DAVE THE SHEEP'S PROFILE

Outside of gameplay/mechanics stuff, the game also had a vaguely Arabian/Middle-Eastern theme going with the music and setting which I really liked. I especially LOVED the main town theme that sounded like it could be a Moroccan marketplace. I think it's great when games really try to evoke a particular theme and culture rather than just going for the usual what-Japanese-writers-think-medieval-Europe-was-like type setting. That theme was definitely one of the cooler things about the game for me, although someone really should have told the character designer you don't wear hotpants in the desert unless you want skin cancer.

I'd like to take the Arabian idea further if I ever did a fan spinoff/sequel thing, maybe make the buildings look more Eastern, make it so some of the monsters are based on mythology from that region (Djinn?) and dammit, I want to see women walking around busy markets balancing pots on their heads. Also men should wear fezes. It's just a setting you can have a lot of fun with.

Great thread! This was always a really interesting game to me, because it did so much so well, yet had so many annoying flaws keeping it from greatness. If they'd had one or two more sequels to fine-tune the formula they would have eventually made a bona fide classic in my opinion. So anyway, here goes.

I hated the five-item limit for entering the tower, and how monsters counted as items. Since you basically NEED* to take a weapon, shield and wind crystal (escape item) with you every time you go in, it meant you could never really go in with more than two monsters. I think that really hurt the system - in Pokemon half the strategy was picking the right monster for the right situation, but when two monsters have to last you the whole 40 floors you lose the flexibility. I would probably make it so the monsters don't count towards the five-item limit, and the player can take, say, 10 if he wants.

I also disliked the fact that monsters lost MP (or whatever it was) constantly while active, even just walking around. It made you not want to use them except in emergencies, but if you summoned them while surrounded by enemies, it was a waste of a turn that could be used to attack, so you didn't really want to use the monster there either. Like Hexatona said, you actually did far better if you avoided using them. I don't know why a monster-taming game made it so inconvenient to use monsters; if I were making a sequel, I would let the player use monsters all the time - why not?

I mostly liked the town aspect. Some of the stuff you ended up building was lame though (Anyone remember the badly translated stand-up comedy? Sheesh...) and it was a shame that it was basically running through a shopping list of predetermined stuff. In your house you got to decorate some of the rooms, but in the town all you did was hand out cheques as far as I remember. It would have been cool to have a bit more choice, maybe bring in some light sim elements. And letting the player choose a girlfriend would have been fun, rather than just having them all crowd around his bed like he's living in a deodorant advert.





* Okay, you don't need those three things... you could take more monsters and find the other items in the tower, but because your character has to start at level 1 every time, the best way to get to the top was to keep one sword and one shield and upgrade the hell out of them.

Oh em eff gee I want to play this game.

I always loved those LCARS consoles on TNG, so this looks really badass to me. Is it an actual Star Trek fangame? Or are you just borrowing the design?

Just a little thing though, do you need those thick green lines on the map? I can see how a grid is useful, of course, but I think it would be a bit better just to have the thin pink lines separating each block (and make the blocks closer together). It's not a big deal when it's just a small part of the window but when it's the whole screen it's hard to focus on what's actually IN the hexagons.

I luuuuuurve puzzles, of all kinds - block pushing, flicking switches, grappling hooks, all that stuff. They don't have to be super-hard but it adds so much to a game to have something to do besides battling. Although there's a tricky balance between "give the player something to do" and "waste the player's time to pad out the length". I reckon the biggest danger is the backtracking and repetition that comes with many kinds of puzzles, so maybe the best approach is little-and-often. I liked in Soul Reaver 2 how basically the whole dungeon was one big puzzle and you just did little bits of it as you went along, especially in the light tomb. Definitely a lot more interesting than just "oh, someone left a block right next to this switch for no good reason". That's a bit tricky for most game makers though!

EDIT: Great call, Neophyte! If you're going to do puzzles (especially manipulating-your-environment puzzles) they should be everywhere. I loved getting out of a dungeon in Zelda and running around robbing people's houses with the new tool I'd just got.