Tears Revolude (PC, Steam)
Aug. 15th, 2023 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroSion and Michelle are mercenaries who discover a strange amnesiac girl named Liana in a cave. At the same time, they also start finding strange jewel-covered boss monsters while searching for treasures left by the famous artist Orwiel; and supposing the two things are related, start following every random lead they can. They quickly discover that the Guild, who run the local area, are also after the girl; so they enlist the leader of the Resistance to help find out what’s going on.
One of the last WorldWideSoftware games I hadn’t played, I picked this up in a Steam Golden Week sale a few years ago, and my thread of re-posting KEMCO reviews inspired me to actually get around to playing it. (WorldWideSoftware clearly stopped producing new games for KEMCO years ago; but it’s not clear to me if they became Rideon or just sold some IP to Rideon; because Adventure Bar Story was made by them and Marenian Tavern Story was credited to Rideon and the two games share far too many assets to be unrelated.)
This game is pretty weird visually and pretty rote in all other respects: The controls are a hybrid of touchscreen (or mouse, in my case) and arrow keys. The dungeon view shows you the character is in a semi-3D angled view, but also gives you a minimap and a first-person view. The enemies are visible (as dark-color balls in all the views), but the worm-tunnel layout of the dungeons generally makes them unavoidable, and they respawn every time you change floors. There also are only 2-3 monsters in a couple of formations in each dungeon, so the battles get particularly repetitive. The graphics feel like they pieced together several unrelated systems (monster designs, character designs, the 3D walls, the visual novel-style character conversations, the menu towns) from different, unrelated sources. Battles are shown in first-person with a style of monster design that again seems different from the rest of the art; and a button style that don’t look familiar to me at all.
You need to revisit several of the earlier dungeons, but it’s to get to new areas within them that require virtually no retreading, so that’s not so bad. There are some puzzles in the later dungeons: Pressing buttons, key-in-lock, pushing blocks; and gradually ramping up into more obtuse candle-lighting sequences. The hardest block-pushing puzzles are in the purchasable bonus dungeon, and they’re mostly hard because the angles are weird and the elevations are hard to discern. (Those areas must have been hell to play on a phone, and a quick check on Youtube seems to indicate they didn’t change anything meaningful in the port.)
Your weapons never change, but you can upgrade them and shift them more towards attack or magic. Unlocking your skills is tied to how much you’ve upgraded your weapons, which means there aren’t a lot of them or a lot of variety, but you can unlock higher-level versions of the skills (which use more MP and have bigger effects) by using them over and over. Albus’ Smoke Blast is the only ability that hits all enemies at level 1, so it was my go-to. Instead of armor, there are accessories and a system of “gems” that you equip for stat bonuses. There’s also “SP” that builds up as you fight which you can use for big combo attacks. Every 5 enemies killed gets you a TRP, which take the place of the IAP store for unlocking bonus dungeons and special items. There’s also a system of achievements that reward you TRP; most of which you’ll stumble into in the normal course of play. Random people in town will request 5 or 10 of a vendortrash item dropped by monsters as a sidequest, which you can fulfill as you walk into and out of each dungeon (which you’ll have to do if you didn’t think to stock up on “recall crystals”).
There are four difficulty levels, and I played on Easy because I had a suspicion this wouldn’t be a game I wanted to grind. (I was correct.) I made it to the proper ending sequence but didn’t bother with the postgame “trial dungeon” and extra achievements.
The plot is honestly forgettable: The Guild has an evil plan, Liana has superpowers that are critical to it, except they actually aren’t and even without her the Guild will destroy the world anyway if you don’t stop them. Also, she and all the Guild heads are artificial humans. It turns out that a downplayed sidekick to the head of the Guild is secretly Orwiel and he organized everything, including creating all of the artificial humans in the search for perfect beauty. The characters have some banter (which is moderately cute in an overdone anime sort of way) and some trauma (which is often downplayed rather than really explored). The Power of Optimistic Thinking (and also punching dudes really hard) saves the day.
Overall: Nothing to write home about, especially since the only thing unique about this was the weird graphic scheme, which doesn’t actually improve anything. It’s not bad, it’s just nothing special.
One of the last WorldWideSoftware games I hadn’t played, I picked this up in a Steam Golden Week sale a few years ago, and my thread of re-posting KEMCO reviews inspired me to actually get around to playing it. (WorldWideSoftware clearly stopped producing new games for KEMCO years ago; but it’s not clear to me if they became Rideon or just sold some IP to Rideon; because Adventure Bar Story was made by them and Marenian Tavern Story was credited to Rideon and the two games share far too many assets to be unrelated.)
This game is pretty weird visually and pretty rote in all other respects: The controls are a hybrid of touchscreen (or mouse, in my case) and arrow keys. The dungeon view shows you the character is in a semi-3D angled view, but also gives you a minimap and a first-person view. The enemies are visible (as dark-color balls in all the views), but the worm-tunnel layout of the dungeons generally makes them unavoidable, and they respawn every time you change floors. There also are only 2-3 monsters in a couple of formations in each dungeon, so the battles get particularly repetitive. The graphics feel like they pieced together several unrelated systems (monster designs, character designs, the 3D walls, the visual novel-style character conversations, the menu towns) from different, unrelated sources. Battles are shown in first-person with a style of monster design that again seems different from the rest of the art; and a button style that don’t look familiar to me at all.
You need to revisit several of the earlier dungeons, but it’s to get to new areas within them that require virtually no retreading, so that’s not so bad. There are some puzzles in the later dungeons: Pressing buttons, key-in-lock, pushing blocks; and gradually ramping up into more obtuse candle-lighting sequences. The hardest block-pushing puzzles are in the purchasable bonus dungeon, and they’re mostly hard because the angles are weird and the elevations are hard to discern. (Those areas must have been hell to play on a phone, and a quick check on Youtube seems to indicate they didn’t change anything meaningful in the port.)
Your weapons never change, but you can upgrade them and shift them more towards attack or magic. Unlocking your skills is tied to how much you’ve upgraded your weapons, which means there aren’t a lot of them or a lot of variety, but you can unlock higher-level versions of the skills (which use more MP and have bigger effects) by using them over and over. Albus’ Smoke Blast is the only ability that hits all enemies at level 1, so it was my go-to. Instead of armor, there are accessories and a system of “gems” that you equip for stat bonuses. There’s also “SP” that builds up as you fight which you can use for big combo attacks. Every 5 enemies killed gets you a TRP, which take the place of the IAP store for unlocking bonus dungeons and special items. There’s also a system of achievements that reward you TRP; most of which you’ll stumble into in the normal course of play. Random people in town will request 5 or 10 of a vendortrash item dropped by monsters as a sidequest, which you can fulfill as you walk into and out of each dungeon (which you’ll have to do if you didn’t think to stock up on “recall crystals”).
There are four difficulty levels, and I played on Easy because I had a suspicion this wouldn’t be a game I wanted to grind. (I was correct.) I made it to the proper ending sequence but didn’t bother with the postgame “trial dungeon” and extra achievements.
The plot is honestly forgettable: The Guild has an evil plan, Liana has superpowers that are critical to it, except they actually aren’t and even without her the Guild will destroy the world anyway if you don’t stop them. Also, she and all the Guild heads are artificial humans. It turns out that a downplayed sidekick to the head of the Guild is secretly Orwiel and he organized everything, including creating all of the artificial humans in the search for perfect beauty. The characters have some banter (which is moderately cute in an overdone anime sort of way) and some trauma (which is often downplayed rather than really explored). The Power of Optimistic Thinking (and also punching dudes really hard) saves the day.
Overall: Nothing to write home about, especially since the only thing unique about this was the weird graphic scheme, which doesn’t actually improve anything. It’s not bad, it’s just nothing special.
