Great ideas thrown into a bag

But those ideas are then dumped out of the bag onto your head all at once.

Whats up guys, My name is Matt, and I am the creator of Alter Legend. CC, the creator of the game I am reviewing now, has definitely done his part in trying out my work, and commenting along the way, so I thought I would give his work a try and guide him in the right direction.

*Understand that at the time of this review, the game is only in its demo phase*

Story - Honestly, I have no idea. I'm a smart guy, but from all I can gather, your in a world forged by magic users, who fucked up some how, and now everything you see in the world pretty much consists of what they made before trapping them selves behind a big magic door like dumb asses.

You play as a girl, which is interesting. ( I'm going to avoid using names because they mean nothing to you if you havn't played.) This girl is a goddess I think. It was explained in the intro, but so were a thousand other things and it was hard to process all of the names that were thrown at you in the poetic rambling that made up the cryptic side scrolling mess of an intro.

*who needs god mode when you play as a god?* don't be alarmed, one of the few semi transparent parts of the plot is that this goddess has been separated from her heavenly companions. In the process of being separated, she is dazed and confused and slowly has to rebuild her godly arsenal of attacks, and that is where leveling comes in, which is a cool spin on the typical, "start as a short white peasant boy, and end as a beautiful tanned eastern European war god, prince, unicorn, klepto.

Seriously though, I can tell CC has beautiful writing, but he needs to learn the art of progression. When your ideas are as lush and fully thought out as CC's are, it takes baby steps to grasp the big heavy concepts and this was the biggest issue with the demo.

Combat - Unfortunately, just like the back story, the combat hits you in a massive wave of what the fuckery. CC gets a high five for trying to be informative with his spell descriptions, but they are PACKED with information that is all in short forms, Well chosen short forms, but LOTS of them. What makes this worse, is the fact that you gain spells faster then Apple releases new Iphones. Every time you level you gain 2 spells, and every time you fight a battle you level... Its ridiculous, So much so that I wish my character was the goddess of simplicity, not cluster fucking spell hoarders.

Once you get the hang of it, its a very nice battle system with a lot of cool gimmicks. A wide array of very original spell effects. For example, there is a healing spell, that does damage to you, before it heals you, it is powerful to compensate, but it means you have to plan your healing otherwise you will kill yourself with the spell if you procrastinate with it.

Dialogue The dialogue is well written for the most part. Once again the whole game plays this very poetic feeling... I mean how else would gods speak. but then, there is this character that you meet who begins to feel like they are going to be a main character, and I really hope not because her dialogue drives me insane. She is annoyingly flamboyant saying things like "hey girl!" "girlfriend, thats my town!" She certainly does not fit the mood, the scene, the time era, and if I met her in real life I would shake her. I'm surprised no one else does, seeing as how she is the only one that speaks that way. I really like the calm cool collective speech that drools out of the main characters speaking hole, but god If i don't use the defend command every turn next combat, in hopes that the mobs just kill this new girl first.

Music - I don't recognize the music, but I don't think its an original sound track either, that being said, the music was gorgeous, sooo damn gorgeous. The title screen was laced with a slide show of game maps and a very rich soundtrack and I voluntarily watched the whole thing. This was easily the best part of the game.

Graphics - I had crazy mixed feelings about this section. The colors in this game are so well chosen, everything oozes beautiful purples blues and pinks. All of the character portraits are original drawings by cc himself, and their colors match the environment. But when it came to actually mapping, it seems that CC felt clutter = good mapping, because crocodile Dundee himself with the biggest machete he could find, couldn't cut his way through all the foliage thrown everywhere on these maps.

Oh Mr. dundee, why don't you just learn from our godly main character?, who seems to be able to just walk over top of all that foliage. Whats that? A bush? don't mind if I do, just wander right through. I big part of the problem is that I don't think much of the maps are parallaxed, if any. The reason this is a big deal, is because the clutter is very blocky, and it really takes away from the organic feel I think CC was trying to get from his vegetation vomit.

I would chock all of the mapping up to a matter of taste if it didnt cause me to become trapped. I didn't think I could walk through a tree that I apparently could, so it was a long time before I was able to move on from the first forest.

All in all, The game as previously stated is a bath tub of good ideas, it just needs drained and placed onto a nice slow moving conveyor belt that displays it all one at a time, rather then giving it to us all at once and explaining it slowly over time. Yes there are tutorials, but If i wanted to read I would go do that, in a book... I want to play, and there are tonnes of ways to teach intuitively. Someone who can explain this better than me is Egorapter here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM

I give this game a 3 out of 5 until it can fix its learning curve. god your lucky i dont give you a zero for putting the credits on an item in my inventory and forcing me to watch it by accident.

Keep plugging away, because you CAN make this game great.



Posts

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Clareain_Christopher
C_C Media Ninja
4334
08/13/2012 11:05 PM
Thanks a lot for writing this! 1/2 star better than the last review. Baby steps... :/

Story: "Seriously though, I can tell CC has beautiful writing, but he needs to learn the art of progression. When your ideas are as lush and fully thought out as CC's are, it takes baby steps to grasp the big heavy concepts and this was the biggest issue with the demo."
Very good point. My issue was that everyone was saying that they couldn't understand the story, which really got to me.

Combat: "Unfortunately, just like the back story, the combat hits you in a massive wave of what the fuckery."
This is an issue I've been working on after releasing the demo. I really wanted players to know how complaced the game could be, so I went overboard in 1.0.
The next demo is A LOT longer, and gives the player a lot more time to play around with certain skill rotations.

Dialogue: She is annoyingly flamboyant saying things like "hey girl!" "girlfriend, thats my town!" She certainly does not fit the mood, the scene
Naka is from New Santoo Rinba, and every other character in Hightide isn't.
I really don't know if I could fix that without destroying her character. And at the very least, a hated character is better than a forgettable character? At least that cat boy, Keverin, is on the same boat as you. He HATES her.
Expect character development from her, too. Who knows! She might be a "noble woman" by the end.
*sigh*


Music - "This was easily the best part of the game."
Music made A Reason for Magic. I would be NOTHING without music.
True story, bro. One song gives me at least one days worth of inspiration

Graphics "clutter"
I'll fix that part of the Forest where you can't see. As for the clutter...too bad.
If I remake the graphics, I might throw myself into a dev hole.
NOT SAYING I don't have plans to really empower my ideas with panos. I just need time to work out a few ideas, and a few concepts, if you well.

"I give this game a 3 out of 5 until it can fix its learning curve. god your lucky i dont give you a zero for putting the credits on an item in my inventory and forcing me to watch it by accident."
1.5R should balance the learning curve.
Also, I added a choice option to read the credits, and speed up the credits.
Galv
4164
08/13/2012 11:29 PM
I tend to express my opinions in the nicest way possible but Matt sure knows how to tell it straight out (which is definitely a lot more helpful for a developer!).

As I have recently had a go of this as well, I can say that I agree with pretty much all of what Matt says.
I think CC's awesome ideas/story and unique art makes his game stand out over generic RPGmaker games and definitely worth pushing forward with it!
Clareain_Christopher
C_C Media Ninja
4334
08/13/2012 11:40 PM

My face while watching this video:

I'll continue to work very hard on this project.
Solitayre
Circumstance penalty for being the bard.
18257
08/13/2012 11:49 PM
Egoraptor is a smart guy who knows a lot about game design if you can get past the YELLING.
Incarnate
1412
08/14/2012 03:00 AM
author=Solitayre
Egoraptor is a smart guy who knows a lot about game design if you can get past the YELLING.


If you read my review you probably get the idea that I love a good straight forward yelling lmao. So it doesnt push me back at all.

CC there are a lot of games on here that i downloaded to give a try, and simply turned off because they were aweful. That didn't happen with yours, and I truly feel that your game has a lot of potential. As for your character being far from a noble woman, she can be giddy, joking and different, without sounding like a black ditz from the block... no racism intended but everyone knows what im talking about. I cant take her seriously. I dont know if you like "kenta" from my game alter legend. but im writing him as a goofy character that can still be taken seriously.
pyrofiend324
535
08/14/2012 03:01 AM
While a bit blunt, I have to agree with a good portion of the points here. The spells are handed out a LOT in the beginning, and the sheer amount of difficulty in trying to comprehend everything is a bit much for many a gamer with no proper background in stuff like this.

And, while I will admit that the graphics have improved IMMENSELY from the VERY clutterific first beta of Santoo Rinba, the clutter is still kinda there...

I'll have to disagree with Matt in regards to Naka's vocan inflections; I kind of like them! However, he does have a point in that there is very little context for it. While I'm not too sure if I should say it here, one of the beta dialogues had one of the more well-speaking people at least slightly notice this. I liked that part a lot.

Just keep improving. Also, try not to worry all too much. Take a step back, breathe a little, and continue. Chaos Divine is currently going through it's THIRD revision/rebalance/graphics update/writing update/script update/EVERYTHING EVER CHRIST ALMIGHTY!-, but it's going slowly, and really that's what you should be doing too. Just taking things slow, but steady.
Clareain_Christopher
C_C Media Ninja
4334
08/14/2012 03:22 AM
Thanks guys.
It means a lot. :)
BurningTyger
Hm i Wonder if i can pul somethi goff here/
1289
08/16/2012 03:00 AM
You can partly blame me for Naka's sounding like that, but I tried to express the offbeat sense I got from her while editing her dialogue. Admittedly she c'n get a bit annoyin' but it grows on ya.

Kav's accent was inspired by vague memories of Sergeant Schultz; apparently Clare liked it, "cause he left it.
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