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Entry tags:
Threads of Fate
A spoiled princess named Mint is denied her inheritance when her younger sister leads a coup against her. Two years later, Mint is travelling the world looking for a [Relic] of the lost Aeon society that she can use to challenge her sister and achieve world domination. At the same time, a boy named Rue is on the same quest, but you can only follow one of their stories at a time.
The interweaving stories are a fun idea (and you'll recall, I loved them in games like Sword of Mana and Treasure of the Rudras). The characters are fun (particularly Mint, who's a giant asshole and unapologetic about it) and the plot is acceptable, if routine. I'm not sure that's enough to save the game when I have such issues with the gameplay, though.
I feel like this straddles the line between "action rpg" and "action/adventure game with rpg elements". The combat is beat-em-up style and there's plenty of isomorphic platforming. You don't gain levels from fighting; your HP and MP rise naturally as you take damage and use magic; and you buy and find upgrades to your strength and defense. You also very rarely just get handed money; instead you have to collect monster coins and assorted other vendortrash to sell. Monsters respawn like whoa, and you recover HP and MP from the potions they drop; there are no consumable items you can carry.
The first area/dungeon is just a setup that lets you get used to the game's style and meet all the characters. Hitboxes are a bit weird and the magic system takes some getting used to, but fine, okay. And while there are lots of treasures you can easily miss, everything can be revisited later.
The second dungeon offers all sorts of annoying gaming "features": Repeated identicle room "mazes", 3D platforming, "run from the boulder" dodging minigames (two of them!), an invincible boss (who is a repeat of a beatable boss!), invisible hidden items; and just to add flavor, rooms where the doors blend into the walls and the camera control is lousy. It also boasts an area where you can get a hidden item that drops the cost of stat upgrades from 30,000 GP to 5,000 GP, assuming you know to look for it, know what to do with it, and have grinded your magic enough at this point to get it.
The third "dungeon" is actually a set of three 2D platforming "mini-games" that you're required to pass to continue. The controls are not particularly responsive, the edge gravity is nonexistant, the enemies are timed to knock you off of everything. Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? was better than this, despite its terrible jump physics and actual stated goal to be a NES-hard platformer game!
And that tells me that this game isn't going to improve for me, so I'm just going to stop.
Overall: In a lot of ways, I'm glad that while retro-game enthusiasts everywhere try to recapture the SNES style of graphics and gameplay, we seem to have left the PS1 era behind. Nobody seems to miss the clunky polygons, guesswork platforming or lousy screen rotation/camera controls--mainstream gaming has take this style of game and made it better with the steady advancement of technology. You can see a lot of the seeds of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and the later Mana series games in this game, but both technology and gameplay standards needed to advance before is could really become something I'd call "good".
The interweaving stories are a fun idea (and you'll recall, I loved them in games like Sword of Mana and Treasure of the Rudras). The characters are fun (particularly Mint, who's a giant asshole and unapologetic about it) and the plot is acceptable, if routine. I'm not sure that's enough to save the game when I have such issues with the gameplay, though.
I feel like this straddles the line between "action rpg" and "action/adventure game with rpg elements". The combat is beat-em-up style and there's plenty of isomorphic platforming. You don't gain levels from fighting; your HP and MP rise naturally as you take damage and use magic; and you buy and find upgrades to your strength and defense. You also very rarely just get handed money; instead you have to collect monster coins and assorted other vendortrash to sell. Monsters respawn like whoa, and you recover HP and MP from the potions they drop; there are no consumable items you can carry.
The first area/dungeon is just a setup that lets you get used to the game's style and meet all the characters. Hitboxes are a bit weird and the magic system takes some getting used to, but fine, okay. And while there are lots of treasures you can easily miss, everything can be revisited later.
The second dungeon offers all sorts of annoying gaming "features": Repeated identicle room "mazes", 3D platforming, "run from the boulder" dodging minigames (two of them!), an invincible boss (who is a repeat of a beatable boss!), invisible hidden items; and just to add flavor, rooms where the doors blend into the walls and the camera control is lousy. It also boasts an area where you can get a hidden item that drops the cost of stat upgrades from 30,000 GP to 5,000 GP, assuming you know to look for it, know what to do with it, and have grinded your magic enough at this point to get it.
The third "dungeon" is actually a set of three 2D platforming "mini-games" that you're required to pass to continue. The controls are not particularly responsive, the edge gravity is nonexistant, the enemies are timed to knock you off of everything. Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? was better than this, despite its terrible jump physics and actual stated goal to be a NES-hard platformer game!
And that tells me that this game isn't going to improve for me, so I'm just going to stop.
Overall: In a lot of ways, I'm glad that while retro-game enthusiasts everywhere try to recapture the SNES style of graphics and gameplay, we seem to have left the PS1 era behind. Nobody seems to miss the clunky polygons, guesswork platforming or lousy screen rotation/camera controls--mainstream gaming has take this style of game and made it better with the steady advancement of technology. You can see a lot of the seeds of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and the later Mana series games in this game, but both technology and gameplay standards needed to advance before is could really become something I'd call "good".