Idunn Ymiraldor

Idunn Ymiraldor (IY) is the second game developed by SovanJedi. His first one, Nigsek: a Monter’s Tail was among the first early RPGMaker RPGs I played quite a few years ago. IY is described as an action RPG, which features battles that I don’t normally enjoy as much as the traditional turn-based ones. So what did I think of the demo?


Story/Plot:

The game starts with an unseen being involved in a chase through space. It chooses Earth as its next hiding place due to the detection of a useful resource.

The story then shifts to the Philadelphia suburban house of Mike, a seventh grader, who lives with his father and older brother. He has a close friend at school named Christine, who he meets when arriving at school. Then, they are both teased by a couple of bullies.



Once the school day ends and Mike is on his way home, he’s caught off guard by the bullies, with whom he has no choice but to fight after discovering their motivation for bullying him and Christine.



Mike then returns to his home, where he’s alone until Christine knocks at the door and they both go to the roof to discuss their current situation. Suddenly, they see something fall from the sky, which scares them.



They decide they need to leave town and head towards Philadelphia. After a series of battle with invaders, their fate is unclear since they are enveloped in a blinding light.



In the final scene of the demo, we get a glimpse of an alien landing on Earth in search of the being introduced at the beginning of the game.




Characters/Dialogue

I found the characters one of the most appealing features in addition to its plot. The dialogue between characters as well as inner dialogue involving one character’s thoughts serves that purpose.

Mike and Christine, the protagonists, are believable characters facing issues typical of seventh graders: they share both awkward and sublime moments in their male-female friendship; Mike faces the moral dilemma of whether to fight or not.
NPCs in this game are also interesting. For example, Mike’s Dad is trying his best to take care of both of his sons, being a widower, and, Mike’s brother, presumably a teenager, treats Mike like a little kid.



Even the bullies have their reasons for giving Mike and Christine a hard time. The alien creatures introduced at the beginning and end of the demo remain mysterious.
I found some minor grammar and spelling issues in the demo, but overall it is relatively well written.


Gameplay

One nice detail is that there are many things that Mike can interact with in his house. For example, he can switch the light on or off in certain rooms. Sadly, the same can’t be said at other places in the game: the only useful object interaction leads to Mike locating the weapon he equips before engaging his first fight.

Not surprisingly, I have mixed feelings regarding the battle system and the enemies involved. Only one party member at a time can be active for fights, but pressing “Escape” brings up a menu that allows you to change the active party member as well as use items (only healing ones were available in the demo) in menu or cast magic (I found no use for it in the demo).

If the health of the currently active members falls to 0, you get the dreaded generic “Game Over” screen or if you defeat an enemy, the only thing you get for it is experience. I think that both of these things could have been handled differently by the developer. For example, when the current active member dies, the other one, if not dead, could replace them automatically and continue fighting. Another alternative would be to have a certain number of lives for each party member. Similarly, when you defeat the enemy, perhaps you can get drops such as healing or reviving items, stuff you can eventually sell or money that you can use to buy things in the future.

As I expected, you have to be facing the enemy and be right in front of it to be able to land a hit. It would be nice, though, if eventually your party members could gain the ability of having ranged attacks. One nice aspect that prevent battles from being button mashfests is that there’s a gauge in the lower left side of the battle screen, that when full, makes the next hit do a significantly high amount of damage. Once used, you need to wait for it to refill again to do obtain the same level of damage. Otherwise, if you mindlessly spam the action button repeatedly to hit, the damage dealt per hit is much less.

Enemies in the demo vary from stationary to mobile, providing a diversity of challenge. The stationary ones can shoot only in one direction and do so intermittently, so that you can wait for them to fire and then give them a few hits in and retreat, repeating this strategy until they are defeated. The mobile ones can have different attacks that can vary from short to long range, target one tile or multiple tiles, follow patterns or be erratically unpredictable.



I had the most difficulty with the second types of enemies I faced which happened to be mobile. These moved slowly and didn’t attack often at first, but once you got close to or attacked them, they moved faster, attacked more frequently and erratically, mixing long and short range attacks. I found that trying to destroy all of them eventually lowered the health of my party members a lot, forcing me to use up all my few healing items, or, even worse, lead to “Game Over” screens. The latter happened to me even more often than it did with the final boss fight. The biggest problems leading to this are: you are only provided in the demo three healing items, with no chance of getting more; the healing items generally heal less than a single hit from the enemies appearing after the first fight. The solution for me was to avoid fighting these types of enemies, taking advantage of the game not requiring me to defeat them to continue to the next screen.


Graphics/Sound

The demo mostly uses pretty, custom, non RTP graphics with lots of detail. During some of the cutscenes there are some animations that serve many purposes, such as showing the emotions of the characters involved in them or the actions that occurred during them.

The background music is non-RTP and I feel was chosen carefully to set the mood well for the different scenes in the game. Sounds in the game are quite useful. For example, I used them as auditory cues in battles to allow me to decide what to do.


Another Issue

In addition to the issues mentioned elsewhere in this review, the only other issue I would like to report is a wall tile in the room of Mike’s brother that can be walked into, resulting in the sprite being partially visible at the other side of the wall.


Conclusion

I found the demo to be entertaining due to its engaging plot and characters, and, visually appealing. I was willing to put up with the somewhat unwieldy battle system and questionable game design choices to continue playing through it. I recommend others play this demo.

I wish that somehow a completed version will be released in the future, although, realistically, it is unlikely to be the case. One can only hope …