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Slog through badly designed maps and enemies...to save the world!

Overview

White December is a game about two adopted siblings who become arbitrarily involved in a plot to save the world's environment from falling into an eternal winter due to the actions of a technological empire. I honestly did not play this game for too long and I will illustrate why in my following points.

Battles and Balance 0/5:


See this battle here? You're going to lose.


You get into battles via touch encounter, but monster symbols are far faster than you, so battles may as well not even be touch encounter due to this. Monster encounters were also placed in incredibly inconvenient and unavoidable locations such as on a single tile wide bridge, or near the exit of a map, and so on.

Both of your characters have no skills other than a 'Quick Heal' command which heals the user's self for about 36 HP on average. Maybe this would have been useful if the game were better balanced, but as it is now, it's not. Monsters hit characters for way more than Quick Heal can keep up with, ultimately making the command useless.

There don't appear to be any other unique battle mechanics, so battles have just boiled down to spam attack and Quick Heal. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if the game actually had some good balance, but monsters take forever to kill. Off the top of my head, enemies took about ten hits to kill. Add a couple misses per battle for each character on top of things and you have a terribly balanced battle system.

"Why not just run away then?", you ask? You can't run away from battles. The option isn't even there in the command list. Which boggles my mind. Did the creator expect you to fight every cheap, unavoidable battle that came your way?

Level Design 1/5


So....where to?


My first point to make is that the hero had a terrible walk speed. He moved at a snail's pace, which made navigating maps a true trial of patience. This is compounded by the fact that touch encounters move at the speed of light.

The maps themselves are badly designed in my opinion. Most were fairly large, square, and had very little tile variation. There were no paths to lead you to the ends of the maps, so you had to spend a good amount of time slogging through them at a snail's pace trying to find the exit in between all the space and lightspeed monster encounters.

Characters and Story 2/5

The game starts out with an incredibly slow screen panning intro, I could endure it, so I let it go on. Then we next came to scene with three people. Two apparently adopted siblings; Ark and Ayana, are practicing their swordsmanship with their instructor; Kazu. After they finish, Ark manages to anger Ayana with a side question. She then runs off, and the game tells me to find her.

They then travel through the forest to meet at Kazu's house, but before they get there, they suddenly find themselves in a snowy field. A woman with blue skin appears before them and after some exchange, and a boss battle, they find themselves knocked out and awakening at Kazu's house mysteriously enough.

Kazu takes them inside and then proceeds to NOT explain what that was all about, instead opting to tell them that he can see the future, and that an evil empire is draining the world's resources with their power plants, which is threatening to lock the world into an eternal winter, and that he's been training them for the day in which they are ready to defeat this empire.

After this random plot twist from nowhere, Kazu tells me to follow him and then disappears, leaving me lost. I promptly died to a cheap group of enemies and turned the game off.

None of the characters really struck me as interesting or well written. As I read their exchanges, I really couldn't get any sort of handle on who they were or what they felt. It all seemed to be very robotic to me. Kazu was probably the most interesting character out of them all. Now you don't need to be a writing professor for me to enjoy your story and characters, but there is a point where even my patience runs dry.

Music and Sound 2/5:

The music was all midi, and none of it really stood out to me. But it didn't make my ears bleed either. It just did it's job. I do question the creator's choice of battle theme though. It was slow, quiet, and did nothing to bring out the feelings of there being a battle. I think I heard a few familiar songs from commercial games as well, but I couldn't pinpoint them.

Overall 1.5/5

Certainly not the worst RM game I've ever played, but it's down there. I feel that this game is a lost cause and that the creator should scrap it, take what they've learned about the maker, and do something new. You can always do better than this.

Posts

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Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
Skie, you stole my review format, you will pay dearly for this. >=(
I'm usually against reviewing games without playing them to completion... but you make a good point there. :P
comment=31656
Skie, you stole my review format, you will pay dearly for this. >=(


Mwahahahaha~
Ciel
an aristocrat of rpgmaker culture
367
comment=31659
Nearly everyone uses this format. That's why I've stopped using it.


the most important thing is one's avant garde review style, not delivering an objective critical analysis of the interactive electronic media product
First sign of trouble: Characters having the same HP and MP.

its hard to please the reviewers of this site, lol. I am pretty sure my game is alot worse than final fantasy but, in my mind if some final fantasies series were made in rpg maker here they'd rate it 3/5 or something heh.

:D

Thanks for the review
Now now. No one is telling you to stop using rpg maker. I'm telling you to improve and create something even better. Don't run away because you got one bad review.

And you're welcome.
Great review and such Skie Fortress, but I'm curious as to how you had so much trouble with the battles? I found them rather easy actually...impossible to lose imho. However, everything else is spot on-- and yeah, the battles are basically unavoidable.

Edit: Yeah giving up isn't the solution. Getting better is a great solution, however. The game really isn't that bad, lots of people were interested enough to at least take a look-- including myself. But you need to fix up some things to make it more enjoyable. I am of course referring to the gameplay problems, such as the slow movement speed, encounters, etc.
comment=31962
I am pretty sure my game is alot worse than final fantasy but, in my mind if some final fantasies series were made in rpg maker here they'd rate it 3/5 or something heh.


Are you saying you consider this game to be half a Final Fantasy?
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
RPG Maker isn't easy to use (well, not easy to use well anyway), most of the well-polished games you see on this site are the result of many years of practice. Chances are you learned a lot from making this game. Any project you made now would probably be a lot better. And the next one will be better than that. As long as you are constantly learning and experimenting with new things, it's almost impossible to not get better.

Take Skie's advice and don't give up. Try your hand at something new and you'll probably realize almost immediately that it is better than your previous efforts. Keep at it, don't give up. This sounds like a first or second project. Everyone's first project is bad. I know mine was! I probably went through ten projects before I made anything vaguely decent (my current projects are probably still bad but whatever!) Don't get discouraged, especially if you enjoy making RPGs. I am sure whatever you bring to the table next time will be a great improvement.

Edit: Wow like five million people posted while I was typing this.
how can a lot worse, ever mean half ?

i said i think some people would rate some ffs bad if not for its fame

comment=32144
how can a lot worse, ever mean half ?

i said i think some people would rate some ffs bad if not for its fame

and I find it hard for me to have patience to fix all the little details that annoy people... it takes time, most of which i wont have soon enough. Thanks for the encouragement


i think this game has a lot of potential - a village blinded from the world, a techno empire turning the world slowly into an eternal winter, a blind master who can predict things (becuase hes blind)

I think you just need to develop your story and characters more with a little research and ideas.
Ok, I need to answer a few things that were mentioned on the review. And with that announce some fixes I will be making.

First the slow speed was a bug I hadn´t noticed because I was testing the game after the intro. Aparrently I left some slowing down on the intro that affected the chacter for the rest of the game. Making the whole experience pretty terrible... I really congratulate people who had the patience to slowly move through the maps for so long. and you have my apologies!

Also, when you have the normal speed you can manage to dodge some speed of light enemies. =)

As for the same HP and MP of characters, that was on purpose. It´s a way to make them only customizable. The way you customize the stats is by finding stat ambrosias and using them. Therefore it´s like choosing the stats for each of them, then eventually they will get very different from one another.

Another thing that was mentioned was the that Quick Heal was the only skill they had. Actually after deafting Misha, the snow woman, you get both ice and Normal heal ambrosias which can be used in which ever of the two characters. A little on further you get new skills and find another character with yet different skills.

About the fight, skie mentioned they were impossible, while some others mentioned it was impossible to lose. I think I will take some of the enemies HP to make battles faster anyhow.

Because of all these things I hadn´t noticed, I decided to take the game off the site and present a fixed demo soon enough.

thanks
Another lesson: Don't upload a game that you haven't play tested THE SAME WAY A PERSON DOWNLOADING WOULD. That means playing the final product outside of the RPGMaker test mode and playing to it to completion. The slow walk speed issue should have never been released.
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