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Volcano Princesspicks up the torch from games such as Long Live The Queen and The Life And Suffering Of Sir Brante in providing a visual novel experience guiding a young child through their formative years, and preparing her for the adversities she will face in adulthood.
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These styles of game often introduce their own spins on the formula that can take a couple of failed attempts to get a grasp of. These hints are aimed at saving that time without spoiling the plot or advanced gameplay.
Don’t Panic At Misspending Your Stat Points
It’s an unfortunate truth of RPG games that sometimesyou can lose before starting by making a wrong choice at character creation. People familiar with this may be worried when thefirst decision they are offered is to choose their daughter’s blood type and birthday.
The choices you make here, thankfully,will not impact your stats or lock you out of a particular ending.
Similarly, this isn’t a game where success is determined by focusing on only one area to the exclusion of others. Befriending characters who benefit one of your stats willoften require an investment in other stats,requiring you to balance your learning. This also means that no stat points are truly wasted.
A good example of this are the knights Lebsa and Hackett that you are able to befriend on a warrior playthrough.Learning about them as people requires you to develop your emotions, and asking their advice will actually increaseyour intelligence. The game rewards both specialised and broad focuses.
Choosing The Right Parenting Style
Immediately after the previous scene where you chose blood types and birthdays you’ll encounter one of the important choices of the early game. You’re offered three parenting styles and your choice between them will have a strong impact on your daughter’s stats and how she responds to your future choices.
These choices correspond to thethree main paths you’re able to take in the game:
This is a good opportunity to decide which direction you want to take a playthrough. The three options here correspond to thethree talent trees focused on combat, life and social skills. You’ll be offered similar choices at intervals, and they follow a trend: the commitment you make willdetermine optional objectives that will speed up your advancement on completion.
Specialisation is rewarded when youassign a study plan at the end of each turn.Meeting or exceeding the stat requirements of a lesson allows you to complete it faster, with some able to be cleared in a single day if you overwhelm them with raw stats. Completing a lesson rewards you with more stats in that area, allowing for some level of snowballing once you get the ball rolling.
Don’t take these commitments to mean you should only study in one area. Even for a specialised playthrough, there are benefits to spreading out. Whileliterature and culture lessons broadly favour emotional skills, you can perform better indance lessons if you have a high strength and stamina.
Equally, there are lessons in swordsmanship that require a decent emotional score in order to properly perform knightly etiquette.
The three broad playstyles are colour coded in each major choice. Red favours warriors, green Scholars and purple Artisans.
Each Resource Is Managed Differently
Betweengold, action points and mood,you are offered plenty of resources to manage right from the first day. Action points you always want to spend fullyas they are restored at the start of each turn. You can restore this by resting at home, by the lakeside or eating meals.
Don’t confuse the action point system for the energy system used in combat. During combat you may store energy for later turns, which is often needed to make use of more expensive abilities.
In contrast to action points, you’ll want tobe more conservative with your mood. The moment your mood falls below 50your attributes will be heavily penalised,slowing down your growth and making many skill checks impossible.
Keeping your moodaround 70 can act as insuranceagainst any unexpected events which may require you to spend mood, whilenot wasting any events that give positive boosts to mood. A complete week of lessons will oftenconsume 50 mood,so you will want a way tobring it up both before or after you end a turn.
Some activities that seem like they would cost mood will actually reward it. Adventuring and combat might cost you sanity in a game like Darkest Dungeon but here you’ll be rewarded witha generous mood boostfor the satisfaction of success. Performing poorly, bybeing defeated early in a dungeon, will damage your mood. Gathering friends who are able to go adventuring with you will improve your performance in dungeons and give downtime activities that also improve mood.
Keep An Eye Open For Free Stuff
Shortly into the game, you’ll unlock the ability to travel around on the map. The tutorial suggests for you togo to the local restaurantand explains thatsnacks and foods can restore mood and action pointsrespectively, for a small price in gold. If you ignore this advice and go to the lake you’ll discover the game’scooking and farming systems ahead of time, as well as discovering a goodtraining spot for strengthby rowing.
Once the tutorial ends, you can only engage in major social interactions with three characters each day,gaining stat points, rare items and large amounts of affection. Alongside these, there aremany activities you can do that do not consume resourcesor have their own dedicated resources that are easy to gather.
Each character can bechatted with once per day for a small boost in your relationswith them. Also, if you see something sparkling on the screen, that means you canclick on it to collect resources such as gold or cooking ingredients. They aren’t tremendous by themselves but will add up over the course of the game.
Some of the free actions the game offers, such assleeping at home or relaxing at the lake, will upgrade with repeated uses and offer greater boosts if you remember to come back every day.
Use The Game’s RPG Elements
It isn’t too often in this genre thatrandomness features heavily, with many visual novels preferring static checks to see if you meet the conditions to achieve an outcome. Genre fans will still know that it’s always worth keeping multiple saves leading up to key decision points.
Volcano Princess features a modest dose of randomness. Sometimes you’ll gain better outcomes on activitieslike foraging and crafting, more akin to what you might see in an RPG.
An early example you’ll encounter is the alchemy store that offers cheap equipment and stat-boosting potions, butoffers a measly five percent chance of getting what you purchaseunless you invest in the relevant skills and talents.
You couldopt to do risky actions like this at the beginning of a turnand then reset the turn if the outcome isn’t to your liking. One example is the jobs that you are offered: You are provided four options, but if none of them appeal to you, they can bechanged by saving and reloading.
Jobs are a multi-month long commitment, so it can help a lot toreset for one that offers either a good salary or a bonus item that you’re able to use.
Unlike games where saving and reloading to get better outcomes is an intended part of the gameplay loop, it can hurt the fun to manipulate the game’s system this way. Decide for yourself whether this is worthwhile, or reserve it for a second playthrough where you can use it to avoid content you’re already experienced and experiment with different playstyles.
Thecombat system is also closer to an RPG than a life simulator. With the right strategies and equipment, you may squeeze the combat system to get more resources out of it. A useful companion for this isNina, who has a low cost healthat greatly increases how far you can go in a dungeon.Enemies in the game hit hard, and your HP totals are low,so having a way to mitigate or restore damage is important for longer dungeons.
Make Use Of The Game’s Achievement System
The game offers a prestige system upon reaching your first ending. Even a bad ending can provide you with opportunities to do better on future playthroughs asyour achievement points are converted into starting boosts.
you’re able to also use some of the knowledge of upcoming events to optimise your playstyle. An example is thebirdie festival, held at the same time each year in Summer, whichtypically offers a large boost to mood and allows you to spend the resource more aggressively in the month before.
you may examine the achievements window on the top right to see what outcomes you can aim for and which endings you are missing. Certain achievements can be completed mid-run andoffer a motivation bonus that multiplies your skill gain for one turn: clearing these at the start of a turn allows you to benefit from them for longer.
Some achievements can be easily completed several at a time, such asgaining a new party member and then immediately clearing a dungeon with them. This can easily stack a50 percent boost to your stat growth.
