A Prologue To A Review...Of A Prologue

Reviewing a game like this is where I feel like the very idea of reviews and scores breaks down, or if not breaks down, then at least struggles mightily. I'm definitely not going to "bury the lead" here. I did not like this game. I thought it did a a lot of things "right" and obviously had a lot of effort put into it. I was even impressed with aspects of it, in certain places. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that this game felt very much to me like the RPG Maker community equivalent of "Oscar bait", a game seemingly designed specifically to have a lot of people like it and released correspondingly right before the Misao voting if I am not mistaken.

But overall, and in spite of the fact that the last thing I want is to insult or discourage the creator, I was unimpressed by Graceless Reminisce. Still, though, it seems on some level insane that I am giving this game a score only marginally higher than I gave Fantasy Gold. Because of the obvious discrepancy of effort and experience and technical no-how on display here, I feel like those scores should be far more widely divergent but the lack of granularity in the review scoring system doesn't seem to allow for that. And for instance...I was definitely substantially more impressed by the technical accomplishments of this game than I was by anything in Les Visiteurs Dan L'Espace which I gave the same score. It's just that I also found a bit more to dislike here.

As readers of my reviews may know, I attempt to mitigate this by including a score for each category in my reviews given out of 100 points instead of out of 5 Stars, but I feel as though the degree to which that mitigates the inherent problems is limited at best. In part, this is because the problem doesn't lie just in granularity. It lies in the fact that the merits of any work of art are truly impossible to describe in a purely quantitative way, rather than textually.

Penultimate disclaimer before I begin to evaluate different categories of the game. This is only a Prologue and a quite short one at that. While I made the judgement call that there was enough on play here to review, when a more complete version of the game is available, I intend to revise this review accordingly to reflect the new content although it will probably take me some time to do so.

And now, a final disclaimer. I need to disclose that I found this game to be suspiciously, conspicuously, eerily similar to some earlier demo releases of LINUS by blueperiod, a game which I was later brought on as a gameplay consultant for. The similarities are numerous, and the most striking are the bleak and dark story of three doomed and demoralized conscript soldiers trapped in a unwinnable war against an unstoppable empress and the nearly identical moody and distinctly artsy aesthetic and thematic cues used to unfold this story. As someone who has personally been caused severe mental distress and emotional harm by (unfair) accusations of plagiarism in the past, I would think very carefully before leveling such accusations against anyone else, so I want to make it clear that I am not doing any such thing. Furthermore, I haven't let this observation impact the score of this review at all. However, I would cautiously suggest that these similarities, be they homage, uncanny coincidence, or whatever are something that VVBlastFuryVV may want to think about in the future.

Now, onto the meat of the review!

Story
Let me be honest. Graceless Reminisce is a stupid and pretentious title for a game. "Pretentious" is a label I hate to append to anything. I think the internet is much too quick to jump to it and I think the speed with which it is used pejoratively reflects a disturbing anti-intellectual and anti-art trend in internet culture: anyone who fails to be sufficiently humble and genuflect at all times is in danger of being labeled "pretentious". Nonetheless, the particular shoe does seem to fit here.

The formal title of the game I played, Graceless Reminisce: Will of Rebellion compounds these issues of stupidity and pretentiousness by being far too long.

The word Graceless means among other things

author=Merriam Webster Online Dictionary
Adjective

• Awkward or clumsy
• Having a style or shape that is not attractive or pleasing
  
• Not kind or polite
  
• 1. Lacking in divine grace
  
• 2. a. Lacking a sense of propriety
  b. devoid of attractive qualities
  
• 3: artistically inept or unbeautiful

Please understand that this word is used as the title descriptor in a game that is trying achingly hard to be the exact opposite of all of these things. I don't know if the use of this word was meant as an ironic genuflection towards humility or what, but it just comes off as rather obnoxious.

The word Reminisce means...

author=Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Verb

• To talk, think, or write about things that happened in the past

This word is inappropriate because if the game is meant as a reminiscence (which by the way is the NOUN form of reminisce and yes I am going somewhere with this later on) i.e. a story that took place in the past being told to the player in the presence, this is so overly subtle that it is effectively hinted at nowhere in the Prologue until the very, very end.

Additionally, please don't fail to apprehend the fact that Graceless is an Adjective while Reminisce is a verb. Therefore, the title of this game is already a grammatical aberration. Adjectives do not modify verbs: adverbs do that. Adjectives modify nouns.

Something can be a Graceless Reminiscence and one can Gracelessly Reminisce but the grammatical bastard phrase "Graceless Reminisce" neither describes a thing that can exist or a thing that one can do.

It is possible that if VVBlastFuryVV speaks English as a second language, this all may come off a bit harsh. However, I must insist that it is a fair request to ask that non-native English speakers stay away from showy $10 words like 'Graceless' and 'Reminisce'.

So we have a title that might as well be, spelled out in plain english, "crappily written memoir". Except grammatically, it is closer to "crappy memoir write". And it describes a game that is clearly striving for artistic elegance (i.e. the exact opposite of graceless) in presenting a story unfolding in the presence.

tl;dr shit title

I want you the reader to understand that I did not let my hatred of the title influence my opinion of the game as a whole, largely because I did not unpack a complete, fully realized understanding of the title's dumbness until now.

Graceless Reminisce opens with a parable about a pair of swans that seems a bit sappy and overwrought but annoyed me immediately with its baffling assumption about the aerial ability of swans. Unless I'm mistaken in an ornithological sense, swans are fully flighted birds able to fly from the moment they are fledged. They do not swim because they have not yet learned to fly, they swim because they are fucking water fowl and it is convenient for them to swim. I know that this opening segment is striving more for poetic truth than ornithological truth but still, as a bird lover and a lover of metaphors, it really bothered me.

Certainly more importantly, I did not see anything about the opening parable reflected even slightly in the greater prologue.

Graceless Reminisce's prologue tells a story about three soldiers named Lyron, Yevan, and Leiza who were apparently childhood friends fighting in a doomed rebellion for the freedom of the land of Xetha. They know that they are fucked over from the start, but rather fatalistically, although they whine about this fact they do not desert. This annoyed me from the beginning, because when Leiza has an emotional breakdown I thought that the characters were going to desert the doomed rebel army. They certainly seemed to know that they were going to die, and in vein, to boot. But they didn't desert, and neither did they stay with the column they were marching in, in proper tactical formation. In other words, they had neither the renegade courage to desert nor the soldierly competence to stay in formation. Instead, they just wound up stragglers fighting other stragglers.

The game continuously stabs towards poignancy but keeps falling short of the mark and wallowing in angst which is kind of like poignancy's mildly retarded cousin. Lyron was whiny and grumpy and fatalistic. Leiza was whiny and emotional and sensitive. Yevan whiles till whiny was the least whiny and the most likable of the characters but in the end was ultimately quite forgettable. In the end the game seems to posit a very bog-standard anime/JRPG message about BECOMING STRONG ENOUGH TO PROTECT THE ONES YOU CARE ABOUT. Bla bla I have seen these themes before. I have to say this generic and uniquely Japanese pathos never resonated with me much in the first place, and I have now seen it so much that I am done to death with it.

But the story's moment of utmost disgrace was an excruciatingly stupid instance of ludonarrative dissonance occurring towards the end of the Prologue/demo. Our trio of soldiers comes across a wounded civilian and Yevan and Leiza want to help. Lyron says no, let's just stand by and WATCH THIS DYING CIVILIAN TALK WITH HER HUSBAND ABOUT HOW SAD IT IS TO DIE FOR SEVERAL MINUTES FIRST because...REASONS.



At no point during this conversation which strove so hard and so...so...well gracelessly to be poignant and sorrowful did Leiza move over to use the POWERFUL HEALING MAGIC SHE HAS BEEN USING TO HEAL AND RESURRECT HER COMRADES FOR THE ENTIRE GAME THUS FAR to aid this tragically dying civilian, nor could I as a player do anything to compel her to help.

The vile stink of ludonarrative dissonance just comes off so much worse to a sniff test here and now in the end of 2014 than back in 1997 when I wasn't allowed to use a Phoenix Down on Aeris which I could at least justify in a handful of ways. But this scene was completely unjustifiable. If your game's story chafes THIS powerfully against its mechanics, then YOU ARE CHEATING AS A STORYTELLER AND AS A GAME MAKER. Cheating in a way that makes everyone lose.

You need to understand that in the story, this scene comes across as Lyron, Yevan, and Leiza standing by and doing absolutely nothing to help this dying woman BECAUSE ANGST and this moment of utmost dumbness makes it impossible to like or care about these characters. Please. Fix.

STORY SCORE: 28/100

Gameplay

This game's gameplay suffered the most from the fact that the entire demo had only one enemy. The enemy was a perfectly fine enemy, and appeared in groups of several sizes, but by the end of the demo I was REALLY SICK OF FIGHTING THAT SAME ENEMY over and over.

Other than that I have no major issues here. Battles feel a bit too numerous and frequent for a prologue. On-touch encounters are appreciated. Battles are decently balanced and were neither too easy (too easy is hard to do for the very beginning of a game, granted: at this stage things should be really damn easy) nor too hard. The battle system is interesting, and I'm not sure how much I like it. The idea of giving the player a grade after the battle is interesting and I appreciated the fairly slick combat animations. But having the heroes represented on the screen BOTH as facesets and in a separate area as battle sprites was a bit confusing, especially since the facesets are used for displaying damage and status effect pop-ups and targeting skills on allies, while the battle sprites just jump around and attack or get attacked. Additionally I found the battle system to be a bit buggy and laggy in places.

The tutorials for things like basic battle functions and save points felt awkward, stilted, and quite unnecessary, which was not helped by missing resource errors popping up. I'd cut them entirely at this point.

Overall the game could use a bit more polish. Among missing resource errors, a few typos, and other things, noticed that the path to the right was named 'Left Path' and the path to the left was named 'Right Path' in one of many anonymous city blocks. And then there was this.



GAMEPLAY SCORE: 50/100

Graphics

Mapping was competently done but nothing to write home about. The use of heavy weather effects and a muted color palette helped the game's mood and atmosphere along substantially while serving as a bit of eye candy. I appreciated some of the many little aesthetic details put into the game's presentation (particularly the asymmetrical pauldrons on the protagonists' armor and cloaks), while others fell a bit flat for me. The battle animations used were cool and flashy and the battle system was very aesthetically pleasing when it wasn't lagging on me. The facesets were put together in the VX Ace faceset editor function, but I thought they were put together nicely. Like any other tool, the VX Ace chara maker can be used well or used poorly. In this case it was used well.

The open flames on the heavily rain soaked streets felt a bit counter-intuitive and dishonest. I understand the visual dramatic instinct to depict things that are both on fire and in the rain, but you must be careful how you handle it because as we all know...rain puts fires out.



GRAPHICS SCORE: 86/100

Audio

While I mostly enjoyed the soundtrack, especially the battle music, during certain slower and more emotionally fraught scenes, the music felt a bit sappy and overwrought to me, a heavy and overpowering soundtrack exacerbating the issues detailed above with the story occasionally feeling as though it was wallowing in angst.

As is often the case, sound effects did not make much of an impression one way or another. I did notice and appreciate the use of a non-default sound for the ambient rainfall.

AUDIO SCORE: 70/100

FINAL SCORE: 44/100 (NOT An Average)
BOTTOM LINE
As for a recommendation to potential players, mine would currently be to skip it. At least in its present state.

I wanted to like this game and I still want to like this game in the future. I respect the technical and artistic accomplishments that VVBlastFuryVV has made here and I earnestly hope that VVBlastFuryVV will take my critique here and use it to make Graceless Reminisce a better game in the future--perhaps even with a better and less grammatically nonsensical title, although even I admit that's probably a pipe dream--rather than becoming discouraged, or offended. Personally speaking as a creator, I know that the latter reactions are all too easy when an obvious labor of love such as this is greeted with a critique such as this.