Reviewed by Geir Gunnarrson.
When I started this game for the first time I thought to my self “oh no not an RPGmaker game”. Even though this game sports many of the traditional RPG tropes or even the RPGmaker tropes, it is not an RPGmaker game.
I thought most of the artwork to be decent, the combat artwork is of a higher caliber than the overworld artwork and the larger character artwork that is displayed when talking to important characters is quite nice. The combat animations are pretty cool and well made compared to the main exploration mode.
Speaking of combat, the combat system is not the traditional turn-based combat but rather Action Turn-Based, ATB for short.
Reminiscent of Final Fantasy 7 meaning there are cooldown timers to your actions but also a resource bar that fills up with time and the different actions need different amount from said bar.
Your character can wield 3 weapons at a time a melee weapon, ranged weapon and a shield. Each weapon has its own bar and you can change between the weapons and use their respective bar to perform actions while your other weapons are recharging.
Enemies have a bar under them filling up slowly and when it is full, they attack, now if you attack them before it is full it will deplete a little bit and if you can keep up the punishment you can delay their attacks. This system makes this a very action based classic JRPG.
After a lengthy prologue (nearly an hour long) you are introduced to the quest system. As far as I can see there are 2 sections: the journal, which is the main story and then quests: where all the quests you accept are listed. There are notice boards in towns where you can grab quests which are mainly collection and kill quests, all very standard.
This system is kind of like the Notice boards in the Witcher 3. After accepting the 3 quests (1 collection and 2 kill quests) available you head out of town. Here you are introduced to the finer points of combat.
The first fight you experience properly is against a couple of brown wolves and you are taught how to attack and change weapons and how to use party members if you have them. You use Q, W and E to attack and A, S and D to change weapons. Classic combat screen with enemies on one side and you on the other.
You scroll through a menu to choose if you want to use an Item, change equipment or call in Assist which will call in your party member to attack and then go on cooldown like any other skill.
After defeating the brown wolves, I was introduced to the Encounter mechanic i.e. the random encounter that most jRPG’s have included since their inception.
This game lets you choose the frequency of those encounters with a touch of a button (E for Encounter). Here you can choose to either increase or decrease the frequency which can help if you want to grind for some experience or items, or just not want to encounter any mobs.
This brings me neatly on to my next point. This game was made with grinding in mind but isn’t very optimized. As soon as the first combat with the brown wolves was over, I walked around the screen a bit looking for further encounters. Before long I loaded into another fight with wolves, white ones this time and boy did those wolves teach me a hard lesson, save and save often.
There are no auto saves in this game and if you die in a fight you can restart the fight or give up and reload a previous save. Seeing as I had not saved so far, I had to restart the game from scratch. After getting back to this point with saves ready I got into the second fight, again the white wolves and again they schooled me hard.
I reloaded and decided to turn off the Encounters and move to a different area, there I progressed to level 8 and decided to go back and teach those white wolves a lesson. There was indeed a lesson learned, but not the one I wanted to teach; the wolves took me out before I could even kill one.
I decided to leave them alone and just continue with the story. The pacing seemed to be decent, at least I did not encounter any white wolves that would kill me easily until I met my first boss outside of the main story.
This boss came in the form of a little girl looking for her missing parents but turned out to be a monster, a kind of werewolf and no matter how hard I tried I could not kill her/it and seeing how used I've become to modern ways of saving games; I had again forgotten to save my game before this fight and lost nearly 2 hours of progress.
This is where I stopped playing but I do know I will get back into the game at some point because the story did keep me interested and I am curious as to what will happen.
The writing is not the greatest but the story is interesting and could keep you engaged the whole way through, if you can ignore some of the game’s cons like the imbalance of some of the encounters and the sheer "grindiness" of the game.
In conclusion this is a very JRPG trope heavy game with some interesting twists to those tropes. The story is very interesting and engaging and could keep you going through the game.
Comentários