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The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, Avalon Code
The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road
Dorothy lives alone on a small farm, until a tornado sweeps up her house. She's deposited in the "Land of Magic" where the great shadow of the Wizard of Oz greets her. He gives her magical shoes so she can travel the magical land, and invites her to his castle. Of course, she'll need to defeat monsters to get there.
The opening story is presented in a "storybook" format. Once you get through the prologue, Oz says that the Winter Witch and her three daughters wish to overthrow him, and that if you defeat them all (after stealing the "eggs" that power their magic barriers) he'll grant your wishes. Then you spend the meat of the game dungeon-crawling like a boss. (There's much more generic jrpg fantasy than Oz references from there on.)
You move by "spinning a trackball" using the touchscreen, and all of the field and battle commands are touchscreen-based (mostly by pressing "buttons"). The biggest problem with this is that it would be a clunky control scheme if it was an actual trackball, and the fact you need to use the stylus to spin it just makes it annoying. The game would be more fun if you could just use the cross-key to move Dorothy.
You get four turns in each round of battle, but you can divide them up among your party members, and monsters only attack the character who is currently acting--however, the lion costs 2 turns for one action, and the tin man costs three. Also, each party member's attacks are particularly effective against certain types of enemies. Enemies come in four types, and each character specializes in one of them: Ghosts (white) are weak to Dorothy. Water-types (blue) are weak to Strawman. Shell-types (yellow) are weak to Lion. Plants (green) are weak to Tin Man. Most of the strategy during battles revolves around juggling your party in and out to handle the collection of monster who appear.
Also, the autobattle function is pretty robust, auto-targeting enemies with the characters who are strong against them, and volunteering items and spells when your characters need healing. (Though this can also be annoying, as the AI kept wasting my anti-poison items on the last round of battle, when status ailments all clear after battle anyway.)
Money is handled oddly--winning battles doesn't give you any, though defeated enemies occasionally drop coins on the map screen. Also, coins will sometimes just be lying in the middle of the road, Mario-style. Given the necessity of items in the early areas, the severe dearth of money is a problem. Also, you need to earn magic one spell at a time by beating bonus dragon bosses, which is not particularly intuitive.
What the game desperately needs is an automap system, but what it gives you are signposts along the paths that you can mark with various symbols as you see fit. But I suppose that would make it clear that the dungeons / areas aren't actually that complex or difficult, they're mostly long stretches of straight lines with occasional turnoffs.
Overall: Once you get past Oz gimmick and stylus control scheme, it's just another 3D dungeon-crawler without a lot of plot or real complexity. It's not bad, it's just nothing special. A time-waster of a game at a point in my life when I don't have a lot of time to waste. (Also, I cannot think about the title without getting a certain Elton John song stuck in my head. So there’s that.)
Avalon Code
A mysterious Book of Prophecy emerges from a monument and falls into the hands of a young man named Yemil. But the Imperial Knights want it. With the help of Rempo, the fire spirit bound to the Book, Yemil will need to record everything he can find into the Book before the world is destroyed, so those things survive into the next world.
The Book is the major mechanic for the game, and occupies the lower DS screen. From there, you can upgrade weapons, monkey with enemy stats, and change the world around you. The Book gains experience as you copy things into it and as you examine items and talk to people, then you can rearrange the attributes of people and objects to improve them. This quickly becomes really complex, as you need to keep track of what attributes you have available and where you put them, or you'll spend an hour flipping through the book trying to find that one Iron tile you need to complete your sword. (Credit to the designers for being really thorough at what you can do by mixing-and-matching traits on items and creatures; but I don't really have the patience for the kind of experimentation the game really demands.)
Another action-rpg hybrid, this game has a fairly standard "running, rolling and sword-slashing" exploration and fighting mode, with the book as the statistics/strategy mechanism, plus plenty of interacting with NPCs and solving their problems. You only get 5 HP, though, which I couldn't figure out how to increase on my own (Apparently there are Hp-increasing tablets I missed). The Game Over screen is a common occurance past the first few areas, though continuing only puts you back to the beginning of the room and doesn't seem to carry any other penalties. The dungeons are strings of puzzle rooms, where you're timed on how quickly you can hit all the switches or defeat all the monsters.
I think there are a lot of interesting concepts here, but the execution has some major flaws. Rather than only being able to have four tiles in "inventory" at any given time, you should have a bank of all currently unused tiles, so you can keep track of them without having to skim. (Especially since the first thing you do unpon meeting a ew monster is to remove most of its traits to weaken it.) Also, the Book is just too goddamn big for something you need to flip through and wait to load--the index isn't good enough and searching the book manually takes too long.
My other issues is that this game can't decide whether it's linear or a wide open sandbox--there seem to be a lot of sidequests that you can do in any order, but if you stumble on the main plot before doing them, you'll get shuffled along and locked out of them (at least for a while--I'm not sure they're permanently missable).
Overall: Bunch of neat concepts, and credit for trying something new, but the execution is too problematic for me to spend limited gaming time on. (I might have made it further in a few years ago.)
Edit: I read the Let’s Play, and I’m even happier with my decision to abandon trying to get through this. The LP is a good read—the author fleshed out the story and added a lot of witty dialogue and better characterization—but it also makes it very clear that for all of this game’s potential, the execution was lacking and playing it for 30 hours wouldn’t have been fun.
Dorothy lives alone on a small farm, until a tornado sweeps up her house. She's deposited in the "Land of Magic" where the great shadow of the Wizard of Oz greets her. He gives her magical shoes so she can travel the magical land, and invites her to his castle. Of course, she'll need to defeat monsters to get there.
The opening story is presented in a "storybook" format. Once you get through the prologue, Oz says that the Winter Witch and her three daughters wish to overthrow him, and that if you defeat them all (after stealing the "eggs" that power their magic barriers) he'll grant your wishes. Then you spend the meat of the game dungeon-crawling like a boss. (There's much more generic jrpg fantasy than Oz references from there on.)
You move by "spinning a trackball" using the touchscreen, and all of the field and battle commands are touchscreen-based (mostly by pressing "buttons"). The biggest problem with this is that it would be a clunky control scheme if it was an actual trackball, and the fact you need to use the stylus to spin it just makes it annoying. The game would be more fun if you could just use the cross-key to move Dorothy.
You get four turns in each round of battle, but you can divide them up among your party members, and monsters only attack the character who is currently acting--however, the lion costs 2 turns for one action, and the tin man costs three. Also, each party member's attacks are particularly effective against certain types of enemies. Enemies come in four types, and each character specializes in one of them: Ghosts (white) are weak to Dorothy. Water-types (blue) are weak to Strawman. Shell-types (yellow) are weak to Lion. Plants (green) are weak to Tin Man. Most of the strategy during battles revolves around juggling your party in and out to handle the collection of monster who appear.
Also, the autobattle function is pretty robust, auto-targeting enemies with the characters who are strong against them, and volunteering items and spells when your characters need healing. (Though this can also be annoying, as the AI kept wasting my anti-poison items on the last round of battle, when status ailments all clear after battle anyway.)
Money is handled oddly--winning battles doesn't give you any, though defeated enemies occasionally drop coins on the map screen. Also, coins will sometimes just be lying in the middle of the road, Mario-style. Given the necessity of items in the early areas, the severe dearth of money is a problem. Also, you need to earn magic one spell at a time by beating bonus dragon bosses, which is not particularly intuitive.
What the game desperately needs is an automap system, but what it gives you are signposts along the paths that you can mark with various symbols as you see fit. But I suppose that would make it clear that the dungeons / areas aren't actually that complex or difficult, they're mostly long stretches of straight lines with occasional turnoffs.
Overall: Once you get past Oz gimmick and stylus control scheme, it's just another 3D dungeon-crawler without a lot of plot or real complexity. It's not bad, it's just nothing special. A time-waster of a game at a point in my life when I don't have a lot of time to waste. (Also, I cannot think about the title without getting a certain Elton John song stuck in my head. So there’s that.)
Avalon Code
A mysterious Book of Prophecy emerges from a monument and falls into the hands of a young man named Yemil. But the Imperial Knights want it. With the help of Rempo, the fire spirit bound to the Book, Yemil will need to record everything he can find into the Book before the world is destroyed, so those things survive into the next world.
The Book is the major mechanic for the game, and occupies the lower DS screen. From there, you can upgrade weapons, monkey with enemy stats, and change the world around you. The Book gains experience as you copy things into it and as you examine items and talk to people, then you can rearrange the attributes of people and objects to improve them. This quickly becomes really complex, as you need to keep track of what attributes you have available and where you put them, or you'll spend an hour flipping through the book trying to find that one Iron tile you need to complete your sword. (Credit to the designers for being really thorough at what you can do by mixing-and-matching traits on items and creatures; but I don't really have the patience for the kind of experimentation the game really demands.)
Another action-rpg hybrid, this game has a fairly standard "running, rolling and sword-slashing" exploration and fighting mode, with the book as the statistics/strategy mechanism, plus plenty of interacting with NPCs and solving their problems. You only get 5 HP, though, which I couldn't figure out how to increase on my own (Apparently there are Hp-increasing tablets I missed). The Game Over screen is a common occurance past the first few areas, though continuing only puts you back to the beginning of the room and doesn't seem to carry any other penalties. The dungeons are strings of puzzle rooms, where you're timed on how quickly you can hit all the switches or defeat all the monsters.
I think there are a lot of interesting concepts here, but the execution has some major flaws. Rather than only being able to have four tiles in "inventory" at any given time, you should have a bank of all currently unused tiles, so you can keep track of them without having to skim. (Especially since the first thing you do unpon meeting a ew monster is to remove most of its traits to weaken it.) Also, the Book is just too goddamn big for something you need to flip through and wait to load--the index isn't good enough and searching the book manually takes too long.
My other issues is that this game can't decide whether it's linear or a wide open sandbox--there seem to be a lot of sidequests that you can do in any order, but if you stumble on the main plot before doing them, you'll get shuffled along and locked out of them (at least for a while--I'm not sure they're permanently missable).
Overall: Bunch of neat concepts, and credit for trying something new, but the execution is too problematic for me to spend limited gaming time on. (I might have made it further in a few years ago.)
Edit: I read the Let’s Play, and I’m even happier with my decision to abandon trying to get through this. The LP is a good read—the author fleshed out the story and added a lot of witty dialogue and better characterization—but it also makes it very clear that for all of this game’s potential, the execution was lacking and playing it for 30 hours wouldn’t have been fun.