Monday 14 January, 2008

Part 2, continued from first GameLog entry (for purposes of CMPS 80K)

GAMEPLAY

Having familiarized myself with the field and combat systems by now, I find I am able to appreciate the gameplay of Radiata Stories significantly more. So far, the characters have shown substantial development, and I confess several of them have become quite endearing to me. The story still continues to flow in the same mission/quest -based format, but I sense something larger at work here in terms of the overall plot.

The disbanding and reforming of my party during missions is an event that I have become quite pleased with at this point, as it allows the player to send Jack out on solo-training, as it were. The option of challenging NPCs to fights (accomplished by literally annoying them into a battle via the “kick” action during field play) also offers a considerable amount of practice without the risk of the player getting a Game Over and having to reload should they lose. I find myself making frequent use of this opportunity, and so Jack has grown reasonably strong now in comparison to his teammates.

This option also allows for a a very different variation in social interaction with NPCs than is usually present in classic RPGs; the player may choose to either talk to a friendly characters, kick them until they fight Jack (or send for the guard to fight him in their stead), or even recruit them into the party if certain requirements have been met.
On that note: I'm beginning to get a broader scope of just how many recruitable characters feature in this game. While Jack is the only truly fully-playable character at this point, the cast of characters that may be recruited into one's party far exceeds one hundred, giving the game an extensive amount of replay value.

DESIGN

From what I have played of Radiata Stories thus far, I would say that most unique element is how effectively the game's light tone is extended to most every facet of it without undermining the actual gameplay. This sort of balance is a difficult one to achieve, and I believe the game has handled it very nicely.
The way in which Jack interacts with the world around him is incredibly innovative in my opinion, and again, a cheerful humor is relayed to the player whenever he or she makes Jack do something untoward (such as kicking an NPC who is sleeping).

Most impressive, however, is the complex and varied number of environments and the characters which inhabit them; everyone around Jack goes about their daily business, roaming from point A to point B to spend their time devoted to allotted tasks. This makes for amazingly complex social interaction between characters, as NPCs are frequently very difficult to track down.
Additionally, the world and its environments are immensely vast, and each of the seven kingdoms and their surrounding areas never fail to be visually pleasing. The map feature makes it very hard to actually get lost, but at times even a single building (such as Radiata Castle) may take hours to fully explore.

As a compulsive saver, it still irks me that I am often hard-pressed to find a suitable Save Point during missions. It is easy enough to win a long succession of battles without dying (provided one has an adequate stock of Herb Extract), but prospective players ought to be prepared to go an hour or so without saving while on a mission.

thanks for the comment and i am glad too see that there is someone who is also playing the game.

In general, this is what we're looking for in terms of GameLogs. Good job. However, next time you submit, please note that we'd like it if you had a design section in /both/ entries, not just the second one. Please follow the template next time. You did seem to be getting a bit more into design towards the end of your first entry, but it's a lot easier on me if you actually label the sections. If you can keep this up next time with a design section for each, it would be a perfectly fine GameLog.

Amy Leek (grader)

Wait, my apologies, I was misremembering the requirements about summary and design. Your entry is perfectly fine, please keep it up. So sorry about the mix-up, please don't think it will effect your grade.