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Thursday 6 March, 2008
GAMEPLAY:
Hooray! I get to play the game now! I can finally make decks and collect skills. The available skills were very limited when I first was able to make a deck, but the number of skills has steadily increased as I’ve completed missions.
This game is really a collectable card game in disguise. I get money from completing missions which I can use to buy a group of five random skills(equivalent of a booster pack in Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh!). Skills even have rarity which affects the chances of getting them, means they are worth more, and roughly correlates to how good they are. My deck requires a large proportion of aura particles which I need to use skills(like land in Magic or energies in Poke’mon…not that I’ve ever played or heard of Poke’mon cards).
Constructing a strategy and seeing how it plays out on the battlefield are the biggest draw for me. Unfortunately, there are few reasonable strategies and different ones usually play the similarly. By similarly, I mean all the decks are really bad. Almost every attack has a crippling draw back. Some are cheap but are only one-time use or they deal good damage but have a horrible trajectory that makes them almost impossible to hit with or they aim fairly well but do little damage for high cost. The fact that they are all bad does make them balanced but it also makes battles tedious and long as ever, a result I hoped to avoid when I could chose my skills. That said, there are some skills I like, they are just few and far between.
DESIGN:
Phantom Dust tries to create a complex set of skills to allow for many unique strategies, but it falls short in most respects. The large amount of skills with many attributes is designed to give the player the freedom to choose whatever strategy they want. This works to a degree. By using melee skills and others that hinder the opponents defense such as preventing them from using skills for ten seconds, I created an effectively aggressive deck. Conversely, by have more aura with more powerful defenses, I made a deck that stalls until it can use expensive skills. So it is possible to make completely different strategies, the big problem is that the way the game is designed to allow these strategies also creates side effects. For one, some of the variants that the designers put in to increase the variety of skills make those skills useless. A good example is the various trajectories attacks have. Some shoot straight ahead, some arc at different angles, and some fall from above. The ones that arc are supposed to give you more choices such as allowing you to hide behind a wall and shoot a blast that arcs over the wall. In practice, most trajectories besides plain straight almost always hit something in the way. When you are inside a building some are impossible to use because they hit the ceiling before coming back down.
Later in the game, missions have rules that change the gameplay. The designers probably did this to create challenge and promote the use of specific strategies certain skills use. This works to a degree as well. One level doubles the cost of all skills, promoting the use of cheap skills and one-use skills which are more powerful for less cost because they can only be used once. The unintentional downside is that I now have to make a specific deck for each mission and I usually have to lose a mission several times before I can see what deck I need to make. It also makes my other decks useless because the rules are so crippling. The double cost rule, for instance, makes almost all decks unusable for having anything of medium to high cost.
The designer’s intentions for these game elements are obvious and are achieved through these methods, but the detriments to gameplay they make are greater that the benefits. The designers didn’t consider the side effects of these choices and the gameplay suffered. This game had potential and it was that potential that got me to play as long as I did. It’s too bad the designers left the game so unrefined.
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