40 Hour Thoughts On A Longer Than 40 Hours Game Nonstories

16 2月 2024

i am not done with the game, but i sure as hell want to talk about its crazy game design and why it might be one of my favorite games of all time.

what is nonstories?

good question. i am 40 hours in and i have no clue what the plot is about. it has connections to a previous game, UnExist ～夢叶わぬ道化達～, but in ways that completely mystify me.

i learned about this game from hadler (the true searcher of video games) who learned it from a viprpg user damu (だむ). damu said the best games they played last year was nonstories and labyrinth of galleria, which is incidentally one of my favorite games of all time.

and i also learned from hadler the game has a yuri harem in the second route, so that sealed the deal for me. 百合はいいぞ。

so let's talk about unexist first:

https://www.freem.ne.jp/win/game/14384

unexist is a free rpg maker game inspired by nepheshel, historie, and alicesoft games.

nepheshel, for those who don't know, is a game inspired by the likes of king's field and is translated into english with approval from the creator. @pig has written about nepheshel here but to summarize, nepheshel has inspired a lineage of rpgs that have interconnecting worlds/dungeons like dark souls 1 and there’s a town of amnesiacs, silent protagonist included.

historie is probably the more influential game in terms of historical influence since it creates this rather deep lore about the end of the world and features a timer that counts down every frame in the game. you have to speedrun through several worlds and figure out what to do to increase the timer, but also you get this delicious lore about how the world is kinda stopped in time.

i can say more about how interesting these games are, but i think it's also important to bring up alicesoft aka the eroge company behind rance series. the developer of unexist/nonstories is into alicesoft games and the way they introduce turn limits, encourage replayability, and ng+ bonuses. alicesoft is way too long to summarize, but i'd like to focus on two alicesoft titles that really remind me of unexist/nonstories:

galzoo island

galzoo island is a dungeon rpg tuned to the style of wizardry games but with a twist: you have to route the game. by that, i mean that you have hunt for events, trigger them to recruit party members, and speedrun the game before certain deadlines.

this encourages players to scout ahead dungeons and note down the sequence of steps they need to do before embarking on the proper run. if you don't plan properly, you'll make the game harder on yourself because the party members you could've recruited will appear as enemy characters from the rival character you're fighting.

i talk about the other details of the game here if you're interested:

https://twitter.com/highimpactsex/status/1457980602813083652

but i think it's important to know that galzoo's main appeal is this need to route, restart, and plan ahead.

rance x

it will be a disservice to say little about the game when it's the culmination of alicesoft's history and design philosophies as a video game, but that's what i am going to do here. rance x has the principles of galzoo but upscaled to the scale of world war 2.

you can embark on long campaigns to save humans from the demon army by walking on tiles. these tiles can trigger enemies, long cutscenes, or new recruitable characters. as the game goes on, you can start planning on how to build your party by doing specific missions in specific sequences. for example, you know a character might be useful for a later boss so you should pick the mission that has them, go on a specific pathway, get it, and then grind enemy encounters to make them stronger.

so in a way, rance x kinda becomes a deckbuilder game but rather than roguelike rng, you have to build your "cards" by picking certain missions in certain sequences to get the best party composition to take on some of the harder challenges.

i talk about rance x more generally here:

https://twitter.com/highimpactsex/status/1468999977946939392

but like galzoo, the most important part is that the game is about routing and grabbing important characters, items, and event triggers for later game content.

back to unexist, the previous game to nonstories: this takes the nepheshel/historie gameplay loop and update it with the alicesoft-isms introduced in the previous sections. you're not just going through metroidvania-styled rpg maker maps but you're supposed to be going through the game multiple times and taking notes on where to go next.

it's a pretty demanding game and that's why the unexist wiki encourages you to play the game from the sixth loop to get enough bonus points. in order to finish a loop, you have to go to sleep for 30 days and you need enough money to do that (thankfully, the starting town has enough items for you to do this). but it gets very silly to sleep so much that the world "ends" six times so you can ng+ your way.

i also found the gameplay loop too obnoxious for me to get through since, for spoilery reasons, you shouldn't level the protagonist up too much or you'll make the game harder. you end up needing to avoid enemy encounters and the enemies are moving in a random way.

i ended up watching these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK8fyb_Po-k&list=PLvQtxhc9w1otCxgMbQvlpr9ZEYEfoYhM7

all that said, i find this game kinda fascinating. as the screenshots of nonstories suggest, all the enemy sprites in unexist are handdrawn. the game is full of personality and the characters are all memorable (i kinda like how one of the party members is just an assassin who really likes killing). and the lore, all written in books you must collect, are unbelievably fascinating and relevant to the story of nonstories. it’s cool how it takes the idea of amnesiac protagonists in a town and turns it into adventurers wandering a massive dungeon connecting to different worlds. and the concept behind the gameplay loop is actually solid, just clumsily executed.

by the end of the unexist playthrough, i was deeply invested into the setting and it was a bit sad that i couldn't get into the game because i loved what the developer was doing in unexist. the story is very evocative and the backstories are unbelievably ambitious for a debut game. and i feel that if the gameplay loop was improved a bit, i would be in love with the game.

finally, nonstories

https://www.freem.ne.jp/win/game/28501

so when i heard that nonstories was going to explore the backstories in the books i've read, i got pretty excited. i'm enjoying the story a lot, but i have no idea how to describe the plot without spoilers and it's gonna be way too long and unreadable.

so let's talk about the gameplay, which is kinda why it's making me go oh my god this is the best game ever:

turn limits + routing

this screen is the main reason why i brought up galzoo and rance x. this screen will burn into your mind. you will never forget this screen and i think about it all the time while eating food or doing something else.

this is the screen where you have to consider what you should do next.

just like unexist, you have more or less 30 days per loop, but missions can time out after a few turns or are replaced by mandatory events. you won't see all the events in a playthrough because plenty of events will time out regardless of how optimal you're playing. you need to experiment with different missions and see what rewards, characters, and event triggers you could get.

i'm at the part of the game where i need to consider the items and equipment i'll be getting in future missions. while bonus points are useful for higher initial levels and better exp rates, the main difficulty of the game after three loops revolves around knowing which mission to pick. the obvious missions are the ones with recruitable characters, but soon i'll need to consider where to procure upgrade shards to make endgame weapons that make fighting certain final bosses viable.

the game also has branching paths, not as extensive as rance x where new stories are made, but they hide new events and really important items. i've been picking the routes with a lot of monsters because they give me exp and money, which will be very useful in the long run. every step i take is pretty meaningful because i know i'm building a party to fight a final boss i have no idea about and that i can't really return to these dungeons/maps. there is no "free battle" i can use to grind my characters up. the stuff i've done in this one turn (called action in the game) is all i have. the endgame for each route is just me armed with the culmination of all the steps i've taken against a greater challenge.

so every decision you take does matter and you can screw yourself over by forgetting to recruit a character, not getting enough exp or money to buy the healing supplies, or missing event triggers entirely that could help you in the long run. and these missions can also be quite long too if you haven't read the story content: it's possible to play these missions for 20 mins to even hours (more on that later), so more the reason to plan ahead and think about what missions you have time for irl and how much brain energy you can muster for the session.

resource management

i'm a fan of games that handles this aspect: shoot em' ups and breath of fire dragon quarter come to mind. these games see every aspect like enemies and items as potential resources to help you finish the game: in dragon quarter for example, enemies don't respawn so they cannot be milked for more currency -- there is a fixed conversion rate: an enemy encounter will give you xyz rewards and nothing more and nothing less. this means the limited enemy encounters become a kind of resource to rely on: you don't want to "spend" all the enemy encounters away but save them for a rainy day.

nonstories doesn't really go that far, but as i said, dungeons are not something you return to so you can't grind forever[^1]. rather, it becomes all about healing supplies and mp. very early on, you'll have enough money to purchase 99x of potions, hi-potions, and weak party heals.

but later on, there's a mission that took me two hours and i've calculated the number of potions used:

that's a lot of items and that means also a lot of money.

that two hour long mission is very stressful for me because there's very, very few saves. the game may offer save tiles in random tiles (rng), but they're not something you can depend on. you have to take long risky journeys and fight through enemies that can take down your party easily; there is no way around it. you're going to be healing a lot either through items or mp.

the better items that will save my ass like mid party heals are also extremely expensive:

starting from what is selected and going dodwn, the list is as follows:

they're pretty expensive. while you can get the phoenix downs through regular sessions, i find mid party heals to be the most useful and somehow the most uncommon find. i don't feel comfortable without sinking money into it because they've saved my ass from some of the tougher boss fights, especially the final bosses of the loops.

also, you might be wondering what the hell is bp, so let's talk about it. bp is a point system inspired from the likes of Galzoo, Sengoku Rance, and Rance Quest where even regular attacks use up currency. your characters can theoretically not be able to attack anything if they don't have any bp left. you may be tempted then to just use regular attacks and save the better attacks for later encounters, but certain enemy encounters require strong attacks because otherwise you'd be using healing items afterwards to heal up.

so you're juggling how strong your attacks are, your healing items, your mp (healing drains the same mp you use for attacks), the branching paths you could take (more monsters to fight or take the safe route), and the money that will be used to replace your healing items or buy higher tier equipment. this balancing act is a constant threat you're facing, especially in dungeons that will take like two hours with few saves.

this makes every session stressful and it's great. the game punishes you if you're being too risky or careless. for the third loop, i've lost around 8 hours to poor decisions, bad RNG, and just pure stubbornness fighting a hard encounter. it's pretty common for me to lose a run twenty minutes in and restart the game. the two hour long dungeon that traumatized me was so scary to me that i didn't want to lose any progress and i just kept marching on, avoiding diversions that will give me more enemies to fight.

and because saving is such a luxury in nonstories, i feel a huge sense of relief whenever i see a save tile. it doesn't matter if it's a checkpoint or i'm near a boss fight; i'm glad that i could reach it. it's exhilarating to see the hours of losing to some shitty encounter finally break through. every ounce of progression i have is unbelievably rewarding because losing is real and i am one step closer to understanding the overall story of nonstories.

conclusion

all in all, i really like what i've played of nonstories. the gameplay is engaging and i cannot stop thinking about the game because i'm thinking what's the next step i like to take and about the weird story so far.

and i know that the game is going to reiterate even more on what i've seen so far and do some fuckery with the bonus points. the extra challenges are apparently even more hardcore about this routing resource management bonanza and i wonder when the hell i'll get to that...

i like the story by the way and i'm deliberately avoiding explaining this until i'm done with the main story. it's just very difficult to explain even a synopsis of the game. all i can say is that i'm impressed enough that i've said it is like the rance x of free doujin games. the amount of worldbuilding, different settings, and characters in a rpg maker game with handdrawn sprites is nothing but incredible.

i look forward to playing the game more (twitter thread) and seeing my party lose my mage character for the tenth million time again, so i have to restart the game. it's fun and i want more people to play it.

[^1]: i'm not sure if this works in nonstories yet but in rance x, there is a very interesting exception where you can intentionally lose a battle and therefore waste the turn. however, you keep the rewards (exp, characters, money) you get and this makes "grinding" possible. based on the mechanics, i think this should be possible but it wouldn't be something you can rely on.