Tuesday 15 January, 2008

Game Entry #2:


GAMEPLAY:
From this point I full control of what I can do. I was supposed to go to a certain town but if my memory serves me correct I can get a very good item in this town. So before I head over to that town I had to do some lvling. Just like all RPG's it takes a considerable amount of time to get something that is good. Fortunately I know what I need to do to get it early on in the game. I am not about 5 hours into the game and I am almost able to get the game. The lvling has been fun because the monsters are interesting and are not bland in any way.

I know that lvling up early on in the game is not exactly what the programmers intended but there is an item that I can't get unless I do so. So they made lvling somewhat difficult for me. To be able to gain lvls at a quicker rate I needed to fight stronger monsters. I did not really mind that I would have crappy equipment when I fight because that is what I get for lvling early but it was a problem when I would get a status ailment suck as paralyze or stone and none of the shops sell something to cure it. I finally found something to cure the paralyze but it was half way across the world. Overall I am happy about what I am doing because the goal is worth the work.

DESIGN:

A great part of the design of this game is that they took all of the great basic rules or standards for RPG's and brought them up the the next lvl. In most RPG's you have spells and skills and what not to make your party stronger. In this game you can't just lvl up and get all your skills. You have to be taught certain things from shops that will give you traits. Once you have some of those traits you can get better or lvl those skills up. Through combinations of curtain traits you can gain special skills. These combinations are not told to you so you have to figure them out. This leads you to play the game more to figure out what all the skills are and what ones are more helpful then others.

Another thing that the player want to continue playing is that there are so many variations of this game it find it to be almost overwhelming. As previously stated there are 12 different characters and 87 different endings. I find this game to be very fun and the fact that there are so many posibilities makes me want to play this game a lot. I want to be able to try out every character on my team and see what skills that can get. The story is interesting enough that every time I go to play it again I am ganna catch something that I did not do before. One final note about this game that really made me realize about what games do today is that when you start out the game they don't tell you how to play at all. I really respect that in the game because they have a manual for a reason. The manual sets the story up very nicely and tells you a lot of helpful things you can do. It explains all the stats and a lot of the skills. A very handy one is the item creation. You can make food (heal stats), weapons, armor, and even character arts. The people in the game (if they have the proper skills) can paint pictures people in the game, places you can go to, and even items. This is a wonderful way to show what the developers really wanted to world to look like even though the technology at the time what not to great.

This game log is pretty much what we're looking for. I only really have two small comments: First, your gameplay sections are more play-by-play than description of the gameplay mechanics. Also, your design section has the "what", but could use more "why".

- Ian Rickard, your TA

(the following is included on all my first-round gradings, and should not be taken as any commentary on your writing.)

If you're interested, I'm happy to provide additional nit-picks of your writing. However as this course is not considered writing intensive, lapses in spelling and grammer of the type I would critique will not have any affect on your grade and so you really needn't worry about them. If you're interested in this type of feedback, email me at inio@soe and I'll provide it privately.