• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

A story so schizophrenic in tone that you'll feel it needs immediate psychiatric help.

  • Mirak
  • 03/19/2016 06:07 AM
  • 5717 views
What

I saw this game in the new entries list and had to give it a try thanks in part to the summary and this wonderful screenshot of the game.


With a pic like this i'm sold!


From that summary, I also learned this game was an entry in the Swap In The Middle With You event, and so, bear in mind the game in itself couldn't have been made in more than 3 weeks. Is a game made in 2 ½ weeks worth your time? Read on and find out!

Playing the game (spoilers ahead, skip down for content analysis)


The first thing i noticed when i opened the game was the great RTP intro theme blaring at full volume in my eardrums. I guess that teaches me to look at my volume levels before opening projects like this. The gamepage advertises an A-M-A-Z-I-N-G soundtrack, so hopefully there will be something other than the A-M-A-Z-I-N-G rtp to go along with this crazy ride. Although that will remain to be seen, since there is no music at all at the start of the game.

We are shown a vision of a ship and then we receive a bit of expository text dump that informs you about the general gist of the game; You're Natalie, a person who wants to find the Peace Sword in order to stop a war or something. You're on a ship that's going... Somewhere and you decide to make port on some town in order to find a place to rest. At this point you're introduced to the moral choice mechanic, you're given two polarizing options, be a psychopatic neo-hitler that kills everything or be a pious paragon of justice and goodness that only kills when absolutely necessary. You'll find various spots in the game where you're forced to choose the path of McGood or McDick and the final ending depends on which path you took the most.

After much *yawning* (by your characters, hopefully not you), you dock the ship and can move. Joining you are three more guys. All you need to know about them you can discover in the status screen. You can walk around and get used to the many locked houses you can find until you find the inn. I don't know if the rhyming on this particular section was intentional, but it gave me a giggle nonetheless since i don't know what kind of tone the game is trying to set up so far, it started with seriousness due to the plot dump at the begginning making note of how the game world has been ravaged by war and stuff, then goes on to perform a dr. Seuss impression outside of an inn in the middle of the night.

After you spend the night here, you'll be able to enter houses and talk to people. The conversations are between the NPC's and all or some of the members in your party. This can get a bit confusing since we don't really know our character's names by memory by this point so one moment the npc is talking, the next one of our party members is talking but you don't know who since other than the names displayed above the box, there are no faces displayed in the chatboxes when one of our party members talk, and so on...

You can find a guy on a carpet who can change the look of your characters to gag characters instead, for instance, i changed my party into a cat, a dog, a little girl and a mounted guard. It is a quirky little feature, but i wonder if it should exist, given the central theme of the game. Regardless, the feature is there.

When you woke up your main character said something along the lines of "ok let's go back to the ship", so you go to it, but it is gone. It is nowhere to be found. Your characters don't make a note of the ship disappearance though, so since no one is saying anything, the only way forward seems to be north right? Wrong. It turns out the event that makes the story proceed doesn't activate if you walk towards the ship from the wrong port, problem is, i walked through the RIGHT port which was the first port from left to right, but the trigger event was, for some reason, in THE SECOND PORT. I stepped on it by mere chance, so if you hit a roadblock at this point, try walking down the second port instead of the first or third one.

Anyways, once the event finally triggers, your characters notice the lack of a ship and ponder what to do. All of a sudden, a piercing woman's shriek is heard! That means i have to lower the fucking volume again because by the way, the game has been running in complete silence so far. No music has played since I started playing, so the scream coming all of a sudden gave me a slight startle

You go north, and find so much blood indeed. You begin your first series of battles here and you get to listen to another A-M-A-Z-I-N-G track at last! It's one of the RTP battle themes. At this point you get to meet one of the antagonists of the game, some dude called Joel. Or was it Noel? You fight a few soldiers and depending on which choice you made in the latest branching path, you'll fight more battles or you'll opt for talking. Assuming you're killing stuff here, you'll disappear the soldier sprites on the map everytime you beat them in battle, but the sprites of the fallen soldiers will reappear when you go somewhere else and come back. They won't do anything though.

At this point i got slightly lost. There's lots of bodies and blood splatters around, and there seem to be many open houses for you to visit, but the game is really picky when it comes to which house it'll let you in. Even if you try entering some houses that are clearly open, nothing will happen if you stand on the entryway or try to enter by interacting with the open door, except for a single house in the upper right corner, which warps you to a room with another corpse and nothing else.

The correct way is all the way to the left, via a dirt road. On the next map there's more random splotches of blood and another house you can't go in, although you can walk over the open door and on the roof of the nearest house in a display of mapping oversight. I pressed on. You walk all the way to the left until you finally get to the scene with the bird. Mind you, it's hilarious. The author used a slowed down chicken cluck for the bird, for christ's sake. At one point, the main character sprite changes, and doesn't turn back to the sprite you chose if you changed your looks at the carpet guy, which is a shame because i thought i could beat the game as a cat. Oh well.


WELL? DO YOU MEAN IT?


You save your game after the cutscene, and the game continues... Onto another cutscene! You arrive to the place you needed to go to, and there's an army waiting for you. The eventing here makes it so there's a large pause from the screen panning to the cutscene actually proceeding, so you might be forgiven for thinking the game froze or something. If you wait enough though, Noel the bad guy will finally talk and proceed the cutscene, after which the screen will pan again and make you wait another couple of seconds. The second time the screen pans too far away and the heroes get pushed off-screen even though they're talking. Apparently the chicken burned the entire army to death because you're warped without an explanation into another place, some mountain.

Your character goes "BY THE GODS, THE PEACE CRYSTALS", then you can walk all over them. In this place there are random encounters, and the foe is strong, and you have no healing items, and there is no inn or place to get more health. "This is going to be a super fun part of the game isn't it?", I thought, as I clenched my teeth and pressed on, disregarding the tortured expression on my face.


What do i do? Where do i go? There's a bridge there but i can't walk on it what is going on?


One of my characters died. When he did, his sprite turned into a mesh of cut-off genie sprites. By the way, and I feel I need to keep mentioning this, apart from the battle theme the game has no other music when walking on maps. It sucks that i have to put a podcast or something to bear the silence, and then i have to pause it everytime i battle. I wish the developers had decided whether to use music entirely or not use it at all.

At the end of a few mountain paths you reach a stone tablet that signals the end of a developer's work and the beginning of the other's. The next portion of the game is extreme. As in, it's an extremely big map with extremely labirynthian paths and no clear indication of the direction you're supposed to be taking. Fortunately, i somehow found the right path on the first try, keeping casualties at a minimum. You then walk ominously through a path of pillars until the next screen breaks all illusions of tension from the game by doing stuff like this


Just decide on a fucking tone already.


At this point i wanted this to end, so i skipped the dialogue of the friendly monsters you encounter in this next map in order to advance to the next portion as quickly as possible. I passed a ghost that said something along the lines of "this door is fake try the other one" but i was like "i can't open your door anyway since it is floating on top of the wall and not the opening".

I think i skipped the final boss, since you find a monster and some guards sleeping on a throne. I walked sticking myself to the left wall and entered the final room, where you find the Peace Sword.

You get it, and the end credits roll. Peace is restored somehow.
You can enjoy the ending you got. There are various endings. I don't have the strenght to watch them all.

Gameplay and Content

The grammar is lacking in some parts of the game, and there's prominent usage of onomatopoeias and *action asterisks*, this might be a deal breaker for some, but i personally did not mind much.

The tiles seem to be the RTP's but that is sort of expected given the time restrictions of the project plus the swapping between developers. The ships were well mapped, considering the usual difficulty of doing this with the jumbled jigsaw puzzle-like composition of the tiles in the engine. The same can't be said about some town and map layouts and some rushed jobs in-buildings. Most of the houses are inaccesible and you can walk on top of a black entrance to reach the roof tiles of some buildings. Is this kind of shoddy map design expected from a rush job? Opinions on this matter are divided between the people i asked, but the general consensus is that no, there's a lot in this game that could have been done better.

Still, it was a joint effort that gave fruit. A small, odorless and bland fruit, but fruit is fruit, and if you're hungry, like really really hungry, you can have this as a snack, or find better fruit somewhere else.

Score: 1.0

Posts

Pages: 1
Thanks a bunch for the well-done and insightful review, Mirak! I will first off quote myself, from a post I made not too long ago.

author=luiishu535
When I first got this game, I decided to fix a lot of stuff and trust me, I did. After I noticed that the game almost had no music I started getting some ideas. It was when Falkion first appeared that I decided to change my plan. I got some really trippy vibes after playing the game, it really blew my mind. I think that some of the errors added to that vibe, since I decided to go far a style similar with Ghost n' Goblin's English translation mixed with the Fight Hard Yeah! guy. I think this made the game more fun + I didn't want to finish this game as a super generic JRPG. There will of course be a lot of mixed opinions on this; not everyone will get it, but if someone does, then I hope that person had a fun time.

This game is basically a trippy WTF experience, with some deep questions like "what's wrong and what's right?" and "even if I succeed, does it even matter in the end?".
Due to the nature of the contest, I was unable to change a lot of things (hence the lack of music in the game and certain other aspects). I agree on you on the bizarre change of tone throughout the game. As I said earlier, I wanted the game to be completely random. After a player has played this game, I want them to basically think "what the frak did I just play?" and "I tried so hard and got so far, but in the end, it doesn't even matter.".

In case you'd ever like to replay the game, then I tip you to play through the Peace Route (basically, you find other solutions than just "kill everything"). It's a different experience and even leads to a different ending, which comes packed with a TWIST!

EDIT: The cutscene near the port should be triggered on both sides. I'll have to take a look at it.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
You were totally allowed to add music if there was none and fix mistakes. Granted, given what you got for your half, I have to give you props for the wild and crazy continuation you did.

Still, you are allowed to fix bugs the other person left you, and this game is positively riddled with bugs. If you answer a certain way, the bad guy will set a town on fire, which is shown by the screen tinted orange-red. That tint will stay there throughout the entire game. There are a ton of places where you can walk on rooftops but can't walk on stuff you're supposed to, and at one point you are given a choice of whether or not to fight a guy and if you fight him, the game says "he's immortal" and you're given an instant game-over (which probably isn't a bug, but is pretty damn mean XD). I applaud Mirak for even getting to the end; he has more patience that I do XD

All in all, I respect the enthusiasm in which you tackled this game and tried to complete it, but again, you were allowed to fix broken stuff that the first developer made. I know it would have taken a lot of time to fix all of that (I played the game back when it was just the first half, and owch, it is really poor and buggy as hell) but I would have liked to see you at least try to fix some of the more glaring bugs and gameplay issues.
What? :O I thought that the choice of no music was a stylistic choice! That's why I didn't edit anything. :S It was weird, but I thought it was the intention of Zero3D to have a lack of music, since a lot of people like to mute the game audio and just listen to Spoofy or something.

Like I said before, I did fix A LOT of bugs, both gameplay-wise and grammar-wise. I decided to roll with the bugs instead, after being so inspired by Falkion, the lack of music AND THE FACT THAT YOU COULD CHANGE YOUR ENTIRE PARTY INTO ANIMALS! xD

About the tint: yes, of course I noticed it, but I didn't see it as a defined "bug/glitch". Instead, I decided that it was just a very weird coincidence. xD
Mirak
Stand back. Artist at work. I paint with enthusiasm if not with talent.
9300
grumpy alert grumpy alert hoot hoot viewer discretion advised
I can only speak for my own experience, but the problem with the "i want people to go WTF when they play this game" thing is that it is still not an enjoyable or fun experience (sans the chicken) because being perplexed or confused is not fun. Even randomness needs a bit of consistency, one setpiece needs to high five the next one, there has to be a connection which opens up the way for the actual random moment to be at a correct level of absurdity to evoke some laughter. The Falkion thing worked for me because it came at the right moment, the fact that it comes in time to help the heroes at the moment where the plot demanded it in what seems to be a heroic hopeful moment, and right as it arrives it clucks like a chicken is absurd enough to make me laugh, even more because no one seems to be bothered by that and they keep a straight face. In contrast, a character suddenly acting wacky and out of character for a brief second after which nobody ever mentions or acknowledges that happening ever again, like the moonwalk screenshot thing, is simply annoying "lol randumb XDDDDD" scenes that add nothing to the game and are not funny. They simply break what little investment there was in the plot and reminds me I am feeling tired and maybe could end it right there.

The only example i can think of that pulls of the randomness aspect well was maybe Just Face It!


Ah yeah, i forgot to mention the orange tint that never went away thing. Well, that happens.

If the lack of music had been a stylistic choice then the sound effects and all of the music would have been removed as well i think, but no the menus have sound and let's not forget the chicken's cluck.
I guess this is basically is the result of having two different developers working on one game with different approaches. I thought the moonwalk scene was a bit funny, but I definitely understand that it also feels very off compared to the serious parts of the game. I guess I wanted to have more Falkion moments. xD

Like I said, I would've added more music to the game if I knew that I was allowed to. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. I definitely agree with them.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
author=luiishu535
I guess this is basically is the result of having two different developers working on one game with different approaches. I thought the moonwalk scene was a bit funny, but I definitely understand that it also feels very off compared to the serious parts of the game. I guess I wanted to have more Falkion moments. xD

Like I said, I would've added more music to the game if I knew that I was allowed to. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. I definitely agree with them.

Yeah, we had a whole discussion as far as how far you can edit other people's games in the event page. It makes sense, honestly, because how can other people appreciate what the second half has to offer when the first half is so unbearable to play?

Anyway, this review is pretty spot-on and I share unity's sentiments on this game. I was this close to just quitting when the big 'ol "f-you" happened at Noel's cutscene, but I persevered to the end. The clucking bird made up for everything, but overall the game really felt thrown together and lacking in effort even at the first half.

I will say, however, the moonwalking scene didn't bug me on the account that everything else in the game was pretty incoherent and indecisive in tone.
author=Ratty
Yeah, we had a whole discussion as far as how far you can edit other people's games in the event page. It makes sense, honestly, because how can other people appreciate what the second half has to offer when the first half is so unbearable to play?

I saw how the successors could change battle-related stuff, but I never heard anything from my partner (they "Aye-part"). I asked Liberty about all this as soon as I got the game, since I wanted to edit the maps. She made it very clear that we were only allowed to fix errors. A lot of the things in this game is just very weird and random. Battles may be a bit straight-forward, but I didn't notice any certain bugs in that department.

author=Ratty
Anyway, this review is pretty spot-on and I share unity's sentiments on this game. I was this close to just quitting when the big 'ol "f-you" happened at Noel's cutscene, but I persevered to the end. The clucking bird made up for everything, but overall the game really felt thrown together and lacking in effort even at the first half.

Yeah, Mirak did a splendid job on the review. Very specific and informative. I am truly very honored.

I didn't think that the instant game over was much of a problem, since I figured that players would save before the cutscene (mainly because the way the cutscene is set up).

I am very glad that you enjoyed the clucking bird! I am thinking about giving Falkion its own game.

author=Ratty
I will say, however, the moonwalking scene didn't bug me on the account that everything else in the game was pretty incoherent and indecisive in tone.

That's exactly what I thought when I made it. I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but that scene is actually a parody on developers messing up the transfer events in their games. It's a pretty common problem to be honest.
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
A game about Falkion would be something I would play.
Awesome! I'll make a blog/topic about it later and what plans I have for it. ^^
Pages: 1