DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=Scourge
That does help clarify things. It sounds like you weren't planning it from the outset, so maybe allegory isn't the right word, but it does have some strong undertones of examining racism and it would be easy to apply that lens to the game (as I did). Honestly, it is difficult to play through the game and not draw those conclusions about events being a metaphor for racism. It does come off a little strong and ham-fisted, but I think that's because everybody, short of Serena and Luke, seems to loath dark mages. It would have been nice to see a handful of other NPCs, even inconsequential ones, express some doubts about whether all dark mages are truly evil.

Personally, I never had a hard time buying the discrimination against dark mages in-story, in large part because if a group of people actually did draw magical powers, which tended to be dangerous and destructive in nature, from emotions like hatred and grief and rage, so that they became more and more powerful the more antisocial they were, I think viewing them with distrust would be an entirely reasonable reaction.

I generally find fictional allegories for racism tired and overplayed, but as a result, if a story looks like it might be trying to do something different, I'll give it the credit of trying to look at it from that other perspective rather than trying to frame it as another allegory about racism.

What I thought was particularly interesting in Umbral Soul was that, unlike all the stories with some pat moral about how love and understanding can overcome hatred, Umbral Soul puts together a setting where it's clear that the hatred underlying the conflict is self-reinforcing. People who try to show dark mages compassion and understanding almost always come to bad ends, because they can't just unilaterally withdraw from the conflict. That means that ordinary people have little incentive to show compassion and understanding for dark mages (because it'll probably come back to bite them,) which means that dark mages have little reason to expect understanding or compassion from ordinary people.

The whole narrative presents a much more interesting and nuanced concept of a balance between good and evil than most works, in my opinion. Both good and evil are at once self-reinforcing and inherently unstable.

Good is self-reinforcing because doing good, and living among good people, is rewarding and makes people happier and more inclined to do good things. It's inherently vulnerable because the more a community runs on goodness, the more vulnerable it becomes to bad actors. The more easily people trust, offer forgiveness and second chances, and assume the best of others, the easier they are to take advantage of.

Evil is self-reinforcing because the more people treat each other badly, the less anyone can afford to unilaterally stop treating others badly. It turns altruism into a coordination problem where it's in nobody's interests to make the first move of showing trust or kindness. It's inherently vulnerable because the more a community runs on evil, the more miserable everyone is and the more they want things to change so they can stop spending all their time being unhappy. Give enough people at once a guarantee that they'll back each other up in a bid to get rid of the evil status quo and they'll probably take it.

In a way, Umbral Soul kind of ends up as an emotional and character driven story about Decision Theory. Which is a lot more novel and interesting in my opinion than another story about how Racism Is Bad.

Of course, I don't expect everyone else to enjoy that aspect of it as much as I did. I gave it a five star review because my reviews aren't averages of everything a game did right or wrong, they're summaries of how much I enjoyed the strongest elements minus how much I felt the weakest ones detracted from the experience. I wasn't really expecting when I wrote it that there would be so many other full-score reviews following it up.

It felt a bit too shameless to bring it up in the body of the review, but Umbral Soul was probably my biggest source of inspiration to get off my ass and start my current game project. I've been sitting on the ideas for it for a long time, but I've spent most of my time since joining RMN looking for teams to work with because I felt I was missing some of the skills necessary to make a good, complete game by myself. Umbral Soul was the game which convinced me that the publicly available resources are good enough to make a game from which I could be proud of as a solo project.

Everyone always says to start small for your first projects, but my practice was always limited before by the fact that I just really prefer more expansive and ambitious narratives, and it's hard to stick with a project you don't enjoy. But now, I'm having so much fun with what I'm doing, I'm losing sleep over it. So I feel like I owe a huge debt of gratitude to you for this game.

The exploit I was referring to

I'm surprised you didn't feel the final conflict was foreshadowed at all. I felt it was foreshadowed quite extensively, but never really elucidated. I could see that it was built up to in advance, but that didn't make it entirely clear what was going on when it happened.

The artistic commentary, I wouldn't really call veiled at all. It's direct and explicit commentary on writing, it just occurs in the context of a work of fiction. I honestly don't remember the context for any discussion of prequels, but I'm thinking maybe Ardus rejects the prospect of writing a prequel to his novel? I wouldn't take it for granted that all of Ardus's views are direct reflections of those of the author, but for Ardus's story in particular I think that any prequel would face major obstacles related to the foregone conclusion set up by the first book.

It couldn't hurt to give it a try. I actually had quite a bit of fun with it, since I was writing up my thoughts on it for the review and discussing it with my friends as I went.

Considering what they cost in the game right now, I don't think wasting the money you spent on a reasonable stock of healing items would be a huge loss. On the other hand, I might be biased by spending more time grinding than most players.

(I have absolutely terrible preferences, where I like both grinding and getting ahead of the level curve, and get catharsis from stomping on enemies that are expected to be challenging, but also like being legitimately challenged in combat. I have the most fun in games which offer optional content which remains challenging even if you take advantage of all the avenues the game offers to strengthen your characters, but honestly, I would not envy a game designer who was forced to cater to my whims.)

If you're planning to nerf the game's healing items, I'd think about maybe boosting Goldo's Essence battle skill up to Kinetic Essence or something to keep him from losing too much of his combat effectiveness. As an alternative, or possibly additional option, you might try implementing more restrictive caps for the number of healing items players can carry. The Star Ocean games offered cheap, effective healing items, for instance, but at a cap of 20 in your inventory they weren't an overwhelming asset (although admittedly the huge variety of different healing items offered late in the game kind of defeated the purpose of the cap.)