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Good base, but in need of a little more testing and refinement

  • Muninn
  • 06/01/2013 02:35 AM
  • 554 views
A Child's Dream is a turn-based RPGMaker VX game by Mordenglory. I managed to complete the game after roughly 7-8 hours of play, though players who spend less time exploring and completing extra content may find their experience shorter by an hour or two.



Summary
A Child's Dream is the story of an unrepentant elven thief by the name of Rolf. As the game begins, Rolf's past exploits have brought him on the wrong side of a group of soldiers, and the player shortly witnesses his execution. After his death, Rolf's spirit is summoned by a mysterious child who returns Rolf to life, giving him the task of retrieving the child's trinket.

Story: It's more than I initially saw, but pushed a bit too far out of the way
For the first half of this game, there isn't really much in the way of story. The child asks for his trinket and sets Rolf on his way, and from that point to the halfway point the game consists of exploring new areas of the world as Rolf becomes powerful enough to survive them.

Once the midpoint of the game is reached, additional characters start to become central figures, but while their impact on the direction of the story is undeniable, their presence remains quite minimal: Generally, the main difference between the first and second halves of the game is that in the second half, reaching any sort of goal is rewarded with a cutscene in which an old man tells you where to go next, whereas the first half tends to leave the player to their own devices. Still, by the time the end credits rolled, I had a good idea of what had been going on throughout the game.

Presentation: Shaky
There were a few nice touches added to this game. Any attack which damages the enemy is accompanied by a little bar indicating how much health the enemy had before and after the attack, although this bar was pushed below other parts of the user interface in the case of enemies with particularly tall sprites. Maps tended to be rather bland, but the rest of the game didn't have anything really outstanding or distinctive going for or against it (I think it was mostly RTP?). The music was good but not really memorable, although at the very least the music was terrifically matched to whatever scene, battle, or location it was with.



Unfortunately, there were many bugs and oversights throughout the game. Punctuation errors are plentiful. In the first town, the door to the Inn opens up into a soild wall. Throughout the game, I was running into battles with invisible, unnamed enemies which appeared to be glitches. At least two bosses (Ravanna and Efreeti) were triggered by stepping on certain squares on the map, but nothing would disable these battles, allowing them to be fought an indefinite number of times. The Imp enemy's Mana Drain attack would cause the game to crash, forcing me to run from any battles with that particular foe. At one point, a glitch with a staircase renders the top of a particular tower unreachable, although luckily it isn't absolutely necessary to do so in order to beat the game.

Gameplay: Too far on the easy side for me too truly enjoy it, but I think I like it anyway
The difficulty of A Child's Dream, in my experience, ranged between "ridiculously easy" and "moderately easy". The game is at its easiest in the beginning, when your 350HP character is using one or two attacks to kill slimes, wasps, and spiders that each deal one or two damage. Once the player travels east to the desert region, they'll find a rather large difficulty spike, mainly as a result of the tougher encounters and long stretches of map that the player must travel between to find full HP and MP restoration. The difficulty lowers again once the player recruits their healbot, and again when said party member learns their MP restoration ability, providing the player with an effectively infinite source of health and magic restoration. The encounter rate remains high for much of the game, but these individual encounters never really threaten the player. Boss battles tend to be a bit more threatening, although a few of them end up with the player spamming attacks and healing as necessary until the boss dies, making them more of an exercise in patience than anything else.

Slightly more challenging than the rest of the game is the bonus dungeon, although it takes a while to reach that point: The early bosses in the tower are slightly-boosted versions of bosses from the game, which means that if the player waits until the endgame when they can beat the final boss of the tower, they'll find the first few floors to be ridiculously simple.

While the difficulty of the game never really managed to satisfy me, the game contained several elements that I think would have been quite interesting had there been a bit more of a challenge. Party members learn skills as they level up but must "equip" them in order to use them in battle, giving a bit of customization regarding what role the player wants their party to fill. This is further expanded by the Parameter system, in which leveling up provides each party member with points to be distributed to their stats as the player sees fit.

Puzzles in the game start off with very simple "The switch is in plain sight, flip it" puzzles which become a bit more complicated by the end of the game. Perhaps the greatest puzzle in the game is the bonus equipment: There are single-screen maps accessible from the world map all over the place, but they're unmarked. A player with good intuition (or one persistent enough to check every square on the world map) will find themselves accumulating some extra power early on.


Final Verdict: Almost
I don't think there was ever really a point where I disliked playing this game. Most of the problems I had with A Child's Dream are matters where the developer was off by just a little. A bit more challenge, some proofreading, and a bit of error checking could easily take this game further.