Marisa is a magician of many talents. In addition to her combat skills and charming personality, she’s a decent thief, and has a vast knowledge of spells (if nowhere near Patchouli’s level). Of course such skills need constant maintaining. Otherwise the madhouse that is Gensoukyo will leave you behind.
Thus throughout the story Marisa will have a chance to work on minor projects that boost her abilities. We’ve loosely categorized them as “Danmaku,” “Kleptomania,” “Knowledge,” and “LOVE.”
Danmaku is of course Marisa’s ability to spark people in the face. While our heroine’s not going to suffer the indignity of being killed by fairies on the way home, Marisa’s Danmaku stat will likely determine the outcome of many of her fights against the other residents of Gensoukyo. And considering that in Gensoukyo “Who cooks lunch?” is a decided by dueling there may be a few fights of note.
Kleptomania is a disease. In Marisa’s mind, a very fun and entertaining disease. With it you’ll find important objects appearing in your pockets, useful implements falling into your hands, and you’ll be better at cheating at Mahjong. Being good at stealing also helps delicate manipulation in general, just in case you needed to help with a puppet show or something.
Knowledge is a girl in the Scarlet Devil Mansion a great aid in figuring out where useful things might be or picking up great ideas. For a Magician, Knowledge is also power. While Danmaku may determine if you can hit with a spell, Knowledge will allow you to perform useful magic tricks on a day to day basis.
LOVE (caps lock required) is Marisa’s ability to get people who would otherwise beat her to a pulp to actually enjoy the time they spend with her. Whether charming your friends and enemies, or just fast talking your way past people who really should know better, LOVE is a great thing to have. And remember, cooking is about heart. (BTW: That’s a game hint).
We’re still tweaking the actual numbers right now, and there’s of course an early period at the beginning where we aren’t so mean as to toss stat challenges at Marisa. But as things progress your skills will start to tweak how effective Marisa is in the story.
Wow, interesting system. So when we are going to make decisions in the game you will have to take into account the different stats in order to not get a bad ending.
Usually, having poor statistics simply blocks off better options. You can muddle through most of the game without them. However some of the harder paths require stats to avoid horrible horrible death.
I don’t expect this to really be too much of a stumbling block though. We aren’t planning on setting things to Lunatic mode as it were. Well at least not often.