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The 8532th Samurai

  • Ilan14
  • 10/01/2015 06:13 PM
  • 1684 views
THE GAMEMAKER PRESENTS THE REVIEW OF:

CHAPTER 1: AWAKENING


NOTE: This review only reflects my personal opinion, and people may differ from what I think of the game. Some people may think that this is the best game ever, some people may think that this is a piece of crap that must be burned to ashes immediately. If you, the developer, agree with the points in my review or not, it's up to you.

This one's a review that I've promsied the developer to make before I made the Eling: First Dimension review, but as it has become an habit of mine, I postponed it for a long while. But no more! Today I bring you a review of this game which apparently is the first installment of a new RPG series(trilogy?), which has caught my attention for it's curious Duel Combat System, so I was like: "Man, I have to see what this shit is all about! XD".

So let's go see what's all about!

IGMC. Each year, at an special month, the Indie Game Making Contest recieves multitudes of contestants, with the objective of making a game in the lapse of one month. These contestants are there, some just for the fun of gamemaking, some to get a chance to put their game on the map, and others do it for the money. Excatly, because in IGMC there are in game thousands of dollars in prizes, which is in itself a great incentive for participating in this contest.

This is the review about one of the entries of this already over contest, and at the start of this review, there's only one thing left to ask:

Was this game an experience truly deserving of maybe, just maybe, one of the prizes at the IGMC? If you saw the score beforehand (which is really likely), you already know the answer. :P


WARNING: There are high chances of finding bad jokes in the screenshots below.




So basically, Blacksword Chronicles starts with a mysterious man (the main character) waking up in an abandoned room, with no memory of who he is or where he is, only remembering the phrase: "Jurdin Kylor must die.". In that same room, he finds a black sword in the floor, so obviously he takes it with him and goes out of the room. After saving a girl named Irene from a bunch of soldiers who tried to rape her (Typical...), he adopts the name of Dust and finds out that he's in the town of Myth Laurelin, a once famous city of mages now turned into a slum governed by the Sword Lord, a tyrannical leader that started excavations in the city for unknown reasons.

The plot of this game will tell us the quest of Dust, as he eventually gets in the way of the Sword Lord plans for the city, while at the same time trying to remember his identity, his past and more importantly, to answer the question: Who is Jurdin Kylor, and why he has to die?

The story is quite simple, and it can get into cliche territory very frequently with characters like main character Dust, a stoic and cool-headed swordsman that doesn't says much, and love interest Irene, an innocent and pure-hearted barmaid/damsel in distress; but it still manages to be entertaining enough not to suck. Of course, given the nature of the game, there're going to be many questions left unanswered. Especially:

What was the ritual with the half-buried kids for?


It also has the plus of having no visible grammar errors as far as I know, which is always welcome.



Classic love story. Boy meets Girl. Soldiers try to rape Girl. Boy saves Girl from Soldiers. Girl starts following Boy everywhere without regards to personal health. :P




I played through this game in the Normal difficulty. So I'm analyzing this section with that in fact.

But what truly makes this game shine is it's battle system, which is a modification of the Yami Symphony Battle System that turns it into a rock-paper-scissors style duel system. Here's the deal:

On the GUI, you'll be shown(in order from left to right) three moves that the enemy will make, and you'll have to respond to them by also making three moves using the arrow keys before the timer in the center of the GUI runs out. So the UP key will be to Slash, the LEFT key will be to Thrust, the DOWN key will be to Hack, and the RIGHT key will be to Parry. After that, you and the enemy will excecute your moves at the same time, and you'll have to make sure that the move you've chosen is the one that trumps the move of the enemy, allowing you to damage him.

That way, Slash beats Thrust, Thrust beats Hack, and Hack beats Slash. Parry, on the other hand allows you to fully evade one enemy move at cost of 2 Aura Points, which are also used to make special attacks, which are excecuted after making a certain combination of moves. These special attacks can only be acquired during the plot, and while these are useful, they are not essential to use except for the point in which you get your first special attack.

Eventually, you can end up facing up to three enemies at the same time, and while all of them have a different move sequence, you'll have to use the same move sequence for every enemy. What that means is that you'll have to take in account the moves of your enemies at the moment of choosing your own moves and sometimes you'll have to sacrifice hitting an enemy in order to hit another.

It should work like that, but here's my only grip with the battle system, and is that if you don't have a high Reflex attribute, in later battles the timer will run out pretty quickly, which at many points it will leave you with the only option of using the same move three times. Or at least that's what happened to me... :(

Leaving aside that, the battle system is pretty cool, simple to learn, yet challenging enough to keep the fun during the playtrough. Other things to note are an interesting minigame in which you'll have to resist hordes of zombies(altough you'll need a good amount of HP if you want to make it through it...) and two puzzles.

The first one involves solving two riddles by looking through books in a library, which was very clever, although it took me a while to figure out the solutions... And the second one involves looking for three crystal shards in the Sword Lord's private garden. And while this sounds simple, this puzzle gets spoiled by the design of the map.

I don't know if this was intentional or not, but the tilesets of this map create many passability issues that makes hard to get through the puzzle. You cannot pass from behind things like trees or pillars, and it's not really clear how you get through certain sections of the map. It took me 10 minutes to figure out that you could go down one of the wines in a certain wall, not to mention that the crystal shards themselves were hard to distinguish due to it's size and the palette of the tilesets.

Aside from that, there were no other passability errors I could discern.



Oooh, he definetly knows how to use it, Pug. And how!




As for graphics, the tilesets are a mix of VX Ace RTP and custom tilesets from many known sources, and here are used in an exceptional way. If you can get past the errors in the Sword Lord's Garden, that map is probably the most beautiful of the bunch, with no doubts. The developer said in it's gamepage that the maps were made by a mapper of renown, and her talent really shows here.

The facesets and charsets are also custom. The facesets look borrowed from other sources, but they still look good and don't clash negatively, and the charsets are made in Mack style, which giving the tilesets used, it's really adequate.

But what I would like to point out are the custom battlers and battle animations. These battlers are fully customized and I must say that they look really impressive! It must have took quite the time and effort to make these, and that alone is worthy of admiration. And the animations for these battlers complement them perfectly.

Again, these battlers were made also by a renown spriter, so seriously: Good job for you! :D



The Sword Lord's Garden is probably the most beautiful map in the game. And if you're not able to get around the passability errors, you're going to be here for a while...




And at last, but not least, the soundtrack which track are taken from many sources. That said, just as the graphics, these tracks are used really well, each one fitting to a T(this is how the phrase is said, right?) the different scenes and events of the game. The battle theme was great too, it had a cool oriental vibe. Sounds are RTP.



And so, my 5th review on this site finally ends. So in the end, is Blacksword Chronicles material for an IGMC prize?

In my perspective: Maybe. It's certainly not a perfect game as I let you know, then again, there's no such thing as a perfect game. But it was certainly a very fun experience, and if it was for me, this game would have at least a minor prize in the IGMC. But I'm not, and the fate of this game will be determinated by the true judges of the event; so now, the only thing we can do is to wait to the final results and see which game will become one of the prized ones and which not...

But even though the IGMC ended, the story of Dust is not over yet, and when the second installment of this series comes to life, I will be there. Because I'm the GameMaker. And I. Make. Reviews!

...Okay, that didn't made much sense... O.O



Oh... I am soooo screwed... D:




- A simple, yet really great combat system.
- The story is entertaining despite it's clichedness.(!?)
- The maps are really beautiful, especially the Sword Lord's Garden despite it's flaws.
- Lots of custom graphics put to good use.
- Excellent soundtrack that fits the mood of each situation perfectly.




- In combat, the time limit to choose moves may run out a little too quickly in later battles.
- The passability issues in the Sword Lord's Garden may make solving the puzzle there difficult.
- The story is quite cliche. I wouldn't play this game if you're not fond of the Damsel in Distress trope... XD


Final Rating: 4 Stars


For future reference, here's a list showing what I consider the stars to mean:
N/A - Not Available: This game has not a note. This is probably because either the game is a demo, is a joke game, or the game is simply sooooo horrible that giving it a note would be doing it a favor...
0.5 - Abysmal: The lowest grade possible in an RMN review. For a game to get this note, it must have failed in absolutely every aspect that makes a game to the point of not having any redeemable qualities. I wouldn't give this game even to my worst enemy.
1 - Terrible: This game sucks badly. Whatever it was trying to accomplish gets lost in a sea of badly designed and/or implemented game elements. It may have very few good qualities which is what saves it from being Abysmal.
1.5 - Bad: This game has some good qualities, but sadly, these end up overweighted by the many flaws that surround it. You may find some enjoyment in this game, but don't expect it to last much.
2 - Mediocre: There was a clear potential for this game, but it ended up failing to live up to it's premise. Only recommended if you like the game's genre.
2.5 - Subpar: While this game isn't exactly bad, there were a few important flaws that leave this game below the average standards. It's still enjoyable, but only to a certain extent.
3 - Average: Basically, a game that has a fair share of pros and cons. It could be better, but is still worth a shot.
3.5 - Good: A game that with a couple of good qualities, manages to stand up between the Average games. It still has a long way to go, but it's a step on the right direction.
4 - Great: This game gets a lot of things right and manages to be an enjoyable experience. It's still not exempt of cons though, which deprives it from getting a higher score.
4.5 - Awesome: A game that regardless of the genre, it's totally worth the play. You'll have fun with it from beginning to end, and the memories of it will remain fresh in your head for a long while. It doesn't get the perfect score by this much.
5 - Epic (Win): The perfect score. This game is sooooo great that you probably won't believe me until you play it. So, no matter what you're doing right now, stop it, download the game, and PLAY IT! Trust me, you won't regret it... :)