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Einherjar's itch.io pageResults
Ranked 15th with 12 votes
| Criteria | Rank | Votes |
| Judge's Choice | #15 | n/a |
| People's Choice Vote | #15 | 12 |
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
PRESENTATION
Graphics were a mixed bag when it came to the mapping portions as some maps were well done and others were a bit sparse or bland (especially the town map which wasn't great in comparison). There were also a lot of inconsistencies with passabilities which made parts of the game a bit annoying to manoeuvre through. The graphics themselves were a mix of different styles and while some did fit well together, some stood out as too different in style.
The writing was decent technically. The characterisation was pretty flat and bland, but there were some parts that did a decent job of showing off the characters a bit better (the scene with MCs mother, for example, though it was rather ham-fisted).
The story itself was alright but it took a while to get to the actual hook of the game and the pacing was a bit on the slow side at times.
Music and sound was decent. Nothing really stood out as good but it didn't stand out as bad either. There wasn't much in the way of ambience created by sound effects but they weren't missing completely. Pretty standard - what was used fit well enough.
GAMEPLAY
Gameplay consisted of battles, interacting with items on the map and menu-based growth/creation.The battles consisted of Pulling from enemies in order to get orbs that allow you to summon new party members to use in battle or fuse to create new ones. Each character had their own skills, though a lot of them were underwhelming for the most part.
In the menu you could choose to use an orb to summon it's character or blend it with an already summoned character in order to either enhance their ability or create a new character instead.
Items could be found by interacting with different on-map events. You didn't get many items and the amount of gold you got didn't really get you much in the way of healing items either.
The balance was pretty bad in some areas - especially if you got new summons, who all start on level 1, and have to battle against enemies who are 10 levels higher than you. Even killing all the enemies beforehand meant that you were underlevelled when summoning a new character and trying to get them up to the MCs level.
One of the characters mentioned that you could swap your summons in battle but you were never told how to by the game and as such I was stuck with only those I bought into battle with me.
ENGAGEMENT
The balance really made this an annoying game to play. You either had to stick with the same characters all the way through (which you couldn't since most of them were weak to certain other characters in a BIG way) or try to level up your newer summons against enemies that are far superior in ability to your own. It got very frustrating, too, when you didn't get enough money to offset the cost of healing items. There was the bed to sleep in, true, but having to go all the way back home just to rest up and try to get back to where you were was also an annoyance (and you can't sleep in the middle of battle when your summons are getting wrekt).Add to that the shallow characterisation that tried for something deep but fell rather flat and it just wasn't very fun. It had some great ideas (I really liked the whole summoning/splicing ideas) but it could have been handled a bit better balance-wise.
THEME
42/80
The theme was teen angst. I guess it showed that well enough in the dialogue. Well, to be fair it was about saving the world and growing up to understand others, and some of that was touched on well in the story. The mechanics didn't really show that off well though - I guess you could kind of make a connection between growing bonds and summoning.I’ve been in Vermont quite a few times and I don’t recall seeing anything like this! This game was very impressive, even moreso given the time limit on the contest. The battles were strategic and challenging but the summoning system is really where this one shines. You could spend hours upon hours farming souls and experimenting with them. The story was entertaining and Brooke was a pretty good antihero. Maps were nice, even though passability errors and the occasional clutter sometimes made it hard to get around. Music was mostly good, although I thought the rock/techno songs were overkill. Very well-rounded game overall, the hard work shows.
Score: 66/80
50/80
Interesting system, though it feels like the presentation lacks because of inconsistency. Also, skippable events can make the game rather short. It felt like certain characters were just too obvious and the pull mechanic is frustrating as there doesn't seem to be much logic towards success (lower hp doesn't really seem to help). Especially in the start where battles seem limited due to a lack of respawns, this can get frustrating when you are dying due to trying to pull and failing repeatedly as your health dwindles.
Theme
You play as Brooke -- a bullying bitch with a terrible home life. You just found out you have a badass aunt and part of a family line of Valkyries. You have to help stop Ragnarok from coming. Surprisingly well done.
Gameplay
The gameplay is pretty fun! However there are some things I would change:
- Allow us to swap Einherjars in and out of battle.
- Crafting shouldn’t go back from the start over and over, it’s particularly annoying when trying to strengthen units.
- Pull should be 100% because most of the powerups are through spirits and I ain’t going anywhere until I get all the spirits. It’s very tedious.
- Level scaling makes it feel like I’m not getting any stronger even if I unlock units such as Cleopatra, Achilles, Helen of Troy, etc.
- Brooke is too useless. I wish she has more utility in battle.
- It’s also annoying to check all decorations to get items especially when I found out I can get cash on gravestone by accident. There needs to be some response from all “interactive” items.
Presentation
Mapping needs some work, especially the collisions. I think this game would benefit a lot from some custom art. The music needs changing. I spent a considerable amount of time in the cemetery and it got annoying really fast.
Engagement
Promising game that just needs polish. I really like how it tackled the transition from ancient -> modern. Probably better pacing though. Her closeness to Penny was just too fast. The cemetery before the cave is a bit annoying too. I think the villain is too obvious, remove the evil monologue and let us figure it out ourselves.
Total – 63/80
Team Members
Mark Waters
Nick Neace
Miss Nile
richter_h
CuckooOrange
Engine
RPG Maker MV
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Comments
This was a really unique experience! I really enjoyed the cinematic-ish intro. It really sets the background up for me. There were some mapping issues, but I'm sure you've heard it all already.
The soul crafting system is really fun and has a lot of potential. I hope in a future version, I will get to explore some of the epic summons. Who are these mysterious summons?? I just kinda farmed a bit in the forest and ended up with like 10 different heroes, which was pretty neat. Although eventually, I ended up just putting all my eggs into one basket and beefed up my Shaka Zulu; A Super Shaka Zulu if you will. I wish there was a better way to heal though. I'm pretty sure with the amount of days I had Brooke sleep, the world would've already been destroyed.
Best of luck! You got my vote~
How can someone spend just one hour in this game?! It's impossible! I just want to keep playinggg! I stopped playing just when the cemetery got available as a training spot and it was really hard to stop honestly. (I'll be keeping the game a bit more to play it later! XD)
I really love what I have seen of the game so far. The summoning system is so interesting! I was pulling souls like it was nobody's business because I wanted to see what other characters I could summon! lol.. and really this opens so many possibilities! My mind went wild wondering what type of summons I would be able to find in the game.
And I dunno what future plans you hold for this game, but you could keep adding new summons and maybe give them a backstory (or even make some sort of side-quests to obtain the real rare ones). I like the idea of this a lot! :) I would definitely love to keep playing this!
(I would love a list of all the summons btw, just to tempt me to play the game even more haha)
The story looks really intriguing too. Though I didn't get too deep into it, I love what I saw of it. The rivalry (and hatred) between the girls and even tho Brooke was kind of mean, I ended up liking her.. and her first meeting with Darius was kind of funny (he is really hot!), I'm really curious to see how this all plays out honestly. :)
Some lil' issues to consider, though they are things that other people probably already mentioned: the mapping, like in town I could walk on some of roofs and in some rooms, like in the mansion, in Hilda's room and in the second floor, there was a few spaces that I couldn't move to, even tho there wasn't anything really blocking my way.
Also the balancing in the battle system is a bit of an issue. I felt like it was a bit of random luck at times really, I was winning battles really easily or my whole party was pretty much dying.. lol I also noticed a few times that I could target everyone in battle, both enemies and allies, to pull or to attack with skills. Made me wonder if I would be able to actually pull souls from my own party. LOL I didn't try it but maybe I will later.. xD
Overall this was a great game! I really enjoyed it. Good luck in the contest! :)
Thanks so much for liking the game! Glad you enjoyed it.
The cemetery area is actually an optional training area that does not need to be completed. The idea for that area is for players who want to grind to have an opportunity to do more battling. But you're right, more battle balancing is needed.
Thank you for your support!
The title card left me without any expectations to begin with, so I am glad to say that these expectations (or lack thereof) were well exceeded! There is so much I could say about the potential behind the unique summon system you have in place. Seeing as they are based on historical and mythological figures, I think one would have a right to expect something in the way of bios for all of them, bios that improve with their experience and level gains, to reflect the self-realisation mentioned in the story (library, was it?). I found myself guessing whom we might be seeing! I personally thought of Rasputin and of the Kalevala epic that surely has some connection to Norse mythology being from the far North.
To ensure the utility of new party members (because there is no way anyone would dare raise several greenhorns and counting), one will need to have new members start at higher levels somehow. Perhaps this could depend on the levels of older members that have some historical connection to provide history lessons! Perhaps they could depend on books that you read in-game!
The story is interesting, and Brooke and Hilda's interaction made me smile: "You are not a nice person." "Neither are you. It must run in the family." Upon learning to "pull", I purposely elected to attack my summon to see if Hilda chastises Brooke, so I was a bit disappointed to not see any smart reaction from Hilda. That dialogue where Amber tempts Penelope could be better done to lift it out of cliché territory.
I loved the Greek guy and the French guy conversing in the café!
I appreciated the music choices just for being unexpected. Anyone who does not like it should know how to turn down the volume rather than complain about it being too loud.
What worries me is that the judges should priniciply take an hour to play at maximum, and that the difficulty spike after gaining access to the cemetary posed something of a bottleneck for me. What happened to all the easy prey, even in the forest? I spent more than an hour on this since I had the liberty of indulging my interest in this entry. I, too, find it surprisingly tedious to set a suitable difficulty curve, so I can empathise.
Some points that you failed to explain sufficiently:
Soulcrafting as a means of not only harvesting souls from fragments, but also of enhancing older summons with fragments pulled from enemies. I discovered accidently that pulling multiples of the same fragment was beneficial for this reason.
Penelope the tutor mentioned in passing something about switching combatants in battle, and Brooke refused her explanation. Is there or isn't there a way of doing this? I could not find how this is done, accidentally or otherwise.
Some rather odd problems:
I am sure you are aware of some strange mapping aspects, so it might not do much good to elaborate here.
Sometimes (I noticed this twice out of the several times I loaded from the title screen) when I load a save file, something goes horribly wrong with the targetting of certain commands. For example, Ptolemy (in my party, NOT the zombie astronomer) once silenced my whole party in one turn (which made the battle hopeless and necessitated a reload). D'Artagnan started attacking himself and setting himself on fire. Brooke tried using pull on herself and all three of her figures. I don't know if you are aware of this or not.
Though this is clearly far from finished, this is worth my vote!
Thanks so much! It makes us very happy that you enjoyed the game. We also want to thank you for your brilliant ideas on how to make this better. I don't know about Rasputin but they sound like interesting heroes we can incorporate in the future! A big fun part of this game for us was that we get to use heroes from all cultures and mythologies to create a new "international" mythology that's in tune with today's global world.
Yeah, this so could be made into an education game. Lol. When we first designed the summoning we thought of using original characters (like say in Valkyrie Profile), but then we thought that it would actually be more interesting to use historical/mythological characters as they have so much backstory already. And we can put in heroes from other cultures so people can learn more about them. Yeah, in our future update we will integrate more of the bio and personalities of the historical celebrities used.
The battle balance is the biggest issue of this game because well, what can we say? Ran outta time. But this will definitely be improved in the update. Also you're right, the tutorial sections could be done better.
What Penelope said is actually a feature that got pulled. In earlier builds, the player could actually swap characters during battle, but we found that this destroyed battle balance even more as battles became too easy if the player has many heroes. So the feature got cut but since we may put this back in a future release, Penny's line stayed.
The weird targeting problem is probably because we didn't setup Yanfly's targeting system correctly. We'll look deeper into its settings.
Thanks again!
Quite nice game, after I saw a school bullying scene I thought entire "game" gonna happen as a rpg session where Penelope fights the bullly with the "game" full of dice rolls etc.
The biggest thing that took me out of game was the Hopeless boss fight scene, used so many times.
Other than that, nice idea and sounds like a pretty complicated souls system there, Sindbad was a kinda weird summon. Had some fun playing the game ;)
Thanks so much! Yeah, you know traditionally the heroine is usually someone like Penny and the bully always gets her just punishment later yada yada. But we thought this is too black and white, and in a sense, is there no redemption for someone who's done bad things? That society should forever condemn the "bad guy" and not try to save him or her? It's a short game but we tried to explore that concept a little here.
The Hopeless fight? Hahaha! Thanks for the comment. We should try to find a more elegant solution to this.
And yeah, Sinbad is way underpowered. I've always loved Sinbad the character. It was just the development process was rushed and didn't get to do enough balancing in time. We need to beef him up in a future build.
Thanks for playing!
Notes
1) Sometimes Brook's spirit shield is cast on the enemy party instead of her own.
2) It would be nice if you could get a bit of description about the abilities of a fused spirit in advance. Since, I'd hate to sacrifice a highly useful spirit for one whose place is already covered on my team.
3) It's pretty easy to stun lock your enemy in this game.
4) Negative status effects like sleep never seem to wear off despite appearing with an obvious counter.
Thanks so much for the review!
First, to ease your worries, all resources, including the songs with lyrics, are LEGAL and LICENSED. We paid for for all of it so it’s all nice and legit. Songs with lyrics are actually a big experimental part of this game. It’s something not often done in RPG Maker games. For better or worse, it’s interesting to see how people react to it.
I quite enjoyed your dry humor! And you’re right, the battle balance in this game is it’s Achilles heel. We’re working on an update that makes battles much faster and Pulling much easier. And we’ve made paralysis lock downs much weaker.
I’m glad you beat the game as it gave us a complete view of how a player could go through the game. Again, thanks so much!
"First, to ease your worries, all resources, including the songs with lyrics, are LEGAL and LICENSED. "
I wasn't so much worried about that, as I was worried about my Let's Play episodes being blocked because of copyright claims on the music. And, yeah, that is something I've run into a few times.
"I quite enjoyed your dry humor!"
Thank you.
"And you’re right, the battle balance in this game is it’s Achilles heel. "
Yeah, the combat balance definitely needs some tweaking.
"Again, thanks so much!"
Your welcome.
It was a pleasure to work with Mark on this game. :) Although I might be a bit biased when saying this, but it is a game worth giving a piece of your time. The battles are very fun and the summoning system makes you enjoy a unique experience. I don't think I played any other RPG game that used a similar concept. The story is also engaging and will keep you motivated to play and know more. ^^
Thanks Miss Nile! I am of course totally biased regarding our game, but I really think Miss Nile did an awesome job on the maps and environment so peoples come and check it out!
Heya! Unfortunately the rar is corrupt. Sometimes that happens when uploading to itch. :(
Thanks for the reminder! Yes, the file seems to become corrupt if you use the Dropbox option, but it should be working now. Please try again.
Got a chance to play and I love the summoning system - I thought that was super cool! The battles were fun enough, and the variety of summons ensured that they never felt tedious. Congratulations on your submission!
Feedback
Thanks for playing and the comments! Glad you enjoyed it.
I can't speak for others but I personally loved the music on the 2F, I guess it's really a personal preference thing. If anything it is a different change.
Just head back to bed and rest to remove the silence.
Yeah, there were things I wish we could've done better, like more testing and battle balance. I should've worked more on the states part, like setting immunity and resistances. Totally my fault. It would've improved the game more. Still, I must say 1 month is a terribly short time. Although the contest build is set, we could work in these improvements in future releases.
Thanks for the comments!