Astoria: The Holders of Power Saga

author=Euphoniac
He even helped me to get an Achievement afterwards that I missed because of a bug. He didn't commit a crime, and doing what he did doesn't make him a jerk (in comparison to other developers on Steam who adorn themselves with courtesy reviews). With his account being suspended, he suffered enough, so I think it's a vengeful move to rekindle this discussion on Steam like you did, my dear Liberty.

It's conspicuous, by the way, that mostly women (Liberty, Rose_Guardian, Unity) are (excessively) upset because of what GoldenUnicornGaming did (Firefly84 as a stoic German like myself seems to be the exception). Perhaps you're a bit too sensitive with regard to this issue. It seems you would like to completely annihilate GoldenUnicornGaming - that's typically male behavior. Since I don't want to turn this into a gender debate, let me close giving this advice: Maybe you should endure the hardships of "going commercial" before judging GoldenUnicornGaming too harshly. His game is fun, and if this fact doesn't matter, why do we still bother with JRPGs?

My playstyle is to do everything in a game I can do without having to read a guide or grind excessively just to get ahead. You know, because most RPGs and jRPGs don't force you to grind crazy amounts due to being balanced when it comes to all aspects - damage, healing, costs (both spell and weapon/armour/item), loot, levelling rewards, experience, stat increases (whether by equipment or skills/levels).

Because forcing people to grind is bad design and hey, guess what? This game has bad design at times. Surprise, that's what I said in my review. Boring your players by excessive grinding is the epitomy of bad design and forcing your player to grind is boring. That's why excessive grinding is frowned apon by anyone in the game industry who isn't making an MMORPG (and even then they make sure to make it more engaging than not).

Please don't even start with the 'every battle is a challenge' because that, again, is bad design since you can die from what is supposed to be exp-grinding trash mobs. Seriously. Bad. Design.


As for the dungeons, you're warned every time, yes, but you're also fucked over every single time too. Because the treasure hauls you get from side quests and the level or two you get from them as well don't really help at all. Upgrade your weapons to more ineffective weapons, grab a few more items that'll be used against a horde of enemies who can kill your crew and deplete them very quickly, and hey, look, you're also stuck in a dungeon where it makes no sense to be stuck to boot! Again, bad design.

Let me break it down into tiny chunks so you can actually understand what I'm saying because you seem to have missed it the last three times I talked about it.

"You can leave dungeons at any time and heal up!"
= Monsters hit hard and cause you to have to heal every round or so.
= This means that you have to use more items to heal.
= This means that you run out of items very fast.
= This means that you have to pull out of dungeons every few battles or so.
= Backtracking through dungeons (even ones without monsters in areas you've already cleared) is boring.
= Every dungeon is the same in this way. This is boring.

"Just grind on the world map."
= World map monsters give you shit-all for exp and gold.
= This means that you have to fight a LOT of them in order to even get one level up, let alone a few.
= The area of the world map where your current objective/dungeon is, is full of monsters capable of killing you.
= They also give shit loot.
= Their shit loot is better than the shitter loot you get from the previous areas of the world map.
= Due to how hard they hit and how badly balanced the game is, your choice is either grind for ages in an early area for tiny amounts of exp and gold against mobs you can kill faster OR try not to die against enemies at the current level who also give tiny amounts of gold and exp, but also make you use up your healing items (!) to stay alive.
= So you go with the less expensive option because the aim is to make fucking gold.
= Guess what? You're gonna be grinding there for ages. (I watched some youtube videos that I got more invested in while trying to grind up some more. It eased the complete and utter boredom I was feeling but meant that, hey, I was not as invested in the game any more. THIS IS BAD GAME DESIGN.


"You're warned before going in the locked dungeons."
= Firstly, there's no logical sense FOR THEM TO BE LOCKED. The game presents no real reason why those dungeons are locked ones and others aren't. It'd be one thing if you got trapped by falling down a hold into a mine or you infiltrated the fort using a route that you can't reuse because it got found. Waltzing in through the front door and then not letting you leave the area, even though you can go back outside that door and into the area around the fort MAKES ZERO SENSE. It's a plot issue and lazy to boot.
= You are not given enough stuff to deal with those locked dungeons. You have to grind up more money to deal with them. See the above issues with that.
= It would be one thing if we were given a fair amount of items to replenish the ones we used (or if the game had a decent fucking balance) but that is not the case. Sometimes they'll throw one or two items at you but that's it. In a dungeon. Full of enemies. Whose groups can kill you or at least lay you flat (and use up the supplies you DO have) if you're careless or unlucky for one round.


"Treasure hordes and sidequests"
= Don't give you enough. Seriously. They don't. Not for the amount of time you put into them.
= Weapons and armour you can buy just don't do enough to merit bothering getting the newest all the time. You're better off buying more healing items and using buffs to protect yourself, and splashing out a bit every now and then on something that boosts stats a lot more instead of a few points here and there.


As for the other stuff: who's to say that the reviews he copied over from steam (as you would have tell) weren't, you know, written by himself? Nothing. It is, in fact, a lot more likely that that is the case. Else why not just ask the proper writers to post them themselves? Instead he deliberately broke site rules to make alternate accounts (and tried his damned best to make them seem very different to each other - let's not forget this, shall we? Why, it's almost like he was trying to cover up the fact that the developer was trying to cheat the system or something...) and posted 5 star reviews. Even if he DID in fact get those reviews from Steam and they weren't written by him, he could easily have given them different scores instead of the highest score possible, or, you know, N/A scores which don't actually change the score of any other reviews given (they don't change the averages of the scores).

But no, he went with subterfuge and fakery and quite frankly, fucked his own name up.

And yes, of course I posted my review on Steam... as well as pointing out that he was a fraud. Who wouldn't after finding out that fact? People should know who they're dealing with and that they shouldn't blatantly trust every review that exists because it's all too easy for someone to try and fuck the system just because they feel entitled to getting what they want. Besides, I posted that before he got banned, so perhaps you should keep your suppositions on things you don't know about to yourself, hm?


...I'm not even going to touch your misogynistic bullshit. That's your damage and if you really think anything like that is close to the truth, I sincerely hope you grow out of it one day. For your own sake.