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Blog 39: Extensive Review by Drifloon

Hi all,

This is quite late, but below is an extensive review of this game by Drifloon extracted from his forums (http://z3.invisionfree.com/RGP_Forum/index.php?showforum=80). It's pretty long and extensive, but quite an enjoyable read. I pretty much agreed with many of the points that he addressed about the game.

Since the review is very long and extensive, I'll be putting this in spoiler format:

Okay, after having some time to reflect on it, I think I'm more or less satisfied with the ending. What I was really hoping for from it was that Vene's decision to live on would be acknowledged as a difficult personal struggle, and that her problems wouldn't be trivially solved for her by generic shounen hero speeches or THE POWER OF LOVE or whatever else, and that pretty much happened just as I wanted it to, really. Lake and Ewan saving her from her disease is a little 'eh', but the fact that the final emphasis is on "Yes, they saved her life, but that still doesn't magically solve everything" rather than just "They saved her life! Yay!" allows me to forgive it, on balance. If the presentation could just be changed slightly - give us the whole aftermath in chronological order, so that we can actually fully feel Vene's despair on learning about her condition rather than only hearing about it after we already know she gets better - then it would be perfect, really. The whole fake-out with showing what looks like her grave and then having her appear while happy music plays is just cheap and cringe-worthy as all heck though, sorry!

Anyway, more general commentary. Above all else, I'm still sort of amazed by how GOOD the whole final act was, which is sort of sad because I wish the whole game could have been that focused and compelling. Granted, I think I probably enjoyed it more from personal bias than anything - I'm sure KoE is probably shaking his head bemused at why I liked it so much - but it felt like the game finally developed on the potential it had had all along as a deconstruction of typical JRPG tropes. Clunky and awkward as a lot of the writing was (Joshua please stop horrifically butchering the Plank of Carneades and leave the talking to your wife in future), it's really interesting to see the classic conflict between saving the world and destroying it painted in such an unconventional way, where both sides are equally sympathetic people responding in their own ways to the suffering that the universe has uncaringly inflicted on them - there's definitely something powerful behind that, and it inspires a lot of thought about the nature and value of life and existence, which I really appreciated. The game really floored me with how much genuine respect and admiration I had for Leona and the family as a whole after her big speech at the end, and how the game totally refused to outright condemn them for what they did or to say for sure that they were wrong - and Vene herself was handled perfectly as well, delivering pretty much everything I could have asked for from her character (though ideally I would have liked it if Er's separation from her had been Siegfriend's doing rather than Ofa's. Ofa doesn't do much for me in general, actually). It's just a real shame that it pretty much took until the very last dungeon for the game to actually get to the heart of the story, and that much of what led up to it was basically either standard JRPG fluff or just bizarre convoluted nonsense (not that that wasn't very entertaining in its own way).

I think the game's major weakness is that it just doesn't really seem to know what it wants to do with itself until at least half way through. Not that I don't sympathise, because most of our projects here have been much the same way, but there's good reason that most of my commentary on the first half was either making fun of it or screaming about Nixon. The first chapter is pretty much all about Lake angsting over his dad and going through a very typical and unexciting "amoral jerk who's redeemed by his meeting with this pure-hearted amnesiac girl who teaches him to care about people" arc. It also sets up Georg and Ende as the antagonists and teases us by making us think Syria's backstory is Vene's. None of this really matters at all. The real emotional center of the story is Vene, but we don't even start to get a proper picture of her character beyond misleading out-of-context flashbacks until we're well past the halfway point of chapter 2 - which, while more interesting than chapter 1, is still taken up largely by a fairly standard "hero arrives in a mysterious new world and has no idea what's going on" plot for a lot of it. We finally learn about the actual core of the story when we get the big talks on DSHIS and the reveals about Seraphic Blue - let me remind you that we're almost halfway through the whole game by this point. I don't mind slow pacing when it's justified, but what frustrates me is how much time the game spends on stuff that's so inconsequential and doesn't really add anything; you can just tell that the guy doesn't really know what to do with Lake or Georg or Ende by the endgame and kind of unceremoniously dumps all of them out of the story in quick succession to start off the final act, because they're artifacts from the first chapter that don't really fit in with the final vision of the game at all. Lake's conclusion is basically the laziest thing ever in that they just kind of recycle the 'I've been redeemed by you, Vene!' stuff from the first chapter for it even though in context it doesn't make even the slightest bit of sense or tie into any of the game's themes at all. I get the impression that he started off making a fairly regular JRPG and came up with a much more interesting concept midway through, then spent a lot of the middle section of the game just trying to somehow connect the two scenarios up in a way that's often less than satisfying - a lot of the time, it feels like there's this weird tension where the game doesn't know whether it wants to play JRPG tropes straight or deconstruct them.

And then I went on this long tangent where I somehow ended up rewriting the whole game in my head and it's ridiculously rambly and self-indulgent so I'll throw it in another spoiler below.
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There are a lot of minor points that could have been improved, but I think the two biggest points that needed better execution would be Lake and Kane. Both of them theoretically have hugely important roles in the plot, but their impact is muted almost completely (at least to me) because of how poorly they're handled. Neither of them should have been allowed to fade into the background as much as they did, and I don't think their personalities as they currently exist are particularly suited to the roles they're supposed to play in the plot either. For Lake, there are two main reasons why the first chapter needs to exist - the first is to set up Vene's ability to develop a genuine connection with someone while she's temporarily free from the obligations of her mission, which is very important for the conclusion, and the second is so that we've had time to see from the perspective of the Ground before we get all the reveals about Fezzite (obviously learning the truth about Devils wouldn't mean much if we hadn't already been introduced to them as the Ground sees them). With that in mind, I think Lake's character should have been built more around fulfilling those two roles as effectively as possible. For one thing - make him someone who would actually CARE about the Devils and Fezzite! Just that alone would give him much more of a personal stake in the things that are going on in the second and third chapters, but his totally apathetic personality totally prevents him from having any interesting reactions to the screwed up stuff that he's confronted with. I'd maybe give him an arc more like Lansard's (which we're mostly just told about at the end; it'd be interesting to see something similar in real-time). Since he's a Devil Sweeper, make him someone who fights Devils because it's "the right thing to do" or because he wants to save people - it doesn't have to be in an embarassingly dorky idealistic hero kind of way, but give him enough genuine conviction that it would seriously shake him to learn that the demons he's devoted his life to fighting are actually other people's children being dumped on them by angels, and then his development in the second and third chapters could revolve around him trying to work through the impact of that revelation. As for his relationship with Vene, that could be handled any way really - it doesn't really matter how they connect, as long as it's something that feels genuine and individual - but the way it is right now does nothing for me.

Also! I wouldn't make him Seraphic Blue. Seriously - he had no interesting reactions to being Seraphic Blue, it didn't matter to the plot at all, it was just pointless! Vene's character arc is literally all about the burden of being Seraphic Blue and what it means to be the one who saves the world; just leave it to her and scrap the "wings" stuff altogether. I'm sure the game could easily come up with some other dumb reason why Seraphic Blue is destined to save the world than that it has to be a half-human, half-angel (which never made any sense anyway especially since that somehow manages to carry over to Vene even though she's 100% angel). I'd scrap the plot about Lake being Ewan and Syria's son anyway - it doesn't really add much to him other than the angsting over his dad (which I'd prefer to replace with more relevant stuff about his reasons for fighting Devils and his relationship with Vene, which should be his two major defining points), and the fact that he's Syria's son actually damages the role he's supposed to play in Vene's arc. I said at the time that his insistence that he doesn't care about her being his mother rings pretty hollow when he was babbling to Georg about "this is how a son shows his love for his mother!" two minutes ago. And a lot of Lake and Vene's bonding in the first chapter feels like it's foreshadowing that mother-son relationship too, with all the "her presence feels somehow familiar and comforting to me" stuff on Lake's end and Vene's "Don't you hurt my Lake!" seeming like she's pretty clearly channeling Syria - this all hurts the credibility of the relationship being presented as "Vene's one true independent connection", so personally I'd remove it entirely. His death would need a thorough reimagining too, obviously.

To change the existing backstory about Syria if she was no longer Lake's mother, it'd be interesting if Syria was also designated as being "the world's savior" from birth (with Vene obviously inheriting that role from her), but Fezzite took a more passive role with her and allowed her to be a more normal person than Vene was. Ewan could maybe have been sent as a government agent to protect Syria and help her in her role of saving the world. Then maybe Syria died as a result of letting her emotions interfere with her role as Seraphic Blue - heck, maybe she dies to save Ewan or something? That would make it a lot more interesting and credible why Fezzite would feel the need to take such drastic measures to raise Vene so carefully and why it would be so important to prevent her from being her own person; to stop what happened with Syria from happening again. Not only would this alone make Siegfriend's actions a lot more understandable, but it could also have interesting ramifications for Georg's motives in that he would probably have a lot of justifiable resentment toward the Fezzite government for throwing the burden of saving the world on his daughter and her ultimately dying as a result; that would make his arguments about Fezzite's interference with the world needing to stop have so much more legitimate weight to them, especially on top of the Devils stuff as well. I'm not sure if I'd keep the stuff with Virginie too, but if it was still there it could possibly be framed more sympathetically as "I want my daughter to have another chance at life" rather than "I want her aaaaall to myself again!!" (And also that Virginie herself is technically sort of a robot and he could justify to himself that she doesn't have any capacity for independent life anyway, so it's okay to use her as a tool. I mean, he can still be a thoroughly self-righteous jerk - he is an antagonist after all - it'd just be nice if he was a slightly more interesting one. Heck, it'd even be interesting to actually have Virginie confront him with that at the end - that he was doing exactly the same thing to her that he was so angry at Fezzite for doing to Syria; forcing her into the role that she was "born for" without any consideration for her individual rights.)

As for Kane, he just completely fell flat to me - which is really frustrating because on a basic conceptual level, having someone like him in the story should have been a great choice! The main weakness of the final villains is that they don't show up at all until the very end of the game, which is problematic because the excellent climactic conflict doesn't feel like it's been built up as well as it should. Having one of those final villains secretly in the party for most of the game should have been the perfect remedy for that, but...oh, too bad, because he's a totally uninteresting and unlikable character who barely does anything for the whole game and who neither the player nor any of the characters have any real investment in! Thanks, game! Seriously, I don't even think anyone even reacts at all when Kane turns out to be a bad guy at the end - no one's shocked, there's no "I can't believe Kane of all people would want to destroy the world! I thought he was our friend!" or anything; just basically "oh, okay then". It's got to win the reward for the most unbelievably anticlimactic party member betrayal ever. I'm kind of stunned as to how they could drop the ball so much on this - like, part of what makes the Kursk family as a whole such great villains is that they seem like quite amiable, likable people; people who you feel like you could get along okay with if, you know, they weren't trying to end all of existence. Kane should in theory epitomise this, as someone who's presented as a 'good guy' for most of the game, but in practice I ended up more invested in his dad who was there for like five minutes than him. He developed no meaningful connections to any of the party, he gave the player no particular reason to care about him, even his fake death was just a dull copy/paste of Hausen's, and what little screentime he DID get just made him seem like a jerk more than anything - there were a million ways the game could have made us care about him, but it just failed on every account.

One thing that's potentially interesting about Kane is that, well, he's kind of dragged into Joshua and Leona's plot by association. I mean, he's like seven years old when Disastia is killed and presumably not much older when his parents start talking about destroying the world, and then he's mostly left all alone for a lot of his childhood while they fake their deaths and take up false identities. So it would hardly be odd for Kane to struggle with the question of whether his parents are really right, whether he really owes them any loyalty, and so on, which would be interesting to explore. I mean, I would still want him to ultimately be on their side in the end, but just seeing him at least struggle with these things and getting a real sense of WHY he has the conviction to end the world would help so much (and it's what's currently missing from his character for me where it isn't for his parents). Since Kane's arc would then naturally center around questions of "Is existence worth saving? Is it right to destroy the world?", there's plenty of potential for interesting interactions he could have with Vene - with him trying to get a sense of why she's so determined to save the world, and possibly being surprised by the common ground they have in their shared belief in the meaninglessness of existence. I think there would easily be ways of having these kinds of discussions without spoiling anything, and it would be a good way of giving more exploration to the major themes of the story before the final act (as well as giving extra insight into Vene herself). Not only that, but since Kane's arc is also about the despair he and his parents suffered as a result of DSHIS, he could also have a lot of interesting interaction with Lake, who in this hypothetical scenario would be still trying to come to terms with the truth of the Devils and the DLG Law himself. Just these little touches alone would give Kane meaningful connections to two of the most important characters, which would do wonders for his role in the plot and make the game feel like a much more connected and coherent whole in general.

So, those are the biggest things I would have liked to have seen from this game. The only other significant thing I would have liked would have been, as I touched on in the LP itself, more emphasis on the Sera-Humans' memories of their past lives and how they affect them, both as individuals and Fezzite as a whole. The idea that Katherine (and a few others, like Leona) brought up about Sera-Humans being intellectually superior because of how they have two lives' worth of knowledge to work from is sort of interesting, and it would have been nice (as KoE suggested) if there had been more exploration of how that might inform the general prejudice against humans that results in things like dumping huge amounts of dangerous monsters on them being considered justifiable. Maybe there's even a general sentiment that it doesn't even really matter if humans die, since they'll just be reincarnated as superior beings anyway, or something like that. It'd just be nice to see more exploration of the difficult decisions made by the Fezzite government in general really. Oh, and I'd also cut all the Rio Explorers nonsense and make it so that Fezzite/Sera-Humans are a natural phenomenon. But yeah, when it comes down to it I think the only two things that I'm seriously interested in with this game are 1) Vene's character arc and 2) the whole DSHIS concept and the various ramifications of that (the Kursk family plot being an extension of this). Those are the two parts of the plot that work best for me - and also the two that are given the most emphasis in the final act - so I would have liked to see the game more tightly focused around those, but I'm sure others would probably disagree with me. Anyway, because of that, I don't really have much to say about the rest of the characters in the end - Yangtze, Doris, Nixon, Minerva, Virginie etc, they're all likable enough characters but none of them are ultimately that important, and their arcs feel quite conventional and decontextualised from the rest of what's going on for the most part. I think they're basically fine in that most of them are fairly "normal" characters for this kind of game, in terms of their motivations and determination to save the world, and because of that, Vene stands out all the more for being so different to them and for not being able to resolve her issues as easily as they can - that contrast is honestly a large part of what I like about her character, of course, so I'm fine with keeping the supporting cast as they are really.

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But yes, overall, for all that I think could have been done better, the final act basically ended up working for me (obviously, if all my gushing throughout the whole thing didn't make that obvious), so I can't complain too much! The game itself is undeniably epic, if nothing else - I clocked in over 50 hours even on RM2k's super-slow timer, and it wasn't counting when I minimised it to write commentary either - I really haven't seen any RPG Maker game that comes close to this in terms of sheer scope and ambition. Granted, I've not been seriously into the RPG Maker community since, like, 2007 or something, so I'm sure there are all kinds of games out there by now that are much more impressive than this (especially nowadays in the age of VXA and all), but considering how old this is, it's impressive what a big project it is. The CBS was also really impressive in most respects - some of the menu transitions felt a little clunky and unresponsive, but in general it was perfectly satisfying to play, reasonably well balanced, and without any significant bugs. I mean, I remember back in the day it was considered an incredible achievement to even have a CBS at all, let alone to have such a big one that holds up so well over an incredibly long game. Of course, it's not perfect - my main issues were that there were some periods where the boss difficulty dropped really low (though the dungeons remained relatively consistently challenging) and that it would have been nice if the field element stuff had a bit more depth to it and was used more creatively. But the character balance is very good, the customisation is good, and I had a lot of fun overall. The bigger dungeons like Benedicta's Tears and the LAJ felt genuinely climactic and exciting in a way that impressed me quite a bit - and the final dungeon was a really great experience all around. There were also a lot of things about it that made me really nostalgic for DSAI; especially during the part where Virginie joined, which reminded me of how we used to introduce a new party member right before having a big dungeon revolving around them to get used to their gameplay gimmick. Just the general feeling of this game trying to throw together so many characters and concepts brought back a lot of fond memories of working with the DSAI universe. It'd be great if we could try and get back into that if possible; I'd admittedly be more interested in RGPBoot right now than anything else, but Rodpop and SRS's apparent attempted efforts to revive DSAI definitely sound good to me as well. I'll try and get on Xfire more in future, if only to hopefully discuss stuff occasionally (I don't really think I'll be able to do much work right now, since the final year of college is burdening me quite a bit.)

So, thank you to all of you (i.e. KoE and all you lurkers) for sticking with me through what I'm pretty sure is RGP's first ever complete LP! It's been great to finally play this game all the way through - I can remember being like 15 and watching Japanese videos of this game wishing I could play it, so many thanks to eplipswich for finally allowing me to experience this wonderful insanity! On the whole, I'm glad that I LPed it rather than just playing it solo in the end because having the pressure to comment on it made me reflect on the experience a lot more than I otherwise would. It has been a great ride!

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Oh, you posted this? Haha, well, it's mostly just me rambling endlessly, but yeah.

I'd like to add for anyone reading that it's incredibly full of spoilers, though, so you shouldn't read it if you haven't finished the game yet!
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