stream of consciousness thoughts:
- immediately enjoying the title screen. high quality
- playing on normal mode
- lots of spelling/grammar mistakes here. "An assesination attemp? ... This is unaceptable!"
- The note the assassin had on him is hilarious. "Kill the governor. Cause chaos. Run away." Like it's a grocery list lol
- Trevor Simons? Is this an isekai?
- Weird issue, but something's going on with the conversation backlog. It runs at double speed for some reason. 2 things are rendering it it seems
- music doesn't loop :(
- walk maps! with recruitment choices! very cool
- aoe stuff!! :D Sick healing staff
- the map command menu is super cool
- found the hidden gold in the cave
- sucks that once you pick your 8th unit the map immediately ends without you getting to see their items/shop for them
- went with Julius (general) Moore (bishop) Sierra (wyvern) Agnim (necromancer) Jean (mage knt) Albert (serpent knt) and Yua (free knt). spent a good half hour exploring the town. pretty neat
- takes several turns just to get to the combat... do not like this
- draw back+canto is pretty buggy
- rocknroll's animation is cool
- the silver lance sprite is HILARIOUS it's amazing to see Yua running across the screen carrying that giant thing
- agnim doesn't count as a spellcaster so the mage-effective bow isn't good against him, strange
- I am so grateful you have my player-only-battle plugin, it's so nice :) plus my warning markers plugin!
- jean is pretty much soloing the north side with staff help from trevor
- yua and moore are dead weight. should've brought better units. moore's supposed "support role" is nonexistent and yua's stats are bad.
- moore gets a big aoe healing staff (never need to heal that many units at once) and a sleep staff with fixed 46% accuracy. It missed almost every single time, but even if it didn't, it still wouldn't have been that good. sure the sleep is permanent but it only lasts for 1 attack, so it's not even great for whaling on the final boss. Maybe if it was a giant aoe SLEEP staff instead of healing it'd be alright
- yua's pretty decent one on one but enemies only come in huge clumps with overlapping ranges and a variety of weapons so she can't contribute at all without dying
- is there a fucking amogus made by the forest in the northwest
- supposedly sierra is a basic class but she can't use the Class Badge? who can I use this on
- the change in map music after defeating amos is welcome
- the victory conditions didn't update after beating amos
- whoolllllle lotta walking once the monsters are in the picture
- vampire lord sprite is pretty sweet
- why did you bother making weapons like, "effective armor" and "effective machine" if those enemy types never appear
- attacking the final boss gave me an error, "unable to allocate enough memory to play audio". It didn't crash but might wanna look into that
- I had trevor on the wrong side of the map with the light sword but eventually I was able to shove/swap/draw back him south to the boss, where he 2 shot him.
- rip to yua and julius, didn't reset for em
- having speeches from each unit you picked is a nice touch
- a ton of bad guys spawned pretty much right on top of trevor tho. not a nice touch
- mainly i'm just pretty bummed this is still going. REALLY wanted it to be over after the dark mage guy, this is sooo long
- the nuclear staff is garbage wtf? mag+1 healing to units within 7 tiles? THIS is a boss drop?
- the memory error is popping up all the time now, like on phase change, on any attack, etc. thinking I'm going to drop this soon.
- yeah shockingly one of the many enemies that spawned on top of trevor got to kill him and I game overed. I'm gonna call it here. Final playtime just over an hour and a half
Closing thoughts:
The noncombat concepts of this game are pretty sweet. First you go around the city, learning about goings-on and its people, and select your small team from a diverse selection of units. The selection you have of weapons and items is pretty awesome. Most affect your stats and many have special effectiveness. I love when an srpg has a diverse arsenal and this game delivers. There's also a dense amount of detail on each unit, since all of them have several skills and several weapon types. The exploration phase at the start of the game where you build your team is the best part.
The actual gameplay is not as good. Frankly, I did not like anything about it. Huge clumps of enemies charge headfirst at you, starting dozens of tiles away from yours and leading to several turns of downtime. Your bulkiest units are able to tank and kill them all despite their weapon types not being homogenized; an effective weapon or two might make you play a little slower, but for the most part someone like Julius or Jean can take on entire squads by themselves with a shield and a strong weapon. And thank god they can, because the alternative would be a fighting retreat where you pick off 1-2 enemies at a time and take five times as long. Not to say the juggernauting strat is FAST - the pacing is excruciating.
By the time I killed Amos I was ready for the map to please end, only for another, monster-focused phase to start. Again they start really far away, and you have to kill another boss. This boss is extremely annoying, with nosferatu, a chance-based skill to negate counters, and insane bulk. If there weren't a monster-effective sword some random enemy dropped that Trevor could use, I would've been softlocked against this guy. So I killed that boss and imagine my surprise when a third wave starts. This time the enemies spawned right on top of Trevor, whose action wasn't refreshed, and he was promptly killed and game-overed. Between the slow pace and the frequent bugs (error messages popping up any time the song would change), I called it quits there. Hopefully that was the last wave so I didn't miss much.
The passion in this project is clearly in the worldbuilding and the team customization. It's genuinely interesting thinking about what team to bring and what weapons and items to buy. It's a shame that I did not click with the gameplay at all. The player's toolset in this game would be much more interesting in a smaller, tighter game.
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