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I Really Wanted To Like This

Les Visiteurs Dan L'Espace is a short RPG about a fish of water scenario: four disparate travelers from a medieval fantasy realm with complex regional and ideological politics find themselves mysteriously transported to a space ship en route as part of an unknown mission. In this confusing situation, they try to piece together what is going on. I really like this set up and I was really motivated to like this game.

Unfortunately, the battles in this game were so bewilderingly punishing that I was not even able to finish it and find the answer to the mystery, which is very disappointing. My curiosity kept me playing a lot longer than I normally would have but that said I could seldom play for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time.

"The battles are too hard" is not a complaint I make of RPG Maker games lightly. This is because it has been made of my games in the past I thought unfairly and I have argued passionately against it. I've even gone so far as developing a theorem on the topic which I quote from time to time, which is that while people claim they detest games you can "spacebar mash" your way through and want difficulty, what people really want is the illusion of difficulty: people don't actually want to be challenged, they just think they do. The other reason that "the battles are too hard" is not a complaint I often levy is, having beaten Demon's Souls my tolerance for difficult games (i.e. "masochism") is quite high

The battles in Les Visiteurs were too hard and they kept me from finishing the game, in spite of my rather strong curiosity where the story was going. The specific one I stalled out on was Sir Kilroy and Friend, where not only did I lose the battle after applying what I thought was a perfectly sound strategy, I lost the battle so completely and utterly that it seemed extremely clear that no matter what I did I would still lose, short (maybe) of starting the game over, grinding a lot more, and allocating my skill points totally differently. But I was honestly not even sure that would help. If Sir Kilroy and Friend was by chance one of those battles you're meant to lose, then the game should have done a much better job of conveying this. I don't think it necessarily contributed to my party's evisceration, but Kilroy's "Close Quarters Combat" ability seemed seriously bugged.

I suppose if I had more patience I could have ground out a few more levels, but at that point in the game the regular encounters were frequently conveying me to the game over screen too, so that too would have been an exercise in frustration.

Usually in my past reviews if I had said a game's battles were too hard, it was because the entire battle system felt broken, a sloppy mess cludged together with no thought put into it at all. That's really not the case here. Yellow Magic obviously put a lot of thought and effort into these battles.

You control four characters throughout the game, Lin, a Black Mage, Alexis, a Swordswoman, Dirk, a Rogue and Tyrell, a healer.

Lin starts out with the ability to deal elemental damage of all four types and all four elemental spells inflict a status effect. That's pretty neat, but in the end she felt kind of useless because there was no way to determine in a timely fashion what any given enemy's elemental weaknesses were, and status effects had an extremely piddly chance of sticking, a mere 30% (and in practice, it seemed to be even less). The damage that Lin dealt to enemies with attacks they were neither weak nor resistant to was very pitiful, usually equivalent or inferior to a single swing of Alexis's sword. Lin was also unbelievably fragile.

Alexis was probably the most useful and well balanced character, a fairly beefy beatstick that could tank somewhat effectively and had various sword Techs. The only thing that annoyed me about her mechanical design was that you need to take a turn to use her cover ability, rather than it being a passive. It also didn't seem to actually work. Alexis was the only character with what felt like an appropriate amount of hit points, and even that was not a lot. Alexis was also my favorite character narratively speaking.

Dirk was definitely the most useless character because he had no really effective means of direct damage which wouldn't be so bad if not for TYRELL having no means of dealing direct damage WHATSOEVER (see below). His steal ability was neat and I appreciated its 100% success rate but then again it also kind of sucked because:

a) Most enemies didn't have any good items.
b) Too many enemies had no items at all.
c) Even when upgraded to mug it did piddling damage
d) Stealing items doesn't help if you don't kill the enemies and get out of the battle you're in alive.

His only moderately useful ability in most fights was Poison Dagger which dealt small direct damage with small chance of poison and also a Haste spell which I used to speed up better characters, but even that felt weak sauce because high AGI doesn't grant extra actions in this game.

Tyrell, a pacifist healder of Pasamena (I get that right?) was the most interesting character. He has no offensive abilities whatsoever and is a pure healer. Unfortunately, he is not good enough at healing to justify his existence. His Cure ability and his Prayer ability were both weak sauce. I bought Revive, Protect, and Shell for him and they really did not help much. If you really can't do anything but heal, Tyrell, you need to heal at least twice as hard as you're healing.

As I'm coming to now, was a Skill Shop system in place to spend SP to unlock new Techs and Magics but SP were scarce and I always felt like my new skills were being greatly outpaced by the enemy's increase in power. This game's difficulty curve is very steep.

One area I have a problem with also is the on touch encounters. See, these make regular enemies easy to miss. This in turn makes grinding easy to skip. Skipping grinding in turn makes the game over screen something you're going to be seen a lot of, because bosses and later regular enemies are tough even if you HAVE picked up a few levels. I also found that healing items (Health Pills) were very weak and

Overall, I would say that this game really needs to be rebalanced thoroughly. Lin's spells need more punch, healing items need more punch, money should be more plentiful, Tyrell's entire shtick needs more punch, and Dirk needs more to do than do shit damage and fail to inflict status effects. Stealables should be better and more common. Encounters should be hard to avoid or the player should be explicitly told to hunt them down and grind them. As of right now this is one of the only RPG Maker games I have ever played where I thought "this would benefit hugely from the inclusion of random encounters".

If I felt too discouraged by the difficulty to finish--well, I am not what you'd call a casual gamer. A lot of other people are going to bounce off the difficulty curve too.

Ok so now let me briefly talk about the story and aesthetics.

As I mentioned I liked the story's fish-out-of-water "Dungeons & Dataterminals" setup a lot. The character's total befuddlement in interpreting and operating modern technology was well played for humor and reminded me a lot of the classic old D&D module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks which Yellow Magic should totally take the time to read through (it's easy to find a scan of the 1970-something original online). That said, I was very disappointed I never found a laser gun for my wizard or power armor for my paladin in Les Vis, at least in the time that I played.

The characters' personalities are quite well drawn although they are all a bit one dimensional and over the top the writing is pretty okay. I found Lin annoying but charming, Alexis to be genuinely likeable and competent, Dirk to be quite forgettable except for one reveal that seemed to be swiftly swept under the carpet without much exploration (before I quit anyway), and Tyrell to be an annoying, whiny bitch. Ok, Tyrell, we get it. You don't like Lin because she is constantly tap dancing on your ballsack. So why don't you channel that passive aggression into NOT HEALING HER or something? Oh, right, because I'm trying to finish this game and it's already super fucking hard.

Almost all of the dialogue is the party bickering and while entertaining at points it can quickly become grating.


I took the same screenshot as nhubi for use in my review so I'll just use hers. My caption: Lin is a bitch.


My only other comment about the story is that I wish that other apsects of the game design

As for the aesthetics, they were all right. Mapping was decent and sprites used were unremarkable. I found the vaguely technoish music to be a bit too quiet and subdued for my tastes, especially for battles where I really would have appreciated more intensity and more volume in the music. As far as I can tell, sound effects were RTP. To switch briefly back to graphics, the High Fantasy battle graphics seemed like a very odd choice because their Photoshop/Poser-style seems to quite conflict with the pixel art style used everywhere else in the game. Oh, and while I'm on the monsters, I noticed that many names were for the most part taken straight from Dungeons & Dragons i.e. in this case the graphics' original filenames if I'm not mistaken (I have that pack too). This bothered me mainly because some iconic D&D monsters were not portrayed in a D&D accurate way, i.e. (Mind) Flayers are enormously powerful psychics, not brutes that unthinkingly hit. I did not take points off for this, it just annoyed me.

BOTTOM LINE
As it stands I can't really recommend LesVisV2 to even hardcore fans of fish-out-of-water genre mashing like myself. I'd love to see it get fixed up further however because I really dig the premise and I think with a little work this could be a solid game. Also, finally like...remember this review is just my opinion, potential player. Just because I gave it 2 Stars and nhubi gave it 2 Stars does not in fact mean it is subpar. Just that a couple people didn't love it. So if the premise sounds interesting to you, don't let these reviews stop you from checking it out.

Posts

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Yellow Magic
Could I BE any more Chandler Bing from Friends (TM)?
3154
Thanks for the review!

I agree with a lot of what you say (and welp, I didn't actually check that the Cover ability worked, my bad) - but (and you are entitled to hate me for this), I am genuinely surprised that you found this game too difficult, and indeed, out of the six or so people I have gotten feedback from, you're the first one to have done so. As a result, I have to take your comments re: Balance with a pinch of salt.

Lin was set up to be the most damage-inflicting character, with or without knowledge of enemy weaknesses - Focus + Flashbang/Multi-Flashbang or whatever I called it would decimate most enemy parties in a couple turns, provided you kept her safe. One of Tyrell's skills (I think it was called 'Multi-Cure' or something) regularly restored around 50% of enemy HP...Dirk was the one character I found hard to balance, though, I'll give you that.

Also, I'd really like to know the strategy you used against Sir Kilroy & Friend. Finally,I should probably apologise for misusing D&D monsters - didn't even realise that they were D&D monsters (shows how much I Know about D&D).
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
I didn't buy Focus with Lin but I did buy Multi-Flashbang so I can attest that without Focus it really wasn't very impressive. It seemed to go off something like 2-4 times doing around 40 damage per pop which seemed downright feeble compared to the big hits we were taking from foes (like usually 250-400 damage each from Kilroy). I believe I had equipped a magic damage enhancing item on her too.

Keep in mind that Focus takes a turn to set up and the party's got to keep the very fragile Lin alive for that turn plus however many turns she flashbangs which isn't always easy because two solid hits from just about any enemy will kill her.

One of the tricks to balancing games where the players can customize the characters' skills as they wish is that the player might miss out on skills that are greatly important. I think this was definitely an issue for me with To Arms!. In this case for me it looks like it was at least Focus and Multi-Cure that I really should have taken.

To satisfy your curiosity:
In the Kilroy fight I tried to set up as many buffs as I could on everyone to keep them operational. I had Dirk Haste everyone and I had Alexis Strengthen herself and Dirk. I had Tyrell try to keep everyone healed, but he only had Cure, Revive, Shell, Protect, and Prayer. I tried to have him Protect Lin at the start of the fight but after that he was locked down putting out HP fires. I wasted one of Alexis's turns using Cover on herself hoping that she could help tank hits for Lin and Tyrell to keep them alive. I had Lin "work the rotation" of her elemental magic trying to find a weakpoint for Kilroy after I had her use Multi Flashbang a couple times and noticed that it was doing 'NULL' damage off of the scantily clad ice lady and with random targeting I didn't want to risk it being wasted like that. Anyway it was going...not good...until Kilroy used an ability that hit literally dozens of times for about 70 damage each leaving more of my party members dead than I could possibly re-up.

I also noticed in this battle as in a lot of battles that when I Phoenix-Downed an ally very frequently the enemy would re-kill that ally and/or another ally the next turn, which was very frustrating as again gold was scarce and revival items were rare. That phenomenon is a frustration that can happen in any RPG, though, it's definitely not specific to your game.

I admit that your knowledge of the game's battle balance is probably much deeper than mine. However, that is almost certainly part of the problem here.

If you take nothing else away from this review, definitely be aware that I skipped most enemy encounters because it was possible to skip them, and I felt severely underleveled in subsequent fights. Basically, understand that "forcing" the player to fight can definitely have its benefits.
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
You make a lot of valid statements, but of the potential points of criticism that could be brought up regarding Les Visiteurs Dans L'Espace, I honestly did not consider balancing to be one. I, for once, found it refreshing to have party members that weren't all equally useful offensively, but rather depended on each other's support to survive in battle and defeat the enemies. (Later in the game, Tyrell actually became my most precious character, because his group healing spell is incredibly powerful, while Dirk could quickly restore his MP). Now I know that I am fairly hardcore when it comes to RPG combat and I like a challenge which requires strategy. Which I found in this game. It might be difficult, yes - but imbalanced?
(Just for your information, I skipped a whole lot of encounters, hardly ever used items and also never bothered to use Lin's "Focus" abilty.)

P.S.: I really like the name Dungeons & Dataterminals. Did you come up with that yourself?


Edit: And of course you replied quicker than me. Oh well.
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
I, for once, found it refreshing to have party members that weren't all equally useful offensively, but rather depended on each other's support to survive in battle and defeat the enemies. (Later in the game, Tyrell actually became my most precious character, because his group healing spell is incredibly powerful, while Dirk could quickly restore his MP).

Oh, I had no problem with Tyrell being offensively useless. I actually thought that was neat. It was just that the other characters didn't seem to be making up for it or picking up his slack enough in my opinion. I guess generally speaking it just really doesn't feel good when my attacks are doing that much less than the enemy's.

Which I found in this game. It might be difficult, yes - but imbalanced? (Just for your information, I skipped a whole lot of encounters, hardly ever used items and also never bothered to use Lin's "Focus" abilty.)

I don't know what's going on, then. I mean, are you suggesting I'm lying? I mean I don't actually think you are, but barring that, either we had very conspicuously different brushes with the RNG, or the version I played wasn't quite the same as the version you played. Because the version I played was, while not strictly impossible, was definitely what I would call "impossible to proceed without extensive grinding" at the point where I quit.

P.S.: I really like the name Dungeons & Dataterminals. Did you come up with that yourself?

Yes, quite. It was the original planned title for this review back when I thought it was going to be positive/neutral recommendation.

Now I know that I am fairly hardcore when it comes to RPG combat and I like a challenge which requires strategy.

Anyway I could definitely use someone like you as a tester on my games in future. Since going back to around '08-'10 I have been getting the impression that they're a bit too challenging for the broadest audiences.
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
author=Max McGee
Oh, I had no problem with Tyrell being offensively useless. I actually thought that was neat. It was just that the other characters didn't seem to be making up for it or picking up his slack enough in my opinion. I guess generally speaking it just really doesn't feel good when my attacks are doing that much less than the enemy's.
I totally get that, even though I learned to look less at the numbers and more at "how long can this character/enemy survive if I keep going like this?". But it probably really depends on what you expect from each character. I only really used Lin and Alexis for damage, while Dirk and Tyrell handled support. Status effects can be crucial at times.


author=Max McGee
I don't know what's going on, then. I mean, are you suggesting I'm lying? I mean I don't actually think you are, but barring that, either we had very conspicuously different brushes with the RNG, or the version I played wasn't quite the same as the version you played.
No, of course I don't think you're lying. I mean, why on earth would you? I was just expressing my astonishment at the fact you found this game so overwhelmingly difficult while I and several others had less problems with it.
And of course, it's possible the RNG just hated you, and that Cover bug is definitely problematic. But I can assure you that it definitely is possible to beat this game. (If I may ask, what level were your characters at?)
In case you're curious, the main parts of my strategy were:
- inflicting as many status effects on enemies as possible right at the beginning (Dirk's Poison Dagger, Ingnite and Nerve Stab as well as the side effects of Lin's stronger elemental spells, hence why I never used Flashbang)
- excessive and sometimes even preemptive healing with Tyrell (using Dirk's Invigorate to refill his MP, and Haste to make sure Tyrell can act before an enemy defeats a weakened party member)
- Strengthen on self and lots of Falcon Barrage with Alexis for big physical damage (not useful against Sir Kilroy, of course)
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
It is weird.

I had just bought Nerve Stab with dirk but I never saw it actually go off and stick. I seemed to be having very shit luck with the status effect component of Lin's spells too (although 30% isn't a very high percentage anyway).

One thing I really never had trouble with was MP, because generally speaking characters have a lot of it and full heal points aren't too rare. That's a detail I failed to mention until now.
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
Yeah, that's definitely the big downside of randomly applied status effects. Though, to be fair, the stronger versions of Lin's spells have a higher chance (50%) of inflicting a status effect in addition to being a lot stronger - which is why I thought they are a better investment than most of her other skills. Dirk's ignite does always succeed, which is nice, but unfortunately that's not the case with his other skills.

True. The only character that sometimes gave me serious MP trouble was Tyrell, because his stronger spells require enormous amounts. Lin on the other hand was never a problem, especially not after unlocking Osmose.
Yellow Magic
Could I BE any more Chandler Bing from Friends (TM)?
3154
author=Max McGee
Keep in mind that Focus takes a turn to set up and the party's got to keep the very fragile Lin alive for that turn plus however many turns she flashbangs which isn't always easy because two solid hits from just about any enemy will kill her.
Besides the various buffs here and there, Alexis has a move called Falcon Shield (which can be learned fairly early IIRC) which strengthens all characters defense/magic defense quite a bit for a turn or two. Did you ever try using it?

One of the tricks to balancing games where the players can customize the characters' skills as they wish is that the player might miss out on skills that are greatly important. I think this was definitely an issue for me with To Arms!. In this case for me it looks like it was at least Focus and Multi-Cure that I really should have taken.
I think you're right - it's pretty easy to miss out. However, in that case it's probably best to try and pick skillsets that'd work universally rather than aiming to predict what lies ahead in the next couple of battles...if that makes sense.

To satisfy your curiosity:
In the Kilroy fight I tried to set up as many buffs as I could on everyone to keep them operational. I had Dirk Haste everyone and I had Alexis Strengthen herself and Dirk. I had Tyrell try to keep everyone healed, but he only had Cure, Revive, Shell, Protect, and Prayer. I tried to have him Protect Lin at the start of the fight but after that he was locked down putting out HP fires. I wasted one of Alexis's turns using Cover on herself hoping that she could help tank hits for Lin and Tyrell to keep them alive. I had Lin "work the rotation" of her elemental magic trying to find a weakpoint for Kilroy after I had her use Multi Flashbang a couple times and noticed that it was doing 'NULL' damage off of the scantily clad ice lady and with random targeting I didn't want to risk it being wasted like that. Anyway it was going...not good...until Kilroy used an ability that hit literally dozens of times for about 70 damage each leaving more of my party members dead than I could possibly re-up.
Oh, I see why you found it impossible then: (Battle spoilers ahead)


- You might have noticed the "Ultimate Regen" spell being cast by Friend (I'm just calling her Friend but I swear she had another name. I don't remember any of this man), and the fact that Kilroy's CQC attack damaged himself - because of the Ultimate Regen, though, the HP lost via CQC was being fully recovered each turn...So going straight for Kilroy was a doomed strategy from the get-go.

- I guess this next part's a bit scummy, but Friend is invulnerable to all magic attacks. Therefore, the only real way to go in the battle is to assault Friend with physical attacks (leaving Lin kinda useless, but at least she could defend herself with Focus/support with Items), and once she's dead, survive against Kilroy's CQC onslaught for a couple of turns until his HP dropped to a point where you could kill him with a single attack. Oh, and Kilroy uses "Falcon Wrath" every 4th turn or so just to catch you out (I do this with a lot of enemies in the game, actually)

Yeah, I know, not immediately obvious how to go about things here, but I didn't exactly want to make an easy ride of a game, and other players seemed to have managed fine against the boss anyway.


I also noticed in this battle as in a lot of battles that when I Phoenix-Downed an ally very frequently the enemy would re-kill that ally and/or another ally the next turn, which was very frustrating as again gold was scarce and revival items were rare. That phenomenon is a frustration that can happen in any RPG, though, it's definitely not specific to your game.
Yeah, in hindsight I should have increased the amount of HP recovered by a character when they were revived.

I admit that your knowledge of the game's battle balance is probably much deeper than mine. However, that is almost certainly part of the problem here.
Well, yeah, I made the game. However, interestingly enough, there seem to be strategies players took that even I was not aware existed! NeverSilent is a good example of this apparently, as I'm reading his comments here and am just like "That was a thing???"

If you take nothing else away from this review, definitely be aware that I skipped most enemy encounters because it was possible to skip them, and I felt severely underleveled in subsequent fights. Basically, understand that "forcing" the player to fight can definitely have its benefits.
I think you already know my feelings about this 8) The amount of levelling needed to beat a boss should be entirely up to the player - if they feel they're underpowered they have all the freedom in the world to do something about it. If they can't be bothered and want to do a low-level strategy of something, fair play. We're gonna have to agree to disagree here.

Just a point to add regarding the conversation you two are having (which is pretty damn cool to see, by the way):

Outside of Burn status (because of which Dirk's Ignite exists), I never really intended for player-induced status effects to be more than a bonus. Yes, there was the incentive in the 50% effect chance for the higher-grade element skills, but I wondered whether players would accept this risk trade-off instead of the Multi-Flashbang. Now, funnily enough, I can't help but wonder if NeverSilent understands my battle system more than I do LOL



EDIT: By the way Max:

My only other comment about the story is that I wish that other apsects of the game design
Just curious if you had anything to add to this line?
NeverSilent
Got any Dexreth amulets?
6280
author=Yellow Magic
Now, funnily enough, I can't help but wonder if NeverSilent understands my battle system more than I do
Hehe... That's pretty funny, actually. Though I don't think it's necessarily about understanding the system better or worse, just about finding a strategic approach that works for you as a player. That's an individual thing, and I'm just the type of player who values healing and damage over time more than straight attack power. Different people will choose different approaches.

Regarding balancing and my thoughts on Mega-Flashbang, there are multiple reasons why I found it a poor alternative to the elemental spells: a) Because it is very expensive both in terms of SP and MP. b) It cannot be used in a controlled way because it randomly targets enemies. c) It cannot apply status effects at all. d) And because it is non-elemental, it's not possible to hit an enemy's weakpoint with it for bonus damage. And since most enemies have at least one elemental weakness, the game encourages experimenting with the elemental spells more than going for the neutral Flashbang damage.

If there were enemies that are resistant to all elements (are there any? I don't exactly remember), and/or if Flashbang simply dealt more damage to begin with, I would have found it a more viable option. But as it is, it felt like an inferior choice to me.

The low HP replenishing upon reviving definitely is a bit uncool, I agree. It makes Tyrell's ultimate revival spell almost indispensable during boss battles, and makes other methods of reviving become kind of useless...


P.S.: @Max McGee:
I also found that healing items (Health Pills) were very weak and
There is also this sentence in the review that is seemingly cut off. Were you going somewhere specific with this or was it an accident?
Max McGee
with sorrow down past the fence
9159
i confess i cannot remember how i was going to finish that OTHER unfinished sentence orz

i think faster than i can type

I was going to say that Health Pills felt both cheap and scarce.

- I guess this next part's a bit scummy, but Friend is invulnerable to all magic attacks. Therefore, the only real way to go in the battle is to assault Friend with physical attacks (leaving Lin kinda useless, but at least she could defend herself with Focus/support with Items), and once she's dead, survive against Kilroy's CQC onslaught for a couple of turns until his HP dropped to a point where you could kill him with a single attack. Oh, and Kilroy uses "Falcon Wrath" every 4th turn or so just to catch you out (I do this with a lot of enemies in the game, actually)

Yeah, I know, not immediately obvious how to go about things here, but I didn't exactly want to make an easy ride of a game, and other players seemed to have managed fine against the boss anyway.

See, I actually assumed the opposite gimmick, that Kilroy had to be defeated before the chick behind him could be damaged at all, because of the way he's standing in front of her. I thought he was protecting her or something.
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