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A Game with Many Sides

The Cerebral Symphony is a semi-traditional 2k3 RPG about a man named Ivan who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder, or better known as Multiple Personality Disorder. His mood causes him to swing between his dark, pensive, and upbeat personalities, and this has effects on both the story and gameplay. However, we’ll talk more about that in their respective sections. The game features a lot of interesting ideas, but the execution feels a bit lacking for most of them.

Let’s Talk About Graphics!

Kind of a hodgepodge here. It’s a mix of RTP and rips with varying levels of effectiveness. Your ‘neighborhood’ is a mess of pipes and machinery ala FF6, but the locations you visit are so varied that they almost don’t feel like they fit in the same world together. Part of this is thematic and another part is visual. Sometimes the graphics fit together decently, and in others, it’s more noticeable. Style clash extends beyond the map to enemy encounters and the like. Most enemies come from FF, but there are also some from Mega Man, and even weirder things. It’s easy enough to look past, but it’s there.

Let’s Talk About Audio!

SFX are mostly RTP. There might have been a few from other sources, but I can’t quite recall. Music consists of midis from a variety of sources (so sayeth the copyright claims on my vids XD). There were some tracks I recognized and others I didn’t, but since they’re all midis, there isn’t as much style clash as there might’ve been. It gets the job done, but that’s about it.

Let’s Talk About Story!

I’d say this is the game’s selling point, but it’s not without its flaws. As before, you play as Ivan, who has multiple personalities. I’m not a mental health expert, but at times, it felt like this game sort of cheapened his condition. As a person with a friend who suffers from DID, I know it isn’t always like how this game portrays (maybe in some cases?). Anyhow, the way it handles Ivan feels a little insensitive, depicting these personalities as more like mood swings than anything else. At one point early on, Ivan is questioning dancers at a club for clues, and he becomes so aggravated that his dark personality takes over and kills them all as the patrons flee. I doubt it’s meant to be taken as a serious message about DID, but it’s kinda tasteless. There are also moments where your choices are influenced by how much you’ve ‘developed’ each personality, whatever that means (I assume in combat). However, it only happens a couple times, so it feels like an idea that’s just tacked on.

The plot itself is rather odd. Ivan and his friend Liz are a pair of thieves who are pulling a heist on a local cult, when a ninja pilfers their quarry while they’re busy arguing. This leads to the club scene with the information gathering, and after that, they’re coerced into working for the mafia and sent out to gather ancient stones from various outside locations. There’s a little more to it than that, but that’s the premise, and they encounter plenty of complications and new characters along the way. What makes it so weird is how out-of-place it seems. From the outset of the game, it feels more like a steampunk sci-fi kind of thing, but then your main quest consists of trying to raid temples to find elemental stones, some of which don’t thematically fit the general concept of ‘temple.’ For example, the Metal Temple contains the Metal Stone (I beg your pardon?), and consists of a series of futuristic chambers containing Mega Man villains. Likewise, the Electric Temple is super high-tech and not at all where one might expect to find an ancient relic.

Thematically, it’s just a really wacky McGuffin quest that’s loosely tied together by the events of the story. Although you work for the Mafia, there are two other powers at play that are also in search of the stones: the Corporation and the Government. These three factions keep you caught up in the middle of them, and are ultimately all people you want to oppose. I’m not sure if there’s meant to be some social commentary here, but for me, it just reinforced the absurdity as all these modern social constructs are out to collect mystical rocks for their incredible power.

The silly plot is somewhat saved by the characters, who are a decently enjoyable bunch. You meet more and more party members as the missions continue along, and they each have their own personality quirks…mostly. You start with Liz, who’s an upbeat go-getter, but also a bit of a spaz. She’ll forget important information within seconds if she doesn’t make a reminder for herself. She’s also a lycanthrope who goes wolf mode during a full moon. I’m not sure if that’s ever explained, but it must be a normal thing in their world since she has friends with the same condition.

And she’s just one of the many people you encounter, like Jean the lazy bard, Dr. Sergius the narcoleptic scientist, Zak the prodigy teen with no personality, Carys the little girl whose delusions become reality, and so on. Some contribute to the plot more than others. Like…I’m not kidding when I say Zak has no personality. I cannot tell you a single trait that defines his character. The only remarkable thing about him is how bland he is, but for the most part, the group has some fun interactions, and those scenes help to keep the plot from dragging too much. Even so, it feels incoherent as a whole and it isn’t all that engaging otherwise.

Let’s Talk About Gameplay!

I think this game’s biggest issue might be that it tries to do too much. Core gameplay is typical of RM; explore, fight monsters, get treasure, etc. It tries to keep things fresh by including various gimmicks for the party members, which is a great idea in theory, but falls apart in practice, mostly because a lot of it just feels very buggy.

Ivan’s is one of the more interesting gimmicks. At the start of each fight, he has a choice to personality shift depending on his current one. Pensive can go up to Upbeat or down to Dark, but the latter two must pass through Pensive to reach each other. Ivan has unique abilities in each of his mindsets, but most of them just do damage, so there’s no meaningful difference between his forms (not even when Upbeat learns fire spells). Liz is similar, but less versatile, as she can become a wolf person to use a separate skill set from her own, but she can’t transform freely until a later point in the game. Her primary skills include healing, so I usually just had her do that instead.

Beyond the starting duo, things get messy. Jean is the third party member you get, and his gimmick is playing different types of music. Certain songs are more effective against certain foes, and what holds him back is that he gets few turns because he has a permanent Tired status that slows him down. Well, I’m not sure what went wrong for me, but the session after I got him, he became unable to move at all for reasons I don’t understand. His ATB bar never fills, so he just stands there taking hits and never getting any actions. There’s no way it was intentional, but I couldn’t make any use out of him beyond that point. I guess I’m lucky there was never a fight he had to win alone.

Another character with issues is Zak, whose stats change on the fly as he randomly flips between certain ability modes (sometimes when he’s not even in the battle). It does weird things to his HP and MP values, and all he can ever do is attack or switch weapons. I couldn’t determine if there was any real difference between weapons, so I always just had him attack. With no other options at his disposal, he was just an extra hitter in combat.

Yet another character is Catherine, who has the ability to read minds, but she also has a berserk mode that triggers under…I’m not sure what conditions. All I know is that she got stuck in it permanently near the end of the game, so she was just going ham on every encounter and hurting herself from recoil in the process. As a result, her gimmick was utterly lost.

Dr. Sergius’ gimmick works, but it’s annoying. His narcolepsy causes him to fall asleep in battle, but he recovers health while he’s snoozing. That might have been fine if it didn’t happen so often when I’d just chosen an action for him. Also, for some reason his sleep message declares his name is Simon, even though he tells everyone his name is Richard. Hm.

Then there’s Bain, the beefy gladiator whose attack animation takes a very long time and has a high chance of missing. It’s brutal when it hits, but I don’t know why it’s even half as lengthy as it is. So for as many interesting gimmicks as the party has, they really leave something to be desired and many of them just fall short. The battles are also very basic and don’t ever push you to improve your tactics at all. If you can dish out enough damage, that’s all you really need. There are elemental attacks you learn from the stones, scrolls that can let any character cast spells, and many items that cure statuses, but all these factors feel arbitrary and irrelevant. They’re just fluff as it is.

As far as I can tell, there’s no leveling up in this game. You can learn new skills by fighting enemies, but they never yield any XP, so the difficulty stays about the same and you just get more tools to work with. My experience with combat was rather polarized. It often seemed like I either stomped the enemy completely or never stood a chance, and that’s referring to the same enemies in some cases. Balance isn’t so out of whack that things feel unfair, but there are times where I think it’s questionable. Ivan is such a powerful fighter, sometimes you can get by just supporting him with the rest of the party.

One thing I did like about the battle system are the Draw and Assist abilities. Everyone has them, and they let you drain MP from foes to replenish your own, or share your MP with an ally so they can keep using their own special attacks. This was most useful for Ivan, since he hit super-hard and his allies could just keep the MP coming by giving theirs to him. Unfortunately, that’s about as deep as combat gets, so there really isn’t much to it in spite of the options available to you.

So battle is a mixed bag, but what about exploration? Well, it definitely feels like the early game had more consideration put into it. The best mapping you’ll find is probably in the mansion from Mission 3. Other maps are rather uninspiring, and some are downright problematic. The temples in particular feel underdeveloped. For example, the Earth Temple is a pyramid that is seven “floors” tall, but it’s actually all one map, and each floor is a single-tile hallway stretching across the length of it. They are also connected by single tile hallways, and the claustrophobic space makes it impossible to avoid encounters (they’re mostly by touch in this game). As a result, it was a very bland and uninteresting dungeon.

In another mission, you get stranded in a jungle and have to survive for a certain amount of time by fighting wildlife, drinking from puddles, and resting in a log. The segment is twenty-ish minutes and it’s not impossible to do, but the map has no landmarks and everything looks the same. There’s only one log, and if you wandered away and don’t know how to get back, you can easily run out of time and fail the segment completely. That’s what happened on my first attempt, and on my second, I did everything I could to cheese through it as quickly as possible. That doesn’t say much about its entertainment value.

The inventory is suitably strange in this as well. The familiar commands of 2k3 have been stylized for this game, and it’s cute, but a little confusing. Instead of equipping your party, you have to ‘configure’ them. Looking at their stats is ‘analysis’. They’re things that make enough sense, but aren’t immediately recognizable, so you have to take a moment to make sure you’re picking the right thing. The stats themselves have weird names too, so you might be out of luck if you don't know what they are by default in RM. Equipment is also very strange, consisting of things like books, records, and nebulous stuff like dreams. Since level-ups aren’t a thing, stats aren’t that much of a factor, so I didn’t end up doing much with the equipment I found. One thing I did find amusing is that some of the accessories are addictive drugs, and they cannot be removed when they’re equipped. Clever.

Overall, the game feels somewhat bare-bones. It has lots of concepts to work with, but none of them really matter because there’s no time used to develop them further. The party’s dynamics are one example, where being able to choose who you bring would create some depth to strategy. However, every time the party split up for missions, the game decided who would go where on its own. You just had to use whatever was chosen for you. I understand why for story purposes, but in terms of gameplay, it just made the game more of an on-rails experience. Features in an RPG are only as valuable as their impact on the game, and most of this game’s features are practically irrelevant.

Let’s Wrap This Up…

I feel a bit bad saying all this since it’s clearly a passion project and Faenon has been developing it for a long time. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, but it would need a lot of refinement to truly shine. There are just too many bugs and underdeveloped concepts at work. The experience as a whole doesn’t feel very cohesive, but it is entertaining, at least. I give this a…

2.5/5 “A game with too many ideas that all needed more attention.”


Not sure this is how DID really works.

Posts

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Ok, well fair enough.

Thanks Halibabica.

You know what happened with this game? I started it when I was 15 and worked really hard on the first two chapters.

Then I went to college, got married, got a job, started having kids, and the challenge became just to finish the game at all--that was my goal, rather than for it to all hold together in a super serious way!

You know what I learned? Making a game is a LOT of work. It's really hard for one person. All the old school 2d rpgs I/we love, they had huge production teams behind them for a reason.

So fair enough.

No comment on the character creation system?

I'm glad you enjoyed some of the characters and the character interactions though. Writing is really my strong point. That's why since I finished TCS I'm just focusing on my writing. (Check out my Twitter, or my patreon.com/luketarassenko , or the latest TCS blog!)
halibabica
RMN's Official Reviewmonger
16873
author=Faenon
the challenge became just to finish the game at all--that was my goal, rather than for it to all hold together in a super serious way!

You know what I learned? Making a game is a LOT of work. It's really hard for one person.

But finish it, you did, and that's more than a lot of people can say! Especially with all that going on in your life, it's a wonder you were able to see it through.

Game design really is tough, and a lot goes into it for a solo dev. We're lucky RM makes things as doable as it does. I'm sure this is a little disappointing, but don't sweat it too much. It's better that you tried something unique, even if it didn't quite pan out. :3

author=Faenon
No comment on the character creation system?


It was an interesting addition, I just try not to spoil too much in my reviews. It's hard to talk about its significance without blowing the lid off something later.
Re-reading this review years later after a PM from its author.

It's interesting that the previous comment seems to have been posted as if this review is somehow objective.

I think a problem with RMN's review system is that some people review games based on the standards of professional or commercially successful indie games, and some people review them against the standards of hobbyists' games. There's no way of differentiating between those when looking at the star ratings. This adds an extra dimension of relativity to already by nature subjective reviews.

Anyway, I much prefer @rpgmakeraddict's review of this game!

One day I will get/take the spare time and effort to refine, edit, revise and update TCS again, then solicit another review!

Meanwhile, writing continues! patreon.com/luektarassenko patreon.com/faenon
halibabica
RMN's Official Reviewmonger
16873
author=Faenon
It's interesting that the previous comment seems to have been posted as if this review is somehow objective.

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not objective. I explained my reasoning as best I could and there are aspects of this game that are legitimately buggy or broken.
author=halibabica
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not objective. I explained my reasoning as best I could and there are aspects of this game that are legitimately buggy or broken.


I meant 'objective' in a literal sense. Like you write as if your review isn't just one dude's opinion.

Anyway, it's all good. Recently starting to watch your LP for the first time and rereading this review has motivated me to return to this game and revise and upgrade it again......one day! Sometime maybe when I need to take a break from writing novels, looking after my wife who has cancer, looking after my children, and my day job......

I will get those five stars one day!
halibabica
RMN's Official Reviewmonger
16873
I'd be happy to give it a second opinion if you do. I know finding time can be tough, but if you can carve out even just half an hour daily, it can be enough to make progress.
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