Monochrome Order (Android)
Feb. 12th, 2024 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroYou are a newly-appointed Arbiter (albeit one who’s been having memory problems), sent to keep the peace in a minor kingdom. There are clearly major events afoot, as Lord Jystice of the Order is plotting to control the world, the Divine Enemies created a miasma that creates monsters, and a woman called the Calamity Witch is fleeing through the countryside. But at the moment, you just need to handle the minor affairs of the townspeople.
A Hit-Point game, and a significantly different one from many others: The big gimmick is that you can pass “judgments” over the course of the game that affect the game world. The first one involves choosing whether the item shop owner can complete a business deal that involves his daughter marrying the partner’s son: If you say yes, the local economy and the item shop’s wares improve. If you say no, you gain personal fame and a free accessory. A number of the judgments are connected to the main plot, and there are multiple endings depending on which you choose. (And there’s a New Game Plus mode so you can see all of the endings and overpower your party to fight the optional superbosses.) At least on your first time through the game, the dungeons and battling are a relatively small portion of the game compared to running around town passing judgment and trying to balance fame, peace and the economy. (Fame is required to use some of the recruitable characters in your party; Peace reduces the chances bandits will attack on the world map; Economy reduces the prices for armor and items in shops.)
I think they did a decent job writing out the stories of each of the Judgment sidequests, though a lot of the time there’s an “obvious” answer but the reward for going against it (…which I looked up rather than save-scum) is better. There’s no morality system—you’re balancing your personal popularity with keeping the peace and boosting the economy, but there’s no equivalent to “losing an eighth”. If you side with the slavers and the murderers every time…that’s fine! You’re the Arbiter, your word is law.
The difficulty is rather wildly uneven, partially because you can free-roam into a lot of areas whenever you feel like it, but also because Hit-Point isn’t the best at balancing their games. You can only use three characters at a time, but there are more than a dozen you can recruit (which is determined by your Judgments --different characters are unlocked depending on how your judgments come down) and they tried to balance the game to punish you for, say, only using fighter or only wizards. It’s debatable how well that works, but your main character has one of the few healing skills and also one of the few hit-all attacks, so if you’re careful and grind a little you can manage. (If you have trouble with the late-game on your first pass, Amtese River north of the starting city is actually a great place to grind XP. There’s also a bonus boss area south of Rufael Grassland that can give you mega-XP if you have fire attacks to kill the monsters with.)
Your characters each have a single weapon that you can upgrade at the blacksmith, and a small skill list you can improve by equipping orbs. There are combo skills you can create by using yours in the correct order in combat; and monsters can activate combos too. I found money to be pretty tight all through the game, between upgrading weapons and trying to keep everyone equipped with decent armor. Characters you aren’t using get “leaked XP” and seem to get recruited at the average level of your main party.
Also worth noting is the art style for the character designs, which makes everyone look vaguely goth and the daemon characters look super-goth. (The sprites, on the other hand, look like typical 32-bit colorful fare.)
PLOT SPOILERS:
I first opted to protect Leyce (the Calamity Witch) at all turns and eventually joined the anti-Lybra group and joined daemons in storming my own base. Because shockingly, the Order is evil. Lord Jystice feeds criminals into the Order Stone to get magical power; and he came up with a way of making artificial Arbiters so he could control them. Your main character is an artificial Arbiter, and it seems like he was created when Jystice stole the divine power from Leyce, who was supposed to be an Arbiter and instead became a wizard. I suspect the endings I didn’t get (particularly the final ending) shed more light on the nature of Arbiters and Divine Enemies and miasma and all that.
I tried the New Game Plus and went for the most different plot I could: I opted not to protect Leyce in the very first choice. And indeed, the “main plot” events go completely differently, though you cover most of the same physical ground—you basically run around investigating several spikes in miasma and monster activity and learn that fellow Arbiter Septer is evil (and a jerk), and then just…decide to go along with Jystice’s evil plan to revive the Divine Enemy Elvil by sacrificing Leyce. Then it turns out the Arbiter Fenge is actually the “X”, eternally reincarnated, cosmically aware, and chosen to bring the divine retribution of the gods. But you defeat her and become a Divine Enemy yourself, and follow Jystice to destroy and remake the miasma-covered world. It’s entertaining how radically different it goes when you make the “wrong” choice on the very first plot Judgment.
The annoying part on repeated plays is that you still have to do all of the steps of all of the Judgments (I mostly ignored Peace and Economy in favor of lots of companions and Fame) and you need to fight tedious battles traveling through the easy areas to unlock everything. If I wanted to do all of the endings, I’d definitely want to shell out for the encounter toggle in the IAP store. I’m curious about the rest of the endings and mythology, but I think I’m stopping after 2 rounds.
Overall: This is something different, and I think it really works for that. The free-roaming/exploration aspect of the world map has a SaGa sort of feel; the Judgment system mixes in a lot of Visual Novel elements; the difficulty is a little rocky but manageable; and a single play-through only takes around 8 hours. Upper-tier!
A Hit-Point game, and a significantly different one from many others: The big gimmick is that you can pass “judgments” over the course of the game that affect the game world. The first one involves choosing whether the item shop owner can complete a business deal that involves his daughter marrying the partner’s son: If you say yes, the local economy and the item shop’s wares improve. If you say no, you gain personal fame and a free accessory. A number of the judgments are connected to the main plot, and there are multiple endings depending on which you choose. (And there’s a New Game Plus mode so you can see all of the endings and overpower your party to fight the optional superbosses.) At least on your first time through the game, the dungeons and battling are a relatively small portion of the game compared to running around town passing judgment and trying to balance fame, peace and the economy. (Fame is required to use some of the recruitable characters in your party; Peace reduces the chances bandits will attack on the world map; Economy reduces the prices for armor and items in shops.)
I think they did a decent job writing out the stories of each of the Judgment sidequests, though a lot of the time there’s an “obvious” answer but the reward for going against it (…which I looked up rather than save-scum) is better. There’s no morality system—you’re balancing your personal popularity with keeping the peace and boosting the economy, but there’s no equivalent to “losing an eighth”. If you side with the slavers and the murderers every time…that’s fine! You’re the Arbiter, your word is law.
The difficulty is rather wildly uneven, partially because you can free-roam into a lot of areas whenever you feel like it, but also because Hit-Point isn’t the best at balancing their games. You can only use three characters at a time, but there are more than a dozen you can recruit (which is determined by your Judgments --different characters are unlocked depending on how your judgments come down) and they tried to balance the game to punish you for, say, only using fighter or only wizards. It’s debatable how well that works, but your main character has one of the few healing skills and also one of the few hit-all attacks, so if you’re careful and grind a little you can manage. (If you have trouble with the late-game on your first pass, Amtese River north of the starting city is actually a great place to grind XP. There’s also a bonus boss area south of Rufael Grassland that can give you mega-XP if you have fire attacks to kill the monsters with.)
Your characters each have a single weapon that you can upgrade at the blacksmith, and a small skill list you can improve by equipping orbs. There are combo skills you can create by using yours in the correct order in combat; and monsters can activate combos too. I found money to be pretty tight all through the game, between upgrading weapons and trying to keep everyone equipped with decent armor. Characters you aren’t using get “leaked XP” and seem to get recruited at the average level of your main party.
Also worth noting is the art style for the character designs, which makes everyone look vaguely goth and the daemon characters look super-goth. (The sprites, on the other hand, look like typical 32-bit colorful fare.)
PLOT SPOILERS:
I first opted to protect Leyce (the Calamity Witch) at all turns and eventually joined the anti-Lybra group and joined daemons in storming my own base. Because shockingly, the Order is evil. Lord Jystice feeds criminals into the Order Stone to get magical power; and he came up with a way of making artificial Arbiters so he could control them. Your main character is an artificial Arbiter, and it seems like he was created when Jystice stole the divine power from Leyce, who was supposed to be an Arbiter and instead became a wizard. I suspect the endings I didn’t get (particularly the final ending) shed more light on the nature of Arbiters and Divine Enemies and miasma and all that.
I tried the New Game Plus and went for the most different plot I could: I opted not to protect Leyce in the very first choice. And indeed, the “main plot” events go completely differently, though you cover most of the same physical ground—you basically run around investigating several spikes in miasma and monster activity and learn that fellow Arbiter Septer is evil (and a jerk), and then just…decide to go along with Jystice’s evil plan to revive the Divine Enemy Elvil by sacrificing Leyce. Then it turns out the Arbiter Fenge is actually the “X”, eternally reincarnated, cosmically aware, and chosen to bring the divine retribution of the gods. But you defeat her and become a Divine Enemy yourself, and follow Jystice to destroy and remake the miasma-covered world. It’s entertaining how radically different it goes when you make the “wrong” choice on the very first plot Judgment.
The annoying part on repeated plays is that you still have to do all of the steps of all of the Judgments (I mostly ignored Peace and Economy in favor of lots of companions and Fame) and you need to fight tedious battles traveling through the easy areas to unlock everything. If I wanted to do all of the endings, I’d definitely want to shell out for the encounter toggle in the IAP store. I’m curious about the rest of the endings and mythology, but I think I’m stopping after 2 rounds.
Overall: This is something different, and I think it really works for that. The free-roaming/exploration aspect of the world map has a SaGa sort of feel; the Judgment system mixes in a lot of Visual Novel elements; the difficulty is a little rocky but manageable; and a single play-through only takes around 8 hours. Upper-tier!
