Rogue Galaxy
Dec. 13th, 2014 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroJaster Rogue is living a normal life with his adoptive parents on a moisture farm on a backwater desert planet caught in a war between two galactic empires. One day, a bunch of space pirates mistake him for the legendary bounty hunter Desert Claw and recruit him for their team. As you can probably guess, he might be a chosen one with great potential / the heir to amazing powers; and he gets embroiled in all sorts of adventure, exploration and galaxy-saving mayhem.
This is an action-rpg, in the style of Final Fantasy 12 mixed with Radiata Stories and maybe the Mana games. It’s a 3D free-roaming style of exploration, with the addition of jumping, climbing and swimming (though with crappy edge gravity). Battles take place on the normal map, though enemies aren’t normally visible and there’s a fanfare after each battle is finished. You have a character you actively use to fight and two AI-controlled partners that you can direct to do things, but you can also pause and go to the menu to use items or activate special abilities. (You have a limited attack gauge that decreases as you strike or use items, then increases as you wait or defend.)
Your party includes an armadillo-man and a C3PO-style robot, so credit for variety, even if the protagonist is the standard spiky-haired white boy. A lizard-man, a beast-man and a bunch of other formulaic humans round out the party.
The map system is free roaming (though very linear in places) with an arrow or star to indicate where you should go next at each point. I give them a lot of credit that there’s very smooth loading, fairly seamless zone transitions. Well designed! There tend to be longer load times when you teleport, but the very fact that you can teleport between save points (which are moderately frequent) makes that okay.
There’s a weapon synthesis system that’s generally easy to use. You need to use weapons before they can be combined, but the game does give you hints on how to combine them, and keeps a record of those hints. The factory sidequest, on the other hand, is totally not intuitive and I never figured out how to do anything with it. And there’s the “Insector” sidequest, apparently a built-in mon-battle game that I couldn’t be bothered with (and thankfully, the game doesn’t seem to ever force you to play).
And it’s very pretty: Level-5 does very nice cell-shaded animation, and this game is no exception.
But then come my complaints: It’s a very long game, but kind of pointlessly so. You need to spend way too much time uncovering too-large dungeon-towns for the amount of plot in any given place, and you really need to fight everything you meet while doing this in order to 1) level your characters, 2) Get the money for new weapons, 3) level up your weapons so you can combine them, and 4) get vendortrash that unlocks your characters’ skills (via the “Revelation Flow,” a system similar to FFX’s sphere grid, but requiring vendortrash items to unlock).
And a lot of that space is relatively empty and very repetitive, in terms of but visuals and the (relatively sparse) puzzle elements. Go this way, find a chest. Go this way, find a dead end. Go this way, hit the save point, find a mimic. Repeat half a dozen times, then fight a boss. Some games disguise that sort of gameplay better than others; this one doesn’t.
The ease of a game-over (which sends you back to your last save, full reload, old-school-style) is surprising, even in random battles—the game is more action-heavy than you’d think looking at it as a Final Fantasy 12 clone. And the game totally isn’t designed for solo battles, so when you occasionally have to fight one, it’s really easy to get your ass kicked (boss of Chapter 6, cough cough).
An irritating design decision is that there’s virtually no armor, and there’s no healing magic at all—all healing is from items, which you have limited carrying capacity for, and which are all percentage-based (which, granted, keeps them useful for the entire game). But that means that, even if you’re really good at dodging, you’re going to spend a lot of time in and out of battle dumping potions on people (because your NPC allies aren’t), and then constantly visit shops and burn valuable cash refilling your stocks.
Overall: This isn’t a bad game, per se, there’s just much more of it then I really feel the need for. I played around 20 hours, putting me about a third of the way through the game, but then I really couldn’t work up the motivation to slog through another near-identical gigantic dungeon. The story would be fine for a shorter game or one with less repetitive gameplay, but I just got tired of it all.
This is an action-rpg, in the style of Final Fantasy 12 mixed with Radiata Stories and maybe the Mana games. It’s a 3D free-roaming style of exploration, with the addition of jumping, climbing and swimming (though with crappy edge gravity). Battles take place on the normal map, though enemies aren’t normally visible and there’s a fanfare after each battle is finished. You have a character you actively use to fight and two AI-controlled partners that you can direct to do things, but you can also pause and go to the menu to use items or activate special abilities. (You have a limited attack gauge that decreases as you strike or use items, then increases as you wait or defend.)
Your party includes an armadillo-man and a C3PO-style robot, so credit for variety, even if the protagonist is the standard spiky-haired white boy. A lizard-man, a beast-man and a bunch of other formulaic humans round out the party.
The map system is free roaming (though very linear in places) with an arrow or star to indicate where you should go next at each point. I give them a lot of credit that there’s very smooth loading, fairly seamless zone transitions. Well designed! There tend to be longer load times when you teleport, but the very fact that you can teleport between save points (which are moderately frequent) makes that okay.
There’s a weapon synthesis system that’s generally easy to use. You need to use weapons before they can be combined, but the game does give you hints on how to combine them, and keeps a record of those hints. The factory sidequest, on the other hand, is totally not intuitive and I never figured out how to do anything with it. And there’s the “Insector” sidequest, apparently a built-in mon-battle game that I couldn’t be bothered with (and thankfully, the game doesn’t seem to ever force you to play).
And it’s very pretty: Level-5 does very nice cell-shaded animation, and this game is no exception.
But then come my complaints: It’s a very long game, but kind of pointlessly so. You need to spend way too much time uncovering too-large dungeon-towns for the amount of plot in any given place, and you really need to fight everything you meet while doing this in order to 1) level your characters, 2) Get the money for new weapons, 3) level up your weapons so you can combine them, and 4) get vendortrash that unlocks your characters’ skills (via the “Revelation Flow,” a system similar to FFX’s sphere grid, but requiring vendortrash items to unlock).
And a lot of that space is relatively empty and very repetitive, in terms of but visuals and the (relatively sparse) puzzle elements. Go this way, find a chest. Go this way, find a dead end. Go this way, hit the save point, find a mimic. Repeat half a dozen times, then fight a boss. Some games disguise that sort of gameplay better than others; this one doesn’t.
The ease of a game-over (which sends you back to your last save, full reload, old-school-style) is surprising, even in random battles—the game is more action-heavy than you’d think looking at it as a Final Fantasy 12 clone. And the game totally isn’t designed for solo battles, so when you occasionally have to fight one, it’s really easy to get your ass kicked (boss of Chapter 6, cough cough).
An irritating design decision is that there’s virtually no armor, and there’s no healing magic at all—all healing is from items, which you have limited carrying capacity for, and which are all percentage-based (which, granted, keeps them useful for the entire game). But that means that, even if you’re really good at dodging, you’re going to spend a lot of time in and out of battle dumping potions on people (because your NPC allies aren’t), and then constantly visit shops and burn valuable cash refilling your stocks.
Overall: This isn’t a bad game, per se, there’s just much more of it then I really feel the need for. I played around 20 hours, putting me about a third of the way through the game, but then I really couldn’t work up the motivation to slog through another near-identical gigantic dungeon. The story would be fine for a shorter game or one with less repetitive gameplay, but I just got tired of it all.
