Gale of Windoria (Android)
Sep. 6th, 2023 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIn a world where each of the four nations has its own element and a great Tetra Quartz that maintains their way of life, a young boy from the wind nation aches to be a warrior when his father wants him to take over the family crafting business. Then everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Then everything changed when the Tetra Quartz somehow became “sullied” and the leaders decided that human sacrifice was the only solution. Shan rescues his friend from sacrifice and sets off on adventure to restore the Tetra Quartzes and blow away the dark clouds of death.
A Hit-Point game, and it’s amusing how it reuses a number of features I saw in Monster Viator. Like, the heroes look very similar and the map screen/dungeon screens are pretty certainly the same engine, but the battle screen is completely different. You still regain all HP and your SP back to a base level in every battle. On the other hand, you spend a LOT of time with only a single party member and no consumables, which makes the early-game battles rather harrowing.
The power-up gimmick here (besides gaining levels) is “quartz” items you can equip to give yourself spells and stat bonuses. (You gain more slots as the game goes on.) Each quartz has a number of available levels, and you raise them by sacrificing other quartzes. In practice, this means that you have to watch for which ones you can get lots of and then burn those to raise the levels of the ones you’re actually using. The game implies there’s strategy to rearranging your quartzes to unlock special bonuses or to change which attacks you can use. And there’s a little of that, but your characters gain their best abilities just from levels and many of the quartzes are just duplicates of each other with slight differences. I found that my quartz loadout was pretty steady and if I couldn’t beat a battle, either grinding for levels or just trying it again and hoping the RNG was nicer were better bets. (Again like Monster Viator, you can retry any battle you lose immediately. The impact of the RNG on battles is lessened before there are fewer percent-chance secondary effects, but luck and what moves the monsters use can cause big swings in difficulty in many battles.) The auto-battle uses your skills freely (and semi-randomly), but because you fully restore after battle, as long as you’re pretty sure you’ll win you can autobattle every random encounter, which does streamline grinding a bit.
And the grind is real: At least for the first five hours or so, the plot is very linear and there aren’t really any sidequests, but just fighting everything you meet won’t get you up to snuff for the bosses. And though I fiddled with my quartz layout and adjusted strategies a bunch, I couldn’t find a way to really get “ahead” of the leveling curve like in some other games. So you really just need to grind a bit in every area, which got frustrating.
Enemies have levels, which in retrospect I think they did in Monster Viator also (there were definitely monsters in different areas that were identical but obviously stronger or weaker), but here they’re explicit, so you know if you’re fighting a level 3 lizard or a level 9 lizard.
There are IAP points, and in this case you start with 150 of them free and get 1 every couple of battles. Each 100 gives you a pick from the random prize box. (interestingly, while the Android version only lets you buy WHP, the Steam version looks like it has XP/GP doublers available as purchasable DLC.) I was five hours in when I’d earned the 50 WHP necessary for a second spin of the wheel.
This game hits you with a lot of jargon in the first ten minutes (your father is a “Beakle” craftsman, which turn out to be little flying baskets that are a theme for the game). The translation is pretty rocky, though—characters who clearly have different ways of speaking in Japanese speak oddly in English, with weird turns of phrase that native English speakers wouldn’t use. The battle dialogue uses the word “unlock” to mean an effect has worn off, which is particularly odd. The plot starts fairly strong, with actual characters and personalities, but gets generic fairly quickly: The evil cult of Death has sent recruits into each country to mess up their way of life and sully their Tetra Quartz and you need to go through each area, stopping the cult and recruiting a new teammate. I’m sure there’s some big twist about the nature of the quartzes or the Death God or something like that at the end, but the constant need to stop and grind to get past bosses wore down my interest in getting to it.
Overall: This has a stronger plot than some other Hit-Point games and definitely stronger characterization, but the translation is a little rocky and the system locks you into a grinding pattern that I don’t love. Five hours of it was worth my $3, but I’m not getting to the end.
A Hit-Point game, and it’s amusing how it reuses a number of features I saw in Monster Viator. Like, the heroes look very similar and the map screen/dungeon screens are pretty certainly the same engine, but the battle screen is completely different. You still regain all HP and your SP back to a base level in every battle. On the other hand, you spend a LOT of time with only a single party member and no consumables, which makes the early-game battles rather harrowing.
The power-up gimmick here (besides gaining levels) is “quartz” items you can equip to give yourself spells and stat bonuses. (You gain more slots as the game goes on.) Each quartz has a number of available levels, and you raise them by sacrificing other quartzes. In practice, this means that you have to watch for which ones you can get lots of and then burn those to raise the levels of the ones you’re actually using. The game implies there’s strategy to rearranging your quartzes to unlock special bonuses or to change which attacks you can use. And there’s a little of that, but your characters gain their best abilities just from levels and many of the quartzes are just duplicates of each other with slight differences. I found that my quartz loadout was pretty steady and if I couldn’t beat a battle, either grinding for levels or just trying it again and hoping the RNG was nicer were better bets. (Again like Monster Viator, you can retry any battle you lose immediately. The impact of the RNG on battles is lessened before there are fewer percent-chance secondary effects, but luck and what moves the monsters use can cause big swings in difficulty in many battles.) The auto-battle uses your skills freely (and semi-randomly), but because you fully restore after battle, as long as you’re pretty sure you’ll win you can autobattle every random encounter, which does streamline grinding a bit.
And the grind is real: At least for the first five hours or so, the plot is very linear and there aren’t really any sidequests, but just fighting everything you meet won’t get you up to snuff for the bosses. And though I fiddled with my quartz layout and adjusted strategies a bunch, I couldn’t find a way to really get “ahead” of the leveling curve like in some other games. So you really just need to grind a bit in every area, which got frustrating.
Enemies have levels, which in retrospect I think they did in Monster Viator also (there were definitely monsters in different areas that were identical but obviously stronger or weaker), but here they’re explicit, so you know if you’re fighting a level 3 lizard or a level 9 lizard.
There are IAP points, and in this case you start with 150 of them free and get 1 every couple of battles. Each 100 gives you a pick from the random prize box. (interestingly, while the Android version only lets you buy WHP, the Steam version looks like it has XP/GP doublers available as purchasable DLC.) I was five hours in when I’d earned the 50 WHP necessary for a second spin of the wheel.
This game hits you with a lot of jargon in the first ten minutes (your father is a “Beakle” craftsman, which turn out to be little flying baskets that are a theme for the game). The translation is pretty rocky, though—characters who clearly have different ways of speaking in Japanese speak oddly in English, with weird turns of phrase that native English speakers wouldn’t use. The battle dialogue uses the word “unlock” to mean an effect has worn off, which is particularly odd. The plot starts fairly strong, with actual characters and personalities, but gets generic fairly quickly: The evil cult of Death has sent recruits into each country to mess up their way of life and sully their Tetra Quartz and you need to go through each area, stopping the cult and recruiting a new teammate. I’m sure there’s some big twist about the nature of the quartzes or the Death God or something like that at the end, but the constant need to stop and grind to get past bosses wore down my interest in getting to it.
Overall: This has a stronger plot than some other Hit-Point games and definitely stronger characterization, but the translation is a little rocky and the system locks you into a grinding pattern that I don’t love. Five hours of it was worth my $3, but I’m not getting to the end.
