By the way, I think I remember reading that in this game each egg can give birth to any TMGC regardless of TMP level. That should be the reason why I ended up having a Tsubutchi instead of a Puchiteletchi. Another design choice I'm not a fan of.
This was nonsense. Actually I've now found out that I still don't understand fully how the TMP system works in this game. My knowledge on how the game works comes from
here, but if you pay attention, you'll see that there's a lot of missing information. For example, what does the "Message" meter do on the status screen, and what's the point of the minigames?
So this morning I was checking out the TMP screen (which as you can see isn't explained in the aforementioned link), and saw that my Hiratchi now has 3 lit-up crowns on the TMP meter but only 2 lit-up "dragon balls"
(they do look like dragon balls from dragon ball Z, don't you think?) on the "Level" meter (the japanese letters mean "reberu" which means level).
Now, upon starting this run, I first wondered what each meant, thinking "why are there 2 meters for just 1 piece of info (i.e. the TMP level)?". Then for some reason I assumed the top one was just for decoration and the bottom one was the real deal. The top one always showed 2 crowns, which didn't make any sense (I knew my first pets were of TMP level 3 by looking at the growth chart) and the bottom one was stuck on level 3. This made me assume that the top one didn't mean anything, but that's until this morning when I found out my Hiratchi has 3 crowns on the top meter and 2 balls on the bottom meter.
I then came back here to have a second look at my Saturday post and indeed,
Both of the parents had 2 TMP crowns despite having 3 "level balls". I'm pretty sure
this is the reason why I ended up having a Tsubutchi instead of a Puchiteletchi when they mated. (Tsubutchi is TMP level 2).
So here I am scratching my head over how this might work. At first I thought, the balls display the actual TMP level of the tamagotchi which
could potentially be attained through good care, but if that was the case, my Hiratchi couldn't possibly have 3 crowns as you can see in my first screenshot above.This reinvigorates my interest in this game a little bit - there's something new here to be understood.
I don't know how the game selects mating partners, I think it gives the player a choice of three characters, but I don't know how frequently they change. We'll see!
That was wrong too. It only shows one potential mating partner at a time, BUT they seem to change every time you open the mating menu. And I just had the idea to use the mating menu to study how the crowns and "level balls" (what a weird combination of words!) behave. If the balls display the "absolute" TMP level, that should be pretty easy to verify by checking out on a number of proposed mating partners and checking whether the number of level balls is always the same as the TMP level displayed on the growth chart.
And about the "Message" thing, I asked a weeb friend of mine and told her this should be very easy to figure out if we had a manual, and she said she'll be asking a japanese friend of hers. I'm not expecting too much out of this but, if I get back from her, I'll be sure to let you guys know.
Thanks for reading!