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Gorgeous, but not so surreal

Story:
Raythe, creatures from a world/reality names Aetherion, are invading the human world. The Raythes takes form based on human thought and fear, often in a symbolic way, resulting in some rather bizarre looking ones. Aetherion itself is rather bizarre, not following the laws of our world. The ARC institute is formed to both combat and study the threat.

This is however the setting rather than the story. The story stars Edan, a student being transferred to ARC. There he meets the other two playable characters, Flynn and Alaria. It's those three characters the story really is about. Aetherion is mostly a battlefield where the conflicts takes place. As such, the story doesn't bring as much new to the table as you first may think based on the setting. That said, the story and the characters are well-written and enjoyable.

Edan possess many common main character traits such as sticking his nose in trouble and not thinking things trough. In addition to that, he is extremely dense, even for being an RPG protagonist. However, he is written so that his behavior ends up being funny rather than aggravating and he tends to annoy other characters rather than the player.

Flynn is a competent, but smug acting fellow who's persona of course hides something painful underneath. Just as with Edan, he is written so that his behavior annoys other characters rather than the player. In addition to that, his behavior, which looked random at first, will make perfect sense during a second playtrough.

Alaria is strong, competent, dutiful, formal and well regarded within the ARC institute. However, when she's dealing with Flynn, she turns into a complete ass, revealing some rather notorious character flaws. Despite the room for personal growth, she mainly serves as a foil for Flynn (and a bit as eye candy).

Combat:
Aetherion uses an ATB-like battle system complete with charge up times that varies from skill to skill. It's very fast paced, but manageable as long as you remember what the skills does and don't have to look at the description mid battle. If you do forget about a skill though, it's gets hectic as the enemies won't let up.

Each character can equip six skills, three attack skills and three support skills. The skills are further organized by level from one to three and must be equipped in the slot of corresponding level, meaning each skill has only one slot it can go into.

In combat you can have up to three bars which decides what skills you can use. Level one skills can always be used and grants one bar, level two skills requires one bar, but grants two bars when used and level three skills requires three bars and will deplete all of them when used. The bars are however category bound and getting three bars from using attack moves will not allow you to use higher leveled support moves and vice verse. In fact, using a skill of a different category will deplete your accumulated bars, so plan ahead.

The bars are the only restriction though, there's no MP or other resource system. You also fully recover after each battle.

There's also the breaking system. If someone gets hit during their skill charge, the charge time will be extended. If extended enough, the skill will fail and the character/enemy has to start over. This allows you to do both offense and defense at the same time, at least in theory. Personally, I've found the battles to fast for me to time skills like this and the number of times I ended up breaking an enemy can be counted on my fingers. Some of the skills that are good at breaking also have a charge up time, making it harder to get them of in time.

A very important aspect of the game is to synchronic the characters' skill setup. Buffs are very powerful and you will kill enemies much faster if you take some turns buffing instead of going all out offense. As such, when selecting the skills for one character, you should consider what the other characters can do. Since you get levels, and with that skills, very fast, there's plenty of optimizing to do. It's a good thing though, since I couldn't break the enemies, I had to compensate elsewhere. Also, the fast acquisition of new skills is what prevents combat from becoming same-ish. The game falls prey to the age old problems of the same tactic working against all regular enemies.

Visuals:
The artwork is very beautiful as is the character animations. There's plenty of eye candy to go around in this game, something you can see by just looking at the screenshots. On the minus side though, the maps of the world Aetherion are rather dull looking. It's supposed to look surreal, but seems more arbitrary than surreal. Still, the game puts a greater focus on character and the combat and those do look great.

Summary:
The game got good characters, fun combat and both are accompanied with excellent visuals. There are some notable flaws though. The flaws don't stop the game from being fun, but the game could have been much more fun than it currently is.

Posts

Pages: 1
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
09/21/2011 04:27 AM
Thanks for the review! Your commentary about the characters amused me. I was worried Edan was veering too far into clueless territory and we'd need to reel him in, but it looks like he's pretty close to that sweet spot where his behavior is endearing rather than irritating.

Aetherion uses an ATB-like battle system complete with charge up times that varies from skill to skill. It's very fast paced, but manageable as long as you remember what the skills does and don't have to look at the description mid battle. If you do forget about a skill though, it's gets hectic as the enemies won't let up.


This, to me, is the biggest concern with the battle system. We've been looking into a pause feature but I think I'd like it if combat froze while selecting your actions. This would affect the game dynamic a lot, however.

Any other comments you have about what you thought the flaws were are welcome.
Crystalgate
694
09/21/2011 07:05 PM
Well, I pointed out that the game isn't so surreal. The surreal elements are there, but they don't feel important.

The surreal elements are far to impersonal IMO. You have creatures who take shapes according to human thoughts, but as far as I know, it could be thoughts of a mailman living on the other side of the world.
Show
There's Ephrian who got twisted by the Raythe. However, it looked more like he had a great amount of power and lost control of it. This is hardly surreal, it is in fact a very recognizable problem.


We also have the maps which while looking unreal, seem rather arbitrary. I think the best way to make something surreal is to start with something recognizable and then twist it so it looks wrong in a way. The monsters work that way, but the maps doesn't.

The game has aggro managing skills, debuffs and the breaking system. However, you can just kill the enemies before they have the chance to be of any trouble. With the right setup, you will kill them so fast you don't need any healing or any form of defensive maneuver. I even managed to kill the first boss before it could use it's boss skill. I noticed a lot of potential tactics in this game, but most of them are obsolete.
Anaryu
8938
09/21/2011 08:43 PM
author=Crystalgate
Well, I pointed out that the game isn't so surreal. The surreal elements are there, but they don't feel important.

The surreal elements are far to impersonal IMO. You have creatures who take shapes according to human thoughts, but as far as I know, it could be thoughts of a mailman living on the other side of the world.
Show
There's Ephrian who got twisted by the Raythe. However, it looked more like he had a great amount of power and lost control of it. This is hardly surreal, it is in fact a very recognizable problem.


We also have the maps which while looking unreal, seem rather arbitrary. I think the best way to make something surreal is to start with something recognizable and then twist it so it looks wrong in a way. The monsters work that way, but the maps doesn't.

The game has aggro managing skills, debuffs and the breaking system. However, you can just kill the enemies before they have the chance to be of any trouble. With the right setup, you will kill them so fast you don't need any healing or any form of defensive maneuver. I even managed to kill the first boss before it could use it's boss skill. I noticed a lot of potential tactics in this game, but most of them are obsolete.

I can't say much on the surreal aspect - by the time I really got a grasp of what to do with surrealism in a game, it was weeks into the project (we'd have an amazingly surreal entry if we had to do it again) - I think complex themes like this should be announce a week or two ahead of time, even at the risk of people cheating a bit, to give the creative range it's own time to mature, just like the game itself has time.

Regarding combat you make a lot of great points, and I'm doing a couple things to help with this, here's a few points I was keeping in mind related when I was designing skills, enemies, and balance:

1. Most people will not experiment outside the stable 'healing' paradigm
- So I made a focus on damage an option, along with focusing on speed, etc (these are tactics I often use because I prefer combat to move fast when I play games, and often leave defense and healing behind if I can win fast enough)

2. Enemies should be fairly fast to kill (lower HP) - too much HP will extend the strategy aspect in a fake way, but frustrate and annoy players
- I made this mistake often in my earlier games, by making battles longer strategy and optimization were more useful, but it was dull and after a while all you wanted was each fight to END ALREADY : )

3. I wanted people to be able to win with any combination of skills and strategy
- Want to carefully fight while keeping HP at max, that's viable - want to spend several turns stacking Spirit on someone and using a high-spirit value skill to do damage 3 to 7x their normal max? No problem there either.

4. No rock/paper/scissors or complex stat systems - Fire doesn't do better against Wind, and Water doesn't beat Fire. It's all 'magic' and it's form might affect the end result, but I don't want people to feel limited to choosing their combinations/skills based on any elemental weaknesses and I don't want it to be a lot of stat math. Attack is your attack, Spirit helps magical type skills, Defense reduces damage (of all sources) and Agility is how fast you are.

I think these are great ideas and I plan to keep them well in mind, here are some areas I am focusing on to balance this out:

1. Spirit needs to be reworked, the way it is you can too much too easily and it's effect is too great because it's based on addition instead of simple % increases (spirit is always considered at 100% since they have 0 in the stat by default)

2. Group skills need to be less powerful than their counter-parts and balanced so they cannot or should not (ie. a reason not to) keep them up constantly. Like Glacial Wall being a 25% shield instead of 50%

3. Enemies need to be more interesting and dangerous - if a strategy works against all enemies, then if I make the enemies more variable and identifiable, your strategies can't always work and instead become your 'optimum state' that you develop many little strategies to achieve (destroy this enemy first because he can break shields, break this enemy as much as possible because they strip my Spirit buffs, then with the key enemies gone your strategy still works.)

4. Improvement of the Aggro system - There's a lot of complexity people aren't aware of with this, but aggro systems need to be fast and easy to identify. I'm thinking maybe a way to assign 'initial buffs' at the start of a battle, so one character could start with hate from all enemies (slight, just to give them the first couple rounds of hate) while others might buff their speed or attack level or attack/spirit, etc.


Things that I haven't come up with solution on yet:

1. Speed of combat - if combat can be paused it totally unbalances play with it unpaused, making combat trivial and breaks the 'flow' that I believe helps combat a lot right now. I could slow down the overall turn speed, or just have it freeze when choosing skills and targets, but again I didn't really like the end result with it pausing, I may need some external feedback on this (maybe you'd be willing to provide feedback?)

2. How to balance damage and defense - As you said pure damage and offensive speed can ignore all other possibilities. I included enemies with really high defense that required you buff past their defense or reduce it (or both) but apparently those didn't prove any type of barrier for you! Maybe balancing spirit and making defense have more impact will help.

3. How to make skill effects obvious and easy to digest (especially in battle) - Cast Time: 10 turns - well how long is a turn? half a second? What are "Recovery Turns" and why should I care? How can I show people what skill is ideal for breaking if they don't just remember it? What about the more complex skills like the amazing but underestimated like Crimson Storm? (this one doesn't make it's power obvious at all)

One tactic I've been tossing around that I'd like feedback on is a grading system (kinda like the Tales games now that I think about it) - earning points or rewarding players for adjusting their tactics instead of trying to force it down their throats by limiting the systems.

Please let me know if you have any feedback, I appreciated the skill and tactics notes you PMed me and found it interesting.

I'd like to mention several people have told me a similar thing: "I found a tactic that works too well" - but none of those have actually been identical yet. I think this means I've got a good start here, and I hate to rock the boat too much by changing the system, so I'm leaning more towards some extra statistical balance and rewarding players for being creative by using more unique enemies and some kind of reward system when they adjust their tactics to hit weak points.

One thing I'm basically avoiding is elemental weaknesses. I've thought about having states that can increase your BREAK rating (in addition to the attacks rating) and having one that reduces their defense against elements, but then it's better just to stick to defense reduction anyway, right?
calunio
Shamed
10439
09/21/2011 08:52 PM
Uhm... well, I'm usually not much into details of battle systems, but overall I really liked Aetherion's battles. My only complaint being it was too fast, it interfered with thinking and strategy.

Also, I found the last boss to be too hard, I tried like... 4 times, and then I switched to easy and won.
Crystalgate
694
09/22/2011 02:33 PM
author=Anaryu
I can't say much on the surreal aspect - by the time I really got a grasp of what to do with surrealism in a game, it was weeks into the project (we'd have an amazingly surreal entry if we had to do it again) - I think complex themes like this should be announce a week or two ahead of time, even at the risk of people cheating a bit, to give the creative range it's own time to mature, just like the game itself has time.

I can imagine that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think making a good game within such a time limit requires you to start and proceed quickly while making a good surreal experience requires you to slow down and think things trough while giving creativity some time.

2. Enemies should be fairly fast to kill (lower HP) - too much HP will extend the strategy aspect in a fake way, but frustrate and annoy players
- I made this mistake often in my earlier games, by making battles longer strategy and optimization were more useful, but it was dull and after a while all you wanted was each fight to END ALREADY : )

I agree that battles should not be to long, if they are, then the player will settle into a series of commands that are repeated.

There is one age old problem lurking here though, usually battles are won as soon as you kill one enemy. Assuming X enemies are threatening, but manageable, X-1 enemies are usually a breeze. If battles are to fast, the player can get that first kill which guarantees a win almost immediately. If the enemies are sturdy enough so that the first kill doesn't happen so quickly, then killing the rest of them takes to long. There's the option of assuming the player will kill one enemy quickly and balance their damage output thereafter, but that comes with the risk of making all strategies except blitzing unfeasible.

3. I wanted people to be able to win with any combination of skills and strategy
- Want to carefully fight while keeping HP at max, that's viable - want to spend several turns stacking Spirit on someone and using a high-spirit value skill to do damage 3 to 7x their normal max? No problem there either.

You have four difficulty levels and I don't think it has to be possible to win with any combination of skills when playing "Insane", at least not unless you're really good at breaking enemies. At that level the player should be expected to choose skills that actually complements each other. For example, if you want to blitz the enemies, the player should have to choose a strong offensive setup to pull that off (again, unless he/she is really good at breaking enemies).

There is one other thing also, my strategy had the characters only use half of their skills. Edan and Alaria only used attack skills while Flynn only used support moves. Against bosses, Alaria would use support as well (exclusively against the last boss), but Edan's and Flynn's strategy pretty much stayed the same. This means that I had practically unused slots to set up more strategies. However, were I to actually use the skills in those slots, the game would have punished me by making battles take a longer time.

...and Agility is how fast you are.

Agility is also invisible as it doesn't appear on the status menu. In any case, I think you do right to keep the base mechanic simple.

1. Spirit needs to be reworked, the way it is you can too much too easily and it's effect is too great because it's based on addition instead of simple % increases (spirit is always considered at 100% since they have 0 in the stat by default)

Yeah, I quickly noticed that +75% spirit boost would increase damage a lot, even on a character with 0 spirit. There also isn't a +75% attack boost available either. I will try an attack setup during the next play-trough though.

3. Enemies need to be more interesting and dangerous - if a strategy works against all enemies, then if I make the enemies more variable and identifiable, your strategies can't always work and instead become your 'optimum state' that you develop many little strategies to achieve (destroy this enemy first because he can break shields, break this enemy as much as possible because they strip my Spirit buffs, then with the key enemies gone your strategy still works.)

That does sound like a good idea, make any (reasonable) main strategy work, but force the player to make small adjustments. This brings me back to the point where I had half the skills unused, I definitely had room for minor extra strategies.

4. Improvement of the Aggro system - There's a lot of complexity people aren't aware of with this, but aggro systems need to be fast and easy to identify. I'm thinking maybe a way to assign 'initial buffs' at the start of a battle, so one character could start with hate from all enemies (slight, just to give them the first couple rounds of hate) while others might buff their speed or attack level or attack/spirit, etc.

Yes, aggro is something you want to catch immediately. The first one I encountered was Edan's kick. However, it's level 2, meaning the enemies could all gang up on Flynn before Edan can use it.

The initial buffs could work. There's the chance that it makes players feel obligated to stick to a specific plan though.

1. Speed of combat - if combat can be paused it totally unbalances play with it unpaused, making combat trivial and breaks the 'flow' that I believe helps combat a lot right now. I could slow down the overall turn speed, or just have it freeze when choosing skills and targets, but again I didn't really like the end result with it pausing, I may need some external feedback on this (maybe you'd be willing to provide feedback?)

I think you at least need a way for the player to answer the phone or the door without getting a game over. Other than that, I can't give much feedback. I used a strategy where I didn't need to bother with things like breaking and could usually just stick to a plan. This means the speed had relative little impact. I will in the future try a playtrough where I test other strategies such as breaking though.

2. How to balance damage and defense - As you said pure damage and offensive speed can ignore all other possibilities. I included enemies with really high defense that required you buff past their defense or reduce it (or both) but apparently those didn't prove any type of barrier for you! Maybe balancing spirit and making defense have more impact will help.

My main strategy involved buffing Edan's and Alaria's spirit with +75%, so if the enemies required me to buff past their defense, most likely I did that already.

3. How to make skill effects obvious and easy to digest (especially in battle) - Cast Time: 10 turns - well how long is a turn? half a second? What are "Recovery Turns" and why should I care? How can I show people what skill is ideal for breaking if they don't just remember it? What about the more complex skills like the amazing but underestimated like Crimson Storm? (this one doesn't make it's power obvious at all)

I would assume that 10 turns take twice as much time as 5 turns. I would also assume that recovery turns determines how far to the right a character is placed on the bar on top of the screen after performing the skill, where again, 10 recovery turns is twice as far to the right as 5 recovery turns.

One tactic I've been tossing around that I'd like feedback on is a grading system (kinda like the Tales games now that I think about it) - earning points or rewarding players for adjusting their tactics instead of trying to force it down their throats by limiting the systems.

I would suggest two grading categories then, speed and damage taken. Speed is obvious, and damage taken should be based on how much damage the characters take over the course of the battle where less is of course better. The system should be such that you get the best score by performing well in both categories rather than aiming for performing as well as possible in only one of them.

I'd like to mention several people have told me a similar thing: "I found a tactic that works too well" - but none of those have actually been identical yet. I think this means I've got a good start here, and I hate to rock the boat too much by changing the system, so I'm leaning more towards some extra statistical balance and rewarding players for being creative by using more unique enemies and some kind of reward system when they adjust their tactics to hit weak points.

I do also think the system itself works and that adjustments is a better idea than reworking it from the ground.

One thing I'm basically avoiding is elemental weaknesses. I've thought about having states that can increase your BREAK rating (in addition to the attacks rating) and having one that reduces their defense against elements, but then it's better just to stick to defense reduction anyway, right?

I agree with not including elements, but how does defense reduction cover states that increase break rating?
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