Amayui Castle Meister: My favorite out of the four

So I kind of finished Caslte Meister. I’m missing two images and I know where they’re from but one of them basically requires me to play the whole game again. And that sounds awful but if you’re levelled enough to finish the append material, you can finish a new game in maybe 4~5 hours if you just do the bare minimum. I just don’t want to, it’s a waste of time. And that’s coming from someone who finished each spirit’s training section, I’ll talk about it later.
So yeah, the game is huge but it’s a lot easier to go through than Kamidori. So I’ll do some comparisons and then I’ll go deeper in just castle meister. For one thing, money becomes irrelevant after like 5 chapters and you also don’t have to pay rent like in Kamidori. I guess you can buy basic materials to skip some farming but overall the material you need isn’t going to be in the store. I’d have to look at it but there’s probably less stuff to craft compared to Kamidori as well, except that’s not saying much and it’s still a shit ton. I also feel like there’s less side quests compared to Kamidori too but that might be my memory failing and thinking they had more than they did.
This game only took around 120 hours but that’s with a lot of material grinding. If you just don’t bother using the spirits at all, you can save quite a few hours. I did save a lot of time grinding where I just cheated in the exp so you level up once after every fight instead of every 10 to 20 kills. You can technically cheat a lot of stuff in to skip the grind, honestly I should’ve done it for the spirit training but I didn’t, lol.
There’s only two routes this time around but they’re much higher quality, but the append and new game plus material is overall weaker. Like they both end strong whilst the Kamidori endings where pretty whatever compared to the character interactions. In Kamidori, Asmo gets introduced in ng+ and it explores the concept that the world has cycles, that the world we live in now was in the past of kamidori, and that it’ll eventually get to that point again. Alongside that, Dion eventually becomes the meister, a rank that you can’t get in basegame. In Castle Meister, it’s just a group of solomon demons invading Avaro’s world. It gives you 50 turns and you really only have like 45 since there’s some waiting involved. Most of the cameo eushully angels aren’t around and even the one you do have basically has no scenes from what I can tell. You do get cup noodles after collecting a bunch of cards but that was Black Eushully’s gimmick, not the normal white one. It is kind of harder than Kamidori but since keeping your units alive is so much easier, it’s not really a problem. And that’s because you have hp potions up the ass and it doesn’t cost a turn to use them. They also removed the costume system and put in a monster capture system, and that’s used to buff your 6 spirits. And this fixes one of the issues in Kamidori where most of the units get benched once you hit the 60s since they stop getting large stat boosts compared to the main 4 characters. Except now it’s to the point that if you spend the time, these spirits will be better than any of your units for a long time. Until again the 60 to 80 range where your normal units get double action by default whilst the spirits need a 5* monster and they’re pretty rare to get. Basically you get them when you’re fighting the extra areas after the solomon demons, and I think you can get a few during the demons but not the elemental ones. It’s kind of poorly designed when you’re basically finishing their training and there’s nothing else to really do outside of ap05 and even then, that’s easier than the dungeons you do to get those 5* monsters.
The side characters are also kind of 50/50, they’re a lot more streamlined now. And what I mean by that is a unit could be introduced early on in Kamidori, and scenes would be sprinkled here and there and eventually goes over a story point that revolves around them. And it was to the point that the side characters outshined the main cast, which also happens in Rhapsody. In Castle Meister, outside of maybe Kisnir and the dragon, the units get introduced and their arc is probably over in the next chapter. Not that they’re gone from the story all together, but their best scenes have already passed. Like the fire fox was extremely well done and the closest you have to that is the dragon who’s optional.

Anyways, that’s all for comparisons. Some parts were kind of short since I was going to handle it here anyway. The plot is actually a lot better this time around. It focuses on Fia extensively compared to having 3 lackluster routes that Kamidori had. Fia is the best part of the vn, the easiest comparison is that she’s Aqua from Konosuba if she was useful and giddier. The voice acting on her is top notch and carries the rest of the group. The rest still fill their role, like Ior and Dieter, but Fia handles the scene.

Honestly I don’t know why Avaro, the protag doesn’t get voiced lines for at least the endings since they’d come out better with them. He does get voice lines when a mission begins so I don’t know why they couldn’t do the two endings.
So the plot starts out with Avaro starting a job in some ruins as a technomancer. A technomancer is basically a mechanical engineer that delves with magic. You don’t absolutely need to have a grasp with magic but you’re going to have a harder time. Anyways, Kisnir is the acting bodyguard, they get attacked and fend off some enemies. Avaro falls and finds Fia in a crystal, it breaks and they enter a contract. Turns out she’s a god but Avaro thinks it’s bullshit for awhile. The ruins is actually a fort and Fia can move it, Avaro uses it as his work station. Fia has amnesia and wants to go to a specific place that’s off limits due to some religious rules. They get in better terms and eventually get together whilst doing requests, gaining new allies, converting some enemies into allies and fending those who just want the fort.
Each chapter has something going on, it’s a good vn to go through when you have a backlog of videos to watch. The gameplay goes on for awhile and it’s just longer due to how much I farm in atelier type of game. I’d rather it lean more to what it was doing in the first 3 or 4 chapters where they’re just going places and making stuff for the people around the area the protagonists are travelling too. I get that it’s not the main point of the game when they’re meant to be going to their destination but some of these villains are kind of annoying. It doesn’t help that Avaro changes slightly in these scenes and becomes pretty preachy and won’t shut up about what’s right. It just happens more often than I’d like and it gets annoying.

So there’s two endings, and you’re most likely going to get the good ending without even trying unless you actively try to speedrun it and ignore most of the optional scenes. Like you have to fuck up multiple times to get to the bad end and I think it’s intentional because I find the difficulty in that route to be tougher than the good ending. There’s a couple of mobs in there that act like regenerators from dead space, they just keep coming back and it’s just pretty annoying when they’re both damage sponges and do an ok amount of damage. But yeah, you have to actively do some shit trades; they give you evil music when they show up, they’re not trying to hide it. Alongside that, you have to actively ignore the dragon Katorit. Funny thing is that I think you can do that in two ways. Not talking to her at all or just ignoring her after she leaves the party for a specific mission but I haven’t tested the latter. You have to finish both routes to unlock Append 5 from what I can tell, though it doesn’t have to be on the 3rd ng+, you can reload a past save and it’ll be unlocked there. I only knew about that after I did my 3rd run.
Speaking of Katorit, she’s really cute and it’s kind of weird that she’s into Avaro once she can transform into her adult form. I wouldn’t mind swapping the first part of append 5 and gave her some more scenes hanging out with the group. She has a couple of good scenes but she can’t compete with Fia. But none of them really can, they all have their moments but I think Mikeyu is the weakest of the bunch, then maybe Mikschana but that mainly pertains to her character interactions. My favorite characters are Dieter and Yourin, the fire spirit. And since I got to Yourin, he had an interesting bit in the start where Fia doesn’t really feel a link with him and I thought that’d be brought up later but it never does. Maybe they meant it as a foreshadow that he was a spirit that belonged to one of her family members but I’m not sure. And I guess I’ll get this out of the way. In kamidori, the elemental spirits were a main focus, not much at all in those one. And it’s a shame because the first four were full of personality and could be used for further character interactions but they never did. I think they might be optional, I never tried not capturing them, it just sounds like a bad investment. There’s a few scenes with the wind spirit but the others are basically ignored outside of another scene that leads to a dungeon for ng+ content. They do have their own append in ng+ and it’s great, I wish there was more of it. Honestly I’d rather they spent time expanding them and the other units instead of adding a Yuela cameo that lasts for awhile.

The units vary in usefulness depending on where you are. Like Avaro is pretty useless endgame whilst Dion was useless to competent since he became such a damn tank at that point. You could technically feed him stat ups to get to that point but you could also just feed it to better units. The best thing about him is that he doesn’t have a cost. Fia is kind of whatever for a long time and the main thing she was good at was summoning the spirits. Where if you did a proper formation, she became the best tank. But once you beef up your summons to the max, you can honestly just let her stay in the back. Ior is generally always good, she has high attack and speed, and her evasion is high enough to counter her low defense. Kisnir was complete ass in the beginning but gets to shine midgame and higher where she becomes a boss killer alongside having really high evasion. Dieter kind of sucks, but he has some range. Mikeyu was too glassy at first but eventually becomes useful when her damage is high enough but honestly she’s still on the weaker side compared to some of the other units, Roseline is in the same circumstances. Liche was a beast at midgame and still holds out ok in ng+. The amount of defense she has lets her tank a whole squad of units by herself, the downside is her attack isn’t the greatest and there’s maps with high spawn rate so she suffers in those maps. I think Katorit is also kind of midtier and so is Mikschana until she gets a specific spear. Outside of Lily, all of the ng+ characters carry too high of a character cost for you to run them. Like you can carry two level 90 units and be around the same cost as one level 50 unit. I’m not sure why I didn’t use Lily outside of her own content, she’s really strong. And then there’s the 6 spirits. I rarely used the ghost ones, the wind and fire ones are op. Especially the fire one, Yourin. This dude not only hit like a truck, but he also tanked for days. And he comes in with Prevail relatively fast which buffs your damage if your hp is under half. The earth one is a weaker version of Yourin. And the reason why the wind is better than water is because she has projectile defense and drain, she just couldn’t die as long as the enemy wasn’t strong to wind.
Before going into spoilers, I’m giving this an 8. There’s a good mix between scenes and gameplay. Gameplay eventually takes a lot more time if you’re doing NG+ stuff and I’d recommend cheating in the exp because that’s a huge grind. I feel like Kamidori had some better parts but Castle Meister has a much better plot going on alongside livelier banter. It’s one of those things where I feel like the 3 main plots in kamidori is like a 5 or 6 but the side characters were a 7 to 8. Whilst this one is more like an 8 in the main plot and then it varies from a 5 to 8 for the side characters. The training system is way better than the clothes but I wish there was more sidequests. It didn’t have the town cohesiveness that Kamidori did. They bring them up here and there and they’re important as plot points but you never see them hang out randomly in town.

Spoilers

So the worst conflict points are on the Infrus Royalty. You meet the third prince Gilch or whatever his name is and he’s just an asshole. And since he’s the first you see, you’re thinking oh this is the over the top one used as a parody. Basically the black sheep of the group and he really wants to take the fort and is willing to use a whole city as bait to get it. And that’s how he fucks up because the people notice that your party members go and help out everybody to evacuate and they all turn on the prince. So now he’s super butthurt and you beat him again later on and he’s the final “you didn’t win” move and launches himself out of the building and dies. But by the end of the game, you find another royal member and she’s just as annoying. And it’s kind of understandable because maybe she and Gilch might’ve been better to each other since they’re both royalty. And it’s not like she wanted the fort, she just wanted to destroy it. Until you play the bad ending and she’s just as bad as Gilch. And it was to the point where I think the game was trying to show how much destruction this fort can cause and why it needs to be controlled. And true enough, but I was basically rooting for Gaidal at that point because the Infrus Kingdom should be overrun, their leaders are complete ass. Like it’s to the point where if there were no drawbacks and Gaidal just found another fort and did what he’s doing, I wouldn’t even feel that bad, fuck those people. On the other side, a pretty good enemy was the Ice Duke Kalmerg. Yeah he’s technically an asshole but you can see what he was going for and he has his own morality. It helps that he’s a dragon so it could be like a culture thing but once he loses he steps inline and helps out the team.
The good ending has some really cool scenes, I was streaming parts of it and the last couple of bosses were going pretty crazy. The last boss ended up being kind of boring but it was a pretty good setpiece. The bad ending has something similar but it’s pretty whatever in comparison but I liked the overall plot. It gave me some small kira kira and Kana Imouto feelings in there.
After awhile the gameplay becomes kind of annoying where a lot of things become tanky or you’re overrun by mob spam. All that is only really shown in the ng+ stuff and the final fights. The fights and where they’re placed is a lot cooler than Kamidori but also weaker than Rhapsody’s ng+ stuff. There was one funny scene where one of the Solomon demons got really butthurt because I took their treasure so the boss fight became somewhat harder but at that point I was pretty high level to compensate for it. There’s also a couple of dragon ball references but my favorite was one of the Mikschana’s spears where it could hit anything from like 9 spaces away so I was poking everything. Too bad her damage output wasn’t the greatest but part of that is because I never got her stupidly overlevelled, I think she got to 77 after I finished everything. Which is still kind of high, the most endgame stuff is around 85~90. Though I did have Ior up to like 90.
There was also some annoying enemies where they had too much shit going on for them. Like they would have soul shield that blocks a lot of damage, and then Projectile Defense, Drain and Prevail all at once. And that point it’s like, fuck off. And most of that is only ng+ stuff, like the first two parts of Append 5 were ass to go through. The mob spam was just too annoying. Though, if you put in a lesser extent, the final boss in the bad ending was also pretty annoying. Where you basically had to fight a boss while trying to not die from the 5 mobs attacking you that will just revive in the next turn if you kill them. And it’s not like they die in one hit either, it was just a waste of turns, at the most I’d kill the wind one in the back since her damage was pretty high against two of the units I used.