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Aldorlea RPGMaker Games #2 - 3 Stars of Destiny (PC)
Apparently there are three humans who have been gifted with great powers, and there's a demon king who wants to kill them so he can become a demon god. It's pretty clear that your characters are those humans (or, two humans and an elf), but as they know nothing about any evil plots, they're mostly just going about their business and having goofy misadventures.
Like The Book of Legends, there are issues with sprawling maps, lack of narrative thrust, and general lack of clarity of which quests you're “supposed” to solve at any given point. The game's Easy mode makes it less likely you'll get punished for exploration, but it's often unclear about how much you should be grinding before entering any given area, and I had several points where I was certain I had wandered into a higher-level sidequest but apparently that was just a random difficulty spike.
The main characters' antics are “wacky,” by which we mean they take turns making stupid choices and complaining about them. They don't really have a goal beyond, “Let's go to this place and see what happens,”--they don't even know about the Big Bad—so the game lacks much narrative thrust. So...a bunch of jerks go on a half-assed journey, bitch and moan a lot, and eventually save the world? Yeah, that'll be a story for the ages.
There are a lot of systems that are questionably implemented—honestly, the design and coding aren't great. There are too many minor items with unclear effects but you can't use or throw away because you might need them for a random sidequest. Many paths go behind solid scenery, but there are also random dark spots on the ground that are apparently obstacles. The alchemist character can apparently upgrade artifacts, but the mechanism that makes that happen is very obtuse. Whenever a character acts in battle (including, say, counterattacks) it counts as a new turn, so they take poison damage or regenerate. And speaking of counterattacks, if both the character and the enemy have auto-counter abilities, them they'll just keep countering back and forth until one of them dies. I don't know if this was lousy design or just lousy playtesting, but my money's on both.
I applaud them having a quest log; but they also could use a lot more documentation about items, skills and status ailments. They could also use a minimap. Or just smaller, less repetitive dungeons.
Overall: I give them credit for managing to be a lousy game in a completely different set of ways than the previous one? I'm kinda dreading what the third game in the pack comes up with.
Like The Book of Legends, there are issues with sprawling maps, lack of narrative thrust, and general lack of clarity of which quests you're “supposed” to solve at any given point. The game's Easy mode makes it less likely you'll get punished for exploration, but it's often unclear about how much you should be grinding before entering any given area, and I had several points where I was certain I had wandered into a higher-level sidequest but apparently that was just a random difficulty spike.
The main characters' antics are “wacky,” by which we mean they take turns making stupid choices and complaining about them. They don't really have a goal beyond, “Let's go to this place and see what happens,”--they don't even know about the Big Bad—so the game lacks much narrative thrust. So...a bunch of jerks go on a half-assed journey, bitch and moan a lot, and eventually save the world? Yeah, that'll be a story for the ages.
There are a lot of systems that are questionably implemented—honestly, the design and coding aren't great. There are too many minor items with unclear effects but you can't use or throw away because you might need them for a random sidequest. Many paths go behind solid scenery, but there are also random dark spots on the ground that are apparently obstacles. The alchemist character can apparently upgrade artifacts, but the mechanism that makes that happen is very obtuse. Whenever a character acts in battle (including, say, counterattacks) it counts as a new turn, so they take poison damage or regenerate. And speaking of counterattacks, if both the character and the enemy have auto-counter abilities, them they'll just keep countering back and forth until one of them dies. I don't know if this was lousy design or just lousy playtesting, but my money's on both.
I applaud them having a quest log; but they also could use a lot more documentation about items, skills and status ailments. They could also use a minimap. Or just smaller, less repetitive dungeons.
Overall: I give them credit for managing to be a lousy game in a completely different set of ways than the previous one? I'm kinda dreading what the third game in the pack comes up with.