Aelwyn's Journey

Aelwyn’s Journey is a game about well literally a journey that the protagonist Aelwyn has to take. Unlike your reluctant type who is forced on a journey to accomplish some sort of goal or save her people, this tale is actually far different from that. Aelwyn’s tale is one that is focused on fleeing to a distant land. That is what the story is about, fleeing because Aelwyn being an elf and one of the few remaining of her kind must flee from the land to a safer corner of the world. It turns out that for some reason, humans wanted the elf race out of the picture and to possibly remove magic from the world which they are blessed with.

At the start of the game, the purpose of the story is made quite clear so the player knows what the games objective is and that is what truly keeps them hooked on playing. When games focus on keeping the player locked on the central theme, it works perfectly and this game did just that. But does that really mean just because the plot is clear and obvious, making the game mechanics focal points on it suggest the game is good? Well it depends. There are a lot of aspects in the game that fail direly.
In terms of the use of graphics, Aelwyn is quite a good game to look at probably more so than most amateur RPG Maker Games. As you explore through the lands you experience a fantasy world set in a medieval style era. Still, there are tons of graphic errors, poor construction and implementation in the development of the environments you journey through. The game really needs work in this aspect. It uses a good set of graphics generally speaking. For example the battlers, the facesets and various other resources make it a unique and an original contribution to the RPG Maker Community. However, what it fails to truly be effective in is the creation of realistic settings that you could actually believe look like proper environments. The towns in the game look truly unrealistic and are badly crafted. This is probably a resource lacking problem. Not only that, but there are a ton of alignment and graphic glitches throughout the entire game, such problems that should truly be taken care of before initial release.

Moving on, let’s examine the level design, its balance and gameplay. The level design is pretty straightforward, you have to keep proceeding onwards really and although there is some backtracking, you only do so to grind and get stronger so you can stand a chance in the next location. The game is designed relatively well but the environments look way off for its design and its almost impossible to imagine any realism in it what so ever. It’s not an easy game at all. I played at the easiest difficulty and although I got to the end, I wasn’t able to defeat the final boss. It’s good there is a difficulty setting which means you can truly test yourself but what’s the point in spending constant hours grinding just to prove you are a better player than someone else in competition. Yes, that’s right, despite the game’s setting being set to easy I still grinded and found the game too difficult to complete at the end (Regardless I’ve seen the ending on Youtube and was truly impressed with its magnificent twist). From my own perspective, I always believed levelling up was a way for the player to either be rewarded for their efforts or to make it easier over time to move to the next location that is a more difficult location after adapting to the difficulty of the current location. When you just level up for no reason, it is truly pointless as all you do is level up not for a challenge but for the challenge of spending more time struggling making it not focused on the complexity of battle and battle unpredictability. Battling being a central focus on this game ended up not being as enjoyable because of this. That said, the battles were fun and the developer created a unique system that truly works for a short game. The default system isn’t used and you actually get to see your characters in animated form fight animated enemies in a turn based style. Still, it has to be noted that despite the resources available for the battle system, it still had a lot of work that needed to be done for it to be truly polished. Animations were way off, there were graphic errors, glitches and also misalignments. Despite that, if you can look past this, you can truly enjoy this aspect of the game.

In terms of conflict, this game is far too simple but is easy to follow. Before we move towards this aspect it should be noted that there are only two main characters in the game that are really playable. The elf herself and a gigantic man who follows and protects the elf helping her flee from perdition. As for the villains, Aelwyn faces the same high ranking officer who wants her dead in order to sell her dead body for gold. It turns out that is also a reason why the elves are fleeing and not just because the King of the realm has ordered their extermination. Apart from the key characters in the game which I won’t reveal too much about, you don’t learn much about the game’s setting at all, its history and its relation to the elves who were forced out. Heck, I don’t think I met any elves at all that contributed to the journey who could truly relate with the protagonist throughout the entire game. All you learn is that Aelwyn is wanted dead and no one will help her but a powerful warrior who seems honourable.

Aelywn's Journey is a playable game no doubt. And also it’s a full game too that will leave those who like ‘RPG Shorts’ satisfied. My ratings are below:
• Gameplay: 4/5
• Story: 4/5
• Level Design: 3/5
• Playability: 3/5
• Graphic Design: 3/5
• Overall: 3.5/5
I enjoyed the game regardless of its flaws.