Nociel (After story)

Game: Nociel (after story)

Developer: Wishiyo

Story: Monster of the week is causing trouble. Generic friends with generic banter must traverse a generic dungeon to find it. If you're worried about rest areas, don't. This dungeon has towns. Yeah.

Graphics: MUCH BETTER THAN THE PREDECESSOR! It's still not great, but it is improving. There are no levitating barrels or crates that I've found. Town layout is still a little strange, but it makes sense now. The presence of the town in the dungeon is strange, but the characters comment on the strangeness, so at least the game admits it and the player can accept the strangeness because of that. Still some other weird, inexplicable things going on, such as an apparent dead girl in a dungeon that nobody sees fit to comment on. If there's a sidequest about her, then I haven't found it. All graphics are standard RTP. All in all, this is a significant improvement over the last game.

Gameplay: We've gone from one extreme to the other. Standard random encounters, whereas they were ridiculously easy in the previous game, are now extremely hard. The standard monsters, while they are a bit of pain, aren't impossibly hard. They're at a fairly good balance. Strategy with them is mostly button mashing, though in the harder dungeons, using special skills for some creatures is advisable. Random encounters are a little bit high. I would recommend lowering them to perhaps 45 or 50 steps.

Now, I'm going to briefly go off on a tangent here about RPG Maker. Random encounters don't work in these systems. They're big-time broken. The way they work, is that the system counts the player's steps and roles a random variable. This is how all random encounters work in any system. The problem with RPG Maker is that after an encounter, the step counter resets so that in theory, you could literally have an encounter every step. This is in no way the developer's fault. Liberty, that lady who is so good at mapping, does have a random encounter system that fixes the encounter rate for VX Ace. I've got it buried in some folder somewhere. You could probably ask her for it. It might be a worthwhile system to track down because the way REs are in VX Ace is really annoying and this game really underscores why it's an issue.

On to bosses; as in the last games, there is a major disparity between the way you fight regular enemies and the way you fight bosses. Now, bosses, in one school of thought, should be harder instances of the previous enemies. There are other approaches to making bosses, but it's generally agreed that the standard encounters, among other things, are supposed to prepare the player for the boss encounter. As in the previous Nociel, they don't. In this game, the magnitude of difficulty for bosses is in outer space. It's as if we have two designers: one is designing the regular enemies and the heroes, the other is designing the bosses, and these two people aren't communicating. At the very beginning of the game is an optional boss that will take hours of grinding to beat. The bosses hit way too hard and get too many turns. Each one can literally wipe you out in a single turn, each physical attack dealing between 800 to 1000 HP of damage and the boss, if choosing a physical attack, getting as many as four hits a turn. You have a chance: Use Yumi's bodyslam every single turn she gets and have Yukima use thunder II. The bosses' have such absurdly high HP that even this probably won't work, but using this strategy, you have a very slim chance of beating them. Also, the bosses all have abilities that inflict crippling status effects on all of your characters in a single hit. Don't worry if he misses: if he gets a chance to use it, he'll be able to attack with it several times so you can be sure there's no way of escaping a crippling status ailment. Boss difficulty renders the game essentially unplayable for most players.

The developer says that food items replace medicine in this game, and yet, you still find potions in chests and enemies drop potions and full potions, though at a ridiculously low rate. There are no reviving items. Item balance is very poor. Weapons and armor, even for the cheapest ones, are impossibly expensive. Money drop is now at a normal level, meaning you'll likely never be able to afford weapons or armor without very high amounts of grinding. The developer needs to bring weapons prices way down.

Writing: There are words on the screen and there's a goal, but that's it. The characters banter and respond to their environment, but there is nothing to tell us who they are or why we should care about them.

Conclusion: The game improves on its predecessor in several areas including use of graphics and battle balance for regular enemies. Boss battles, however are so poorly balanced that their difficulty is game breaking. Item balanced is non-existent and subjects the player to an unfair handicap; this includes weapons and armor. Until these issues are corrected, I can't really recommend the game. The game may improve in many areas over its predecessor, but its playability is highly questionable. Most players won't have enough time in their lives to grind enough to get to the level necessary to simply beat the first boss. This game leaves me weary and spent of energy. It's highly improved mapping and overall improved system are definitely a plus, but its problems really hurt it, in a lot of ways, more than the previous game.