move near them, I don't get what the point is. You and the enemy can just move wherever, then you reposition and it makes no difference at all.

Maybe I'm missing something?
I think the idea is to maximize damage and avoid incoming damage as much as possible. Because there are a lot of attacks that the enemy will "charge" marking a section around them that will get hit and you have to move out of that section to avoid the damage. However later enemies will charge deadly attack in the same section that is also their weak point so you have to weigh options of taking the hit or losing a turn of good damage. But since there is no time limit, there is never a reason to eat these attacks.

however I've had several occurances when they charge up an attack an unleash it before the party in that section have a turn to move out of the way so it just wipes out my team for no reason, which felt cheap every fucking time it happened and it happens a lot.

But yeah, the combat isn't very deep from what I've seen after about 10 hours of play.
 

Elvis Starburst

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I think the idea is to maximize damage and avoid incoming damage as much as possible. Because there are a lot of attacks that the enemy will "charge" marking a section around them that will get hit and you have to move out of that section to avoid the damage. However later enemies will charge deadly attack in the same section that is also their weak point so you have to weigh options of taking the hit or losing a turn of good damage. But since there is no time limit, there is never a reason to eat these attacks.

however I've had several occurances when they charge up an attack an unleash it before the party in that section have a turn to move out of the way so it just wipes out my team for no reason, which felt cheap every fucking time it happened and it happens a lot.
I guess part of the strategy is to weigh out if a monster can potentially do that and just wreck your team if you get too greedy. Either way, never really was a fan of either of the combat systems I mentioned