![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThe royals of the Kingdom of Easthend are overthrown in a blood coup d’etat, and their lost princess is found by an adventurer and his golem partner. The three of them go to search for a legendary wish-granting artifact to try to save the kingdom, and meet plenty of golems, elves and dwarves along the way.
This is a WorldWideSoftware game, which means it has perfectly fine systems, a perfectly fine plot, a reasonable if somewhat awkward translation, and some reasonably good dungeon design. The graphic scheme shows a love for FF6, but a lack of talent to fully mimic it. Character designs are fine. Dungeons are often full of barely-visible obstacles and the scale for staircases (or towns on the world map) is really weird, but they get creative with the layouts and there are a few simple setpiece puzzles. Monsters are visible and you can determine surprise attacks depending on how you run into them.
The battle system is turn-based, but with a weird sort of nod to active time battle. Skills are learned through a class system--you equip "tablets" which grant skills and battle stances, and can permanently learn them via points acquired in battle. Human characters have one set (which are not entirely shared—one human is mage-focused, the other martial-focused), and the golem character has another. Equipment is independent of this, and character-specific. The tablets have undocumented permanent stat bonuses, usually at 800 and 1000/Master if there's nothing else listed. So there's a reason to master tablets even if there's no power listed at that level.
The lack of both full-party healing and all-enemy attacks for most of the game means that boss battles often become adventures in round-robin item use. (Bosses virtually always have a powerful hit-all attack in their rotation, though they never seem to use it twice in a row.) Though it turns out I made my own life much more difficult by missing the Holy Priest tablet in the Cave of the Abyss (left path after the first boss), which has all the higher-level healing spells.
Laishutia's "Sleep Cloud" spell is actually amazingly effective for random battles, because it almost always works and enemies don't wake up until you hit them. Once you also have "Mental Steal" (which seems effective on anything that isn't undead), you can use magic to your heart's content without worrying about items. Of course, given the Campset item (fully refills the party, can't be used in battle) becomes trivially cheap in the later game, you can spam magic a lot already.
The "break" system is badly documented, but when your meter fills to 100% (by taking damage), you can opt to enhance one attack and jump it to the front of the action queue. Given how slowly the meter fills and the mild chain benefits from using attacks in succession, I found that the best way to use them was to throw out buffs and debuffs like crazy in the first two rounds of a boss battle, then unleash my best attacks as breaks in one big smash. On the topic of buffs/debuffs, they last only a few rounds and Dauturu (who gets most of the debuffs) never has as much MP as you want, so you need to make them count.
The ability to "make" weapons rather than buying them is minor in the first half of the game, as it just lets you arrange merit points slightly differently. Later in the game it becomes a critical system, as you hit rounds of weapons that can only be made with Silver Ore or Mithril Ore, which you collect in dungeons. (There's an Orichalcum third set available once the final dungeon opens up, but you need to go to the Dwarf town to make them. Nothing tells you this, of course. A Zebulon fourth set is available in the post-game dungeons.)
It irritates me that you can often reach destinations that aren't on "the plotted line", but there's no benefit to doing so--most of the time, the characters will just say, "We have no reason to be here now." There are at least five locked locations around the world that are apparently only used for the post-game.
Periodically, you'll split your main party and get other characters to join you for portions of a dungeon. This is mildly irritating because of the way the tablet system works, that you're wasting time earning skills for characters who'll leave your party shortly thereafter. You're given the option of putting any of the temporary characters back into your party for the final dungeon and post-game (replacing a main character, of course), but I don't see a lot of value in that, as my main characters were well ahead of them in mastered classes at that point.
Overall: The plot is forgettable, but inoffensive. There are fun breaks and corner-cases to find in the systems, and the difficulty curve is fair. Better than average for a KEMCO game, overall.
This is a WorldWideSoftware game, which means it has perfectly fine systems, a perfectly fine plot, a reasonable if somewhat awkward translation, and some reasonably good dungeon design. The graphic scheme shows a love for FF6, but a lack of talent to fully mimic it. Character designs are fine. Dungeons are often full of barely-visible obstacles and the scale for staircases (or towns on the world map) is really weird, but they get creative with the layouts and there are a few simple setpiece puzzles. Monsters are visible and you can determine surprise attacks depending on how you run into them.
The battle system is turn-based, but with a weird sort of nod to active time battle. Skills are learned through a class system--you equip "tablets" which grant skills and battle stances, and can permanently learn them via points acquired in battle. Human characters have one set (which are not entirely shared—one human is mage-focused, the other martial-focused), and the golem character has another. Equipment is independent of this, and character-specific. The tablets have undocumented permanent stat bonuses, usually at 800 and 1000/Master if there's nothing else listed. So there's a reason to master tablets even if there's no power listed at that level.
The lack of both full-party healing and all-enemy attacks for most of the game means that boss battles often become adventures in round-robin item use. (Bosses virtually always have a powerful hit-all attack in their rotation, though they never seem to use it twice in a row.) Though it turns out I made my own life much more difficult by missing the Holy Priest tablet in the Cave of the Abyss (left path after the first boss), which has all the higher-level healing spells.
Laishutia's "Sleep Cloud" spell is actually amazingly effective for random battles, because it almost always works and enemies don't wake up until you hit them. Once you also have "Mental Steal" (which seems effective on anything that isn't undead), you can use magic to your heart's content without worrying about items. Of course, given the Campset item (fully refills the party, can't be used in battle) becomes trivially cheap in the later game, you can spam magic a lot already.
The "break" system is badly documented, but when your meter fills to 100% (by taking damage), you can opt to enhance one attack and jump it to the front of the action queue. Given how slowly the meter fills and the mild chain benefits from using attacks in succession, I found that the best way to use them was to throw out buffs and debuffs like crazy in the first two rounds of a boss battle, then unleash my best attacks as breaks in one big smash. On the topic of buffs/debuffs, they last only a few rounds and Dauturu (who gets most of the debuffs) never has as much MP as you want, so you need to make them count.
The ability to "make" weapons rather than buying them is minor in the first half of the game, as it just lets you arrange merit points slightly differently. Later in the game it becomes a critical system, as you hit rounds of weapons that can only be made with Silver Ore or Mithril Ore, which you collect in dungeons. (There's an Orichalcum third set available once the final dungeon opens up, but you need to go to the Dwarf town to make them. Nothing tells you this, of course. A Zebulon fourth set is available in the post-game dungeons.)
It irritates me that you can often reach destinations that aren't on "the plotted line", but there's no benefit to doing so--most of the time, the characters will just say, "We have no reason to be here now." There are at least five locked locations around the world that are apparently only used for the post-game.
Periodically, you'll split your main party and get other characters to join you for portions of a dungeon. This is mildly irritating because of the way the tablet system works, that you're wasting time earning skills for characters who'll leave your party shortly thereafter. You're given the option of putting any of the temporary characters back into your party for the final dungeon and post-game (replacing a main character, of course), but I don't see a lot of value in that, as my main characters were well ahead of them in mastered classes at that point.
Overall: The plot is forgettable, but inoffensive. There are fun breaks and corner-cases to find in the systems, and the difficulty curve is fair. Better than average for a KEMCO game, overall.
