Liar!

After Mystic Messenger, I was wondering if there could be another otome game that captured my heart. Given how Cheritz seemed to know their stuff, I decided to pay another $58 to buy Dandelion and Nameless off Steam as they had raving reviews. I spent more than a month between the two games and have to say they are pretty good with loveable characters (Jiwoo and Yuri ftw) and plot lines.

Then came along another mobile app called Liar by Voltage which was premised on a rather interesting game concept. Unlike its usual formula of either a visual novel which requires you to cough up dollars to buy each story or its ‘Party’ version which requires you to log in daily to progress the story using tickets and grinding mindless tasks for points, Liar was somewhat more intelligent. While yes, you still get limited tickets and have to grind through answering BGR questions, there is also now a mystery element where you get to pick up clues and call out a liar amongst the 10 men whom you are dating. There is definitely more interactivity for the user. Also the story plot is really very much more realistic as you encounter scums that pretty much make up our real world and have the chance to understand what made them become who they are. I’m sorry girls, chances are you will meet a jerk in your life, rather than a prince, or rock star or demigod.

With good planning you can also get through the whole game without having to spend a single cent to achieve S status for all the characters. Here’s how.

First of all, under Story Map, Voltage has already revealed exactly how many chapters there are in the entire game from chapter one to nine – a total of 337. You need a story ticket to advance each chapter. Five tickets are restored each day but for first time installation, you get ten tickets for the first 15 days. In addition, you also get story tickets as log in bonuses for the first 15 days – 6 for every 3 days, making a total of 30 tickets that you can store to your count. Do NOT use them to advance the story in the initial few episodes.

To get a S status ending for each episode, you will need to complete the story and obtain a requisite Cool Points within x number of days from the time you start the episode. The x ranges from 4 to 9 days. With careful planning, you can allocate your daily reset tickets and those from the log in bonuses to complete the game without having to buy any.

The difficult part for me was more of getting enough Cool Points within the stipulated time period. Thus based on advice from other blogs, I computed exactly how many Cool Points I needed to have on day 1 of starting the episode to ensure that I have the requisite amount by the time I reach end of episode x days later. I didn’t start the episode until I obtained the required start amount. Nevertheless should you fail to obtain that, you can exchange coins for Cool Points. Coins are quite easily obtainable by reading the stories and logging in daily but you may want to reserve them to purchase the Lovers route story from episode 6 onwards.
Here is an example of how you can try to plan your ticket usage, assuming minimal to zero error in picking the liar.

Ep 1 – 18 chap (given enough resources to complete upon first installation)

Ep 2 – 30 chap (3 days to complete)

Ep 3 – 26 chap (3 days to complete)

Ep 4 – 37 chap (4 days to complete)

Ep 5 – 35 chap (4 days to complete)

Ep 6 – 48 chap (9 days to complete, starting from here, it gets more challenging as the first 15 days is over. The allocated time to complete to obtain S rating is typically about 2 days less than the days you need just by depending on the daily ticket reset. Hence this would be timely to start exercising some of the spare tickets you have been collecting. Assuming you use 10 additional tickets per episode, you will need a total of 40 additional tickets to get you through to the end but you would already have saved up 30 previously. The balance 10 can be obtained through daily log in bonus from day 15 though the quantum isn’t quite so generous.)
Ep 7 – 39 chap (8 days to complete)

Ep 8 – 47 chap (10 days to complete)

Ep 9 – 57 chap (12 days to complete)

Though having said this, this was something I picked up from hindsight. I paid for a total of 33 additional tickets since I stupidly used up the bonus ones too hurriedly. I hope this helps you to save some money while playing one of the better Voltage games out there.

Without revealing any spoilers in this game, I thought that one of the most important lessons I learnt from this game is that there is really no perfect person out there for us – ideal perhaps in the sense of someone who truly understands and accepts you but no perfect man. Ironically, we find out that the biggest liar isn’t the men the protagonist dated but rather herself for trying to portray the image of the perfect woman that she wasn’t. Love it!