Visions & Voices

I've been playing the latest release of V&V. I generally don't like RPGs, at all, but I found this game to be pretty interesting. Here's a short review of my impressions, good and bad.

I like the storyline. Most fantasy/medieval settings bore the hell out of me, but this game has a very interesting grim atmosphere that is pleasant to follow. The characters let out a lot of personality with short texts, which is exactly what I want in a game like this. Getting bits of information that add up into a bigger picture, places getting darker over time and giving each day a different feeling than the previous one, the changes in people's moods, the music, 5/5 easily for this entire aspect of the game.

The weapon system bothers me. I don't know if this is intentional, but all weapons are inferior to simply leaving my character with bare hands, with the exception of Lyla who seems to do well with spell orbs. It seems like the only reason for me to put a weapon is if it has an effect like the stun on Sledgeogre. I'm playing on Insane Difficulty, dunno if this has anything to do with it. But bare hands far out-strength all weapons in this game for phys characters.

It would be nice if you could remove the Wanderer from your active party. As of right now, you pretty much HAVE to use Telia for her Pilfering Jig in certain battles (for stuff like Featured Keys) which means I only really get a choice for 2 characters in my party (and even this is debatable, with Dison's Shish Kabob on boss battles).

One thing I initially liked about this game is that it encourages avoiding battles and does not support grinding. I soon discovered that I was wrong, though, because if you want to stock up on vorpal picks or void gems, if you need more wp or sf shots, or simply if you want the mighty s, you -DO- have to grind battles. Battles also increase my 5 stats over time, and with the wanderer's ability to recharge SF and heal with SF cost it means you can grind weak battles to heal up for free. This game might not display a level, but it still has the mechanics that support grinding in it. But it doesn't require it, so all's good (I guess?).

Overall I'd say the battle system is ok, I absolutely hate random factors in games but I don't think you can go around that with RPG Maker without altering item design with stats like +CRI. Like others here said, the items could really use better descriptions. Like, if you could plain write on items "This item increases X character's damage by 2" this would be best. I had to basically experiment with all my items to find out things like Joseph's Cloak adding damage (woot? it must be the +LOG?) - and like I said earlier, was disappointed to find that all weapons in this game REDUCE my physical damage output over bare hands. If this is not intentional, please release a fix, I would love to have a use for all those pretty dagger and sword icons for more than just collector's value.

Also, for people who don't play RPGs a lot (like, never), it would be nice if there was some explanation somewhere about all the various buffs and debuffs in this game do. For instance I have no clue what "blind" does, how "can delay target" works, whether "force/sleight" means anything useful, etc.

Also, it would be nice if monster spawns were somewhat more, dunno, patterned. Weapons with properties like Necrotic/Fire/Cold etc seem to be a lot more effective or ineffective against certain monsters. You'd think this information would help, which it does for fixed boss battles, but for common encounters this is entirely useless because I can't expect what type of monsters I'm about to get so it all comes down to having the best raw damage output. Each area seems to have monsters of its own, but their properties vary greatly. If I could know for sure that monsters in a certain area are all significantly weak to cold damage, I'd be able to equip cold weapons, that might have lower raw damage but be more effective in that area.

Then again this game isn't focused around combat. I do everything possible to just drag encounters away, sometimes it's really easy, sometimes it takes a long walk, and sometimes you need some quick maneuvers like upon entering the Manor (when exiting it's just an easy long walk). Normally this would be good, except at some point the monsters fail to scale and there's no real reason to avoid fighting them, since I can just fight, steal their stuff, heal myself with their SF, and go on, having gained more than I lost from that battle. I expected Insane-dif to be actually, well, hard? Which it seemed at first when I just started the game, but as soon as I learned my characters' abilities and experimented with items everything became ridiculously easy.

I still didn't beat the game, I'm taking my time to cover all spots. Currently exploring the day7 cave with 7 hours game-time on my save, most of which is just going around checking I didn't miss a portal popup or item pickup.
day6 seemed entirely useless (outside of the story/character texts in the tavern and upon leaving it), all I found were two small item-pickup portals. Did I miss anything?

All in all, I like this game a lot. If you're ever going to release a patch/revision/whatever you RPG people call it in the future, or for other future RPGs with similar style, here are my suggestions:

1. Make battles harder, at least to the point where you lose more than you gain so that you can't just battle infinitely to your heart's desire on a limited day system. The only reason I thought limited days were cool is because I was under the impression I have limited time/options, which means I'd have to think twice before each move and plan ahead. But if I can gain more than I lose per battle, my time is pretty much unlimited which makes everything simpler.

2. Create patterns in encounters, so that you can use game knowledge to play better/more strategically, in ways like modifying your item setup based on location, instead of just testing boss battles and save-load -> win. Why can you buy portable records at a vendor? Make the player have to deal with a limited amount (not that I ever had to buy a single one, the game gives you so many already).

3. I really like the day-limit system, I probably wouldn't play this at all without it. Make it even more limiting in the future. Like I said earlier, drastically reduce amount of saves, maybe limit it to like 3-5 tavern saves per day, 1 hour gametime per day (with a visible timer), etc.

4. I only pick up items for collector's value, other than the occasional +4MGC/PHYS Accessory. Make the items actually matter. Most of them have absolutely zero use. If the game had stuff like, areas with monsters highly vulnerable to poison damage, that one poison weapon could be very useful, etc.

5. Sorry for the long post! 99% of what I wrote is about gameplay, and this is an RPG. The story/characters/atmosphere/display were all great. Good job and I look forward to future releases of you guys : )

hey, gameplay is one of the most important features of an rpg

There's that attention you crave! Go Craze and Karsuman!

You must be really happy with 1000+ downloads. I need to play his properly sometime.

Advertise outside of the RM* community. Seriously.

This discussion in motivating me to finish the game and review it.

I had actually never payed attention to the number of downloads before Max's post.
I donwloaded this game because I remember reading someone talk good about it, and because I was curious about Karsuman's games.