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Hate to be the one to say it, but...

  • Ayanin
  • 09/09/2013 06:28 AM
  • 34672 views
Pretty graphics are wonderful things. Original storylines are admirable, too, but when it comes down to it, a game has got to actually be playable. Even a non-gamer should be able to play it, and not be dying frequently. After all, this is not a first person shooter! (A game type where frequent death is anticipated.)

Well, that's what happened here.

Now, it would be one thing if you could traditionally "level grind" ... gain a few extra levels here and there, move on, and be fine... but you can't do that here. The monsters in each new area are pretty overkill, so that you can die more or less at any area you advance to. If you gained a few levels in the last area, you'll hardly even notice it in the next, if at all. Used up the only items that made winning against the last boss possible? Too bad. You'll die frequently in boss fights without serious help from something that isn't you (which you won't get but maybe once or twice, and maybe only then if you checked nearly every tile that you've laid eyes on), but evidently, you're otherwise just plain out of luck. Not what I would call a good gaming experience.

How bad was it?

Well, my experience was (without spending hours level grinding) the average boss fight goes like this:

1) You have approximately one round to use up whatever help you have on you... which you will probably die instantly, without. If you're lucky, you may actually get a WHOLE ROUND to attack! But it won't accomplish anything, even if you do.

2) Then, the boss promptly reduces you to near-death (as in one-hit) state. If not your whole party.

3) Now what?

Yeah... "now what?" is right. Because in the time it takes you to heal everybody (if you have enough MPs or whatever to do that), you've just wasted your next round. At which point, the boss promptly reduces you (all?) to one-hit life status, once again. So for every round that you heal yourself beyond having only one hit left, the boss simply undoes whatever you just did, pretty much the next turn he gets. Okay, you MIGHT get a single round between, sometimes, in which to attempt pathetically to attack... but often not. I say pathetically, because you are basically fleas as far as the bosses are concerned. You do fairly negligable damage to the boss, no matter what you use, while the boss, on the other hand, mops the floor with you every single round.

Basically, it's a viciouis cycle of getting knocked down, healing and then getting knocked down again.

So get ready to waste countless hours level grinding!

Or, you can just do what I did, and uninstall, and hope for another game to come along where you can actually survive long enough without truly ridiculous emounts of effort, in order to see the entire game. Or even the first half of it.

So if you actually like level grinding for hours on end, go for it. Or if you just like looking at the pretty game over screen. Or if you've got a program that allows you to hack save files, maybe. (For the first time, I really, really wished I had that, and normally, I hate even using walkthroughs, because I dislike any kind of "cheating".) But if none of that describes you... I'm afraid you might not have much more fun playing this game than I did, even if it was pretty.

Finally, I felt that in all honesty, I had to give it a pretty bad rating, and not just to be a jerk, or because I personally didn't care for it, but for a pretty striaghtforward and valid reason: like I said... a game should be playable.

Any way you look at it, no matter how beautiful, haunting or grand the music and graphics were, or how original and deep the plot, not much of that is really going to matter if the player faces what feels like literally "mission impossible," from the moment they start. If you're dying almost the moment you set foot outside of the first town, at monsters that are not even bosses, and when fighting bosses boils down to a never ending circle of "die now or die later" choices (see above), chances are, at least some people are never going to stick around long enough to see those beautiful graphics, hear your best music, or enjoy your story. Think about it: how many times does the average person... the AVERAGE person... have to end up dead in an RPG (again, not a first person shooter, or some other game-type where you'd EXPECT to die often, but in an RPG of all things), before they simply go away and find something that actually amuses them, instead of just frusterating them continually?

The cold hard truth is this: no matter how great your game is, if the player quits in frustration before they ever get to see %90 of it, then for that person, none of that remaining %90 really counts for anything. It's the same for that player as if the game ended where they quit. Or you might say, it's almost the same as if the play was somehow "broken" and you simply could not continue (even if it is actually technically possible, by some means involving epic patience, to do so).

Now, a person might object and say that's not fair, because the player COULD have played it, and it's not the game maker's fault that they quit. Oh sure. They could have continued to play... with a ridiculous amount of effort. But in this case, we're not talking about people quitting because they're lazy. We're talking about people quitting because an absurd level of effort is required by the game. In this case, it's the game, not the user, that's unreasonable. The fault, in this case, lies with the game.

For this reason, in trying to give an honest rating, I rated it subpar.

In my book, a game is "not playable," if it's not playable for common people without an insane/ridiculous amount of effort, and if a game is "not playable," then it fails to meet the most fundamental criteria of all games: that to begin with, you can actually play it! It should not just be TECHNICALLY playable, if, for instance, you're willing to frisk every tile on every screen of the game you can physically access, and press up against every inch of wall in every map, and waste days of your life level grinding like you were playing Maple Story (where at least the players would have the option of talking to their friends rather than just dying of boredom or quitting in frustration). It should be playable for anyone willing to put forth a reasonable effort. But a REASONABLE effort, not just for those who are willing to sit up all night with a pot of coffee frisking tiles and level grinding for hours on end. (Definitely not reasonable.)

It would be far better to do a less glorious job with your game, and at least to have a game that everyone can actually play... and dare I say, maybe even enjoy? ... than to have a drop-dead-gorgeous game, that you have to have no life at all (eg, the countless hours for level grinding), and endless patience, in order to play.

And by "play" I do mean without a walkthrough. Cheating should not be a prerequisite to being able to play the game. It should be pretty straightforward and fairly balanced in difficulty, for those who know what to expect in an RPG of this kind (in this case, the mainstream kind, as opposed to, say, puzzle RPGS, where it's taken for granted that you pretty much have to be a genius to play without a walkthrough).

Posts

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Not everybody likes writing reviews, or feels that they have good enough writing skills, or can be bothered to take the time to do it. Among other reasons. I didn't play the game and I still feel this is a bad review. I don't feel as strongly about it as other people, and I'm certainly not going to play and review it myself.

It's a good counter argument, but you can't expect everybody to write a review. It seems like you are trying to discourage discussion because you don't like how it sounds. People see something they don't like and want to voice their opinion of it.

"Writing your own review" isn't the only relevant response to this.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
That's fine, they don't have to write a review.

In the meantime, Ayanin's opinion will account for 12.5% of this game's rating, and the opinions of the twenty people who disagreed will count for zero.
Bloody hell guys, so an RPG Maker game got a bad review, it's not the end of the world or anything.

Edit: And you know what they say, any publicity is good publicity... right? This game is still 4/5 after all.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
Eurovision1968
Bloody hell guys, so an RPG Maker game got a bad review, it's not the end of the world or anything.

Edit: And you know what they say, any publicity is good publicity... right? This game is still 4/5 after all.


it's more that this isn't a review, it's vitriolic filth
Ronove
More like Misao Stealing Prince
2867
Guys, I think we get it. This review is staying up. I've said my piece about it and so have so many of you, so stop coming out of the woodwork to complain about people complaining about it. We're going in a circle here and it's not fun.

I have no authority to make any of you listen but come on. This is going on too much and I really don't want people to know SSP as the game if you give it a bad score, people will bitch until their heads pop off.

(also if you barf up your food after eating at a restaurant you are allowed in my mind to make a bad review if it's because of food poisoning. I don't think SSP gave anyone food poisoning. Oh god I hope it didn't.)
The bread was improperly toasted.
Ronove
More like Misao Stealing Prince
2867
You have to forgive Snowe, he lives in fantasy steampunk inspired land. I don't think they have toasters.
halibabica
RMN's Official Reviewmonger
16873
Where to even begin...

Just because Ayanin didn't see the full breadth of the game doesn't mean their opinion is invalid or that they aren't allowed to post it. True, the review isn't very well written, but that's all. They presented their experience of the game, and it wasn't favorable. What's more important is WHY it wasn't.

A lot of the people getting riled up seem to be upset because the review didn't address the game's other strong aspects; those being story, graphics, etc. While a review should take a game's component parts into consideration, this is something of an extreme case. The reviewer didn't get far enough into the game for those factors to matter, and good as they are, they weren't enough to keep them trying when the game became unbearable to play.

Sorry, but unless you're making a visual novel, gameplay is king. The game could have the greatest graphics and story ever created, but it wouldn't matter if the game couldn't be played, and that's what happened here. Furthermore, a player's reasons for quitting can be some of the most valuable information they can offer a developer, so to say they were wrong to post this is pretty ignorant.

But the fact remains that others have had no trouble playing this game at all. Several of you have accused Ayanin of 'being bad at RPGs' and 'lacking basic strategy', but I'm not sure any of you are even trying to see where they're coming from. This review didn't happen by accident. There were reasons why Ayanin was compelled to write and post it, and I think I understand why.

See, in general, RPGs are a very forgiving genre. There are typically multiple paths to success and players can approach the game's challenges however they see fit. But from what I'm seeing described here (and not having played myself), that's not the case with this game. Boss fights are ruthless, and making mistakes can result in game over almost instantly.

So if you went into this game with the mindset of a normal RPG, like Ronove has said the introduction deliberately instills, such a high difficulty early on is something unexpected. If you're used to handling RPGs a certain way, you could quickly become frustrated when the more common methods (like grinding) don't work. If you're REALLY used to more typical RPGs, say, where status problems are next to useless, then I can see how a player could become stuck very quickly. They enter a boss fight and lose one round into it. They grind to get stronger, but that doesn't help. They explore their options, and maybe they try the status problems that are needed to succeed. But what if those statuses fail on the first try? Who's to say the boss wasn't just immune all along? Is it possible to tell? Were there any context clues that indicated the status problem was the way to go in the first place?

There's only so much I can say having not played the game myself, but this at least makes sense to me. If the game is meant to be played a specific way and that way isn't entirely obvious, I can see how a player could get stuck.

I'm sorry for continuing this, Ronove, but I felt it needed to be said. Many of the replies here aren't very well-reasoned.
Ronove
More like Misao Stealing Prince
2867
It needed to be said?

What do you think a lot of people have been SAYING for the past 5 pages?

Yes, some people have said the reviewer needs to learn how to play games, but there are multiple people who have said that no, everyone shut up this reviewer can review however he wants. You coming in here after the fact, after the stuff blows over, to add the LAST opinion is really really ludicrous. Did you read the other five pages?

Also, sleep never misses Lorel. It won't miss on the first try unless VX really likes to screw over how I set everything up.

Just please, let the conversation die. What's been said has been said for the past five pages.
Oblic
Once a member of RMN, always a member of RMN!
1937
Jesus Christ... I left for a few days (partially because of this long string of comments, partially to get some IRL work done) and this tirefire is STILL burning... I came on here only to find out that there were 250 some-odd new notices, most of which came from this review! I have wanted to respond to more of the comments since my last post (which I feel ever so slightly bad about, but not much), but I felt like it would only be throwing another gallon of gasoline on this seemingly endless inferno. I'm not saying the discussion should stop, but I really feel like it's getting way off topic... I'm pretty sure everything that can be said, has been (although I have been enjoying the EXTREMELY labored analogies that have come out of all this).

It's amazing how something so insignificant can really get people so riled up that they start going for the throats of those that may have supported them in the past. I like this community, a lot, and it really bugs me when this vitriolic craziness occurs. Sure, there are valid points on both sides, but I feel like some of it has seriously gotten out of hand (personal attacks and crazy (yet endlessly entertaining) analogies). And, yes, I had my part in this, but isn't six pages of (mostly) angry attacks already enough?

*climbs down from soapbox*

I love RMN, and everything that comes with it, especially the community, but it's stuff like this that worries me. Maybe I'm over analyzing this whole thing, but still...

*okay, for real this time... off the soapbox*

Edit: Wow, in the 15 minutes it took me to type this sappy thing, Ronove beat me to the punch! At least I'm not the only one feeling the way I do.
Decky
I'm a dog pirate
19645
Alright, I'm putting my foot down. Everything that could be said has been said to death, and any attempts at consensus building has gone beyond piling on a reviewer and onto some broader questions as a whole. I appreciate the passionate discourse, as I feel that it can be a net positive when done correctly. However, some things just go on for a little too long.

http://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/14099/

(Standards topic)

http://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/14116/

(Review scores topic)
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