JPARKER1984'S PROFILE

Here's my review for Asdivine Hearts, published by KEMCO and developed by Exe Create Inc. It will be lengthy and spoiler free.

I just beat this game 20 mins ago and man.... I don't even know where to begin with this. Writing reviews aren't really my thing, but this prompted me to do just that.

MUSIC:

This section will be really short as I don't have much to say. The music, while not anything special it's also not terrible. It feels standard for what you expect out of a run of the mil RPG. All areas seem to have matching music. I did like the battle theme though, it has a lot of energy.

GRAPHICS: (Brace yourself, I have a lot to say here.)

Oh boy..... the graphics, I'll start with the good. The sprites could use some more frames, but they are designed well, especially the important characters. The towns, the caves, the forests and all the other areas are colorful..... that's where the good ends.

The NPCs seem to ALL use the same sprite, there's really not so much as a color change. One guy might be a salesman in one town, then a mayor in another, then a bandit in another. Like seriously, outside of the important characters the developers got REALLY lazy with this aspect. It's really jarring and hard to take the game seriously when the guy that tried to rob you is the same exact sprite as the guy that is a mayor of a city, but NOT the same person.

The dungeons, OMG! The layouts are terrible and that's coming from me, a guy that kinda sucks sometimes at maps in RPG Maker. It seems like every area used a generator and that's it. They are all bland and boring, there's very little in the way of "clutter" to shine up the place. Like flowers here and there, different color trees, box or barrels. Almost nothing, it seems like their goal was to speed run the areas to get the game out and do virtually no quality control. You'll see like 4 or 5 different map styles, meaning you'll see the same tile set in multiple areas. They couldn't even at least do a color change. You'd think that for the final area they would put some effort in, but nope.... all the issues above are present.

The monster sprites in battle however are fantastic, they have a ton of detail and animate smoothly. Which is weird that they put so much effort into that, but for like everything else they gave up.

BATTLE SYSTEM: (See the "Various Things" section for a deal breaker about the battle system.)

It's standard fair for a JRPG, with a few exceptions. You have attack, defend, flee, item expected stuff. You have MAGIC and SKILL for the characters "abilities." Magic works as you'd expect, cast a skill for the required MP cost. Skill uses SP, which a character has a limited amount of. Say you use a skill that cost 5 SP, you have to wait an amount of turns for it to come back, or you could use items/magic to do that as well. The one really cool thing is called a Trust Gauge. if you have a full party of the 5 main cast, you can up your Trust Gauge to a max of 100% and once you do, you can use something that's akin to limit break from FF7. Each character has their own "Trust" skill, keep in mind that you have to decide which of the 5 "Trust" skills meet the situation.

STORY:

It's not good and it's not bad, it's just blah. It's what you may expect from a first RPG from a rookie developer. It's the big bad guy trying to destroy everything for plot reason you can read a mile away. The heroes are very cookie cutter, which is not good or bad, just predictable. You can tell the writing isn't done by a group that want's people to actually read all of the text. It has a tendency to ramble and make a 2 min conversation turn into a 5 min conversation. And while some people may be adults, most of them seem to speak like teenagers.... it's weird. All in all, the game took me like 40 hours when it really should have been 20 some. There's way to much backtracking for illogical reasons that just seem like time padding.

VARIOUS THINGS:

Difficulty - Easy.... way to easy, but it shouldn't be due to one fatal flaw. Remember the "Trust" skills, well. One of the main cast has a skill that causes several harsh status effects to the WHOLE enemy group. That includes poison, paralyze and many more. Meaning every time that enemies turn comes up, not only do they not act.... they take massive damage and you can.... USE IT ON ALL BOSSES, including the final one. You have to have all 5 heroes in the party, which you do for the majority of the time. So I would just grind for like 15 min before every boss fight making it trivial. Even without that, there's very little strategy. Once you find a small set of skills, you'll stick with that. Speaking of skills....

Skills - The game as a whole is fairly simple, but the magics/skills can be way to complicated and/or wordy, here's an example. There's a skill called "You have my support" it's description is "A parasol stab with a smile, 1/3 of damage is restored to the party divided by their numbers." There's many skills with long titles and lengthy complicated descriptions. So when you have a battle system as a whole that's boring/easy and mix it with this.... yikes!

Crafting - There's a simple but effective crafting system. I never really needed to grind for resources, because they seems to drop at a fast enough rate from battle. At some point though, because of how easy the game is I didn't feel the need to put time into it much.

Rubix/Jewel System - This is how characters get their skills. You equip a Rubix that you then attach Jewels to, think Materia in FF7. You will get a 4x4 Rubix and jewels with have to fit within that space. It may be a straight line, or look like a Tetris block. It really depends on the jewel and what it does. Over time you will gain bigger Rubix. It creates a interesting dynamic, do you equip that large strength+ 16% or do you equip the light jewel 2 that gives you access to good skills? There's many other examples of things like that.

OVERALL: It was a slog, I didn't have much fun after the first handful of hours. It has a new game plus type of thing, but I won't be doing it. It's not the worst RPG I've ever play, but it's nowhere near the best. I've played MANY games that are better. Hell, most of the RPG Maker games I've played are better then it. I don't mean that as a knock to RPG Maker games, but a knock at a company versus usually a single person. I bought the 4 game switch pack, but honestly I don't know that I'll be playing the other Asdivine games. With it being to easy, broken, boring and visually uninteresting.... this game is better left in it's case on a shelf.

Here's a really huge folder of enemies/monsters that can be used for various makers. This took me a VERY long amount of time to put together. It's all from the Final Fantasy series. Specifically FF1 PSP, FF2 PSP, FF4 PSP and FF Dimensions. Here's the link to the pack, below the link is more info on the pack which I encourage you to read.

https://www.mediafire.com/file/s0f201ow19xbb1d/Enemies_%2526_Monsters.rar/file

There's 1347 files and they are all if not most of the enemies from the FF games listed above. That includes all the official color variants plus a few custom ones here and there. All of the sprites are as is except that they were sized up x2 from the original artwork. Also the FF Dimensions ones were give a darker outline color.

I picked these games because I felt they mesh mostly well together and I love the FF series. With this pack you can find virtually any kind of enemy for any situation.

I named the files in categories rather then what they were called in the actual games, figured that would be easier since some may want to use different names, or they aren't aware of all the FF enemies. The categories are as follows.

01) Aquatic
02) Beast
03) Bird
04) Demon
05) Dragon
06) Dinosaur
07) Elemental
08) Esper
09) Humanoid
10) Insect
11) Plantlike
12) Reptile
13) Robotic
14) Undead

Most of them are in the right categories. Some I struggled to decided where to put, but I feel I did a good job overall. Well that's that, I hope someone finds this useful.

Say I have a town, we will call it Little Village for this example. Say I enter Little Village from the world map, how do I make it so if I ender a house INSIDE of Little Village, it WON'T show the name of the town again after leaving the shop? So in short, I only want to see the name of the town when entering from the world map.

In any Final Fantasy, or RPG for that matter. Negative status effects are a way or life for better or for worse. With that said, of the options listed below, what do you think is the worst/most annoying?

Keep in mind, the options listed here are from my mind. I understand that some may find others that aren't listed here more annoying and that's ok.

As the title says, I need a private tester or two (maybe 3 lol.) In the past I would be to quick to just upload a game just to get it out there. Only to have to make updates soon after, sometimes many. This time I'd like to be smarter about it, because for whatever reason this game is further along by a long shot, then any game I've worked on for the last several years. I just feel something really strong about this one.

So I'm not looking for a review at this point, just a bug tester and opinion seeker for lack of better terms. Here's some basic info on my game if anyone happens to be interested in helping me out.

1. it's called "Fatal Fantasy As Fate May Have It." As the name suggests, it's heavily inspired by the Final Fantasy series, as well as the likes of Dragon Quest and other JRPGs of SNES era.

2. Currently the rough estimate of playtime sits around 12 ish hours, depending on grinding and doing everything there's to do. I got through what I have so far in 9 hours and 46 min and I was using CTRL to avoid most battles.

3. It's really story heavy, there's a ton of dialog and cutscenes. You won't find any (purposeful) spelling errors, BUT you will find minor grammar errors such as the wrong (Ok or Okay.)

If anyone is interested, let me know either way and I'll give you more details. Have a good day everyone.