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This is The End!

  • Kylaila
  • 01/06/2015 05:14 PM
  • 1178 views
"The End" is a short RPG about the actual ending of your RPG. What happens when all calms down and our heroes are ready to settle down?
It was made for the MOG Creation event and features a colorful mix of different graphic and music resources. Themewise, it reminds me a little bit of Space Funeral backwards.

Our group of heroes is about to defeat the vile demonlord to save their world once and for all! All that is left is to enjoy the peace they created, but alas, the world suddenly begins to change. So it is up to you to get your original world back.

The story runs on two layers.
The first is about the group of heroes defending evil, the second is about the meta-level of game creation - what does the end of the story mean?

And similarily, the group of heroes is likeable on their own - your evil warmagus cares lovingly for his adopted son, for example. But they also are a parody of your typical adventure party. The hero with no real connection what-so-ever, the ranger who is out for revenge, former enemies, they are all there.



So this is why they keep going.


However, while the catch is definitely on the characters, the world and their story, you will spend most of your time in dungeons.

Now, there is a difficulty selection which allows for someone who is out there for the story and I would advise to choose this route.
The harder option is not yet hard, but I suppose it might lengthen the battles. You can beat boss fights even with equipment that reduces your combat abilities in order to gain more EP.
There is one fight where you can be in danger should you not manage to stop a certain attack - but the solutions are spelled out for you, which should not be done. At least not in the higher difficulty.

There are no random, but touch encounters. You will have trouble avoiding them as your party members walk behind you and trigger fights as well. I would estimate that you will have to fight 70% of them even if you try your hardest to avoid them.


These are still easy to dodge!

In battle, you use spells with AP gained by hitting and being hit as well as SP, which is your managauge that starts out full. Spells are tiered and need either more SP or AP. The "lower" ones need few AP, but high SP while higher ones need more AP, but few SP.

Yet there is no reason at all for the SP gauge to exist, as you can simply ignore it. It regenerates far too quickly to ever be an issue - as such, equipment that boosts the SP gauge or its regenerations are obsolete as well.
AP is not a huge issue, either, as you will need to use your lower tier spells a lot (2 characters have a heal spell in this tier) - especially in tough fights it will stay full.

Equipment is fairly imbalanced. There are ones that apply status effects to your attack, make you attack twice and are useful - but then there are ones which give minimalistic boosts which you can barely notice, or some that simply do not work or are not worth using.
For example, the training shield is supposed to give you a def boost after a normal attack while reducing attack overall. Fairly nice for Luna who is often supporting or healing during bossfights. Yet it simply does not work. It will "fail" every single time.

There is an item that only activates upon character death .. which makes it hard to use as you do have a hard time dying. And I as an item conserver would not purposely kill teammates to resurrect them with items I need to buy again.

The demon armor has too little effect for me to use as well - it makes you more vulnerable to attacks, but gives an attack boost once you are attacked/targetted. Except you do not want to be attacked wearing it. The only one who could be possibly useful with it would be Iggy who can increase his evasion greatly.. but I admit I did not try this combination. It made my characters too vulnerable to keep using it.

There are items to regenerate after fights as well .. but you are healed so greatly after fights that I never came out harmed.
Generally, the only item worth spending money on is the revive one. And during the entire game I only used one.

The spell variation is quite nice and allows setting up combos or just going for an attack spam. A few character notes.


However, I cannot find proper use for it and most boosts Swiftheart can use take too long to be very effective; or so it seemed to me.
Luna's heart-shaped spell/odd heal I completely ignored as a direct heal seemed to be far more effective and the AP better used for the attack spell.
Ark's low tier spells seem to be lacking as well. I have never really been able to find good use for them. It seemed always better to save up for stronger spells.
Iggy's setup is solid imo, you can do a lot with him and he is fairly strong to boot. You can use pretty much all of it.


All in all, the battles drag on for far too long for no good reason. I do not mind fighting many battles, but the long cast animations and the fairly high enemy HP made it quite a bother.
You could resort to attack-spam with few healing in between for all random encounters which was both faster and more effective.

You can easily see that a lot of effort went into the battles, but they still remain as the downside of the game. As this game will be polished up in the future, I would love to see this system work well. As it is, it does not.


The world remains with its constant change in graphics, music and atmosphere. And while these changes could easily be jarring, they are in fact not - the very last dungeon may get on your nerves a tiny little bit, but rightly so.
Most of the MOG resources have been used, but they are handpicked and well-chosen, music and graphics blend together nicely, so does the dialogue.
For example, once the graphics shift into old-school ones, all NPC dialogue is in capital letters only.
The light humourous tone works splendidly as well. The first thing that happens once your characters turn into something else is to make fun of themselves and to explore the fear of being turned into 100% vegetable.

The music is unexpectedly enjoyeable, especially the later battle-theme (black-whiteish graphics) is simply gorgeus. It made the later battles much much more fun.
Of course, a few things are out there. There are a few typos, there are passable objects, there are a few tunes that could be better (the endboss theme was a little bit disappointing compared to the normal battle theme, for one), but considering that this is a contest game, I can only be impressed by how well all these different elements come together.

It is a wonderful lighthearted game with a serious theme staying underneath it, however, the battles can be a little bit tiring.

Posts

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Thanks for the kind review! :D

Wait...

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE SPARRING SHIELD FAILS?! GAH!

This is what happens when I'm testing the combat equipment at past midnight, trying to get it done on time... ;_;

I'm going to fix that problem asap. Sorry. :(

And when I have time again, I'm going to fix this up and vastly improve the combat system. Probably going to change a lot of the skills too. They looked perfect on paper, but only when I was making the gameplay part of the game during the last 4 days of the contest did I realize they had some holes in them. :(
Sounds like an event game to me, haha.
It's really great considering all that, really looking forward to a polished up version!
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