Tuesday 15 January, 2008

Gameplay Part 2

Out of all the time I invested in the game, I found most of that most of my time went into trying to get every recruitable person to join my party. And this is no simple task. There are NPCs who are recruitable in only at a certain time of the day. This is both tedious and addicting. If you are unable to talk to the person or complete their task on time, you had to wait an entire day until you are able to talk to them at the right time.

Many may think that it is waste of time building up a list potential party members when you are only able to take three people with you on your journey. The key reason is variety. Each character has their own specialties and set of combos. No two characters have the same set of attacks.

An incentive to have different characters tag along with you is that they often carry a different ability. These abilities vary and differ from a measly increase in defense to a major increase in strength. You are able to learn these abilities by simply having the character(s) with the desired ability in your party and using formations during combat. After a while, you will have the ability all to yourself and can boot the person from your party if you don’t like them.

Leveling is an issue. The monsters tend to get really weak while the bosses get significantly more difficult if you are not at a high enough level or have a decent healer in your party. This especially applies to certain NPCs that require you to defeat them before they are willing to join your party or if you plan on heading into secret dungeons or fighting additional bosses outside of the main storyline.

Design

The story of the game itself isn’t anything too great, but is offset with its colorful cast of characters and their interactions. Humor combined with the characters “offbeat style of play” worked well in creating some comical scenes. The main character is witty yet far from being what you would call smart. In fact, he is probably just above the idiot level, which is something rarely seen in today’s hero character, but that's what makes him cool.

The game lacks any of what you would call “dungeons”, but that does not take too much out of the game, as there is plenty else to do. Well, there are technically dungeons and forts and such but no real puzzles that have to be solved. There are tons of characters to recruit to build up your alliance and a wide variety of items to collect to enhance your character. Some things I found particularly noteworthy about this game are the recruitment function, ability to kick whatever you feel like, and the option of customizing your characters look with different sets of armor. The recruitable NPCs all follow their own schedule as they move about the world at their own pace, which will keep most people who strive for perfect completion playing for hours on end.

Just as the NPCs will follow a set schedule and return home, sleep, shop, chat, etc., I found it interesting that the monsters on the map also followed a schedule. Like most RPGs, the monsters change depending on the time of day, but what caught my attention was the fact that the monsters you encounter during the day actually sleep. This makes it easier to avoid encounters if you are running low on health or just don’t feel like being pitted against weaker creatures that dish out practically no exp and only succeed in wasting your time.

The voice acting and visuals are surely things to note within the game. The graphics stand out with an anime-look and vivid colors. The voice acting along with the facial and body language were done extremely well. The fluctuation between an almost a two-dimensional look and a three-dimensional feel really adds to the game’s effect. The game has its failings, but the overall game has a nice feel to it.

I really like this gamelog! The only thing I would change about it is parts of your design section. It seems you have repeated yourself in a lot of places (the closing paragraph in particular). Repeating (and preferably expounding on) your ideas is fine, but in the future you should rephrase them rather than exactly copy from your previous entry. Otherwise, you did a great job.

-Gillian Smith (TA)