Ruinverse (Android)
Feb. 27th, 2024 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroKit was able to make his dream of being a Transporter come true when a magical ruin gifted him with Warp magic. Four years later, he and his best friend Allie encounter a second ruin that has a strange effect on her memory, which turns out to be because a magical spirit named Alvyn has taken up co-residence in her body. And meanwhile, an earthquake has raised a giant tree from the ocean and brought along three demons searching for their missing Lord, who kill the elven king and impersonate his children.
This has the bajillion trappings we’ve come to expect from more recent EXE-Create games: The grid-based battle setup and “follow” attacks from your party. In-game achievements. Grumbly-person sidequests in towns that encourage you to go back to previous dungeons. Encounter-rate adjusting devices at the beginning and end of each dungeon. Small, large and metal monsters (and boulders and crates in battle). Easy teleportation between areas. (It’s also got a proper world map with a ship and airship, which we haven’t seen in a while.)
Oh, and Maidame Curie has a cameo in the IAP-locked dungeon and postgame.
Weapons come with all manner of enhancements (which look identical to a number of the other games) but oddly, there’s no crafting/combining system at all. There’s nothing to do with your extreme excess of weapons and armor except to sell them—which works out okay, because you need lots of money to upgrade the daily skill-point dispenser, but is still mildly frustrating when you get a good ability or big bonus on a lousy weapon, or vice-versa.
New to this one: The skill system is a points-based tree, and you get points from leveling up and can spend them to enhance or learn new skills along the branches you’ve unlocked.
There are a LOT of real-time-dependent systems: There’s a real-time gardening system for stat-boosting seeds, which we’ve seen before. There’s the Avelonia Tree, a real time “skill tree” that grows skill points every six hours. (You’ll eventually get way more skill points from the tree than from levels.) There’s a daily “roulette” that gives you items or IAP points. There are three daily monster-killing quests that reward you with IAP. This really, really wants you to play it daily for a few weeks rather than all at once, and I’m not really sure why.
A bunch of the features don't unlock until a few hours in, including a 100-battle arena, and "magic circles" that affect the battlefield but can only be used every 20 turns. There are also extremely high-level areas you can start accessing once you get a ship but clearly are intended for postgame grinding, and a bonus dungeon that you can unlock with IAP that I could reach the end of two-thirds through the game (when I’d saved up enough to unlock it) but couldn’t beat the boss until I was ready for the final dungeon.
The game’s biggest problem is that they hit a couple of uncomfortable comedy tropes that we should be past now, and they don’t let them go. There’s Lexor, the elf doctor character, who constantly sexually harasses your main character under the guise of examining his "magical flow" as payment for services. Nana the dwarf girl's entire shtick is molesting Kit the fox-man because his fur is so soft. And Allie keeps "hilariously" hitting Kit and accidentally switching to Alvyn. And it’s not just once: These are the three running gags that recur constantly, more than a dozen times over the course of the game.
SPOILERS
The first twist this that Alvyn is the missing Demon Lord Ordyn, not a Seraph. (He’s been in Allie’s body her whole life, the encounters with relics just woke him up.) The second twist is that the Seraphs only created the elves; the demons created humans, beasts and dwarves--and the Seraphs instigated the war. (And the demons, generally nice guys, were betrayed from within.) The ending reveals that lieutenant Erebos had it in for Ordyn the whole time and was the betrayer. I got the Normal Ending, where Alvyn ends up stuck in control of Allie’s body but lies while searching for a solution. I was tired by then and didn’t bother with the postgame, but it seems safe to assume that ending allows Alvyn to get his own body back.
Overall: This is a really mixed bag. The systems are fine, maybe a little weaker than other recent EXE-Create titles, and the battles are pretty breezy. The plot and pacing are decent, there are some fun twists... it's just that the characterization and "humor" are such 90s anime nonsense. There will be a serious moment about a parent's dementia or fear of death that leads straight into "now let me molest you so I feel better!" And that really keeps this off my recommended list.
This has the bajillion trappings we’ve come to expect from more recent EXE-Create games: The grid-based battle setup and “follow” attacks from your party. In-game achievements. Grumbly-person sidequests in towns that encourage you to go back to previous dungeons. Encounter-rate adjusting devices at the beginning and end of each dungeon. Small, large and metal monsters (and boulders and crates in battle). Easy teleportation between areas. (It’s also got a proper world map with a ship and airship, which we haven’t seen in a while.)
Oh, and Maidame Curie has a cameo in the IAP-locked dungeon and postgame.
Weapons come with all manner of enhancements (which look identical to a number of the other games) but oddly, there’s no crafting/combining system at all. There’s nothing to do with your extreme excess of weapons and armor except to sell them—which works out okay, because you need lots of money to upgrade the daily skill-point dispenser, but is still mildly frustrating when you get a good ability or big bonus on a lousy weapon, or vice-versa.
New to this one: The skill system is a points-based tree, and you get points from leveling up and can spend them to enhance or learn new skills along the branches you’ve unlocked.
There are a LOT of real-time-dependent systems: There’s a real-time gardening system for stat-boosting seeds, which we’ve seen before. There’s the Avelonia Tree, a real time “skill tree” that grows skill points every six hours. (You’ll eventually get way more skill points from the tree than from levels.) There’s a daily “roulette” that gives you items or IAP points. There are three daily monster-killing quests that reward you with IAP. This really, really wants you to play it daily for a few weeks rather than all at once, and I’m not really sure why.
A bunch of the features don't unlock until a few hours in, including a 100-battle arena, and "magic circles" that affect the battlefield but can only be used every 20 turns. There are also extremely high-level areas you can start accessing once you get a ship but clearly are intended for postgame grinding, and a bonus dungeon that you can unlock with IAP that I could reach the end of two-thirds through the game (when I’d saved up enough to unlock it) but couldn’t beat the boss until I was ready for the final dungeon.
The game’s biggest problem is that they hit a couple of uncomfortable comedy tropes that we should be past now, and they don’t let them go. There’s Lexor, the elf doctor character, who constantly sexually harasses your main character under the guise of examining his "magical flow" as payment for services. Nana the dwarf girl's entire shtick is molesting Kit the fox-man because his fur is so soft. And Allie keeps "hilariously" hitting Kit and accidentally switching to Alvyn. And it’s not just once: These are the three running gags that recur constantly, more than a dozen times over the course of the game.
SPOILERS
The first twist this that Alvyn is the missing Demon Lord Ordyn, not a Seraph. (He’s been in Allie’s body her whole life, the encounters with relics just woke him up.) The second twist is that the Seraphs only created the elves; the demons created humans, beasts and dwarves--and the Seraphs instigated the war. (And the demons, generally nice guys, were betrayed from within.) The ending reveals that lieutenant Erebos had it in for Ordyn the whole time and was the betrayer. I got the Normal Ending, where Alvyn ends up stuck in control of Allie’s body but lies while searching for a solution. I was tired by then and didn’t bother with the postgame, but it seems safe to assume that ending allows Alvyn to get his own body back.
Overall: This is a really mixed bag. The systems are fine, maybe a little weaker than other recent EXE-Create titles, and the battles are pretty breezy. The plot and pacing are decent, there are some fun twists... it's just that the characterization and "humor" are such 90s anime nonsense. There will be a serious moment about a parent's dementia or fear of death that leads straight into "now let me molest you so I feel better!" And that really keeps this off my recommended list.
