A Certain Inefficient Method of Reading Moonrunes

Just finished Dengeki Gakuen RPG: Cross of Venus the other day (yes I’m aware that I’m over a year late to the party) and noticed the lack of English guides for it, so here’s a semi-comprehensive guide for all those English speakers having difficulties with what to do next, etc, who are too lazy to go around deciphering Engrish. Credits to all those nice and helpful people from the Gamefaqs boards and to the Japanese Strategy Wiki. I am aware there’s already a guide out there, but its in Thai and apparently Google Translate is as horrible at translating Thai to English as it is translating Japanese into English. There’s also a video review on Youtube in English.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/952306-dengeki-gakuen-rpg-cross-of-venus

http://game-pit.jp/wiki/dgrpg/ (requires ability to understand moonrunes or translated gibberish from Google Translate)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXm_efsaC3c (video review)

So, lets start off with introductions (shamelessly ripped straight off Wikipedia). Dengeki Gakuen RPG: Cross of Venus (電撃学園RPG Cross of Venus) is a Japanese action role-playing video game developed by Pegasus Japan and published by ASCII Media Works for the Nintendo DS handheld video game console, and was first released in Japan on March 19, 2009 in limited and regular editions. The game was produced in commemoration of the fifteenth anniversary of ASCII Media Works’ light novel imprint Dengeki Bunko.

As this is a crossover game, each series included is a light novel serialized in Dengeki Bunko, some of which have anime adaptations. The main 8 series get playable characters and chapters dedicated to their worlds, while others appear as support ‘cards’ which will be explained later. Characters are partially voiced by their respective voice actors from their series’ anime adaptations (where there is one).

Main series included (with playable characters):

• Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu (Kana Iriya)
• Kino no Tabi (Kino)
• To Aru Majutsu no Index (Index)
• Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu (Nogizaka Haruka)
• Bokusatsu Tenshi Dokuro-chan (Dokuro)
• Toradora! (Aisaka Taiga)
• Asura Cryin’ (Minakami Misao)
• Shakugan no Shana (Shana)
• Dengeki Gakuen Originals (unnamed protagonist)

Story: The protagonist and his childhood friend, Kasugai Kizuna, investigate a ghost rumor at their school and come across Shana. As a result, they discover that their world (reality) and the light novel worlds have overlapped, and some organization called Zetsumu (絶夢) is trying to cause chaos by changing the stories in the novel worlds. They then agree to help restore order by travelling to each novel world to combat Zetsumu.

Welcome to Academy City, forerunners in esper research!

Battle System: Cross of Venus’ battles occur on a 2D plane. You can take up to 3 battle characters in a battle along with 3 additional support characters. There are 2 bars for each battle character; one is the red HP bar, the other the blue EP bar. Support characters only have the EP bar. Only one battle character can be on the screen at a time. The A-button is a standard attack which can be chained 3 times. Down-A is a slow attack that knocks down most enemies, Up-A is a jump attack, Forward-Forward-A is a dash attack. The Y button is the special attack which costs EP. The B-button is block, and the X-button is for switching characters on the fly. You can chain combos by attacking with either A or Y then pressing X to switch to the next character and continue attacking. This works until all three of your battle characters has attacked. For example, a standard combo would be AAA-X-AAA-X-AAA-Y-X-X. However, keep in mind that you will get interrupted if you get hit, either from enemies that don’t flinch or projectiles or some other source.

Characters, cards, and enemies come in one of three attributes,which have a rock-paper-scissors relationship. Fight (闘) beats Love (恋), which beats Knowledge (知), which in turn beats Fight.

Only my RAILGUN can shoot it. 今すぐ!!!

At the bottom screen is the battle menu for support characters, namely Index, Haruka, and Misao, which includes 4 cards per support character. You cycle through them with the L-Button and R-Button. These cards come in 5 types: attack (blue), support (orange) , healing (yellow) , summon (green), and equip (purple). Just touch the screen to use them during battle after they have charged up.

Menu: Press the start button to access the menu. The options are as follows: (left column, top to down) items, party selection, special moves selection, character status; (right column, top to down) cards, save, load, settings, quit to start screen. In the cards option, first tab is to view your cards or discard them; second tab to fuse 2 cards; third tab to upgrade cards, fourth tab to equip cards onto your support characters. You can only have 150 cards maximum at any time.

For card fusion, you combine one core card (the ones without symbols) with one unit card (the ones with 1-3 red lightning symbols) to form one battle card (ones which you can equip and use in battle). A complete listing of the cards, effects, price, and fusion table (under 合成レシピ) can be found at the Japanese Strategy Wiki under 電撃カード, given here:

http://game-pit.jp/wiki/dgrpg/index.php?%E9%9B%BB%E6%92%83%E3%82%AB%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89

It’s probably a good idea to keep it untranslated and just match the moonrunes to figure out which cards are which, or else how are you supposed to know “Chronicle of the End” is actually 終わりのクロニクル. (It should be somewhat easier if you know how to read traditional Chinese. At least you would recognize the kanji. The first column of the fusion table lists the core cards, second column lists their attributes, third column lists the result of a fusion with a Fight unit card, fourth column lists the result of a fusion with a Love unit card, fifth column lists the result of a fusion with a Knowledge unit card, sixth column lists the specific card needed to fuse a summon card, and the last column lists the resulting summon card.

Go read Utsuro no Hako to Zero no Maria now @ Baka-Tsuki! Volume 3 has just been fully translated!

 For upgrading cards, you combine one battle card with one unit card. The max level for each battle card is lv3. Points are added to the battle card according to how many lightning symbols the unit card had. 10 points are needed for lv2, and another 10 points for lv3. Levels increase the effectiveness of battle cards.

Cards are awarded as enemy drops (1-2 lightning symbols), boss drops (3 lightning symbols), items on the ground, or bought from Horo at the Dengeki Gakuen cafeteria. Try to save up the ones with 3 lightning symbols, because they can be fused into powerful summon cards (again, check the fusion table to see which core card you need to fuse it with). Later on you can buy 3 lightning cards from Horo, so don’t worry if you accidently fused it with something else or discarded it.

As this post is getting quite long, I will start the actual semi-guide in my next post. I probably will only cover just the tricky bits in each chapter and not write a complete step by step walkthrough, mainly because I’m feeling somewhat lazy and there’s already walkthroughs out there (although in different languages). Most areas can be cleared by just visiting every corner of the map a few times anyways, though it is time consuming.

Is it just me or does Shana have much more hair in this game?

Note: Someone should really make a program to take screenshots directly from the DS. All I can find so far is to take pictures using a camera and putting the two screens together in Paint.

NoteII: Really wished more light novels would get translated. So far I’ve found them usually better than their anime or manga counterparts (although it really depends on the ability of the translator).

NoteIII: This game is not really recommended to those who don’t know or haven’t read the novels or watched the anime’s. After all, Crossover games are a niche genre. Also, there are multiple loops in each chapter where you have to do certain things in a certain order in order to break out and continue. If you just go around randomly, well, expect to get stuck for awhile, unless somehow you are super lucky.

Part I : Close Encounter of the Third Kind