Doki Doki Majo Shipan! Duo

[briareos_kerensky]

Let's take a look at the extra I've got in the standard version of the game:



I guess you've already understood where this will bring and how to get there.
Remember Transformer toys with their stickers that would show Decepticon/Autobot faces when you press your fingers on them? Same thing here, just with a more mature theme. Lady's named Kureha and she's the first suspect of witchcraft in this game.

These are the impressions after an hour or so and after having discovered if she's a witch or not.

The game goes on just like the first DDMS: instead of being teamed up with a chibi angel this time you've got Kuro, a chibi devil that calls you "Shimobe-sama" or something similar.
There's also a normal (I hope) girl named Koron folloeing you around for some reason; she has the same light-blue hairs as Lulu (the chibi angel in the first game) and similar eyes, but she doesn't look as psycho as that angel.

Your targets are girls suspected by witchcraft and the only way you have to expose them (...) is to go around school, collect evidence, battle the girl and then touch her until a mark is revealed, which will tell you if she's a witch or not.

Just like the first game the interface is very simple and all touch-screen based.
Locations are now identified by various icons, depending on what will happen there:
* a single purple ! icon for empty locations (where you can find black pandas and white rabbits for...don't know, I think it will unlock extras)
* a green ! icon for secondary dialogues
* a pink !! icon for story-relevant locations
* an icon with the face of a character for a dialogue with him/her (mostly her).

For non-Japanese speakers tapping around is a viable option, with interesting locations clearly marked on the map it's easy to understand how to make the story advance and story-related items are incredibly easy to spot.
Choosing random sentences when prompted with multiple choices works too, apparently there are no "wrong" answers...probably they go toward a counter to see which girl likes you the best at the end of the game, I wouldn't be surprised about that.

Like exploring, battles work in the same way as before. You need to damage the witch by hitting back her attacks by either sliding over her projectiles or simply tapping them; in the first battle you can charge up your attack to throw Kuro at the witch for more damage and I'm pretty sure that once you've defeated a witch her powers will be available in the next battle, like the first game.

No changes in the touching session, too: you need to touch or gaze at the girl to make her heart race faster to reveal the witch mark. There are other options like showing evidence, whispering in the mic and a mysterious, never active, binocular.
However, you simply go on a touch/gaze frenzy on the few hot spots and win through the inquisition, tried more than once to show evidence and the result was to "cool off" the girl.

Until the next girl, then, but here's a farewell gift:

[briareos_kerensky]

Second and third cases done.

Almost the entire cast from the first game makes a comeback in this second installment, with Renge, the SNK maniac, finding a good match in Kamome, a ninja obsessed girl collecting Ninja Combat. Apparently in the DDMSD world they even hold entire fairs deticated to Ninja Combat...oh yes, Renge upgraded from an AES to a Neo Geo CD.

Combat still follows the same routine, hit the girl before she hits you and swap character when someone's MP has been depleted. Right now all characters except Kuro have the same basic attack ("projectile" traveling through the screen, being it a fireball or a lion), secondary attacks appear useless as all enemies have a not-that-random pattern with huge delays between the first attack frame and the actual attack.

Cracked the touching phase a bit: by touching/gazing various parts you get three kind of hearts: pink is OK, purple is bad, blue...wait I'm gonna spoiler it...

->Open Spoiler<-

blue hearts (not sure it they were in the first game) build up you H (ecchi/hentai, you get the deal) combo counter, if you get the counter high enough the game zooms in on a particular part of the girl where you can continue to build up the counter for unknown reasons or...well, if I say that one of the parts you can zoom in are the breast, you should understand, right?

Also, purple hearts are very very hard to get now, each girl has one or two "bad" parts that shouldn't be touched/gazed upon, and most areas are touch/gaze free while other few are touch or gaze only.

During the second case I've also got the glimpse of some sort of "diary interrogation", where the upper screen will display a diary you can go through and presumably you can click the mic icon to say what's written on it...I think. Not being able to read kanji I haven't understood what that phase was all about, let's ignore how it should be played.
However, the subject of the interrogation was Maria, one of my fav-no wait, my favourite character in the first game so everything was fine.

Two school locations also give you access to battle replays and the aforementioned diary interrogation.

The game still goes heavy on Athena cameos (mostly centered on the new Athena version for mobiles, which has the same charades of DDMS and DDMSD), there are more SNK cameos like Ninja Combat above and funny bits scattered throughout the game for those who played the first. For non-Japanese speakers this makes the game a bit more enjoyable during exploration phases, which have gained limited interactivity rather than being dull "click until your screen bleeds" tour of duties.

There's still that black panda to be found around and most of the times it's disguised in the most humorous ways (as a cicada, as a cake or as a chalk bust) and there are eight white bunnies, probably one for each case. Still don't know what they do, probably never will, but I'm always on search for them.

[Briareos]

Thanks for the insight, should make it easier for the rest of us!

[briareos_kerensky]

...us?

I thought that all the hits of this thread were for making a laugh or two at my English or to understand if I'm better left alone or alone in a cage

Nevertheless, fourth case is about twins. One goes by "boku" (a masculine way to say "I"), I just hope it won't end like the first game...the swimsuits they always have on (oh Japan how I love thee and thee strange sense of fashion) shouldn't herald any tomcat in sight...

[Briareos]

Just had a crack at this today and I am quite lost, but will persevere. Had a few massive conversation with a devil and another guy, had a few sections where I was clearly meant to do something but bungled it, one with the devil in a library and another with a big stone head. Need to try and save next time too!

[briareos_kerensky]

The devil is Kuro, essentially your sidekick in this quest. Sha has a fair amount of investigation-relevant scenes but most of the times you see her doing strange faces and acting funny.

The guy...is he old and dressed like a bartender? If so, I don't know who he is, sometimes he pops out when you go to the restaurant near your house, but still haven't got a clue who he is.
If he was a blond guy,

->Open Spoiler<-

he's will give you a ticket to Kureha's (pink-haired lass with huge breasts) show...or something similar...if you chose the right option, IIRC. Got lucky at first try and got the ticket, no, don't remember which option.

The Moai stone head is actually a backpack (...) that will give you the next target once the chapter is completed and will appear when you have enough/all the evidence to frame the witch. There are also a few dialogues with that thing in it but mostly are just comical intermissions.

[kernow]

oh yes, Renge upgraded from an AES to a Neo Geo CD.

[briareos_kerensky]

Yeah, not the best of upgrades.

[kernow]

So does it actually show a little pixel AES in the first one? if so pretty cool

[Briareos]

The devil is Kuro, essentially your sidekick in this quest. Sha has a fair amount of investigation-relevant scenes but most of the times you see her doing strange faces and acting funny.

The guy...is he old and dressed like a bartender? If so, I don't know who he is, sometimes he pops out when you go to the restaurant near your house, but still haven't got a clue who he is.
If he was a blond guy,

->Open Spoiler<-

he's will give you a ticket to Kureha's (pink-haired lass with huge breasts) show...or something similar...if you chose the right option, IIRC. Got lucky at first try and got the ticket, no, don't remember which option.

The Moai stone head is actually a backpack (...) that will give you the next target once the chapter is completed and will appear when you have enough/all the evidence to frame the witch. There are also a few dialogues with that thing in it but mostly are just comical intermissions.

Thanks for the tips, do the face buttons ever serve any purpose or is it all from the screen? I ask as a couple of times there were symbols at the top like here:

http://uk.ds.ign.com/dor/objects/965204/doki-doki-majo-saiban-2-duo/images/doki-doki-majo-saiban-2-duo-20080403104722992.html

That look like you should be able to touch them if you could switch the upper and lower screens...

[briareos_kerensky]

Of the face buttons, the d-pad is used during witch inspection, being it the touching or the diary section; Y is used to skip dialogues and I think A and B follow their usual tradition of accepting/canceling options...never used them, however; start is for pause (and dialogue recap IIRC). L is used during battles to swap between characters and to swap between them on a few screens only: you'll see their small portrait with a brighter purple border and the touch screen will show L and R icons on the upper corners if you are totally lazy.

In these screens you basically act as usual, you tap and slide everything except you have to do it with all characters multiple times if that location doesn't have the back icon on the lower right corner.

BTW, it took me half a game (I think) but I managed to understand how time goes on.
Each day is divided in three parts, morning, afternoon and evening (I think...I suspect they are more like morning school time, afternoon school time and after school) and each part is composed by five "hours", each spent by visiting a single location (purple ! icon). You can go around the various "macro-location" (school, east yard, west yard, shopping district, your neighborhood etc etc) as much as you want to see the available options for that hour, but entering a specific location (classroom, gym, cafe and so on) eats up an hour. Black pandas and white bunnies are found at specific locations at a specific hour, just like conversations. Conversations might consume a whole part of the day or even the whole day, depending on how the story should go.
Unlike the first game, you can see how many hours you have left for each part of the day thanks to the clock on the upper-right corner of the touch screen and there are three tunes for each part.

So does it actually show a little pixel AES in the first one? if so pretty cool

Yup, you can also drag it around the screen with no purpose at all. If you dragged it near the trash bin it would disappear, but magically reappear soon after.

[briareos_kerensky]

Ah, finally, game completed.

The 9th chapter featured a mini-dungeon where you have to solve a few intertwined puzzles: the first is the hardest (because I didn't know what to do due to lack of Japanese knowledge), but the game is so kind to give you a hint for it...and that hint is basically how the puzzle is solved. Then it's just going from room to room in the right order and click where the graphics scream at you "Hey! You, there! Click on me! Now!".

Unfortunately both the last and 8th chapters are mostly gauntlets of long dialogues with no chance to miss any, so this little spark of interactivity is lost into the sea of taps to advance through countless words.

Following SNK tradition the last boss is somewhat overpowered and hard to beat against what was before, but it's still easy for anyone with a minimum of reflexes: it requires some character swap, but you just need three out of nine, so, yes, any hardship in the game has been removed.

I still need to figure out how to play the diary inspection part and it serves no purpose for the main game, but probably it unlocks cutscenes in the extra menu, which is revealed after beating the game once. These cutscenes are just a stream of comic (I hope) dialogues between all characters from both games and non-Japanese speakers can skip them in favor of the gallery.

The gallery shows the event images unlocked throughout the game and it a certain image is linked to a cutscene, it allows you to play it back.

By finishing the game I confirmed that some dialogues throughout it influence the ending (the one after the credit roll) and with nine girls in the game, there are nine endings, but since at the first playthrough I've got

->Open Spoiler<-

Rekka (the red-haired swordswoman)

, the world is happy and I don't have any willpower left to redo the whole thing, unless I find a sprite rip of the game somewhere...ah, wait, maybe Neon will be worth it. Or Koron...or continue with Etrian Odyssey II.

Drawing the conclusion, DDMS II is somewhat better than the first game, even if it's way easier: there is more interaction (even if it's minimum by any other standard), the presentation is superior, with more sprites and even images, probably there are some secondary paths to undertake (I can think of three of these, but I doubt I'll discover them without a translation) and the character design is better than the first one - it might seem trivial but the game lives on the charades, so having cuter characters is defenitively better...and no boy werewolves.

Yes, Duo is better than the first DDMS.

[toythatkills]

This has been reduced to &#163;10 on P-A for the week, for those that want it

[randombs]

Until the next girl, then, but here's a farewell gift:

What the HELL kinda gift is this?

Why didn't you rub harder, man!?

Or is that as light as it gets?

I did try the first game and the trailer was more fun for me - all that wading through text and then getting stuck on some silly tutorial with a panda doll. I promptly headed over to Gamefaqs where some persevering soul had put up a save 45 minutes in (and I salute him for lasting that long) but alas, even then the prospect of poking cartoon girls with my stylus became a bit of a pipe dream (these lines just write themselves).

If ever a game deserved a quick-play mode, this is it. I don't suppose Duo does?

[briareos_kerensky]

What the HELL kinda gift is this?

A Japanese gift for a game where you touch girls.

Why didn't you rub harder, man!?
Or is that as light as it gets?

I think it's as light as it gets. Now, I know I'm speaking about a game where you touch girls to succeed, but rubbing a card for more than 1 minute is too much even for me.

Serious reply: I don't think the black coating used to mask Kureha can go lighter than that, probably a lighter color would have revealed more but it wouldn't have masked the body properly when not heated.

I did try the first game and the trailer was more fun for me - all that wading through text and then getting stuck on some silly tutorial with a panda doll.

Was struck on that too, luckily I had a save file just before that, reloaded and answered "no" when Lulu asked for a tutorial on touching girls.

Erhm...

If ever a game deserved a quick-play mode, this is it. I don't suppose Duo does?

You unlock quick-play mode after beating the game twice on both games, but if you couldn't be bothered about the first, then Duo won't be different.
Even with the new (basic) puzzles and "improved" interactivity Duo is more straightforward than the first,

->Open Spoiler<-

except during the twins and final chapters, where you could end struck if you don't have the patience to go around every location and click on the right icon at the right hour

.