Hanako Games

Skip exams?

#1 by AngelBen - Nov 5 2019

Honestly, I'm bored of the game now, simply because going through the exam dungeons over and over and over is so tedious. It sucks out my motivation to play. It didn't seem as bad in Horse Hall for some reason. But I'm wondering if there could be a way to skip the exams after you've passed them once - like the way you can skip puzzles in Fatal Hearts

Re: Skip exams?

#2 by MillaMaxwell - Nov 5 2019

Hmm... I feel like this wouldn't fit as well in Magical Diary because the exams aren't necessarily always solvable depending on your spell list. For example, if on Playthrough #1, I diversify my activities and have a few spells of each color by Exam #2, I can beat that exam pretty easily. But on Playthrough #2, however, I only study white magic every day of every week and so it is literally impossible to pass that exam. Then it wouldn't make sense to let the player skip it and automatically pass because the character hasn't earned it.

I do agree that the exams can get pretty tedious on repeat playthroughs, but the only way I could think of to implement something like this would be to make them only skippable if you have the same spells (and adequate stats) that you used to pass an exam a particular way in a previous playthrough. But there's so many variables in a solution like that that it's unlikely to be worthwhile to program for what would end up being a relatively minor quality-of-life feature.

Re: Skip exams?

#3 by hanako - Nov 5 2019

Skipping exams would not make sense for the story.

However, if you've got the merits for it, you can always 'Give Up' quickly just to bypass it. (Not on the first one, of course, but otherwise.) And once the game is actually finished and we tell people what the cheat codes are, you could cheat your merits so that you could give up all you wanted without getting kicked out. You'd still need to actually play the dungeon if you wanted either the extra achievements for different solutions (which will be coded eventually) or the detentions. But it needs to be a cheat, not a feature.

Re: Skip exams?

#4 by Airy_sama - Nov 6 2019

I mean it's not a 'instant win', or a 'skip' proper, but a lot of the exams can just be breezed through if you've got enough mana along with teleport self, and awareness. That being said they make sense in universe as a way of honing both the skills, and problem solving with just a sprinkling of magical elitism that even as much as Potsdam wants to please you she wouldn't go that far as to let you just 'skip' so either go the cheese route of blue/white builds, only do the easy exams to keep your merits high then intentionally flunk the others, or wait until we can cheat.