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Pretty good ages ago, pretty good now!

Everlong.
This game was made in 2003 and started as a Final Fantasy fangame, but presenting also many other references.

The story begins with an elite Cirigoth Blackguard that is trying to desert from his own army, After some events this man on the run, Azrael, meets a couple of outlaws at war against the Tyr-Anox invasion force. As the plot advances and a series of events happens,the protagonist becomes Glen (one of the outlaws) and the party members increase as the scope of their adventure.


Ok, I admit that I cannot help being a good guy when I find myself in these situations!

Expect dungeon delving and lots of combat, exploration and many quests. I admit the game is also really generous for what concerns gold, but that's not really important. In fact exploration is really useful and rewarding, expect to find useful items and resources checking everywhere, and this makes really worthwhile exploring well every single map!

Combat is organized with the classic side view layout and battlers that use the same style of the charsets. Monsters are instead giant static sprites, a classic old Rmk style. As you can probably expect each character has a set of skills that will increase as they earn levels, and these costs energy points to be performed.
Oh an important things that I found no need to grind, even if certain Beatles with bosses are rather long and a bit tedious, anyway it's just a little flaw in a sea of features and well imolemented gameplay.

Everlong is a really player-friendly game with its useful menus, features and options, like the possibility to assist the difficulty or skip combat encounters. The skill system and meccanica are really well done and I appreciate a game that offers choices and customization!


Sammy bravely punches a demon!

Graphically the game utilizes many rtp, edits and sprites from various sources, that sometimes do not really match perfectly (some sprites look more realistic and others do not), but it's not a really great difference of style that I found it annoying (for example facesets come from different sources but you won't find cartoonish characters mixed with fotorealistic ones at all!). The maps are ok, I found them to be adequate, nothing exceptional or memorable, but let's say that they do their job and are both varied and reasonably well made.


Well, mommy did not raise a helpless idiot, my friend!

The only real problem of this game is that it is terribly generic. It offers a lot of content but for the most part the events are predictable, the graphics used (charsets, chipsets and facesets) are ok but already seen, there is nothing new that makes it stand out from the typical Jrpgs that sees heroes fighting darkness. Except maybe for the quantity of monsters, characters and quests!
There is in fact an enormous quantity of sidequests and they become more and more as you progress. There is even one sidequest involves collecting books that contain information about most of the other sidequests!


Choices, choices... the real question is "are we greedy?"

Verdict
This game has a looong story, and while I played only the last versions, I can confirm that it was finely improved after each update, dialogues were considerably improved and also the structure of the game itself was re-balanced, modified and perfected under most aspects. While the storyline isn't over original, the characters are interesting and quite believable, they're well written.


Posts

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Thank you for the excellent review! This is actually really great, because it's concise but detailed enough to give players a good idea about what type of game Everlong is, and the flaws and shortcomings that will have to be tolerated to enjoy it.

I absolutely agree the story is generic fantasy, and the game heavily utilizes typical JRPG design and tropes to chase the nostalgia of the SNES era. I'd say there's an overabundance of items and monsters, which has made rebalancing rather difficult, though tinkering with dynRPG has opened up some new possibilities. Many maps are downright embarrassing in their primitive design. To be fair, this project began with RPG Maker 2000, and parallax mapping wasn't much of a thing back then. Making the game more player friendly has always been a prominent goal, and I've had some great suggestions over the years that I implemented, such as Story Mode. I'm always open to new ideas on how to improve Everlong and make it more fun to play!
author=DJC
Thank you for the excellent review! This is actually really great, because it's concise but detailed enough to give players a good idea about what type of game Everlong is, and the flaws and shortcomings that will have to be tolerated to enjoy it.

I absolutely agree the story is generic fantasy, and the game heavily utilizes typical JRPG design and tropes to chase the nostalgia of the SNES era. I'd say there's an overabundance of items and monsters, which has made rebalancing rather difficult, though tinkering with dynRPG has opened up some new possibilities. Many maps are downright embarrassing in their primitive design. To be fair, this project began with RPG Maker 2000, and parallax mapping wasn't much of a thing back then. Making the game more player friendly has always been a prominent goal, and I've had some great suggestions over the years that I implemented, such as Story Mode. I'm always open to new ideas on how to improve Everlong and make it more fun to play!


Well I admit I am a looong time player, but I found admirable not only the constant updating of the game, but I was also impressed about how player-friendly the game is: it's rare to find a game that assist so well the player with a useful interface. Oh and it's also a long game full of content, I can't imagine how much work was required to make (and update) it!
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