#button mashing the A button to skip the unskippable cutscene

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Why would you—That's not—I just wanted to ask for help, why did you have to go and make it awkward???

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[ratlesshonret]

FAIR WARNING: THIS POST IS LONG! I HAVE MANY THOUGHTS ON THESE GAMES

You can find the positive version of this post Here

EDIT: AS OF 12/15/2023, A PATCH HAS RELEASED THAT HAS FIXED MANY OF MY ISSUES WITH THE GAME. I WILL KEEP THIS POST UP, BUT KNOW THAT MANY OF THESE ISSUES NO LONGER EXIST.

This post is some more random Little Goody Two Shoes thoughts because... to be frank, I have many thoughts about this game. Please do note, however, that I have still only finished two endings (for context, the two Rozenmarine endings.)

This post will probably trend more negative than the last few I've made about this game, where I was giving heavy benefit of the doubt to avoid sounding too negative. As much as I love LGTS, just like with my "Things I Didn't Like About GoldenerTraum" post, I think its important to criticize things you like.

And I mean, I'm also hoping maybe there's a 1% chance a developer at Astral Shift has seen the sentiments I'm about to echo and is maybe going to push a patch for the game to improve some stuff. Who knows.

This post will also cover GoldenerTraum again, as some things have changed since my last post about it.

I want to preface this with one last thing: Just to stress, I am a fan of Pocket Mirror. I love this series. I was there only months after the original Pocket Mirror came out all those years ago, and I've been in love with the game ever since. And that may potentially be part of the reason I'm so critical of both GoldenerTraum and LGTS. I'm not sharing this post out of a desire to bash these games, but out of a slim hope that my words may affect something.

Proper rant below the cut.

PART 1 - LITTLE GOODY TWO SHOES

(The following issues, regarding many scenes being unskippable, have been fixed in a patch)

To be very blunt, I really don't like how annoying it is to replay this game. Due to the way heart events work, unless I specifically set up a file where I date everyone at once (which is hard due to the whole "you will have no money" thing) I need to play the entire game three times, which is what I've chosen to do (due to the aforementioned "you will have no money" thing.)

Once you've seen every scene, the days are just "mash dialogue (a decent chunk of which you cant skip with the skip button,) do minigames, mash more dialogue, and do the Witching Hour that you've already solved all the puzzles for."

And like, the game is fun. I like the minigames. I can't say the same about the Witching Hours but honestly who cares, I don't necessarily have to enjoy them. That's not something I'm going to complain about (yet.)

it just gets repetitive doing it so many times.

For an example, I tried playing earlier to do Freya's route and couldn't even make it through one day. I just got so bored. I know this genre of game doesn't necessarily lend itself to replaying due to the whole appeal being the story/cutscenes and the puzzles, but I actually do have an actionable idea that, while it won't fix the issue, would make it a lot less annoying. Its also something that I've seen many people suggest before.

Add. A. Fucking. Skip. Button.

To. EVERY. Cutscene.

Not just some of them.

I had this complaint with Pocket Mirror as well, but its more lowkey there because as long as you either know the route or just separate your saves often, you only need to replay the entirety of the game twice. Which I feel like is actually good for a narrative game, because you get to pick up on things you missed the first time.

However, even in that game I disliked how slow mashing was in certain sections. My biggest and most commonly-cited example is Enjel's Theater, where my fastest time getting through the entire scene (not including the cutscene and with the fastest mashing technique I know, involving four buttons) was somewhere between 4-5 minutes.

It doesn't sound like much, but because every route needs you to go through it due to Enjel's area being after every ending choice is passed, you need to do it at least three times. Four if you're going for the secret ending in GoldenerTraum.

However, this is the LGTS section. And I have to say, this issue is worse in LGTS. Even just with the one playthrough I did to get the two endings I have, there were so many times where, either through loading saves or the ending divergences right at the end that happen after the last save point, I needed to rewatch very long scenes.

This wouldn't be very insulting if there wasn't a skip button already in the game, but there is, they just chose not to let you use it in many of the longest and most narratively-important scenes. Which I get why that was done, but I don't agree with it.

I feel like the most sensible course of action would be to do what many other games of this genre do, and simply have a persisting flag that permanently goes up for every save file once you've seen a cutscene. And once this flag is raised, let the player hold shift to skip the dialogue very quickly if they enter that scene again. This way, replaying the game or loading saves due to fails wouldn't be quite as annoying.

Also, I wish to whoever is listening that the first half of the credits was counted as an animated cutscene so it could be skipped with ESC. Again, they could even have a flag that raises as soon as you have one ending that only lets you skip the credits once you've raised it if its that important, that way the player still has to watch it once.

Overall, it makes the player (or at least me) feel like it isn't worth it to get every ending. In my eyes, I already got the canon ending. Everything else is just bonus. And while I normally love bonus (and will still hunt every ending) this is bonus that takes potential hours of mashing through scenes and repeating puzzles to see any reward from.

Oh yeah. Speaking of the puzzles...

PART 2 - LGTS: THE WITCHING HOUR

Now onto my more minor gripes. I really don't like most of the Witching Hour segments in the game. And honestly, feel free to skip this entire section (after the next paragraph) because this is less "here are some actionable ideas the developers could potentially roll out a patch to implement" and more "here's what frustrated me about the game."

(However, when possible, I will add a "solution" section to each individual Witching Hour breakdown to give a suggestion on how to mitigate the annoyance)

Because I've already invited you to skip this section, I'll just sum it up here with a nice TL;DR that explains my thesis: While you do know most of the puzzle solutions, a combination of game jank and general weirdness in the way certain things are implemented means you still aren't guaranteed to get by without damage or annoyance, which exacerbates the whole "lack of replay value" issue that is already very massive in a game with ten endings and a lot of dialogue that isn't easily skippable. A game's biggest killer of replay value is "that section" that makes the player decide they don't wanna replay after all, and I think most Witching Hours are "that section."

With this in mind, as if this post wasn't convoluted enough, let's break this down by section.

WITCHING HOUR 1

"Wouldn't it be funny if we made the puzzle answer "examine some random bookshelf" for no reason?"

This Witching Hour took me thirty real life minutes to get past. The candles are annoying to dodge unless you play really slow, and the "hint" is so laughably vague that it took the combined brain powers of three people (I was screensharing to others at the time) to figure out what it might mean.

Solution: Make the bookshelf more obvious. Or alternatively, add another hint, so that you have two things subtly nudging the player towards "a bookshelf is the answer" and not one.

WITCHING HOUR 2

(This Witching Hour has been fixed in a patch, and these complaints may no longer apply)

I hate the moths.

Honestly, while "moths are attracted to light" is obvious, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that I had to turn my lantern off for them to be attracted to the light/corpse I was leading them to instead of my own body.

Solution: Honestly, I don't have any real answer. I think this was just my own human error. My best idea is just to make the moth hitboxes more lenient and increase the I-frames so you don't have to face-tank as much damage, because I had to tank a lot even after knowing how the puzzle worked.

WITCHING HOUR 3

(This Witching Hour has been fixed in a patch, and these complaints may no longer apply)

I hate birds.

Let me get this out of the way: I would've struggled a lot less had I talked to Rozenmarine and gotten the hint that I've since learned she gives you about how the big bird works. However, as many others have pointed out, the "puzzle" is still janky as hell even when you know the answer.

I did eventually figure out the whole "the bird is less likely to attack when you're near unshaking trees" thing, but even then I still was tanking a lot of damage. Why "less likely" and not "won't?" Hitboxes and timing.

Because of how the hitboxes are coded, Elise gets hit seemingly at random sometimes, even if you're directly next to a tree that was not shaking even the tiniest bit for minutes before you got there. I think the hitbox that detects "you're close to a 'bird gets mad' spot" might be too big or something, but I'm not a programmer, nor do I know if hitboxes are even the issue.

Solution: This one is twofold. The lesser one is to have Rozenmarine give you more useful dialogue when you talk to her as a party member beforehand, that way the player is incentivized to actually speak with her. The greater one is to re-examine the hitboxes in the area to make sure they're fair, and also maybe make the time that a tree is safe last longer so you don't just get jumpscared by random damage.

WITCHING HOUR 4

I hate children.

Honestly though, this is one of the least offensive Witching Hour sections in the game. The only real struggle point is the collapsing tile part right at the start, which luckily is the only part that isn't timed. Still, it can be improved, because I had to reload a save several times to figure out the whole "shaking tiles will fall" thing.

Solution: Make the shake more obvious. That's it. Just increase the range of their shiver by a few pixels. The rest of the area is fine.

WITCHING HOUR 5

Honestly? No major notes. Tense, genuinely scary, and requires some actual skill without being overly punishing. Maybe the water chasers could be slowed a bit, but that's just a personal balancing idea and not something I feel is necessary.

Though if I had to complain, I don't like the "guide the spirit to its other half" part. I thought by now game designers knew that "following partner who is way slower than the player and who returns to the beginning if you stray away for too long and also there's chasers" was universally despised. Especially when, depending on where in the movement cycles you are, you'll have to run away from the spirit and onto land.

Solution: Make the spirit faster. And give a bit more leniency to how far you can stray and for how long before they return. Or even don't make them return at all.

WITCHING HOUR 6

Ah, the boss fight. How I loathe you.

Most of this Witching Hour isn't very bad. I don't really like the plot setup for how it occurs, but I'm willing to overlook it.

But the boss. Oh the boss.

Such minimal windup on its attacks that you can't easily dodge.

Random cycles so you can't just predict what's coming next.

Timed questions (on a tight timer!) between each phase that instantly kill you if you answer wrong or run out of time, forcing you to redo the whole fight.

A screen flipping effect that is infinitely worse than anything in Lisette's chases in Pocket Mirror in terms of how unfair it is.

I want to be honest. Everything about this fight feels so poorly thought out and designed that I am astonished it got past testing. In fact, my only explanation is that the people who tested this fight were all people who were so familiar with the game due to development that they knew the attacks and the question answers.

I needed to spam healing items. And I'm lucky that I grinded out the best possible amount of money you could have so I could afford lots of them. But if you don't have healing, you need to play this insanely unfair fight close to perfectly.

Solution: Honestly, I don't think there's an easy solution. The entire fight is so badly designed that it'd require a full rework. But here are some ideas.

Add longer windup to the attacks, with a more obvious indicator of which one it is. As it is now, you have maybe one second to both recover from the last onslaught and figure out what the boss is doing now before you are being attacked again.

Remove the entire screen-flipping and control-reversing gimmick. It worked in Lisette's chases due to how it was done there, but it does NOT work here.

Finally, lessen the penalty for an incorrect guess. Maybe make it 1-2 hearts of damage + redoing the phase. It may sound too generous, but I personally hate this idea of "haha instant-death you gotta do it again" that seems to exist in both games. I thought we left that in 2016.

WITCHING HOUR 7

No notes.

CONCLUSION

I have to imagine that the main people who play-tested this game were those who worked on it. Some of the decisions are incredibly hostile to the player, both due to non-conveyed information on puzzle gimmicks as well as the occasional bit of odd coding/implementation. The Witching Hours on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday are the only ones I don't have major issues with.

I really say this with a heavy heart, but I just feel like the puzzle design has regressed since Pocket Mirror.

PART 3 - MISPLACED EXPECTATIONS

I want to quickly address a point I briefly brought up at the start of this post. This part won't drag on very long, don't worry.

"I was there only months after the original Pocket Mirror came out all those years ago, and I've been in love with the game ever since. And that may potentially be part of the reason I'm so critical of both GoldenerTraum and LGTS."

Elaborating on what I mean by this: My expectations may simply be too high. And I think its important that I acknowledge my complete and utter bias. I try to be as fair as possible and push off most of the weight of my expectations on my rankings, but its impossible to not have it somewhat matter.

When I heard "Pocket Mirror is getting a remaster," there was a lot of things I hoped. Most of which didn't come true. I'll get into those later, that is its own section.

And I've been waiting for LGTS for basically seven years. From what I remember, it was announced that there would be a sequel very soon after the game's release, with concepts and everything. And while I know the game was only in proper development for like, 1/3 of that time, it still sat dormant in my mind for all that time.

Maybe that's why I'm so harsh on the game's problems. In my mind, this has been years upon years in the making, and its hard not to be let down by even the tiniest little things when you've been building excitement for that long.

Finally, I want to re-iterate: I like LGTS. I think it is a good game, both as a Pocket Mirror prequel and as a standalone. However, I will add the caveat that it is mainly for the plot and characters, not for the gameplay. I think Pocket Mirror is far superior in that regard.

PART 4 - MY (FEW) COMPLAINTS WITH GOLDENERTRAUM (2)

If you remember, I made a post almost five months ago, which was right after the game's release, about my issues with Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum.

Just as in that post, I want to state first and foremost: I think GoldenerTraum is superior to the original Pocket Mirror in basically every way. The graphics, extra lore and ending, and general quality of life features more than make up for my complaints.

This will basically be a rehashing of that post. This post is to the original what GoldenerTraum was to Pocket Mirror: an update. It will include the original points, with me adding in my changed opinions and anything that has been fixed about the game since I made that post.

"There’s a major audio syncing bug during the “chalk” scene before Harpae’s theater. My theory as to why this issue exists is because they changed the scene slightly, but did not update the music. I understand if the devs either were unwilling or unable to redo the music for this scene, but it’s majorly immersion breaking to have the sound of glass shattering be separated by an entire several seconds from the associated visual."

As far as I know, this has not been fixed. And from the looks of it, the game is no longer receiving patches or fixes. This is by far the most immersion-breaking point in the entire game.

"Mashing through text is SLOW. For a game that expects you to play several times to see every ending, there sure is no fast text option that I could find. Even mashing four buttons at once for frame-perfect dialogue skipping, it’s still slow. Scenes like Enjel’s Theater especially suffer from this, with it basically being a full six minutes even when mashing as fast as possible."

Already discussed, see above.

"This one is more of a personal thing, but I was hoping at least some scenes would be slightly rewritten. Some of the dialogue is very stilted and odd, with some questionable punctuation choices as well. Harpae’s area is especially bad. I get that the conversations being cyclical and neither of them wanting the other to take blame for anything is thematic, but it is a bit annoying to sit through basically the same conversation over and over again."

I've sort of reversed this opinion since I stated it. While I was hoping for some dialogue rewrites, I understand that the game was a "remaster" and not a "remake," with the main goal being to put it visually and gameplay-wise on par with the upcoming LGTS.

"Finally, the game is still kinda buggy. I know the team has worked super hard to patch the game several times, and I’m really thankful. I know it’s difficult to fix bugs, I really do. But encountering a softlock even after the “softlock fix” update, and other random issues, makes the game discouraging to play sometimes."

Quite a few of the bugs I was thinking about still exist in modern versions. They basically all have to do with issues related to fast text-mashing, which as I've stated, is required if you want to keep your sanity playing the game several times.

"Sprites. My biggest example of this is the scene where Harpae slaps Goldia. The handprint on Goldia’s face that was present in the original immediately after is completely missing. Also, in Enjel’s Theater, there’s no longer a unique “mouth zipped” sprite for Enjel, DESPITE THAT SPRITE EXISTING ON GOLDIA IN THE WITCHING HOUR ENDING. This one genuinely makes the scene less coherent, as Enjel’s mouth getting sewn up is the focal point of the scene."

ACCORDING TO A PATCH NOTE, THE LATTER COMPLAINT HAS BEEN FIXED, AND ENJEL WAS GIVEN HER PROPER SPRITE

I can't say it was because of me, but I will continue to privately think that.

The former complaint still exists. They couldn't have added a slap png to Goldia's face?

"Less impactful choices. The two I can think of here are both in Lisette’s area, with the “Accept or Protect” choice, and the “Help Me?” choice. In the former, it used to be a screen-wide filter was applied, and the text that you were choosing between was large and stylized to cover most of the screen. In the latter, you had to physically stand over your dialogue option. I understand if the engine doesn’t support these “special” dialogue choices, but replacing them with just normal choice boxes is a bit disappointing."

This is what I meant in that post. A few of the choices feel less impactful. In the latter especially, it was changed from standing on your option to just choosing it in the menu like every other choice.

That's the bulk of my complaints on GoldenerTraum. A lot of this probably sounds like "old person yells at cloud about minor changes to game" but I think its important to recognize that the original Pocket Mirror was superior in a few places.

I hope GoldenerTraum gets one last patch to fix some of my issues.

PART 5 - CONCLUSION

I love this series. I want it to be the best it can be. That's my only motivation behind making this. I'm nothing if not nostalgic and petty, so I feel like I'm an okay person to point out minor things that could be improved in both GoldenerTraum and Little Goody Two Shoes.

Again, and I know I've worn out this point by now, but I love these games. GoldenerTraum is a superior game to the original Pocket Mirror in 99% of cases, and LGTS is an amazing sequel. I just see a lot of tiny issues in the former (which to be fair, do add up) and a lot of missed potential combined with odd decisions in the latter.

If anybody from Astral Shift happens to be reading this, I have nothing but respect and admiration for the work you have done over the years. I don't want anybody, team member or random person reading this, to think I intend to disrespect or show disdain for anyone on any of these projects, or to think I won't be happy without perfection. These are all simply minor-to-moderate complaints I have, and I'd be fine if none of them are changed. I simply wish they would be.

I have high hopes for future projects, and I definitely don't think I'll be let down. I believe in this team, and have full confidence that whatever they make, Pocket Mirror related or otherwise, will be, if not perfect, of incredibly high quality.

If you read all of this, thank you, and goodnight.

(it is three in the morning and i have been writing this for like an hour)