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They said I'd die. They said I'd die and go to heaven.
But no - that was not enough for me. I didn't want to die. I wanted to live.
In my fear of death, I lost sight of myself and everything I held dear. I made the wrong choice and everyone but me paid the price. But now, with all the things I have learned...I would make things right again. I would correct my mistake and return everything to the way it was before. Dear God...I no longer expect to enter heaven's pearly gates. But please, let me ask for one last favor, one final prayer, if You will.

Ten days, God. Let my body hold out for just ten more days, so I can redeem myself...


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Visions & Voices is an exploration-based RPG set in the Montfort village. One man, the Wanderer, has decided to brave the village and figure out what is going on - why the people are vanishing, and why those who don't are going insane.

This version is an overhaul of the original release three months prior. While the first version of Visions & Voices was created in three weeks' time, the game has been revisited for an extreme overhaul of the aspect system, progression, story layout and difficulty/balance. New content has been added as well - just in case the superbosses aren't enough, there are several new 'uberbosses' hidden in new dungeons.

Enter the village, if you dare - but who are you do stop the apotheosis of a madman?

Features
-Five to ten hours of exploration-based gameplay
-Recruitable allies to find unique skills for
-Fast active-time battles with a unique personality aspect system for stats
-A dark setting with a story told out in a nontraditional manner
-Difficulty settings and the ability to customize the Wanderer - and even play solo
-Many unique weapons and other pieces of equipment to find, steal and kill for
-Talk to your allies with new conversations every day
-Five distinct endings and intelligent interaction that recognizes your accomplishments

P.S. Full credits are found within the in-game help menu, but a quick shout-out to Mac (tiles/characters), milano_cat (monsters), Danny Schneidemesser (final boss track) and Enu/Mr. Bubble (battle system and translation) is due.

Latest Blog

Issues

i mean come on do you know how hard it is to fight another battle when all your teamates have little life left, and the food barely does anything. dude great game and story but its just not long enough, and i have to keep going back to the hotel to sleep i knew something bad was happining but i was trying to level up for + i saved before i went to sleep u knwo what that means....yeah i have to start over. make it so that food do better, there is someway you can travel back in time a few days, and that the enemys are from super easy to unbeatable, OMG where te hell is a walkthrough that can be use to beat the game.... i say all you gotta do is ATTACK and thats it. ive played alot of games, and i see how you are tryign to make it on the player with a timeline, but there is no clear way of me knowing that im fighting super hard monster with three people vs 6, i found one miniboss which of course i lost by 100 :(. look find a way to go back in time to give the player a better chance of winning, or a walkthrough cause i din't understand how am i suppose to gain all this stuff in 10 days, without getting own.

simply here what i mean, enemys can be easy or hard at random and can be like 6vs3. the food really doesn't help, 10=2 hours max cause of the teamates being knock out after one or two fights making you SLEEP AND SAVE! then the next day you could lose. and oh yeah clear direction....yes i got all the prohets stuff but once you get them its all over time is ticking and you are losing. p.s. i HAVE to restart now cause i saved one day before i lose and well...what can i do?

Posts



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 : )
This is actually a pretty long review! :)
hey, gameplay is one of the most important features of an rpg
I agree, Nemo, but everyone has their own reasons for playing whatever they do.
There's that attention you crave! Go Craze and Karsuman!
This took longer than 3 weeks. It went down for weeks overgoing an overhaul.
Yeah, it's actually six weeks.

Oh well.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
Okay, a finished quality game with five and a half weeks. Sorr-y.
You must be really happy with 1000+ downloads. I need to play his properly sometime.
Deltree
doesn't live here anymore
4556
This game brings out my compulsive RPG packrat tendencies so hard. "DON'T EAT THAT! I might need that carrot at some point!"

Great so far. Killer chef is the best. I hope I can finish it this weekend.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
LWG: Ignore the first release's 2,000+ downloads. =D

Deltree: <3 Dison is great. Also, EAT YOUR VEGETABLES.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
oh hey 3,000+ downloads
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
Over 4,000 downloads, yay, hooray. (We actually hit it yesterday afternoon but I didn't feel like making a post (ssssh)).
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
The amount of downloads this has is pretty disgusting. (I originally typed "pretty discussing" and while that is a nonsenseism, it is also worth DISCUSSING).

It's not like this is a bad game or anything but the fact that it has download numbers like ABL after so little time is ridiculous. I repeat that V&V is a pretty cool game but this kind of wildly anomalous number reinforces the vast discrepancy between goodness and downloads. Well, I mean, not that those numbers SHOULD correlate...there's no way to know if a game is good before you download it. ANYWAY...

Is this from TV Tropes + Newgrounds? Seriously, most (good) RM games deserve at least this much publicity. What can we do to spread it around the community?

(I was typing this post before Craze made his most recent post, bizarrely enough).
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
Advertise outside of the RM* community. Seriously.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
I am not happy until I get 50,000 downloads in a month.

I am not joking.

Also, your post makes me :barf: because, well:
-This is not a lot of downloads
-We released outside of the community
-This game is pretty cool and original
-We released outside of the community
-We got onto blogs like Play This Thing
-We released outside of the community
-GAME IS NOT BAD BUT THIS IS DISGUSTING hey thanks
-This is not a lot of downloads

Also, I would never release ABL outside of the community.
This discussion in motivating me to finish the game and review it.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15170
Give it 1/5 stars for having downloads.
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.
This game is addicting. My god. I think it's the difficulty, or something like that, or perhaps all of the various kinds of exploration and management I can do while running from the few monster clouds I come across! But either way, I think it's awesome.

I don't know what day I'm on, and I know that I should have been keeping count since day one; a fleshy, LONG dungeon has appeared though that links all (or close to) of the houses and various buildings together. Is this place tied to the final dungeon? Is there something important in there as soon as it opens up, or am I going to have to wait until a certain day to find something important in there?