BLACK SIGIL FOR THE DS -- IT'S LIKE FF6 AND CT HAD A BABY

It is really weird how there is no special transition to battle, it is the same as when you enter a town or w/e, the screen just goes black without any sound effects or graphical things. Also the sound effect for selecting things in menus is really weird, it is like a dull noise and is really boring I have no idea why they used it for everything!

Also!!!! There is seriously a random battle every 2 steps on the world map and the ATB is almsot as slow as FF9's!!!!!!!!

And there's no way to escape from battles (that I can find, anyway).
I really want to like this game, but... I just can't.

Well guys, you've been suckered into the indie dream once again. :(

Hold B to escape from battles. It's dumb that they don't mention this in the manual, or show you how to defend (holding L).

The beginning of the game is easily the worst and most unforgiving. There are a lot of flaws, like having no special transition into battle. I'm not sure when I enter a town or I've gotten into a battle, it's one of those annoying nitpicks. And yeah there are probably only 12 sound effects in the whole game. The ATB is abysmal in the beginning and setting the battle speed in the menu seems to do nothing. Thankfully it speeds up later in the game when you have a full party. Also lol of course the game promises to be 40 hours long, this tends to happen when you get into battle every 5 steps. And speaking of battles, the battle maps are so small that usually only one character will be able to attack the enemy at a time. If your other characters are blocked off, they have to result to using magic. Moving around helps sometimes, but it's like the battle maps were made to give you a handicap. Saving in the game is also annoying, you can't save in towns or at inns, so you need to go on the worldmap just to save.

But aside from that, it is...okay I guess. I enjoy it because of how it looks and I've grown to really like some of the music in the game. I really really like how the towns are done. There are tons of secrets and treasure chests everywhere and they do a good job of teasing you trying to get to them. The dialogue is not that good and there are certain cutscenes where the player walk speed will decrease by 4x and it will take 20 seconds for the person to leave the room so the game can resume. The game just seems to lack some polish. For a small development team though, they did their best, and I enjoy it for what it is. Just make sure you have your jRPG hat on because this game will throw everything from ellipses to cliche love scenes at you.

There is your review...

I appreciate the mini reviews guys. I guess I'll skip it and wait for something less stressful (yay for Spirit Tracks).

author=kentona link=topic=3687.msg80733#msg80733 date=1245078957
Wow, this game sounds like an RM2k3 user's first solid attempt at a game. Like, if it was released here it'd be one of the top games, but just doesn't quite cut it in the "real" world.

Here it would be an 'okay' game at best.

So I gave this game 8 hours so far. I can't stand much more. The encounter rate is atrocious. I must have gotten into 5 battles or more per map. There are no differing transitions between leaving a map and entering battle. The sound effects are pretty dull, and the battle system is slow and clunky. It just feels really thrown together at times.

I mean, they tried to mix things up with spell ranges and character movement, but then they killed it by making the battle maps puny combined with the fact that the characters take up way too much space on the battlefield. There are times where you can clearly see an open path, but when you try to move, oops one of your allies is taking up far more space than they look like they are, which results in one character being able to attack at a time unless you use skills that ignore movement. This could have been solved by having larger battle environments and smaller character hitboxes or allowing ally pass-through. Seriously you can barely move anywhere.

Second gripe is the low amount of saving opportunities. I swear I was at one point in the game where one of your characters was forced to not use magic, rendering them useless. They coupled this with the fact that you had to go through 2 dungeons back to back. between them, I think there were 2 save points. One at the beginning of the first, and another at the end of the second. Plus you can only save on the world map out of dungeons.

I know that they were trying to make it a throwback to the SNES days, but they really had no need to take the bad parts of those days with it in my opinion.

On the positive side. I enjoyed the graphics. Most of the environments are nice looking, if you stop to take a look. They also hid lots of little treasures and things in towns and dungeons so that gives you an incentive to look around. The music is pretty good as well. I'm not fond of the normal battle theme, but I enjoy most of the field themes. The story and characters I found were pretty good too. I liked their interactions and I even laughed a few times at the antics of Kairu and Aurora.

All in all, the game has potential and good ideas, but they're horribly implemented and they all come together for an okay experience at best. Not a bad game considering it's the studio's first commercial venture, but still.

Oh yeah the dungeon where Aurora can't use magic is hilariously bad, especially the story behind it. Like I said, there are just so many handicaps in this game (Kairu's curse gives him random status effects every battle, magic taken away from you, battle map handicaps, every enemy having a self destruct move) that it takes away from the experience. And the encounter rate is just as high as Lufia 1. If the game toned all of this down, more people would enjoy it. As much as all of us are complaining though, I think it still is a decent game. I've just gotten an airship, so hopefully things pick up and I won't have to traverse that overworld ever again.

I completely agree with all of Skie's points. That is p much what is wrong with this game. But!! I love anything SNES style so much that I will most likely be finishing it anyway.