Posted on: December 31, 2011
apc
Zweryfikowany użytkownikGry: 567 Opinie: 14
Mind the 'J' !
I got the game because of the reviews, and played it to the end, so I want to warn others, who are not aware what JRPG really means in terms of gameplay. Patience and diligence are of the core values of oriental culture, and you can definitely tell this by their RPGs (anyone remember Lineage with insane amounts of harvesting?). From the westerner point of view this game is an absolute time waster: 60%+ of the time is backtracking, 50% of the remaining time is watching combat animations, which leaves about 20% of actual gaming time (20 hours out of 'whopping 100 hours of gameplay'). The whole story can be told in about 40 minutes, the exploration of new areas is about 5 hours, and the rest are repetitious drab battles. Anyway, 80% time playing this game is plain wasted! And - don't be surprised - this is a very good JRPG! It's just how they're made, because the values are different! Details follow (for the brave): 1. The game has INSANE amount of backtracking. There will be areas which you will cross left-to-right and then right-to-left more than 6 times, each time fighting the SAME enemies in the SAME places (enemies respawn every time you re-enter the area). To make matters even worse, some areas are mazes with switches, that raise/lower barriers and open/close doors. You can have up to 5 switches in a maze, and most of thies time after you hit a switch you have to lug your party across the whole area, so you will fully cross the same area 8 to 10 times easily. And there are about 20 areas like this in the game. Furthermore, there will be areas, with lots of recursive backtracking: Area1->Area2->Area3->Area4->Fight the Boss->Area4->Area3->Area2->Area1. While still fighting the SAME enemies in the SAME places. I mean it! Most normal games give you a shortcut or a cutscene after you've defeated the boos (or achieved something equally important) and you're immediately transferred to your camp or world map - but not this one! And, yes, there will be a place with switches AND recursive backtracking. To complicate the matters, the plague of 199x games - getting stuck in the pixels - is here as well. Be ready for lots of manual control over your characters when passing narrow doors and ledges, walking around trees and flower pots and so on. Overall, expect to spend 60%+ of gaming time lugging yourself through areas to which you have been at least twice before. 2. Well, we all understand that certain amount of marching and backtracking is essential in every RPG to maintain story. But here comes another failure. At first 30% of the game the story is really interesting - the unusual concept of the layered world, biomechanics, core magic, etc. But then you realize that the writers probably forgot the main rules of drama dynamics: every good drama has it's pace accelerating towards the culmination in the end, so you expect major events to happen quicker, pauses to become shorted and the fights to become more intense. Well, this is true of boss fights (expect to fight two bosses in a row a few times), but as for the rest - the process is the same from 30% to 98% of the same: walk mazes, flip switches (see previous sections) and fight the SAME enemies in the SAME places, up until (and including) the final stage. . After about 60% in game you run into lots of situations when you have to go through an area only to talk to a character at the other end (no there's no shortcut even if it's 25th time you're being here! while being interrupted by critters that yield 38 exp (when you have about 15000 to level) about 8 times! (See section on battles below). Game designers try to keep interest by providing a variety of environments, but still the whole thing turns into routine about 50% of the game and even at the very end of it you need to collect 4 colour switches and flip tons of switches to get to the final boss. Also about 30-40% in game you realize that the plot and the characters are quite sketchy and cannot actually convey the cosmic scale of events. At about 60% of the game you get tired of parade of cliches including many 'noble deaths' that fail to create any feelings. The main characters are not much better, but at least you get a few side quests to end ideological quarrels between some of them. There is also lots of loose ends: you need to find a boat to cross a lake, when you have a flyer capable of delivering you anywhere (which could be solution to endless trekking, but, alas), and so on... And finally, RPG assumes certain choices that you can make to affect the global course of events. Well, sorry, you can't - it's an almost linear walking/battling quest! 3. So, the game is not about role playing, and not about story. it's about walking a lot and fighting approximately every 20 steps you make. What about the battles? After looking at the screenshots and game description you may expect something akin to Heroes of Might and Magic 2/3 with hero development, tactics and use of skills. Well, the hero development is out of your control - the whole group gets equal XP, the stats simply grow as characters level up (no point distribution, no skill trees, nothing). Certain skills open as you reach certain levels, and that all about it. You still can quip your party, though with typical JRPG-style items (Sword, Sword+1, Sword+2, ... Sword+99, etc) with little variation. The only interesting point here is getting weapon upgrades that unlock new skills for certain characters. The battles are on par: you get skills that hit targets 'close together' or 'in a single line' but there's no movement on the battlefield! Your group and the enemy group just STAND there exchanging blows (another typical CRPG/JRPG feat), there's no difference between melee vs ranged, no maneuvers, nothing. Sometimes enemies move (zombies closing in), but that happens very rare and you cannot move your characters anyway. The initiative mechanism and card combos are interesting, though, and we can see these mechanics getting into 'typical' strategies and RPGs. But probably the worst about the battles is lengthy combo/casting animations (some of them are like 20 seconds) which you cannot skip! Expect to dedicate about 50% of your battle time to them (including jumping into the battle sequences, which can sometimes be veeeery looong). === Conclusion === I understand that most of the explained above are typical traits of J/CRPGs, thus 3/5, not 1/5. If you're fan of tactcal battles: get HoMM2/3/4 and download fome 'Adventure' type maps (my favourite one is a map for HoMM2 where you start with a single Ghost and take on 500 Black Dragons in the end). If you're RPG fan, well, this is NOT an RPG. If you're Diablo/Witcher Action/RPG fan - this may be good for you if you're fine with the fact that 80% of the time you spend doing useful (NOT really fighting, NOT really developing the plot). But better buy Witcher cheap from GOG if you haven't been through it yet!
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