Valthirian Arc : Daybreak

INITIAL IMPRESSION



Valthirian Arc, an RPG-simulation game made with Flash, by Lucidrine. It combines several aspects of common RPGs with a simulation system as the base. The game is, practically, about training students. You’re the principal of an academy. You pay a fee to enroll new students into the academy. You train it sending he/she to quests (errands, whose are quests made on background by your students, and hunts, where you get and battle against monsters).

About first impressions, Valthirian Arc is a very nice game! All graphical aspects are very well made and consistent, with great artworks and sprites matching tones and colours. Music is spectacular and very professional. Also, it includes good sound effects and voices. When you get to see it, you wonder what you need to do. But you get the grasp, even if the “tutorial lady” doesn’t show you everything step by step (which is a failure in some cases, when you just get irritated by tutorials aha!).

Well, that would cover the initial impression right? Now we’ll move along.

PLAYING THE GAME



When you’re playing, you’re maybe curious about the things you need to do…

You’re introduced to the evil lord! That king will “kill you” (in terms of giving you Game Over) if you fail his high and wicked expectations. He will make you to “sell” your best students in exchange of fame! How bad! And what' worse, he likes to see students killing each others, thinking that you would give him a demonstration of what you can do. If you please him, he will give you more fame!
Oh well, at least they don’t die. Don’t worry.

(And worst of all… that $%&@ king doesn’t even shows his face. Never. Just sends a letter or something, but you never see him).

Let’s talk about the “action”. In the game, you have four tabs, where you do all action, excluding the battles of course. That will be covered later.

The important ones are Organize, where you manage your students and do all preparations for battle, and Quest, where you select the… quest… you’re going to do.

Next, the Rune List. This thing gives only some directions of what you can try to do. Things like “getting a total of 30 students”, or “not being penalized by your evil lord just by not being what he expected, for a year” (I had to sacrifice three of my best “men” to get it D:, you damn evil lord!).

Last, the Academy statistics. Most of statistics are there for the record, the one that’s really important is the “Class on Demand”, where the evil lord points you what he wishes for his breakfast wants in his army RIGHT NOW!1!. If you have luck, you can please the lord and never get to the situation of sacrificing your best men. Like me.



After all of that, let’s move to the battle! You’re on a “randomly” generated map, monsters are scattered on random too, and you’re placed randomly. Bad part about it is that is too much of random, sometimes you’re lucky and don’t have over nine thousand monsters at your sides.

Maybe you got some low-level students to train them, and they get killed at once- bad luck. Bad part about it is that, if you see before, you need luck to please your evil lord. So, this game is played by gambling after all. But it’s fun if you don’t get stressed hahah.

There are some issues at battles though. Not only about being instantly cornered by a bunch’a munstah! It’s about your friends AI. Sometimes they prefer to get stuck in a nearby corner (even if it isn’t between them and their destination) instead of going with you. Monsters have also problems with their AI, since it’s easy to kill melee monsters with ranged characters when you have some water. They get stuck trying to get to you, planning how they go above water, instead of going around it.

Somehow, that last thing compensates a little. The experience is given to you by how much a student acts in “the hunt” (battle). At least for mages (females), it’s good for levelling, since you can just stay far from them pretty easily. That way you can please your king.

Oh wait, I forgot about one thing. The errand quests. Bad part about them is that you only need to do them at the beginning. And that’s because errand quests give so little experience… but give some gold. Not THAT much, but they give some.
When you have, say, four months or so, you don’t really need that much gold. And sometimes you only get errands! Bad luck! Or maybe just a one-star hunt.

And that would cover the gameplay I suppose.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Overall, the game is nice. There are some issues regarding the gameplay that lets you at mercy of god. Stuff at battles, and that evil lord. And when you get the grasp of things, you can even realize that it’s very late for you to erase and rewrite all those mistakes that you did.

Oh well, good thing is that you can still restart. Or just play at the endless mode if you don’t feel confident enough.



AND HERE COMES OUR SCORE
I'm not a scorelover-guy, but anyway, score gives more locker space yeah!

The reason for this score is that, this is a good game. It's not excellent, neither wonderful. I enjoyed it for a good time. I even had played it before, on other circumstances, and I didn't felt "bad" about playing it again.

And so, that's it.