DAWN'S LIGHT

Hey Darken, make my gaame for me so I can sell it and keep all the profits... for foooood.

post=102370
And you are...?

That would be telling now, wouldn't it? Anyhows, please focus your attention back on the brilliant game.

Where is it?

post=102384
PHANTOM LEGACY.

/thread

http://www.gamezebo.com/download-games/dawns-light/review

heres a review.

basically its like this.

Role-playing games (RPGs) routinely clock in at 30 hours of gameplay or more, but bigger is not always better. Sometimes too much of that time is spent stumbling through maze-like dungeons, scrolling past overly long-winded dialogue, and being pummelled by endless random monster encounters. Refreshingly, Dawn's Light avoids these common pitfalls. The sprite-based RPG from John Wizard Games is a smart, well-balanced adventure that should prove engaging and creative enough to impress even the most jaded of RPG veterans.

But instead of merely maintaining the status quo, Dawn's Light manages to take a fresh and innovative approach to these tried and true RPG conventions.

Take the dungeons, and the enemies that dwell in them. Dungeons are, without fail, logically laid out and never so complicated that you feel hopelessly lost - even given the lack of an in-game overworld map. Enemies aren't the random kind that pounce on you unseen, but are walking around so that they can be engaged or avoided as the player wishes. However, in another clever twist, the number of enemies you defeat is directly tied to the rewards you get at the end of the dungeon. At the end of most dungeons is a treasure room, but the amount of treasure you can take depends on how many monsters you defeated along the way.

Enemy encounters are turn-based, with the enemy or groups of enemies on one side and your party on the other. Party members can be told to attack, guard, use a special skill or item, or attempt to escape. Vanquishing a foe earns experience points through which the players will routinely "level up" and become more powerful. In yet another display of developer creativity, players earn additional skills by finding statues scattered throughout the game, as opposed to earning them through levelling.

The dialogue, too, is particularly snappy and well-written. There's enough of it to flesh out the story and characters but not enough that you ever get the sense you're scrolling too much. It's funny too, especially if you've played your fair share of RPGs and are wise to a lot of the typical stereotypes, which Dawn's Light happily lampoons.

Dawn's Light is controlled exclusively with the keyboard (as opposed to the mouse or a combination of both) and the system works quite well. You can't save at any time, but rather have to record your progress in special red books that are scattered liberally throughout the game. One quirk I encountered was that enemies rarely - if ever - seem to drop items. You can, however, scavenge pretty much anything you need from barrels scattered throughout the world. These healing items are plentiful enough that you can use them without needing to run back to town every few encounters to heal, but not so ridiculously common that you end up finishing the game with 200 extra Health Potions in your inventory.

In a genre where games can all start to resemble each other, Dawn's Light boasts an attractive and unified art style, with cute sprite-based graphics and nice larger anime-style headshots that are displayed when the characters are talking. The soundtrack is a little more eclectic, with blues and jazz mixed with more "traditional" fantasy numbers. The rapid shifts in style can be a bit jarring, but the music never goes as far as to grate on the nerves.

There was just one design decision in this exquisitely designed game that I didn't care for. Travel in itself is - again - very clever. Very early on in the game you're given control of a ship and can sail between a network of islands. However, you can't actually dock at a particular island until its location has been formally revealed to you, either through conversations or by finding the right map. This is a very cool way of doing things, but the world itself is divided into several self-contained regions. You can't sail from one region to another in your ship, but instead have to use crystals housed in a specific building in each region. It seems like a needlessly cumbersome way to switch between regions. Why can't you just access the full world map by sea?

Aside from these nitpicks, playing Dawn's Light seldom feels like a chore. From the dialogue to the battles to the quests, everything just smacks of competent and clever game design. Dawn's Light is a marvelous role-playing game.

Its definitely worth playing, as far as RPG's go. I wouldn't pay for it though, you can get a crack for it by TE, by googling.

Aye, sadly I have to disagree with the review, so I'll post my own. Thanks for necroposting by the way, as it's allowed me the ability to make my own post in answer to your review. Also, you may want to avoid telling me about how to get illegal copies (via cracks) as I'm pretty sure it's not allowed.

Before I played Dawn's Light, I played it's spiritual sequel "Dawn's Light: A Christmas Tale". I call it a "spiritual sequel" since it more or less uses the same characters and carries similar puzzle themes, but it's not a true sequel to the actual game. Heck, it's not even based in the same universe. In DL: ACT John Wizard must save Christmas in an odd off-beat comical version of the Grinch, and in order to do so must first dive into the game of his creation (the original Dawn's Light) and retrieve DL's heroes in order to stop the grinch-like John Naught. Everything about this game was great. So naturally I decided I wanted to see how the heroes ended up together in the original tale.

Alas, everything about DL: ACT was just a gimmick to get people to spend money on the original DL by providing a code that shaved off $5 on the purchase price. Good gimmick, yes, but unfortunately, DL is not worth the money to spend it on. At best, it's a good attempt at creating an RM game that, while severely flawed, may prove to be enjoyable to some degree. At worst, well, it's the worst commercial game I've played and its glaring flaws prove to me that it was rushed out way too fast without any care on the final look. If anything, I think DL: ACT is far more deserving of going commercial over this, and its creators could probably garner respect if he were to start offering DL as a free download, perhaps with the purchase of one of his newer titles.

In any case, you are presented with a typical cliche story of two brothers who get separated, a blood-thirsty villain bent on world domination, and the hero who gets caught up in the conflict while trying to seek revenge against the one that destroyed the orphanage he spent a good chunk of his life at. You start the game doing a couple of fetch quests before the story gets rolling. The main purpose of the game is to seal portals the villain is using to bring out demons. There are 8 portals in all, guarded by a demon boss. There are a ton (and I mean a ton) of sidequests to embark on to extend the time you play this game, and the worldmap is more of a placeholder. You move on the worldmap from one place to another, but you don't necessarily explore the worldmap. It's just there to move from one town or dungeon to another. And there are 5 sections of the ocean to travel, but each section can only be accessed via a teleport. The music is decent, the characters gain decent skills, and it's nice to not have to level grind. Enemies are not random, and once they are fought and destroyed they are gone forever. Since beginning enemies can be rough, this makes it nice to be able to go back to a town, restore, buy some healing items, return to where you left off, and not have to worry about having to fight your way back to where you were.

However, the big problem that I had with this game wasn't the RTP. I personally like VX's RTP package if used right, although some people will have a problem purchasing a game made with just the RTP. My problem was in the story, it's execution of the story, the writing, and the overall gameplay. In several instances, there were mapping issues where your character could litterally pass through a wall he shouldn't have, climbed a ceiling tile, or otherwise access an area that should not have been passable. Early on in the game, you get a map for a snowy region/town (can't recall the name). You also get access to your second main character Vera. However, if you get the map to the snowy area and go there first (without getting Vera), the cutscene in this snowy area will assume Vera is in your party, even though she's not. This is a problem, of course, with the switches not being used correctly, but little things like that occur throughout the game. And for anybody that's seen the screenshot, the horrible use of sbs where your battlers look like they are floating. Now, I don't know if it's legal or not to use battlebacks from other RM engines and apply them into VX and then sell it as your own commercial title. In similar regards, I don't even know if it's legal to make a commercial game using scripts he pulled from other scripters unless prior arrangements were made.

However, to use these battlebacks and scripts and not make the necessary adjustments so your battlers looked like they were standing on solid ground, at the very least, would put a sour taste in my mouth even if this had been freeware, which it is not.

Finally, the story and writing: the creator couldn't seem to make up his mind which type of a story to tell. He seemed to want to make a dark, comical tale, but oftentimes the game was too serious or not serious at all. It's attempt at humor was very dry (unlike the very funny spiritual sequel I mentioned above), and trying to go back and forth between humor and serious just didn't seem to work very well. If a proper balance cannot be established, he should have gone one way or another. But aside from that, the writing was just plain horrible. In the beginning, it was okay, but hardly half way through the glaring misspellings and grammar errors crept up, and they just kept coming, until the end of the game where almost every other line being spoken seemed to have issues. In fact, I felt he had gotten bored by the end of the game and was trying to speed through it, to the point that he didn't care about how anything was spelled.

But what more do you expect from a story where you are just going from one portal to another? If it had not been for the sidequests, this game would have been complete drab. The sidequests will probably end up taking half of your time, because there are so many, that I felt the sidequests were simply added as a way to try and beef up the game and hide some of the other glaring flaws.

This does not mean that I don't believe in commercial RM games in any way, and there were some redeeming qualities in DL, as stated above. I also believe DL's creator has a lot of potential. However, I don't believe DL is the game to showcase his talents, nor do I believe it's worth the asking price.

Will you people stop posting reviews of this game? You'd think that a year-old topic would just... die? (and here I am reviving it again.)

Let's all just say that Dawn's Light is shit and no one in their right mind would pay $20 for it. Next.