Avantasia The Game

I must start by saying I have never heard of the rock opera on which this game was based. However after looking in the BGM folder I found a few songs form the Opera and determined them to be awesome. The idea of adapting a rock opera to a video game certainly sounds cool as well. This will not quite be a full review as game appears to be in a developmental stage and requires quite a bit of additional work to perfect. Instead I will simply give my impressions after playing for several hours.

You are Gabriel, a young priest in what appeared to be medieval Europe, who is torn between the loyalty to his faith and his love for his sister, who has been accused of heresy. Vandroiy, a mystic, encourages you to “Use your mind” and to break free of the prison the church has placed you in….both literally and figuratively. Following Vandroiy’s advice, Gabriel finds himself flung into Avantasia, the Kingdom of Light and Dreams, a mystical land where all the fantasy creatures such as elves and dwarves reside. Join Gabriel on his quest to understand the nature of this strange world, find his way home, and save his sister.

Balance:
I’ll start with the good. Although the game is made in RMXP, the battle engine uses an ATB script, and skills and spells have a charge time, which adds a strategic element to battles. You start with two characters and are quickly joined by a third, and each character starts with a handful of skills and learns many more very quickly, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that even at level 1 my character had quite a few options for what to do in battle. Additionally, each character has a special super ability that gets stronger over time. Finally, the main character has an alignment system that affects what skills he learns.

However, battles in the game are quite flawed as enemies are simply too powerful. Physical attacks and skills miss with absolutely absurd frequency; I suspect the Evasion Differential for enemies is set much too high. Also, many enemies have stunning or poisoning abilities that are very accurate, are used with almost 100% frequency, and sometimes affect the whole party. More than once my whole party was stunned and simply kept stunned until everyone was dead. This is not fun design. Other enemies have mass attack spells that do much too much damage considering the low max hp of your party.
Encounters are not random so you can often avoid combat, except in certain areas where the enemy “spawns” are much too dense and it is all but impossible to avoid fighting them.

Level Design:
The maps are pretty enough, but suffer from some very basic problems, such as teleporting events on some maps that only work when you are facing a certain direction and you can only advance to the next map by stepping on exactly the right tile. The game seems to be laid out very similarly to an MMORPG, with a large number of side quests and large open areas simply devoted to hunting enemies of a certain type. Many quests can be completed simply by slaying enough of a specific type of enemy. This is an interesting stylistic choice as it allows the player to grind by fighting exactly the type of enemy they want to fight.

Characters:
While there are some interesting characters here, particularly the druid Vandroiy who seems to be serving as Gabriel’s spiritual guide of sorts on his quest for Enlightenment, the relationships between the characters are ultimately ambiguous and unclear. A third character in my party, Regrin, seemed to join my party for no reason and had nothing to say to add to my quest, he simply served as another character to use. Is he a dwarf? He looked like a dwarf, but ultimately this completely unclear and I know nothing about this mysterious warrior at all. This is likely due to the fact that the game is adapted from a rock opera, so of course the characters and their relationships were not explored in any great depth there, but taking a few liberties to make the characters more personable would improve the game as a whole.

Storyline:
The core story of the game is very serviceable, with a flawed hero who is not out to save the world, merely his sister. The game uses a few great methods to establish the connection between them, such as when you sleep, Gabriel will have flashbacks of their childhood together. This is a great way to establish their relationship without interrupting the narrative.

However, the game is translated form Spanish, and it shows. The dialogue, while readable, ultimately suffers from a large number of grammatical and syntax errors which drag down the presentation. The game also suffers from a lack of direction, I was told to go to a specific town early on only to have no idea what to do when I got there or where to go next.

One perk though, you can’t talk to anyone in this game without practically tripping over sidequests to go do. However, like the main quest, it is often unclear where you should go to complete them, with only vague hints given as to what to do or what to kill.

Music and Sound:
I assume a large number of the songs used in the game are taken from the Opera itself, and regardless of their origin, most of them are quite good. One particular feature I really liked was that slaying certain monsters allowed you to acquire a musical track which you could then set as the battle music whenever you wanted. A very nice touch since having the same battle music for ten hours can get repetitive quickly.

Overall N/A
This project shows a lot of promise but ultimately suffers from a lot of glaring, basic design problems. While numerous scripts are at work to make the game aesthetically remarkable, not enough attention seems to have been paid to basic elements such as monster balance or teleport events, which ultimately conspire to make the game ultimately unplayable in its current state. I will certainly revisit this game at such time that these flaws are corrected, until then I am not entering a score for this project.

Things to Revise
-Better monster balance, they simply dodge to often and their status effects are too effective.
-Fix teleport events
-Better direction on where to go and how to complete objectives, both in the main quest and side quests.
I hope you find this review helpful and wish you luck in your coming revisions.