From The Abyss
May. 11th, 2012 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe Abyss Gate is open! The Abyss Lord is awake! The Kingdom is in peril! Quick, [generic hero], you are our only hope!
This is an action/beat-em-up game with RPG elements—very similar to Children of Mana, actually. From the home screen in town (where you can buy equipment, talk to the ten residents, and save your game) you travel to each section of the abyss, which is broken up into maze-like stages. When you get through the three stages in each section, you fight a boss and get a reward. There are eight areas, and you can revisit previous areas to grind if the new ones prove too difficult. Also, the levels are procedurally-generated, but only once per game, so you can map an area of the abyss, then return and continue with the same map. (That “once per game” continues into the post-game, where the enemies get beefed up and a few get new item drops, but the maps are the same.)
Among the gimmicks that liven things up is “Soul Capture”, which allows you to spend 1/10 of your MP to attempt to capture a weakened monster and turn it into a skill. Skills are also buyable in town, but obviously getting them for free is better. Money can be a little short if you plow straight through each dungeon, because monsters drop potions, weapons and vendortrash, but they don’t just give you money for killing them.
You heal completely on level up, and retain your levels as you progress through the game (so it’s not like the Mysterious Dungeon roguelikes, where you revert to Level 1 every time you surface). I actually needed very few of the potions that were constantly being dropped, especially after I started absorbing the healing spells.
When you start a new game, you’re asked a series of questions that determine your starting stats. You also distribute your level up gains manually, so you have a decent ability to customize your character into a glass cannon, a tank, a wizard, or an all-rounder. There are also a variety of weapons, with special abilities for each, in addition to elemental spells.
What I found, in terms of combat, though, was that except for boss battles, the game is all about hit-stun. Virtually all enemies have a stun animation (and a little knockback) when you hit them, which prevents them from attacking and interrupts any casting. So you buy enough speed to hit often enough to stun-lock enemies, and that pretty much covers you, no matter how many hits it actually takes to bring them down. (Which can be a lot, especially in the beginning or when you meet some of the HP-loaded enemies in the later dungeons.) I’ll also note that there’s no collision damage unless the enemy is in their “attack” pose, so sometimes the safest place to attack from (especially for, say, the giant snake monsters) is inside the enemy sprite.
The game isn’t that difficult, once you get over the initial hump of needing an absurd amount of hits to kill enemies until you find a better weapon or level up a bunch. Which is good, because the “Resurrection” item, which is supposed to bring you back to life when you die, either doesn’t work or doesn’t work against bosses, as I discovered in my fight against the Stage 5 boss. (The only time I died, actually.) If you die, it’s back to the title screen—which is really irritating if you just ran three full stages and died against the boss.
This game is hurt by the fact that it’s obviously generic; it has very little story, despite their attempts to engage you with the half-dozen unimportant villagers. It’s really an excuse plot to get you to go dungeon-crawling. I suspect that the exact same game, if it was marketed as part of and used art assets from the Final Fantasy or the Mana series, would have done significantly better.
Overall: Fun for a little while, but totally forgettable. It’s an excuse to mash the attack button and collect skill and item icons that you’ll never click on. I probably paid $5 for it, and that was about right.
This is an action/beat-em-up game with RPG elements—very similar to Children of Mana, actually. From the home screen in town (where you can buy equipment, talk to the ten residents, and save your game) you travel to each section of the abyss, which is broken up into maze-like stages. When you get through the three stages in each section, you fight a boss and get a reward. There are eight areas, and you can revisit previous areas to grind if the new ones prove too difficult. Also, the levels are procedurally-generated, but only once per game, so you can map an area of the abyss, then return and continue with the same map. (That “once per game” continues into the post-game, where the enemies get beefed up and a few get new item drops, but the maps are the same.)
Among the gimmicks that liven things up is “Soul Capture”, which allows you to spend 1/10 of your MP to attempt to capture a weakened monster and turn it into a skill. Skills are also buyable in town, but obviously getting them for free is better. Money can be a little short if you plow straight through each dungeon, because monsters drop potions, weapons and vendortrash, but they don’t just give you money for killing them.
You heal completely on level up, and retain your levels as you progress through the game (so it’s not like the Mysterious Dungeon roguelikes, where you revert to Level 1 every time you surface). I actually needed very few of the potions that were constantly being dropped, especially after I started absorbing the healing spells.
When you start a new game, you’re asked a series of questions that determine your starting stats. You also distribute your level up gains manually, so you have a decent ability to customize your character into a glass cannon, a tank, a wizard, or an all-rounder. There are also a variety of weapons, with special abilities for each, in addition to elemental spells.
What I found, in terms of combat, though, was that except for boss battles, the game is all about hit-stun. Virtually all enemies have a stun animation (and a little knockback) when you hit them, which prevents them from attacking and interrupts any casting. So you buy enough speed to hit often enough to stun-lock enemies, and that pretty much covers you, no matter how many hits it actually takes to bring them down. (Which can be a lot, especially in the beginning or when you meet some of the HP-loaded enemies in the later dungeons.) I’ll also note that there’s no collision damage unless the enemy is in their “attack” pose, so sometimes the safest place to attack from (especially for, say, the giant snake monsters) is inside the enemy sprite.
The game isn’t that difficult, once you get over the initial hump of needing an absurd amount of hits to kill enemies until you find a better weapon or level up a bunch. Which is good, because the “Resurrection” item, which is supposed to bring you back to life when you die, either doesn’t work or doesn’t work against bosses, as I discovered in my fight against the Stage 5 boss. (The only time I died, actually.) If you die, it’s back to the title screen—which is really irritating if you just ran three full stages and died against the boss.
This game is hurt by the fact that it’s obviously generic; it has very little story, despite their attempts to engage you with the half-dozen unimportant villagers. It’s really an excuse plot to get you to go dungeon-crawling. I suspect that the exact same game, if it was marketed as part of and used art assets from the Final Fantasy or the Mana series, would have done significantly better.
Overall: Fun for a little while, but totally forgettable. It’s an excuse to mash the attack button and collect skill and item icons that you’ll never click on. I probably paid $5 for it, and that was about right.
