Sword of Elpisia (Android)
Dec. 15th, 2024 02:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA traveling magitool repairman is just going about his business when he stumbles into a town that’s been attacked by strange monsters with the power to permanently transform humans into magiswords. He ends up semi-adopting an orphan girl, and they meet up with two other adventurers to find out the truth of the monsters and the magiswords.
Yet another “recent era” EXE-Create game with a lot of the usual features with new skins on them. There’s a daily roulette. There’s s grid-based battle system (though only 3x2 this time), and you’ve got both magic based on MP and weapon skills based on a three-dot energy meter that recharges as you do normal attacks. The weapon skills are attached to the weapon you have equipped, which you get lots of from the IAP lottery and random drops, and can combine to strengthen. Armor can be combined in this game, too.
As a change of pace, the party members you have don’t all just join and stay; for the first few hours of the game you have a main character and a rotating cast of other party members.
It occurs to me that while I get down on the EXE-Create games for the systems being very similar, they have been very good about integrating quality-of-life options that the classic jrpgs they’re modeled on didn’t have. Every one of them has a fast-travel option. Every one of them has a mini-map. Most of them put your next destination on the well-detailed world map. They all have detailed logs of the plot and the sidequests; and most have a conversation log in case you skip dialogue too fast. They all have difficulty options (so if you want to just Auto through most battles you can play on Easy); they all have a way to both reduce random encounters and just summon a bunch of them without needing to walk in circles. As annoying as IAP features are, you never actually need them to beat the game, and most of the time buying the full game gives you enough free IAP currency to enjoy the bonus dungeon and/or storage room equipment. Like, I talk a lot of smack about KEMCO and their shovelware tendencies, but especially in the more recent years, their active developers have maintained an awareness of what makes their games fun that 1990s SNES jrpg developers didn’t always manage.
All of that said, I started playing this in August and got about three hours in, then got distracted by other things (and my son borrowed the Retroid Pocket 3 to play N64 games on) because despite the plot being something a little different, it’s all very similar to the previous half-dozen KEMCO games I played in the spring and summer. I loaded it back up intent on finishing it, and then discovered that the very next cutscene—like, literally five minutes from where my last save was—crashes the game. I could probably try transferring my save or restarting on a different device, but I clearly wasn’t engaged enough in this in the first place. It’s not particularly better or worse than any recent EXE-Create game, but be warned about that issue.
Yet another “recent era” EXE-Create game with a lot of the usual features with new skins on them. There’s a daily roulette. There’s s grid-based battle system (though only 3x2 this time), and you’ve got both magic based on MP and weapon skills based on a three-dot energy meter that recharges as you do normal attacks. The weapon skills are attached to the weapon you have equipped, which you get lots of from the IAP lottery and random drops, and can combine to strengthen. Armor can be combined in this game, too.
As a change of pace, the party members you have don’t all just join and stay; for the first few hours of the game you have a main character and a rotating cast of other party members.
It occurs to me that while I get down on the EXE-Create games for the systems being very similar, they have been very good about integrating quality-of-life options that the classic jrpgs they’re modeled on didn’t have. Every one of them has a fast-travel option. Every one of them has a mini-map. Most of them put your next destination on the well-detailed world map. They all have detailed logs of the plot and the sidequests; and most have a conversation log in case you skip dialogue too fast. They all have difficulty options (so if you want to just Auto through most battles you can play on Easy); they all have a way to both reduce random encounters and just summon a bunch of them without needing to walk in circles. As annoying as IAP features are, you never actually need them to beat the game, and most of the time buying the full game gives you enough free IAP currency to enjoy the bonus dungeon and/or storage room equipment. Like, I talk a lot of smack about KEMCO and their shovelware tendencies, but especially in the more recent years, their active developers have maintained an awareness of what makes their games fun that 1990s SNES jrpg developers didn’t always manage.
All of that said, I started playing this in August and got about three hours in, then got distracted by other things (and my son borrowed the Retroid Pocket 3 to play N64 games on) because despite the plot being something a little different, it’s all very similar to the previous half-dozen KEMCO games I played in the spring and summer. I loaded it back up intent on finishing it, and then discovered that the very next cutscene—like, literally five minutes from where my last save was—crashes the game. I could probably try transferring my save or restarting on a different device, but I clearly wasn’t engaged enough in this in the first place. It’s not particularly better or worse than any recent EXE-Create game, but be warned about that issue.
