Xelos: Sinner's Circle (Demo)

Xelos: sinner's circle is a strategic rpg with chacters of questionable morals and motives. This review is to help give feedback to Coy13.
This is my first review, so I might say some odd things here or there


Story
The demo starts off with a man named Vusui slaughtering nun's and various priestsin a church in order to summon a devil type enity so that he could grant him unimaginable powers in return for the souls that have been saficficed. After this deed he trades his soul to have that said power.Now this introduction to the story arch is not too orginal,
but it does show you what your getting into.

The cutscene at the introduction sets the mood but the glaring problem is that it comes across as patchy, the priest saying "2" instead of two was abit odd for me and the demon lord's grand enterance was simply a flash of red and a sprite appearing with no sound effects making me lose immersion of the scene.
And for the majority of the demo 2/5



Characters
Well from what I gathered the characters come across as a bunch of bastards, which is proberly the whole idea in the first place. In the demo there's no explantion or sutle hints on why the party are so moody all the time.. what I did find interesting is that Vusui swicthes the Rpg staple on it's head by refusing to help a damsel getting argro with some guards.



Whilst playing I was secretly hoping that he'll let her get arrested and you wouldn't hear about it for the remainder of the demo. However when the word money crops up, Vusui ends up lending a hand. Now if these scenarios continue later on but with the character's actually going through with twisting around the odd clique,
then it'll make some interesting story devolpment. 1/5


Graphics
From what I've seen some of the sprites have been ripped from other games with the monsters coming straight out of the the folders of XP. Also the tilesets are all from RTP but the good thing I can say is that it's consistant if it does look the same most of the time.



I did a little smirk at the animation happening here, looks like he's drawing white chalk over them..
the use of blood effects would add much more to this sequence.
2/5



Level Design/Gameplay
The collision is abit odd to say the least, with the characters unable to walk over plants.
Whilst exploring enemies will chase you if you stray too near with my complaint is that they're a little too fast virtually forcing you to battle.
You come across treasure chests containing Cards that you can use in and out of battle, you always know where your going and there is always a impusle to explore the area before moving on.
Some of the items in your inventory have the words Blood at the end of them e.g Phinox Blood which the first thing that formed in my mind is that all the characters are vampires...
I'm pretty sure they're not though. 1.5/5


Battles/balance
The first battle in the demo gives a brief tutorial on how to engage enemies.
At first I just started spamming the attack icon and fair enough I emerged victorious without a single slice of HP taken away, with that false sense of sercuirty in mind I tackled the first monster I saw and to be quite frank with you my spamming tactics were ineffective and my party were wiped out.
Second time around I started using stances and ablities to overcome my enemies and the amount of tactical combinations is staggering.



The stances do make a differance in the flow of battle with the use of Combat points offering you a idea on which move is avaiable to you and how you are able to use it in the right situration.

The party members and enemies take turns in the same stlyings of Final Fantasy 10 with the added feature of a threat System that have the opponents targeting the one character whose been the most bothersome to them.
At first I didnt really like how the battles were played out but in a space of a hour it was gradually growing on me and when I finally started to enjoy it..
the demo ended.

The battle system is perfectly fine but one fault I found was that the enemy dodged my attack with the words (no joke) Critical Evade,
was it to rasie self disappointment in missing a devastating attack or simply a problem with the script.

The game rewards you with winning battles by topping your party back to health but running away you will still have the damage inflicted on you prior to legging it.
2.5/5


Music
The music is acceptable to me but forgettable, the battle theme suits quite well with the boss at the end of the demo being the main standout of my playthrough. But you do need to fix that church meoldy carrying over to the next scene as the player needs to re-adjust to the timeline changing accordingly otherwise you'll just think it's simply been tacked on. Also the cutscenes need sound effects you can't be to quiet out in the woods. 2/5



Overall the demo has a potenially brillent battle system in the works but it's only being let down by presentation and techicnal faults.
So I'm giving it a score of 2 stars.