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And in the end, I never understood why the game is called "Broken Gauntlet"...
Ilan14- 02/14/2015 12:28 AM
- 6411 views
THE GAMEMAKER PRESENTS THE REVIEW OF:
NOTE: This review only reflects my personal opinion, and people may differ from what I think of the game. Some people may think that this is the best game ever, some people may think that this is a piece of crap that must be burned to ashes immediately. If you, the developer, agree with the points in my review or not, it's up to you.
So then, I decided to make another review for three reasons. First, to have something to do. Second, to get me (and the developer of this game) some Makerscore. And third... well the third reason was generated recently because of the Strawberry Review Jam, which gave me a major motivation to make this review. (Well, the most I will be able to get from that event is the lowest achievement... But, Makerscore is Makerscore.)
Anyways, let's start with this thing!
Tactical RPG's. I played some of those and I have to say that is a very good genre, being Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword, which I have been playing recently, my favorite so far. But this genre of game is almost absent in RMN, and I think I can understand why. Making a TRPG is way more hard than making a regular RPG since along with the normal aspects of an RPG, now you have to take in account other things regarding the battle system. Things like the battle scenario, terrain advantages, the character's movement capacity, the area of effect of skills, etc. Things that make balancing the battles more difficult than if you were making an RPG.
So it's kind of admirable that the developer decided to make an TRPG knowing how difficult would it be, and this game was honestly a good demonstration of what could be achieved with a great effort. (And I may be exaggerating, but if I downloaded this game, it was for a reason.) Sadly, I have to review this project not as a demonstration, but as a game. And as a game, Broken Gauntlet could have been better...
WARNING: There are high chances of finding bad jokes in the screenshots below.
In the gamepage description, the developer told possible players to "throw away any ideas of story or deep character development". Now, when he said that, I thought that he meant that the story and characters were going to be plain simple, and possibly cliche, and honestly I was okay with that idea, since he clarified that the focus of the game was going to be in the gameplay. But I didn't thought that the story was going to be almost unexistent, and that the characters were going to be devoid of almost any kind of personality.
So you know what I mean, the "story" goes like this: You are Yasar, a warrior guy who just joined the army and with your new partner Selina the Archer, you have to kill monsters for no apparent reason (and if there's a reason, it's not well explained), and travel to other places to kill more monsters. Later, two more characters (Ottmar the Mage and Phoebe the Cleric) join your party, and at the end, you are for some reason obligated to help a good kingdom to stop a bad kingdom ruled by a king who wants to take over the world! Or something like that...
Now, I could let that slide it if weren't for one thing: The dialogue.
It's not good. The dialogue is the part that most suffers in the writing aspect and it is prevalent during all the game. For starters, there were a few instances in which the game didn't cared about the fourth wall. The bosses in the game are referred by the characters as that term: Bosses. And earlier in the game, the commander who the main characters take orders from, reffered to the concept of training as Grinding. Yes, two RPG terms are apparently normal terms in the game world.
Another thing to note is the fact that the more you advance in the game, the more robotic the lines Ottmar and Phoebe recite start to sound. At least other characters try to distinguish themselves from the rest of the cast, but these two just contribute to the detriment of the dialogue.
There are other issues like mispelled words and other things like that, but I think I said enough. Now, I know that the focus of the game was supposed supposed to be the gameplay and not the story, but I really don't think that's an excuse for a bad dialogue like this one. To finish with this section already, I'll refer you to the screenshot below so you can see a little example of what I mean about the game's dialogue:
I played through this game in the Normal difficulty. So I'm analyzing this section with that in fact.
Now it's time to analyze the focus of the game, which is it's gameplay...
...This is going to be long.
The way to advance in Broken Gauntlet is pretty straight-foward, until you get to the final segments of the game the structure of progression works like this: You have an island, and there's a boss in it which you have to eliminate, but before you can reach the boss, you have to eliminate all the groups of enemies in the area. Once you defeat the boss, you go by ship to the next island, and while you're in the ship, fight a couple of battles more before being able to get there. Rinse and repeat until the endgame sections.
In the island's, you will also have the forts, the only monster-free places in the game, and the place where the commanders (sorry, commander, since is the same one who's in all the forts. Which is also a Running Gag in the game.) who run them give you the assignment of killing the enemies and the boss. In the forts you can also buy items, rest to fully recover your party (But for a price, which it seems ilogical because well, our characters are in the army so they should be able to use the forts to rest whenever they want. But that's just my opinion.), and do training battles to gain levels. Altough you'll never need to do this, unless you want to win the final battle in "Normal" difficulty, but I'll get to that later.
And then we got the battles. It's pretty much standard fare: At the beginning of the battle, we have to position our characters in the battlefield, and then it's randomly chosen who's going to move first, the player or the enemy. After that we have to do what we always do in TRPG's, fight the enemies moving our characters, choosing which actions they will excecute, then when we don't have any actions left, let the opponent move and hopefully when our turn comes back, everything will still go smoothly, and so until all enemies are dead. So far, the battles of Broken Gauntlet would be more or less decent. Until! We found three design and functionality flaws that affect gravely the quality of the gameplay and that I will ennumerate right now:
1. Bare-Bones Strategy:
With this, I mean that most of the battles have only a minumum of strategy that has to be applied to defeat the enemies, making the combats quite boring, and in the beginning of the game, very easy. This is due a number of factors being a) The normal strategy of the enemies only consisting of:
-Not attacking your party unless they are in their attack range.
-If they can excecute an attack in the next turn without needing to move, after attacking, the enemy will move out of your party's reach.
-Sling any skill they have against your party until they ran out of MP.
And since at the beginning your characters start with only one skill, there's not so much thinking you have to do either.
b) By exception of the ocasional "wall" in the battlefield, the enviroment doesn't play any role in the battle, there's not even modifications to atributtes based on terrain!
And c) Once you figure out for what your characters are useful for and for what not, it's too hard to lose in "Normal" difficulty, let's take a look at the main characters for a moment:
Yasar: A warrior and your main damage dealer. Just make sure he's always in the front.
Selina: An archer and a pretty useful unit. Especially when damaged enemies start to run away.
Ottmar: A mage which at first is useful when dealing with enemies with elemental weaknesses, but when these stop appearing, he becomes a minor accompaniment to Yasar's damage until he gets better spells.
Phoebe: A cleric and ironically the most useless unit in the game. See, the way to gain experience in the game is by hitting enemies (more if you kill them) and using items and skills, and since healing is the only good thing she can do, she's always more levels down than his partners. And her healing spells aren't that useful either, since the first one heals just a little more than a Potion. She gets better when she gets her spell who heals 50% of an ally's HP at a short distance.
This flaw is notably reduced later in the game, when the enemies get harder and have more varied skills, actually making you to think on what to do to win, and making the combats less boring, so at least that's a good thing.
2. Cheap Resource Management:
Next, we got the resource management who's also excecuted in a lousy way, so you can understand what I mean, Yasar starts with 7 SP and a skill that costs 1 SP, and Selina starts with 5 SP, and a skill that costs 1 SP, and that's good. By the time they get their second skills, Yasar has 13 SP and Selina has 11 SP (more or less...), but the skill they learn has a cost that skyrockets to 10 SP. Now, I don't know what you think, but for me that looks a little expensive. And to add to the injury, here's the only SP regenerative item in the game.
Either(but I think it was probably meant to say "Ether"):
Recovers 15% of SP to an ally.
15% of SP regeneration to characters who have 13 and 11 of SP respectively. If you made the calculation, I think you get my point. Ottmar and Phoebe don't have any problems with this since they are mages, and because of that they have many SP, but for Yasar and Selina this feels like a very bad joke for them since the skills they adquire keep getting more expensive.
So then, the only actual way of regenerating SP is with an Elixir who fully recovers the HP and SP of an ally, but is very hard to get, or by paying to rest in the fort. And this can take up even to 25 seconds depending on how far you're from the fort. It would have been really better for the game if there had been a better version of the Ether (and of the Potion, because is just as useless as the Ether) to avoid this annoyance.
3. Frustration Factor:
Lastly, the battles can get very frustrating at later points of the game since due to a flaw of the battle script that unallows a unit to redo his movement once it moved anywhere (even if by accident you moved to the same place the unit is actually), it becomes important not to waste your movements and actions. Since one turn wasted is one turn more that lasts the battle and one turn more the enemy has to defeat your party.
Since the enemies run away a lot due to the strategy I already mentioned, this can get annoying pretty fast, and more annoying if the enemies can cast skills from a distance (which is pretty much most of them). And the more enemies, the worse this gets.
Also the bosses have lots of HP, and they have skills that can weaken your party very quickly. Luckily, in this sections you get as temporary allies: Edward, the commander who the main characters take orders from, who has two skills that cause 1000 and 2000 of damage respectively to a short line of enemies, and Lei-Won, commander of the army of the good kingdom mentioned in the writing section, who has a skill that deals 1000 of damage to a small group of enemies, and the best Fire spell. (And the "Diamond" item that makes him regenerate HP and SP each turn!)
This contributes to making the battles less frustating but not too much easy to remove the strategy factor of the game.
Despite this flaws, I still kept going with the game to the final battle, but then, the final bosses presented themselves. The king of the bad kingdom, and the "Skull Lord", a monster with a powerful Darkness spell, an element to which every unit is weak to (and which there's no way to defend the party against). Also both bosses had 25000 HP. After a few turns, they decimated my party; so I decided "fuck that shit!", changed the difficulty to "Easy" and eliminated them. This probably could have been easily solved by doing training battles, but I didn't wanted to spend more time in this game that the one I needed to.
I understand the last battle had to be the hardest one, but I think it could have been done without making it almost impossible to beat without grinding and by doing that, proving my point about the flaws in the gameplay aspect.
Something that deserves a last mention (and to end this section for once since it's getting too long that even I expected...) is the difficulty system. It could have been a good adition, but the only times you will actually change to a higher difficulty than the "Normal" one, is when playing the game again with the feature "New Game +" that is included, in order to add more challenge. And in my opinion, this game is one that is only worthy to play once.
Having finished with the sum up of that section, which looked more like a speech, let's move on to something more easy to analyze: The Aesthetics. The game uses a mix of the DS Resource Pack graphics with the RTP graphics and a couple of other ones. But there's a problem with this, the mix is constant during all the game, and the RTP big sized graphics clash with the small sized graphics of the DS pack, it's specially notorious in the interior maps but it also can be noticed on the sprites. (Speaking about sprites, I noticed that Selina's hair in the cutscenes is pink, but in the battle is brown. It's the same with her faceset, I wondered if the developer noticed this since it lasts during all the game...)
Then we got the game maps, which as I already mentioned in the Gameplay section, many of them are big, empty and bland, being the overworld maps the major victim of this. Now this may be because the DS Pack had limitated overworld tilsets, but still this is not something I can easily ignore. There are exceptions of course, which can be seen in some of the interior and exterior maps, but those exceptions are scarce.
And finally, in regards to the musical aspect of the review, all the music is taken from the DS Resource Pack, but even though the themes are appropriately used (except for the fact that the battle theme is always the same, even in boss battles), the music doesn't stand out. Now, It may be just my opinion, and it WON'T affect the score of the review, but it just felt that while the music didn't made worse the experience, it didn't made it better either.
So then, Broken Gauntlet was supposed to be a take on in a classic Tactical RPG experience inspired by games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Shining Force and Fire Emblem, three games that I played and liked (but didn't finished for different reasons). But what I got was boring battles that sometimes would become frustrating due to the many issues mentioned above in the review, an unpolished dialogue that stays like this during all the game, and mostly empty and/or unimaginative maps who end up all together ruining the experience.
Now, I don't want the developer to misunderstand me, there are good points in this game, since it motivates you to use some strategy to defeat your enemies, since their skills vary during the course of the game and they'll make you act in a different way than before at some points. Also, some of the maps are actually pretty good, and this project was still a good first attempt to a RPG Maker Tactical RPG game. But in the balance, the cons surpass the pros by a lot, so I can only recommend this game to people who like TRPG's a lot.
- A good attempt to use the GubiD's Tactical Battle System in a game.
- Despite the flaws in the combat system, the later parts of the game encourage you to use some strategy in order to win the battles.
- The design of some of the interior and exterior maps are decent...
- ...but the rest of them are big empty spaces which also are used for battles. The overworld and the ship also suffer from a bad-tasting simplicity.
- The dialogue of the game has a notable lack of polish.
- The battles constantly switch between being boring and being frustrating, and sometimes those two overlap. And that is in the "Normal" difficulty level.
- The use of the DS graphics with RTP graphics between others, can feel a little clashing visually.
- Some minor issues in general, like the slow disappearing of the enemies one for one at the end of the battle, that can get annoying in a battle with many enemies.
Final Rating: 2 Stars
(I'm sorry if the review was too harsh, but I couldn't find another way to express how I felt about this game...)
Editor's Note: This review was edited to change the text size.
NOTE: This review only reflects my personal opinion, and people may differ from what I think of the game. Some people may think that this is the best game ever, some people may think that this is a piece of crap that must be burned to ashes immediately. If you, the developer, agree with the points in my review or not, it's up to you.
So then, I decided to make another review for three reasons. First, to have something to do. Second, to get me (and the developer of this game) some Makerscore. And third... well the third reason was generated recently because of the Strawberry Review Jam, which gave me a major motivation to make this review. (Well, the most I will be able to get from that event is the lowest achievement... But, Makerscore is Makerscore.)
Anyways, let's start with this thing!
Tactical RPG's. I played some of those and I have to say that is a very good genre, being Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword, which I have been playing recently, my favorite so far. But this genre of game is almost absent in RMN, and I think I can understand why. Making a TRPG is way more hard than making a regular RPG since along with the normal aspects of an RPG, now you have to take in account other things regarding the battle system. Things like the battle scenario, terrain advantages, the character's movement capacity, the area of effect of skills, etc. Things that make balancing the battles more difficult than if you were making an RPG.
So it's kind of admirable that the developer decided to make an TRPG knowing how difficult would it be, and this game was honestly a good demonstration of what could be achieved with a great effort. (And I may be exaggerating, but if I downloaded this game, it was for a reason.) Sadly, I have to review this project not as a demonstration, but as a game. And as a game, Broken Gauntlet could have been better...
WARNING: There are high chances of finding bad jokes in the screenshots below.
In the gamepage description, the developer told possible players to "throw away any ideas of story or deep character development". Now, when he said that, I thought that he meant that the story and characters were going to be plain simple, and possibly cliche, and honestly I was okay with that idea, since he clarified that the focus of the game was going to be in the gameplay. But I didn't thought that the story was going to be almost unexistent, and that the characters were going to be devoid of almost any kind of personality.
So you know what I mean, the "story" goes like this: You are Yasar, a warrior guy who just joined the army and with your new partner Selina the Archer, you have to kill monsters for no apparent reason (and if there's a reason, it's not well explained), and travel to other places to kill more monsters. Later, two more characters (Ottmar the Mage and Phoebe the Cleric) join your party, and at the end, you are for some reason obligated to help a good kingdom to stop a bad kingdom ruled by a king who wants to take over the world! Or something like that...
Now, I could let that slide it if weren't for one thing: The dialogue.
It's not good. The dialogue is the part that most suffers in the writing aspect and it is prevalent during all the game. For starters, there were a few instances in which the game didn't cared about the fourth wall. The bosses in the game are referred by the characters as that term: Bosses. And earlier in the game, the commander who the main characters take orders from, reffered to the concept of training as Grinding. Yes, two RPG terms are apparently normal terms in the game world.
Another thing to note is the fact that the more you advance in the game, the more robotic the lines Ottmar and Phoebe recite start to sound. At least other characters try to distinguish themselves from the rest of the cast, but these two just contribute to the detriment of the dialogue.
There are other issues like mispelled words and other things like that, but I think I said enough. Now, I know that the focus of the game was supposed supposed to be the gameplay and not the story, but I really don't think that's an excuse for a bad dialogue like this one. To finish with this section already, I'll refer you to the screenshot below so you can see a little example of what I mean about the game's dialogue:
So that means, "Lord" is his title, AND his last name then?
I played through this game in the Normal difficulty. So I'm analyzing this section with that in fact.
Now it's time to analyze the focus of the game, which is it's gameplay...
...This is going to be long.
The way to advance in Broken Gauntlet is pretty straight-foward, until you get to the final segments of the game the structure of progression works like this: You have an island, and there's a boss in it which you have to eliminate, but before you can reach the boss, you have to eliminate all the groups of enemies in the area. Once you defeat the boss, you go by ship to the next island, and while you're in the ship, fight a couple of battles more before being able to get there. Rinse and repeat until the endgame sections.
In the island's, you will also have the forts, the only monster-free places in the game, and the place where the commanders (sorry, commander, since is the same one who's in all the forts. Which is also a Running Gag in the game.) who run them give you the assignment of killing the enemies and the boss. In the forts you can also buy items, rest to fully recover your party (But for a price, which it seems ilogical because well, our characters are in the army so they should be able to use the forts to rest whenever they want. But that's just my opinion.), and do training battles to gain levels. Altough you'll never need to do this, unless you want to win the final battle in "Normal" difficulty, but I'll get to that later.
And then we got the battles. It's pretty much standard fare: At the beginning of the battle, we have to position our characters in the battlefield, and then it's randomly chosen who's going to move first, the player or the enemy. After that we have to do what we always do in TRPG's, fight the enemies moving our characters, choosing which actions they will excecute, then when we don't have any actions left, let the opponent move and hopefully when our turn comes back, everything will still go smoothly, and so until all enemies are dead. So far, the battles of Broken Gauntlet would be more or less decent. Until! We found three design and functionality flaws that affect gravely the quality of the gameplay and that I will ennumerate right now:
1. Bare-Bones Strategy:
With this, I mean that most of the battles have only a minumum of strategy that has to be applied to defeat the enemies, making the combats quite boring, and in the beginning of the game, very easy. This is due a number of factors being a) The normal strategy of the enemies only consisting of:
-Not attacking your party unless they are in their attack range.
-If they can excecute an attack in the next turn without needing to move, after attacking, the enemy will move out of your party's reach.
-Sling any skill they have against your party until they ran out of MP.
And since at the beginning your characters start with only one skill, there's not so much thinking you have to do either.
b) By exception of the ocasional "wall" in the battlefield, the enviroment doesn't play any role in the battle, there's not even modifications to atributtes based on terrain!
And c) Once you figure out for what your characters are useful for and for what not, it's too hard to lose in "Normal" difficulty, let's take a look at the main characters for a moment:
Yasar: A warrior and your main damage dealer. Just make sure he's always in the front.
Selina: An archer and a pretty useful unit. Especially when damaged enemies start to run away.
Ottmar: A mage which at first is useful when dealing with enemies with elemental weaknesses, but when these stop appearing, he becomes a minor accompaniment to Yasar's damage until he gets better spells.
Phoebe: A cleric and ironically the most useless unit in the game. See, the way to gain experience in the game is by hitting enemies (more if you kill them) and using items and skills, and since healing is the only good thing she can do, she's always more levels down than his partners. And her healing spells aren't that useful either, since the first one heals just a little more than a Potion. She gets better when she gets her spell who heals 50% of an ally's HP at a short distance.
This flaw is notably reduced later in the game, when the enemies get harder and have more varied skills, actually making you to think on what to do to win, and making the combats less boring, so at least that's a good thing.
2. Cheap Resource Management:
Next, we got the resource management who's also excecuted in a lousy way, so you can understand what I mean, Yasar starts with 7 SP and a skill that costs 1 SP, and Selina starts with 5 SP, and a skill that costs 1 SP, and that's good. By the time they get their second skills, Yasar has 13 SP and Selina has 11 SP (more or less...), but the skill they learn has a cost that skyrockets to 10 SP. Now, I don't know what you think, but for me that looks a little expensive. And to add to the injury, here's the only SP regenerative item in the game.
Either(but I think it was probably meant to say "Ether"):
Recovers 15% of SP to an ally.
15% of SP regeneration to characters who have 13 and 11 of SP respectively. If you made the calculation, I think you get my point. Ottmar and Phoebe don't have any problems with this since they are mages, and because of that they have many SP, but for Yasar and Selina this feels like a very bad joke for them since the skills they adquire keep getting more expensive.
So then, the only actual way of regenerating SP is with an Elixir who fully recovers the HP and SP of an ally, but is very hard to get, or by paying to rest in the fort. And this can take up even to 25 seconds depending on how far you're from the fort. It would have been really better for the game if there had been a better version of the Ether (and of the Potion, because is just as useless as the Ether) to avoid this annoyance.
3. Frustration Factor:
Lastly, the battles can get very frustrating at later points of the game since due to a flaw of the battle script that unallows a unit to redo his movement once it moved anywhere (even if by accident you moved to the same place the unit is actually), it becomes important not to waste your movements and actions. Since one turn wasted is one turn more that lasts the battle and one turn more the enemy has to defeat your party.
Since the enemies run away a lot due to the strategy I already mentioned, this can get annoying pretty fast, and more annoying if the enemies can cast skills from a distance (which is pretty much most of them). And the more enemies, the worse this gets.
Also the bosses have lots of HP, and they have skills that can weaken your party very quickly. Luckily, in this sections you get as temporary allies: Edward, the commander who the main characters take orders from, who has two skills that cause 1000 and 2000 of damage respectively to a short line of enemies, and Lei-Won, commander of the army of the good kingdom mentioned in the writing section, who has a skill that deals 1000 of damage to a small group of enemies, and the best Fire spell. (And the "Diamond" item that makes him regenerate HP and SP each turn!)
This contributes to making the battles less frustating but not too much easy to remove the strategy factor of the game.
Despite this flaws, I still kept going with the game to the final battle, but then, the final bosses presented themselves. The king of the bad kingdom, and the "Skull Lord", a monster with a powerful Darkness spell, an element to which every unit is weak to (and which there's no way to defend the party against). Also both bosses had 25000 HP. After a few turns, they decimated my party; so I decided "fuck that shit!", changed the difficulty to "Easy" and eliminated them. This probably could have been easily solved by doing training battles, but I didn't wanted to spend more time in this game that the one I needed to.
I understand the last battle had to be the hardest one, but I think it could have been done without making it almost impossible to beat without grinding and by doing that, proving my point about the flaws in the gameplay aspect.
Something that deserves a last mention (and to end this section for once since it's getting too long that even I expected...) is the difficulty system. It could have been a good adition, but the only times you will actually change to a higher difficulty than the "Normal" one, is when playing the game again with the feature "New Game +" that is included, in order to add more challenge. And in my opinion, this game is one that is only worthy to play once.
Once this guy is in your party, the only thing that separates you from victory is the final battle.
Having finished with the sum up of that section, which looked more like a speech, let's move on to something more easy to analyze: The Aesthetics. The game uses a mix of the DS Resource Pack graphics with the RTP graphics and a couple of other ones. But there's a problem with this, the mix is constant during all the game, and the RTP big sized graphics clash with the small sized graphics of the DS pack, it's specially notorious in the interior maps but it also can be noticed on the sprites. (Speaking about sprites, I noticed that Selina's hair in the cutscenes is pink, but in the battle is brown. It's the same with her faceset, I wondered if the developer noticed this since it lasts during all the game...)
Then we got the game maps, which as I already mentioned in the Gameplay section, many of them are big, empty and bland, being the overworld maps the major victim of this. Now this may be because the DS Pack had limitated overworld tilsets, but still this is not something I can easily ignore. There are exceptions of course, which can be seen in some of the interior and exterior maps, but those exceptions are scarce.
In this image, you can appreciate the beauty of the game maps. Some people may call it "emptiness", but I prefer to call it "simplicity".
And finally, in regards to the musical aspect of the review, all the music is taken from the DS Resource Pack, but even though the themes are appropriately used (except for the fact that the battle theme is always the same, even in boss battles), the music doesn't stand out. Now, It may be just my opinion, and it WON'T affect the score of the review, but it just felt that while the music didn't made worse the experience, it didn't made it better either.
So then, Broken Gauntlet was supposed to be a take on in a classic Tactical RPG experience inspired by games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Shining Force and Fire Emblem, three games that I played and liked (but didn't finished for different reasons). But what I got was boring battles that sometimes would become frustrating due to the many issues mentioned above in the review, an unpolished dialogue that stays like this during all the game, and mostly empty and/or unimaginative maps who end up all together ruining the experience.
Now, I don't want the developer to misunderstand me, there are good points in this game, since it motivates you to use some strategy to defeat your enemies, since their skills vary during the course of the game and they'll make you act in a different way than before at some points. Also, some of the maps are actually pretty good, and this project was still a good first attempt to a RPG Maker Tactical RPG game. But in the balance, the cons surpass the pros by a lot, so I can only recommend this game to people who like TRPG's a lot.
Wait, did he just said "his demon friend"!? You know what, this may be the best time to pass to the Good and Bad stuff of the game...
- A good attempt to use the GubiD's Tactical Battle System in a game.
- Despite the flaws in the combat system, the later parts of the game encourage you to use some strategy in order to win the battles.
- The design of some of the interior and exterior maps are decent...
- ...but the rest of them are big empty spaces which also are used for battles. The overworld and the ship also suffer from a bad-tasting simplicity.
- The dialogue of the game has a notable lack of polish.
- The battles constantly switch between being boring and being frustrating, and sometimes those two overlap. And that is in the "Normal" difficulty level.
- The use of the DS graphics with RTP graphics between others, can feel a little clashing visually.
- Some minor issues in general, like the slow disappearing of the enemies one for one at the end of the battle, that can get annoying in a battle with many enemies.
Final Rating: 2 Stars
(I'm sorry if the review was too harsh, but I couldn't find another way to express how I felt about this game...)
Editor's Note: This review was edited to change the text size.
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CloseIn the future, please don't arbitrarily change the size of the text in your reviews to be enormous. It was very distracting and very hard to fix.
Sorry! :(
I made that in order to be more visible.
(Altough I actually did that in the other review I submitted previously, I don't know how that didn't came out in the revision...)
I made that in order to be more visible.
(Altough I actually did that in the other review I submitted previously, I don't know how that didn't came out in the revision...)
Other than that, this is a really well-written review. You seem to be really good at articulating yourself and it has great formatting that makes it easy to read.
A very well written review that I can mostly agree with.
Broken Gauntlet is still the best tactics game made with RPG Maker
on this website :)
author=kory_toombs
Broken Gauntlet is still the best tactics game made with RPG Maker
on this website :)
I can't argue with you on that. :P
Glad you liked the review!
author=kory_toombs
A very well written review that I can mostly agree with.
Broken Gauntlet is still the best tactics game made with RPG Maker
on this website :)
you do realize we have 2 other ones
right? XD
(technically more if you count Dyhalto's SRPG95 games)
Hm, just downloaded this game, let's seee, let's seeeeee...
I never remember seeing island sky before?
And am not sure about Aurora Wing.
There was one released recently, but that was afterwards.
There's a lot of games that have categorized themselves tactics, but
not many that actually are.
All the ones mentioned are made with RPG Maker 2000 / 2003.
Where are all the tactics games made with XP / VX / Ace?
The screen shots in this make it look tactic-ish
more than the ones you mentioned, whose screen shots don't
give enough info as to whether they are real tactics games.
http://rpgmaker.net/games/7506/
And this one that isn't finished, with a more recent engine.
http://rpgmaker.net/games/5653/
Dude Aurora Wing is a classic. IT's literally everywhere. It was submitted in 2007 and it's one of the best ranked games on this site. It must take a lot of guts to call your 2.5 star game the best tactics game of this site. I'm just saying you should measure your words, buddy. Also, doesn't this look tactics enough for you??? :o
http://rpgmaker.net/games/42/images/306/
Or this
http://rpgmaker.net/games/110/images/369/
Now now, your game likely isn't bad -- I'm downloading it again (for the third time, because I always forget where I put stuff I download) and I'm likely having a fun time. But please, be careful when you say things like "this is the best", and if it is bad (which I'll see by now) this isn't a redeeming quality at all. Anyway, I'm kind of ranting and it's kind of morning so whatever, sorry if I'm picking on you and going on with this for too long e_e
*hugs*
http://rpgmaker.net/games/42/images/306/
Or this
http://rpgmaker.net/games/110/images/369/
Now now, your game likely isn't bad -- I'm downloading it again (for the third time, because I always forget where I put stuff I download) and I'm likely having a fun time. But please, be careful when you say things like "this is the best", and if it is bad (which I'll see by now) this isn't a redeeming quality at all. Anyway, I'm kind of ranting and it's kind of morning so whatever, sorry if I'm picking on you and going on with this for too long e_e
*hugs*
Those pictures aren't very clear as to whether they are tactics games.
Especially the picture for Aurora Wing. And I think the other game page
has been kept private, which was why I have never noticed it before.
author=kory_toombs
Those pictures aren't very clear as to whether they are tactics games.
Especially the picture for Aurora Wing. And I think the other game page
has been kept private, which was why I have never noticed it before.
Except for the fact that it has "move" as a command, and its genre is filed under "tactics RPG". Also I'm sure games like The Reconstruction and I Miss the Sunrise count too.
Marking a game under Tactics doesn't make it tactics.
For example, these titles don't look like tactics games for sure:
(And there's more from where that came from)
http://rpgmaker.net/games/4851/
http://rpgmaker.net/games/594/
http://rpgmaker.net/games/1895/
The games you mentioned don't look like normal combat, but I can't agree that they look like true tactics games (Similar to the style represented in games like Final Fantasy Tactics.)
But before we get wayyy toooo carried away with this conversation.
1) Find a tactics game for RPG Maker XP, VX, or Ace on RMN.
2) Or better yet find a tactics game that uses the same script I did.
My comment at general was aimed at the fact that with so many games on RMN
it is curious that there are no tactics games. I'm not saying my game is
better than other games because there is no game like mine. I'm comparing
it to nothing, which of course makes it the best.
No offense to fans of Aurora Wing, which I'm sure is a great game.
author=kory_toombs
I'm not saying my game is better than other games because there is no game like mine. I'm comparing it to nothing, which of course makes it the best.
It's one thing to not be aware of games like Aurora Wing, or what-have-you. However, to say that you refuse to compare it with anything, and is therefore the best, seems more than a little disingenuous, and also more than a little ignorant.
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