Ephemeral Fantasia
Nov. 17th, 2012 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe renowned musician (and also thief) Mouse is invited to a royal wedding on a remote island, but it quickly becomes evident that something weird is going on there. Especially when it becomes clear that he and everyone else are trapped on the island, and the only way out is through the king—who controls time itself. Strap on your little booties, ‘cause it’s groundhog day!
I see what they were trying to do here: It’s a game in the tradition of classic crpgs like Ultima, where people have schedules and set events, and you need to take excessive notes and piece together all the clues to solve the game. The basic concept is clever. They obviously put a lot of work into setting up all of the inhabitants of the island and all of the different events. Credit where credit is due.
There are some games that you can point to and say definitively, “This aspect of the game made it bad.” I’m not sure I see that here, because I think there are a lot of separate mediocre elements that add up to make this a kinda lousy game. (Besides the fact that “take excessive notes and piece together moon logic puzzles” has never really been my cup of tea—I prefer more linear, plot-heavy games.)
• There’s a 5-day in-game time limit and a real-time passage of time that corresponds to it, so the day/night cycle goes on as you travel from place to place, talk to people, and steal stuff from their houses. Days go by really quickly, and if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s easy to miss the window for something.
• On a related note, the map of the island is divided up into lots of little fragments that are hidden all over the place, and even the town is maze-like anyway, so getting lost is easy. (You have to run in a lot of circles and space-filling paths to get in and out of town.) Similarly, you can hold circle to run…in a game where time is critical, why isn’t running the default?
• The zone borders are really oddly placed, and between switching zones and time changes, you end up with a lot of random loading while you’re trying to run around. (Though they are still way better about loading than, say, Metal Saga.)
• There’s a Guitar Hero-esque minigame that doesn’t have a tutorial, or even an explanation of which buttons to press in order to play it; and playing it is critical to advancing the story. When I figured out how to change from the completely unintuitive control scheme to one that made vague sense, it was kinda fun, but it made a crappy first impression and it’s still not the best minigame ever.
• The graphics aren’t bad, per se, but the human characters are very stiff and unexpressive in their stripperific anime costumes. It feels a bit like this was built with the PS1 in mind, and when given the extra processing power, they decided to use it to make battles extra-spinny!
• The main character, Mouse, is a mute hero with a talking guitar as his sidekick; the guitar is a condescending, unscrupulous asshole and that’s the only impression you get of Mouse, too.
• The general flow of the game is that you need to learn all of the townspeople’s daily cycles and piece together clues by taking extensive notes of everyone’s problems, then show up in the right place at the right time to solve them. While you’re doing this, you’ll get battered by tons of random battles and competing sidequests. Which again is not, in itself, a bad thing, but isn’t a style of game I really enjoy.
• The battle system is a crib of Final Fantasy’s Active Time Battle, where everyone has a meter that fills until they can attack again, and the enemies take their turns whether you’re ready or not. It’s not great for solo battles (a decent chunk of the early game), and even with the battle mode set to “Fast” random battles tend to drag on.
• The random encounter rate is pretty dang high.
• Among the first enemies you meet, when you only have one party member, is a rabbit that can paralyze you. My feelings on shut-down status effects when you only have a single character are well-documented. Also, poison is really nasty and moderately common in the early areas, but I couldn’t figure out which of the zillion item store sold antidotes (and Mouse doesn’t get healing spells, from the look of things), so I ended up using the more expensive cure-all status item; and then gave up when I was poisoned after a time loop caused be to lose all my items.
• Oh, yes, with each reset, you lose all of your gold and consumable items. You keep XP, equipable items, equipment upgrades and spells/skills. (And map pieces, which is most important of all.)
Among things I did like: Each character has a personal XP level which controls their stats, but there’s also a party XP level which determines everyone’s HP and MP. Which means if you get a new low-level character, they at least have some survivability.
Overall: Reviews I’ve seen of this online are very polarized—it apparently has people who think it’s kinda crap and people who think it’s total awesomesauce. Unfortunately, I’m in the former category. It’s a mediocre execution of a game style I’m not wild about, certainly not enough to play 60+ hours of it when I still have a shelf full of games I’m likely to enjoy more. Though this is probably the first console rpg I’ve played that I thought The CRPG Addict might enjoy.
I see what they were trying to do here: It’s a game in the tradition of classic crpgs like Ultima, where people have schedules and set events, and you need to take excessive notes and piece together all the clues to solve the game. The basic concept is clever. They obviously put a lot of work into setting up all of the inhabitants of the island and all of the different events. Credit where credit is due.
There are some games that you can point to and say definitively, “This aspect of the game made it bad.” I’m not sure I see that here, because I think there are a lot of separate mediocre elements that add up to make this a kinda lousy game. (Besides the fact that “take excessive notes and piece together moon logic puzzles” has never really been my cup of tea—I prefer more linear, plot-heavy games.)
• There’s a 5-day in-game time limit and a real-time passage of time that corresponds to it, so the day/night cycle goes on as you travel from place to place, talk to people, and steal stuff from their houses. Days go by really quickly, and if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s easy to miss the window for something.
• On a related note, the map of the island is divided up into lots of little fragments that are hidden all over the place, and even the town is maze-like anyway, so getting lost is easy. (You have to run in a lot of circles and space-filling paths to get in and out of town.) Similarly, you can hold circle to run…in a game where time is critical, why isn’t running the default?
• The zone borders are really oddly placed, and between switching zones and time changes, you end up with a lot of random loading while you’re trying to run around. (Though they are still way better about loading than, say, Metal Saga.)
• There’s a Guitar Hero-esque minigame that doesn’t have a tutorial, or even an explanation of which buttons to press in order to play it; and playing it is critical to advancing the story. When I figured out how to change from the completely unintuitive control scheme to one that made vague sense, it was kinda fun, but it made a crappy first impression and it’s still not the best minigame ever.
• The graphics aren’t bad, per se, but the human characters are very stiff and unexpressive in their stripperific anime costumes. It feels a bit like this was built with the PS1 in mind, and when given the extra processing power, they decided to use it to make battles extra-spinny!
• The main character, Mouse, is a mute hero with a talking guitar as his sidekick; the guitar is a condescending, unscrupulous asshole and that’s the only impression you get of Mouse, too.
• The general flow of the game is that you need to learn all of the townspeople’s daily cycles and piece together clues by taking extensive notes of everyone’s problems, then show up in the right place at the right time to solve them. While you’re doing this, you’ll get battered by tons of random battles and competing sidequests. Which again is not, in itself, a bad thing, but isn’t a style of game I really enjoy.
• The battle system is a crib of Final Fantasy’s Active Time Battle, where everyone has a meter that fills until they can attack again, and the enemies take their turns whether you’re ready or not. It’s not great for solo battles (a decent chunk of the early game), and even with the battle mode set to “Fast” random battles tend to drag on.
• The random encounter rate is pretty dang high.
• Among the first enemies you meet, when you only have one party member, is a rabbit that can paralyze you. My feelings on shut-down status effects when you only have a single character are well-documented. Also, poison is really nasty and moderately common in the early areas, but I couldn’t figure out which of the zillion item store sold antidotes (and Mouse doesn’t get healing spells, from the look of things), so I ended up using the more expensive cure-all status item; and then gave up when I was poisoned after a time loop caused be to lose all my items.
• Oh, yes, with each reset, you lose all of your gold and consumable items. You keep XP, equipable items, equipment upgrades and spells/skills. (And map pieces, which is most important of all.)
Among things I did like: Each character has a personal XP level which controls their stats, but there’s also a party XP level which determines everyone’s HP and MP. Which means if you get a new low-level character, they at least have some survivability.
Overall: Reviews I’ve seen of this online are very polarized—it apparently has people who think it’s kinda crap and people who think it’s total awesomesauce. Unfortunately, I’m in the former category. It’s a mediocre execution of a game style I’m not wild about, certainly not enough to play 60+ hours of it when I still have a shelf full of games I’m likely to enjoy more. Though this is probably the first console rpg I’ve played that I thought The CRPG Addict might enjoy.
