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Quick Introduction
Legends of an Otherworld is an RPG with gameplay most closely resembling that of Final Fantasy X. Due to taking inspiration primarily from challenge runs of that game, the difficulty level is very high. In feedback I have seen, while there's little praise for the story / etc, and the minigames / puzzles have mixed reactions; there has been consistently highly positive feedback on the battles, especially the boss battles, with several battles being touted as examples of "how to do RPG Maker game boss battles the right way". Legends of an Otherworld easily has 30+ hours of gameplay in the mandatory content alone, with even more in optional content.

My future plans are to remake this game from the ground up in a custom engine rather than RPG Maker, with greatly improved mapping and storywriting, while keeping more or less the same great battle gameplay.

Setting / Background
The game begins when two cousins, Tara Ascira and Leanna Haysworth, awaken in a mysterious dungeon that seems to ignore every law of reality. With no recollection of how they got there, or even much idea of where they were from or what happened in their past, they decide to do the only thing they can - try to find a way out.

While attempting to return to their hometown of Saria – of course, via the obligatory roundabout route with many distractions along the way – they encounter a young white mage, Harley Ryder, who realises that the dungeon they mention bears strong resemblances to an almost-forgotten ancient legend of the world's origin, and the greatest evil threatening it. Needless to say, what started as simply a quest to get home – and find out how they ended up in such a place and what they had forgotten about themself – quickly turns into an adventure that could determine the fate of the entire world. No matter how much they – or at least, Tara – want to avoid getting involved, it seems everyone, and even the universe itself, is determined to force their involvement.

Gameplay
Legends of an Otherworld features a CTB (conditional turn battle) system, similar to that of Final Fantasy X, in which battles take place one action at a time with turn timing determined both by the battler's agility stat and what move they used last, also giving players as much time as they need to think about and select their next action. It also provides a large degree of freedom in terms of what bonuses to give characters and what skills to teach them. Careful management and strategic use of these abilities, and of the items obtained, is critical to winning. Those who try to win simply by level grinding will have a hard time, and towards the end of the game bosses (and even some random encounters) are perfectly capable of wiping out even a max-level party without much effort, if the player neglects strategy.

Many enemies go beyond the simple default mechanics of "randomly select attacks, maybe with a few limiting conditions", and have fully scripted AI for both their regular attacks and counterattacks. One type of random encounter enemy will always gang up on a single party member rather than spreading their attacks around. There are bosses who will select their actions and/or targets based on what will be most effective; or who will heal themself when nessecary but eventually realise "my healing isn't keeping up with damage I'm receiving, so I'm better off just trying to defeat the player as quickly as possible". Almost every boss - and certianly every major boss - has some unique pattern and/or traits which must be figured out and exploited in order to beat them. Once again, this is not a game which can be won simply by over-grinding then attacking everything to death.

And for those who find the main storyline bosses aren’t enough, there are extra-hard optional bosses available at virtually all stages throughout the game; the first one becomes available before the third storyline boss, while there are also plenty of postgame-level bosses that make the already-hard endgame bosses look like pushovers.

For those who seek to just complete the storyline, you may be looking at 30+ hours of gameplay. Optional content can easily add another 10 – 20 on top of that. This is a very large game. Lucky you can save anywhere you like – that’s one of the few ways the game is nice to you.

Gameplay videos
These do not spoil anything storyline-wise. They do, however, spoil (to some extent) strategies for these two bosses. Both are fairly early-game bosses, the first more so than the second, but the second is often a major roadblock boss for many players.



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Latest Blog

Feedback from an LP

SentinelProxima recently completed a Let's Play of this game on Youtube.

Some background information here - at the time he started this LP, the game had been sitting in an incomplete, abandoned state on my hard drive for several years. It's a miracle that I still had the source code, to be honest. Watching through his LP actually was a big factor in me finally resuming work and finishing the game off - particularly of note, only about 20% - 30% of the game actually remained to make at this stage, so more had been done than not. Ironically, the LP itself went through a similar thing - after reaching the final boss, it was left for over a year before SentinelProxima finished it off.

From watching through this LP, there's a few things I picked up on relating to the battle system that I feel need changing for my new project. These are not at all to fault SentinelProxima's playstyle - I can certianly understand why he did things the way he did, and a big part of that is "the game allowed for it", or even in some cases "the game required it". Conversely, there are some things that I feel were underused, and that I should consider either reworking to make them more useful, or outright removing them.

A particular concern for me was that the start of every battle was basically "set up protective statuses and buffs". These things absolutely need to exist, but the problem I see is the "set up once, now you're good for the whole battle" approach. I feel these need to be handled differently. One possible way of doing this is to make sure most bosses (and higher-tier random encounters) have a way of dealing with these. Another is by making them of limited duration (most status effects and all buffs in my game did not expire over time).

Another idea I have had regarding this, specifically with regard to buffs, is to do away with the "two levels of buff", make them more potent so that they're still useful, and slap on a restriction that you may only have one stat buffed at a time - if you buff a different one, the original buff goes away. (Most likely, debuffs would work the same way. One buff and one debuff at the same time, as long as they're on different stats, would be possible.)

In short, I'm wanting these kind of things to be situational rather than an "always do this first". But at the same time, I don't want to make them too minor or too short-duration to be worth using, either.

There will always be some cases where the best approach really is "always try to have it". Haste is an example of such - the advantage of being under Haste is tremendous. This would likely need to be addressed either by bosses removing Haste regularly, or by limited duration and a high cost to cast it.

Finally, another concern relates to sidequests. In the LP, SentinelProxima chose to pursue most sidequests as soon as they became available. This was intended, and taken into account level-wise, for most of the sidequests. The problem arises with one that was specifically intended as post-game, yet SentinelProxima chose to do it before completing the game. In this case, it meant he had a relatively easy time with the final bosses.

I'm not sure how this can be avoided. One option, of course, is to literally block access to such sidequests until after the final boss. But I don't know how I feel about this option. Another could be to give no rewards, not even levelling, from such sidequests - but then this limits the ability to give the player more to work with as they continue through the quest.

I'm really not sure what the answer to this one is. The only way I could see to resolve it is to directly buff up the final bosses if sidequests have been completed, but eh... that doesn't quite feel right either to me.
  • Completed
  • ninjamida
  • RPG Maker VX Ace
  • RPG
  • 01/11/2018 08:50 PM
  • 09/24/2022 05:02 AM
  • 01/01/2018
  • 23117
  • 5
  • 421

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Posts

Pages: 1
30 hours of gameplay? Well, played about 15 minutes and found myself at the inn. So far your mapping quality is below average, but you did events and tutorial quite nicely. The last teleport room before the inn is not fun though. You should reduce the encounter rate on the blocks, I got 1 encounter every step I took.
author=sawworm
30 hours of gameplay? Well, played about 15 minutes and found myself at the inn. So far your mapping quality is below average, but you did events and tutorial quite nicely. The last teleport room before the inn is not fun though. You should reduce the encounter rate on the blocks, I got 1 encounter every step I took.

Gameplay spoiler re: high encounter rate in that room
You might have encountered an NPC on the previous screen saying "the red flash means danger". This is what you missed for that screen - when the screen flashes red, you'll get encounters (almost) every step. When it flashes green, you'll get no encounters at all. You've got to move after the green flash, and stop after the red one (unless you're not on the shiny blocks, in which case you won't get encounters no matter what).


Yeah, I know the mapping quality isn't very good. It was actually a big issue in getting the game accepted to this site - got by on a combination of picking the best maps the game had to offer, and the videos that focus on the battle gameplay which is the game's strong point. This is even more true near the start of the game, as my original reason for starting the game was "hey, I have neat ideas for custom FFX enemies, but there's no suitable hacking tools for it... I'll just create my own RPG Maker project with similar systems and shoehorn in some kind of plot and maps"; the story gets a bit better as the game goes on (although still not great) but the mapping only slightly improves IMO.

Appreciate the feedback anyway though. While I'm likely not updating this version any further except to fix bugs, as mentioned I do intend to do a full remake and I'll definitely be taking feedback into account for that. :)
I'm very slowly playing through the game. You did a good job on your bosses. Not too hard, not too easy. But I can put them into the annoying category since you need to be in favour of RNG. I also design my bosses to be annoying as possible so I can relate to you.

Currently, I'm in the second city, where my healer left me. I'm still going to nitpick on maps (sorry!), they are still not improved as I go. I feel like you didn't care about mapping at all, even the inn layout is the same as the first one (except the rooms and bar). You might want to check out these issues in your remake. Also, many people in this community hate locked doors and this game has so many of them. Try to make them openable doors, making interior houses shouldn't be that hard. I mean if you really want to keep those locked doors... it's your choice, but it's not a good design choice.
Yeah, those kind of issues are definitely things I'll be revising. :)
Regarding the locked doors, thanks, I didn't really think about that. I'll be sure to take that into account. What's the usual preference - no doors at all (just walls)?
author=ninjamida
Yeah, those kind of issues are definitely things I'll be revising. :)
Regarding the locked doors, thanks, I didn't really think about that. I'll be sure to take that into account. What's the usual preference - no doors at all (just walls)?


That's right, no door (adding walls) is the right choice but for adding better details try to make some indoor maps, people love details, it makes your towns more alive. I've seen enough let's play videos of Rpg maker games, all I see their frustration when they realize they can't open the door and there is no other way to open them, like lockpicking the doors.
Professor_Q
"Life is a riddle I wish I had the answer for..."
3237
This game looks very interesting. I'll have to check this out, even if the "high difficulty" description scares me a little... ^_^ (I belong to the Chrono Cross school of RPG design, for better or worse!)
author=Professor_Q
This game looks very interesting. I'll have to check this out, even if the "high difficulty" description scares me a little... ^_^ (I belong to the Chrono Cross school of RPG design, for better or worse!)


I don't know what you mean by "Chrono Cross school", unfortunately. I couldn't get into Chrono Cross enough to really know what it's like - I did love Chrono Trigger though.

But anyway, I hope you enjoy it!
How do I beat Cemeos? It seems they are just straight up invincible, as whenever I kill them, they respawn with higher HP.
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