CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

As a thieves hideout it looks about the right size. The cave has perspective issues though.

Basically, the cave is four tiles high at the leftmost section while it's only two tiles high elsewhere. You could say it's natural for a cave to have different heights at different places, but the transition doesn't work. Think about how high the roof has to be at different places and things will look weird.

Other than that, it looks great. It's has enough details to not look boring, but not so many it feels cluttered.

Agree. Sometimes another player says the opposite of what I say. Most common example being the other player saying the game is balanced and I saying it's not.

author=Jude
Maybe i am missing something, but won't the chest return to its original facing state when you reload the map?

That's also my impression.

If you need extra switches, you can free a lot of them with a creative use of variables.

I avoid getting to hyped on a game. Still, White Knight Chronicles ended up disappointing me.

The first disappointment was the combat system. I did realize that this was to good to be true. The characters blocked and dodged in a way that would fail under a lot of conditions.

However, then came some gameplay videos from gamespot demonstrating the combat system. Those videos were very believable, you could even see things like AI characters getting stuck behind objects or staring blankly at nowhere while the controlled character was cutting an enemy open.

Well, in those videos you could see the main character use various combos on the enemies. They didn't look realistic in any way or shape, but it looked fun to use them. The problem is that in actuality, you don't fight that way. Normally you you just spam the same move over and over. When you built up enough AP, then you can use a combo, as opposed to always using combos like the videos showed. To this day I still don't know why they didn't let us use combos all the time and balance the game accordingly instead of making the combos some sort of supermove. Heck, it's not as if that game is balanced as it is anyway.

Combat also turned out to be slow. You attack and then you wait for maybe three seconds for a circle to fill up before you can attack again.

The other problem is the story. They said they would go for a simple and in many ways, old-fashioned, story. I approved of that since when it comes to story, I definitely think it's better to aim low and hit the mark than aiming high and miss. Well, they aimed low, but still missed by a mile. The story is not just simple, it's downright idiotic.

author=Max McGee
If I mention that I had trouble with 'Mechanic X' in 'Final Fantasy Game Y' the response is just as likely to be: "You suck at Final Fantasy, bro." Can't beat Sephiroth? Try playing better.

Imagine if I was trying to explain being unable to get past a boss battle in Eternal Paradise, on the other hand. Maybe I made an LT of it and posted it on RMN? I very much doubt that anyone would come back with "you suck at Eternal Paradise"...not even Ephiam. Instead, the consensus would most likely be: game's too hard, bro! Tone it down!

There are millions of people who has beaten Sephiroth, so we know that he's perfectly beatable. As for LTs, I have noticed that sometimes the LTer is playing the game really poorly. Maybe I should speak up when I see it?

To be frank, It's very rare that a commercial RPG made in the last ten years is particular difficult. If someone complains about a mandatory boss being to hard, it is usually so that the player is rather poor at the game. This does not necessarily hold true in RM games. I have seen a lot of people aiming towards making their game challenging, sometimes without giving the player the proper tools to overcome said challenges. So, often it actually is justified that you tell someone to get better when they can't get past a boss in a commercial RPG, while you tell the creator to tone it down in a RM game.