Cruna Aktrid (CA) is an RPG that grabbed my attention due to its promise of turn-based battles taking place on a grid. My two former experiences involving something similar were in Deltree’s The Reconstruction and I Miss The Sunrise. My review covers demo v0.11 and is a result of playing the demo several times.


Story/Plot:

The game starts with Ashen, a female teenage summoner, looking for her friend Lyka, a male teenage miner. They go to a nearby forest but something unexpected happens during their hunt.


Characters/Dialogue:

The two main characters in this relatively short demo have very defined personalities. Lyka is a pushover when it comes to Ashen, but is reckless when taking decisions. Ashen is controlling and physically abusive of Lyka.




Hey Jealousy …


The dialogue of most non-player characters (NPCs) is somewhat forgettable, relying on dull one liners. However, two NPCs involved in cutscenes and another one not involved in them actually have interesting things to say. The final character introduced in the demo doesn’t actually say anything in it, but her reactions to events give you an idea of her personality.

The writing is somewhat hard to understand due to some serious grammatical errors. I would recommend to the developer they get a person with good grammar to revise his writing. Another recommendation regarding dialogue is to avoid showing one line of dialogue at a time if there’s enough text to fill the textbox, unless the circumstances require this technique.




Forceful???


Gameplay:

When first entering the forest, you are given the chance of learn the different aspects of the Greed Grid Battle (GGB) system from a tutorial. Due to the issue mentioned earlier regarding the hard to understand writing, I found it better to experience the GGB system first hand and figure out things as I went along. I would suggest that the developer not only rewrite the tutorial, but also rethink the way to present it. Perhaps, a tutorial where things are explained, gradually, in a tutorial battle would be better to avoid overwhelming the player with too many details at once.

Most battles are initiated by touch encounters and usually involve one enemy, although rarely you get to fight two of them. In the forest area, between the first encounter and the first boss, the number of enemies available to encounter appears to be random. In one of my gameplays, I actually found no enemies to fight whatsoever.





At the start of the battle your characters are placed in a 3X3 grid in the right side of the screen at positions you preset from the main menu. I found that placing my party members in the same horizontal column was the best option, with the character with the stronger defense in front of the one with weaker one, so that melee attacks damage only the former one.





During your turn, you have to select the series of actions of your party members in the order in which these will be performed during the next turn. What actions are available as choices for a party member will depend on the remaining Action Points (AP), whose amount must be more or equal than the action’s AP cost. One detail that would be nice would be for the cost of the non-Special actions to be shown to facilitate planning, although with enough uses, those can be figured out. To finalize the sequence of party actions chosen and start the turn, “Done” must be chosen using any party member. I found the best strategy was to alternate choosing actions between the party members.




The horizontal action menu is unique and shows which actions are currently available as choices (blue) or not (red) due to the remaining AP of the party member


Enemies and party members have normal melee attacks that have a specific target that is in front of a horizontal column. Special offensive skills target a specific area of the grid, produce higher damage than melee attacks and cost the party member perform it a specific skill statistic (ST for Lyka) to use. For example, enemy boars have column special attacks that will damage all the targets located on the column targeted. In the case of enemy’s special offensive attacks, there is always a warning during the turn before it occurs that clues the player that the attack is coming so that they can take the appropriate action in response.

I didn’t find Lyka’s Shockwave special skill particularly useful since it didn’t seem to do more damage to enemies than a regular attack. Also, I wasn’t able to figure what area it targeted since it only said in its description “Linear Attack” which could mean that it targets either columns or rows and there was no visual feedback, in the form of, for example, colored squares in the enemy’s grid.
One interesting feature of the battle system is if a party member is attacked while guarding instead of getting less Hit Points (HPs) damaged, their party member specific skill statistic gets reduced. If the latter goes down to 0, that party member’s defense is broken. A couple of other details of the battle are that APs are regenerated slightly after each turn and the party member specific skill statistic can get restored very slightly.

Overall, I found that the GGB system works pretty well and I enjoyed fighting the battles using, although the right strategies became predictable after a while.


Graphics/Sound:

The CA demo uses mostly RTP graphics. The clear exceptions are the sprites of the main characters, their battlers and those of the enemies. The sprites of the main characters, while cute, seem out of place when compared with the RTP sprites. The battlers, while relatively simple, are quite nice looking. I found the forest to have areas that were too straight and thus didn’t feel natural.





The shapes of the bodies of the custom sprites for the main characters, who are teenagers, seem to be out of proportion when compared to those of the RTP children. Also, they clash with the RTP sprites since they lack the black outline.


The music and sound effects were well chosen.


A Few Issues Encountered and Recommendations:

- An option to return to the title screen should be included in the main menu.
- If you return back to town, you can’t return to the forest at all.
- The game when running in fullscreen has a 16:9 aspect ratio leaving vertical bars below and above the gameplay area, giving it a cinematic feel. When I tried to run it in windowed mode, I found out that it wasn’t a practical option because, for some reason, there was a white rectangle that was always on top that obscured more than half of my computer screen.
- I found a bug in the demo. After causing the first boss to run away for a second time, if you follow the direction towards where it ran away, you can fight it a couple of times after which you supposedly defeat it, which wasn’t true. You can only defeat it if you follow the other path.
- Placing a savepoint before entering the area with the first boss would make sense.
- You currently only gain experience from battles. Getting some drops should be a given.


Conclusion:

I found the CA demo battle system to be enjoyable and work well. However, there are several rough edges that need to be smoothed to make the player’s experience better. Now I understand why the developer wrote that “Everything in this demo is subject to change”.