Nociel

Game: Nociel

Developer: Wishiyo

Now I don't feel so bad about the games I've made. I almost wondered if this was a demo, but his page says complete, there's nothing on his page to suggest it's a demo, and when I finally played it, it had an ending, and that ending pretty well precluded any chance for a sequel.

Story: You have to kill an evil spirit and end a curse. There are characters that help you. You don't know them from Adam and you're not going to, either. Your journey takes you from the castle and...into town. While you're in the castle, you get Alice and Inyo to join your party. When you're in town, you're going to meet a girl. She says she's heard of you and asks to join your party. Nociel says, "Sure, why not?" I'd tell you more, but I fear I've already spoiled most of the story.

Graphics: Basic RTP. It would definitely not hurt the developer to watch Liberty's town mapping tutorial. While we're at it, here is her forest and nature mapping tutorial and her shift mapping tutorial. I strongly recommend watching these.

And I'm really not trying to rub salt in the wound with this screenshot. I'm just trying to show the developer an example of what not to do.


Upon leaving the castle, there is a town to the south, designated by a wall of town tiles and a desert camp to the east with a desert town north of that, not even in the same area as the town (that is an important distinction to make and you will soon find out why). Don't bother going into the desert camp. You can't. Instead, go to the town. Now, from here, you can buy weapons, go to the inn, or go east, west, or south. If you go west, you'll find yourself in another part of town. If you go south, you'll be in a creature grind area. If you go east, you'll be in the desert camp. Likewise, if you go in the town section to the west, you'll find a stair that leads to a secret passage that leads to the desert town. The secret passage is really the only part of this system that makes sense. Transfer points that make sense would go a long way to improving the overall situation.

Gameplay: In his game description, which seems way too short to have qualified for a game page, he says that this game gets very hard. It would help if the very first chest I grabbed didn't have 10,000 gold in it, if there weren't three more easily accessible chests with insane amounts of money in them, if I couldn't buy super strong weapons so early in the game, if all of the creatures weren't pushovers, and if my character didn't start at level 15 and immediately acquire a party member at level 50. What's more, the entire game is button mashing, and then you can't harm the final boss with attacks.

Characters don't have enough attack magic. With all of the button mashing that came before, the boss is actually only hard because you are completely unprepared by the previous battles. The player doesn't understand how the magic works or how it can be used effectively against the boss because all of the creature encounters throughout the game have been so weak, magic was never necessary, and using magic was a waste. When there's a mini-boss, he generally serves to give the player an idea of what he or she will be dealing with when confronting the next boss. In this case, the mini-boss was even easier to beat than any of the previous encounters, and then when I confronted the final boss, attack didn't work, and the only attack magic available did laughably low amounts of damage. Fortunately, he wasn't that hard to defeat, but the balance in this game only serves to frustrate the player.

It's clear from what little dialogue there is that the game doesn't take itself seriously, but it should at least take the player seriously, and it doesn't feel as if it does. In the Game Theory & Design section of the forum, LockeZ discusses how to design a boss battle. While this is for designing awesome bosses that will challenge the player and that the player can respect, much of what LockeZ teaches in this thread can also be used for designing regular creature encounters. Creatures should challenge the player, should be comparable to the player's level, but shouldn't be easy enough that the player can just run over them like a freight train.

In item shops, there are numerous items and weapons that have no function in the game. It's nice to have selection for realism, but when a game has items in the purchase list that the player can't use, they're just wasting space and it runs the chance of the player actually spending hard earned money on these useless items.

There is a lot of good gameplay and questing going on in this game. There are plenty of characters that send the player on item fetch quests. The eventing on these quests are well done and these quests serve to make the game a bit more interesting for the player.

One more thing I'd like to point out. You have these vast dungeons and nothing in them. Dungeons aren't fun if they don't reward the player, whether it's with story progression, items, treasure, new party members; if you're going to have a dungeon full of rooms, you should make sure that some of those rooms have something worth going into them for, even if it's just a potion here and there.

Glitches: There are no game-breaking bugs. There is a sleeping soldier that when interacted with, his sprite changes to another RTP man; I recommend going into the event and setting it to fixed direction. I had thought that a walking barrel was a glitch, but when I walked up to it and triggered it, it proudly proclaimed that it was a walking barrel, so I suppose that's not a glitch.

Conclusion: This game is anything but finished. It's lack of a story isn't really an issue, but the dialogue does nothing. There are no interactions that further any kind of story and the game just feels like doing a bunch of pointless stuff before fighting the boss. Maps are messy, difficult to navigate and don't make linear sense. Creature encounters are bland, easy, and do not prepare the player for the endgame. Though the game functions and can be played from beginning to end without any roadblocks, I can't recommend it. It needs a tremendous amount of polish and and encounters need a great deal of adjustment.