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Year of the Dog

  • Marrend
  • 02/02/2019 05:04 PM
  • 1510 views
Game Title: Final Fantasy Vs Dog
Engine: RPG Maker 2003
Status at review: Complete

The playable characters in the Final Fantasy series battle against a wide range of foes. We have Vaan slaying rats in the near-opening of FF12 (if memory recalls correctly) to fighting literal Behemoths in... well, a lot of titles in the series have that. To say nothing of sometimes there being optional bosses that are arguably harder to deal with than the final bosses. Weapon in FF7 chiefly comes to mind here. With this game, we see Cecil (and later on Kain, and Rydia) face-off against an apparently common dog, but, in actuality, a deadly foe.

The game's content consists solely of this fight, and is not to be taken 100% seriously. For example, during the fight, I saw a video play of a dog running over a kid. This was actually the animation for the dog's Limit Break. Or, perhaps, some kind of summon? The first time it uses this ability, the Limit Break graphical effect sparks. Each time it uses that ability afterwards, I can hear the summon SFX before the video plays, but little else apart from that.

I don't know if the use of FF7 effects and music was done on purpose, or not. I must admit to expecting FF4 stuff, considering. However, I'm not going to complain about it. They work well enough.

I'm not used to Cecil having any special abilities (though, I understand that Dark is an ability he gets in the more modern ports of FF4), but, Kain's Jump is mostly pretty spot-on. The one thing that felt a little off is that players choose the Jump command, Kain jumps, and when Kain is supposed to land, they must select the command again (it's the only one on the list at this point), then choose the target for the Jump. I largely assume it was done this way because of the constraints of the engine used more than anything else.

This doesn't take very long to play at all. My first play, I lost, and that was maybe five minutes in. My second play, I won, and that was maybe another two minutes? I wasn't really keeping track, so I'll have to be forgiven on such approximations.

Summary:
Despite the game-length, I had a bit of fun here. The game does what it sets out to do, and is exactly what it says on the tin. I don't know if I would recommend this for a feature, but, certainly, deserving of the recognition of "Year of the Dog" (come on, it's right in the game-title!) and "Punniest Game Alive" for 2018.





Ya did good, LordBlueRouge.


BOTTOM LINE: 3.5/5


Side note on ratings (since there is/was/will be somewhat of a spate on what rating means what between each user):
1/5 -> Terrible. Forget about hitting an audience. The game is so bug-ridden, or otherwise unplayable, that what entertainment can be found in the game has a hard time coming to the surface.

2/5 -> Bad but playable. I had a poor experience with the game. When played by a player the game actually caters to, it would serve it's purpose.

3/5 -> Average. A solid experience, but snags somewhere along the line cause it to be held back from being "good".

4/5 -> Good. I enjoyed the experience, and have no qualms supporting it if was considered for a featured game (if it wasn't featured already).

5/5 -> Excellent. Among the paragons of gaming experiences, and instant feature material in my humble opinion (if it wasn't featured already).

Posts

Pages: 1
LordBlueRouge
2143
02/02/2019 05:13 PM
Holyshit, I didn't expect a review!

Thank you Marrend! ♥♥♥

For example, during the fight, I saw a video play of a dog running over a kid. This was actually the animation for the dog's Limit Break. Or, perhaps, some kind of summon? The first time it uses this ability, the Limit Break graphical effect sparks. Each time it uses that ability afterwards, I can hear the summon SFX before the video plays, but little else apart from that.

Yeah, I wrote a blog post about this back in 2018:

I wanted to throw this up for reference, before throwing together the quick tutorial and uploading the demo: One of the things I wanted to do, but unfortunately didn’t have the time to get to was to transpose a ff7 summoning animation into rpgmaker2003, like the animated gif below:

(So like this, but imagine the Dog summoning materia, instead) The problem is rpgmaker2003 has a hard limit of 8 instances for battle animations. So for each frame, there’s a maximum of about 8 symbol/kanji sprites that will fly into the Dog before he disappears for the summon - but there’s also the green/blue animation, happening around Cloud’s feet at the same time, as well. I'd really like to try and figure out how to do this, because seeing this in rpgmaker2003, I think would make for a better joke, ...But yeah, I’m kind of burnt out on this project at this point - But at some point, I'd like to return later and figure out how to solve this eventually. So yeah, whenever you hear the summoning soundeffect from FF7 in the demo (and you're probably going to hear it a lot...) this is the animation that's suppose to be playing during it. Expect the download for the tech demo soon.

But yeah, Cecil's DarkWave took about a week to recreate in rpgmaker2003, Kain's Jump, took about a week and a half and Ryida's Summon animation, which ends the demo took about 3 weeks - Like, it's a very simple tech demo, but as you mentioned with Kain's Jump, there's actually a lot going on to try and work around rpgmaker2003's default battle system, to try and make it look like an actual final fantasy game - I had to study old rpgmaker games like Final Fantasy Time and Again and Final Fantasy ? an old japanese rpgmaker2000, to see what they got right, and tried to make something that at least, looked the part, in rpgmaker2003.

I'm also glad you mentioned that you lost the game once. Kaempfer, best tester on rpgmaker.net, was a huge help with sorting this out. I needed the game to be difficult enough, so the player would lose at least once, so they'd see the gameover video - the gameover video took me about 2 weeks to put together. (the part where the youtube video gets a millions dislikes, was the hardest to do, because flash doesn't video output actionscript. So I had to manually reinput all the numbers in for each frame. I can't remember frames how many it was, but it was alot)

Thank you for the review dude!♥♥♥ it means a lot.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
02/02/2019 05:49 PM
author=LordBlueRouge
Holyshit, I didn't expect a review!


You can thank this event for that.

As for the summon animation, yeah, I think I saw an image somewhere in the game folder that looked like the FF7 summon animation was being studied. Though, for this game, you probably could have continued to use the Limit Break spark for a graphical effect, perhaps?

Still, I can appreciate the effort you put in to what's here, given my own efforts in the creation of certain games which will remain nameless but will totally link to.
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