Seraphic Blue Review

Translation: 2.5 out of 5

+ I have to applaud Eplipswich for taking on such a gargantuan effort.

This is actually the hardest section for me to judge. If Eplipswich is handcuffed to an EXACT phrase for phrase translation by the game’s creator, my criticism here pretty much goes out the window.

To me, the translation seems very clumsy. It feels like what you might get by feeding the text through an online bot. You get a very literal translation, but the flavor of the words is all wrong. Some phrases are down right funny, while others are simply painful to have to read. On several occasions, the mood of a scene was completely ruined by a piece of W.T.F? dialog.

I would suggest you bring an editor/proof reader in at the end to help you naturalize the dialog. For me, the most glaring bits of Engrish came out during the overlays during the cutscenes. The actual in game dialog was fairly clean, outside of a few important scenes.

I know it sounds daunting, to make subtle alterations to every message box full of text you’ve already invested a sizable chunk of time into translating, but I think this game would REALLY be able to shine with cleaner phrasing. Every time I started to get interested, started to feel the story pull me in, some laughable line threw me right back out.

Despite being really unhappy with the way most of the text reads, I’m still giving this section two and a half stars, mainly out of respect for your taking on such a massive project, and because I realize the game’s original author might have placed stipulations on what you can and cannot change in the script.


Gameplay: 2 out of 5

+ There is depth to be found here. The sphere system gives you quite a bit of customization options for your team. The only problem is that you usually have to go into a boss fight and get creamed the first time in order to formulate your strategy. I like that there are items to increase the likelihood of your additional effects striking the enemy/increase the power of your elemental damage add ons/resistances. Certain status ailments are very useful against some of the tougher regular enemies you will come across, and while the turn indicator is not always accurate (enemy turns appear to jump ahead every now and then) it does help you plan for that big attack you know is coming up next. The enemy data function works well, and I have to give credit to the developer for not causing it to waste a turn.

- However, it seems that bosses resist just about everything. It seemed like I was able to stack effects up on enemies in fights I didn’t have much trouble with anyway, but every time it would have really helped me out to be able to poison a boss with gargantuan hp numbers, slow them down, cause them to forget their skills, or to paralyze them for a couple turns reprieve, I found myself unable to because of the enemy’s resistances. After this happened a few times, I didn't even bother trying to use status effects, and just relied on using whichever character could hit the hardest while the rest focused on healing, making the occasional attack of opportunity every so many turns.

- This means that you can have a reliable party build, using weapon add ons and effects, that make the random (which I’m not sure they really are) encounters something of a breeze, but that same build will be completely useless against bosses. Again, you will not know this until you get into the fight, so you will have to watch the pre-battle cutscene again for the almost inevitable second attempt.

- Navigating the item menus can be something of a chore since there is no sort function. When you find or purchase a sphere or curative item, you may need to flip through several pages until you find the slot it occupies. This is one area where the game’s professionalism really takes a hit.

+ The game is actually somewhat fair, in that things like poison which seem entirely overpowered when they are used on the party are actually just as overpowered once you manage to tack it onto an enemy

- Certain areas just heap punishment on the player like there is no tomorrow. One monster type had an attack which was capable of poisoning, confusing, and blinding the target (I believe. I alt-f4’ed out the first time it happened, and on subsequent re-plays I didn’t notice all of the effects stacking up). Now, that isn’t so bad in and of itself, but four of these monsters appeared in a given encounter, and they always seemed to have the initiative. A lot of time I was left crossing my fingers that the computer would burn a turn attacking/missing, so I’d get a chance to fight back.

Innovation: 2 out of 5

- To put it bluntly, I didn’t notice much. The plot felt cobbled together from a host of JRPG and Anime clichés. In some cases I was able to predict the outcomes and “twists” just by identifying what I believe to be one of the creator’s sources of inspiration.

- This is JRPG 101. At times it feels like the creators were ticking things off a checklist.

+ I did like the sphere system. At first blush it may seem like it is trying to be Materia 2.0, but it ends up much more customizable and enjoyable!

+ Being able to automatically refill my hp and tp after battles via the supplement was a nice touch…

- ...but it felt like an excuse the developer invented to keep from properly balancing some of the dungeons.

Music & Sound Fx: 2 out of 5

This is a mixed bag. For the most part, the music does its job. I like that in some areas the track fades out. When used sparingly, silence can work better for some scenes then the best orchestral score could. I noticed some tracks had similar themes to pieces I was familiar with, and I’m not sure if they were written that way, or it was just a coincidence.

- I would be remiss if I didn't point out the number of audio glitches I encountered. Some of them were minor, subtle latency and clipping in a song, while others were more glaring, almost sounding as if the file had been sped up to compress it, and then played back at the accelerated speed instead of slowed down. The game made me paw my headphones off my bleeding ears twice when it decided to vomit a string of bit noise at me in the middle of a scene that, otherwise, had me leaning in and getting interested.

Graphics: 3 out of 5

+ The game has a consistent, clean style that is easy to look at.

+ I believe the monster sprites are all custom, and if not, are at least uncommon enough that I do not believe I recognize a single one of them from another source.

- Unfortunately, outside of combat and character sprites, you’ve seen most of it before. The areas tend to blend together, when combined with the fact that you never seem to spend too much time in one place, it becomes hard to remember individual towns.

- The over world map is just plain ugly.

Bells and Whistles/Presentation: 4 out of 5

+ The character portraits and cut scene artwork is really well done for the most part. I’d put the artwork in the game’s “cinematic” sequences up there with Dhux’s Scar. As a whole, the cutscenes are fairly exceptional.

- Unfortunately, you’re not able to skip them, if for example, you are trying to get back for your third attempt at a boss. As pretty as everything is too look at, the third time I am stuck watching a whole scene just to get slaughtered by a boss, it really starts to grate on my nerves.

Overall: 2.5 out of 5

In closing, I do not want my relatively low score to discourage anyone from trying this game out. It is a very competent JRPG, and once you get used to some of its quirks, you will be able to have fun with it.

This game could easily move into the 3.5+ star range with just a few adjustments.

Right now, the biggest strike against the game, for me, is how stilted and unnatural a number of the scenes are. Without the “build your character from scratch” aspect you get in most Western Rpgs, it has to rely on the main strength of the JRPG, which is the story. If I can’t get into the story, or can’t get through a major cutscene without either rolling my eyes or laughing, I can’t get into the game. Period.

If I were able to skip through the scenes I’d already seen, thus saving a lot of time on the almost inevitable multiple boss attempts, I might have been inclined to have bumped the score a little higher as well.