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The Guardian Review

The Guardian is an adventure/RPG game written by reLic. The systems are very neat, and the battle system good. The storyline is pretty weak, but the game focuses on the systems and gameplay.

Story (Minor spoilers)
The Guardian is set in a world ruled by 4 monsters - the main bosses in the game. The main character is a person named The Guardian who was frozen in time for 1180 years. He has just been un-frozen because the 4 monsters who were previously banished returned and destroyed his city.

Through the game, The Guardian gets items that help him on his quest, meets his brother, who now lives on a kind of ethereal realm, and destroys the evil monsters of the land, and the Mother of the creatures.

The main character's personality is never revealed in the game. He does not talk with anyone, and is the only playable character in the game.

I did not find any logic errors or spelling errors in the storyline.

One thing I did not like was that over the game, you find different letters that people wrote about supernatural things happening. But these things never tie into the game itself, as far as I could tell (I cleared nearly all screens 100%)

Character customization
This is a very important aspect to the game. Your character is nearly fully customizable.

The three 'attributes' are AP, BP, and GP.

BP is the most important. You can choose from 4 upgrades. Sword upgrade, Flame upgrade, Ice upgrade, and Armor upgrade. They are the rarest of the three stat points, and only a few of them are found on the field. The strongest enemies drop them (red dragons+ have a chance I believe)

AP is the second most important upgrade. You can choose from many upgrades here. They are: Max HP, Max MP, P-Attack, P-Defense, M-Attack, M-Defense, Agility, Luck. Most of those should be obvious. Luck is crit chance, M-Attack and M-Defense are defense and attack with fire and ice, etc etc. These are found a little too commonly in caves and on monsters. A little TOO commonly. Also, the amount that AP does upgrades over time. For example, at 5 Agility, 1 AP adds 1 Agility. to your hero. At 1000 Agility, 1 AP adds 15 Agility. This makes it the best idea to spam all your SP in one of the statistics area, which I believe is a negative aspect to this section.

GP is the least important upgrade. It is essentially money. It is found on basically every monster and as common as AP on caves and the world map. You can trade in two GP for one AP, and four GP for one BP. You can trade in three GP for one health potion, and three GP for one MP potion.

The main ways to get these three are from random areas in caves, and drops from monsters (and trading in GP for AP and BP). Sometimes in caves and castles, there are crates and barrels lying on the ground. Pressing Enter on those will sometimes give you one of the three attribute points. BP is the least common, and GP and AP are about equally common.

When you kill a monster, it drops any combination of the three based on how hard it is and (sometimes) by randomness. For example, the first monster only gives 1 GP, but harder monsters can give 1 AP + 1 GP or even 1 BP.

There is one other way to get the three attribute points, which is to do dungeons with the dog that you get in the first village. You can use Scrolls (collected randomly on ground) in order to direct a dog to collect items for you in a dungeon.

Monsters do not respawn, so spending the three attributes intelligently is a necessity to beat the game.

Gameplay
The gameplay itself is somewhat well implemented.

The AP system of increased gains over time when you increase stats encourages people just to dump all of their AP in one stat. I did this for Agility during my playthrough, and I had 1500 agility by the end of the game. Enough to kill the final boss before she got a single attack in.

Also, as the hidden items in caves are a big part of the game, if you do not know about them or only know where some of them are, it is very very hard to beat the game.

The battle system is decent, but it only ever handles 1 vs 1 battles. I would like to see a battle system where you could fight two monsters at once in a random encounter.

Each monster has a specific weakness. Either fire, sword, or ice. But for each BP, you can only improve one of the three attacks, so you will always be weak against something. I felt that the ice and fire were useless (partly because of MP). I only improved only my sword and was fine throughout the same, even vs bosses who were weak against fire/ice.

Conclusion
I felt that the best part of the game was the customization and the ability to explore how you wished.
The weak part of the game was the story

I give it a 4/5

EDIT: In lieu of changes that fixed some of the problems surrounding the stats system, this will be upgraded to 4.5/5.

Posts

Pages: 1
reLic
643
12/03/2012 11:07 AM
Thanks for the review! The game has been updated and it's now harder to reach a ridiculously high agility stat. Still possible though as one of the first and most important ideas of this game is to let you as the player build your character however you like.
Pages: 1