Aelwyn's Journey

Name: Aelwyn's Journey

Developer: kory_toombs

Story: You play an elf fleeing from genocide, and nobody cares. She meets a soldier willing to help her flee to her people. ON the way, they flee a man hunting the elves.

Writing: The game is trying to grim-dark but against a somewhat bland setting. It's an interesting story but it takes itself way too seriously and has no sense of humor. The game involves a subplot of a murderous demon so that it can set up a poorly executed twist. This might have been interesting, but it was only talked about in the beginning, gets a scene where the main characters stumble upon victims, and then waits until near the end of the game to have a boss a say something that sets up the twist, so that when it happens, the twist just feels cheap and underdeveloped. There are inherent problems with the twist that I really can't go into it without spoiling the game, one of those being a reference to one of the player character's strength.

Aelyn and Gawion are interesting characters, but I can't say they're well developed. Gawion helps Aelyn, and spends the rest of the game protective to her and loyal, which isn't unbelievable as it's easy to see Aelyn as a persecuted innocent, but no effort goes into really developing this relationship. Lord Martyn's motivations are believable but he is a bit mwahaha evil. The game doesn't really explore the characters and so feels like it falls a little bit short.



Gameplay: Basic RPG Maker combat with Holder's sideview battlers. The battles are pretty much basic with some thought given to strategy, but the battles quickly get repetitive and dull, especially considering random encounter rates are of the obnoxious variety. Abilities aren't quite as well thought out as they should be as the distinct lack of a revive ability or of revive items creates unwinnable scenarios with the bosses. Should one of your characters fall, most boss battles, except the first, are unwinnable. Overall, the game is pretty much a basic RPG. Battles, as stated, have a bit of strategy as you get to more advanced areas, but even those get dull and repetitive. I reached the point where I was just escaping the fights. There is a level cap of 15, so their really is no point in putting up with the encounters anyway. There should be an option to turn them off, but there's not. Money is basically useless since you very quickly acquire all the purchasable items, and Healing Potions are easily stolen from enemies anyway. I was barely halfway through the second woods by the time I had more healing potions than I was ever going to use. The final battle with Martyn is badly unbalanced and MP is way too low. You have two elixirs that restore full health, and you can only really use Gawion's heal spell once. This is horribly inadequate because Martyn and his soldiers have ridiculously high HP and their combined attacks are higher than what your healing potions can restore. The fact that Martyn gets priority in this battle means that if you attack, and your health gets low, you will die the next turn because you can't heal in time to prevent Martyn from winning.



Graphics: This game uses PVG graphics, specifically, the High Fantasy pack and Monster Pack I and I have to say, I begin to understand why people don't like them. No effort is made to take advantage of the full advantages of the tiles. The maps are dull and bland with no efforts to add variety. Tree areas are incredibly square and here's a cave:



There's very little real effort put into the mapping, and this feels very much like a project that was made solely for the purpose of having an excuse to try out the resources. Characters sprites are put to good use, but unfortunately, they're on some rather plain maps.

Music: The music is from the Cinematic Soundtrack pack, and the music is grimdark and dour, adding to the dour feeling of the game. It's a logical choice for music but it turns the game into a complete stereotype of the high fantasy genre.



Conclusion: To say I enjoyed the game would be a bit too much, but I didn't hate it and I did want to finish it, and that, at least is something. If nothing else, it makes me want to pull out my PVG graphics, and see how well I can do.