KANAJANA'S PROFILE

I hate to admit it, but I'm stumped. So much so that I did an archaeological dig to figure out my user ID on this site, which I've basically only used once before. (It was to compliment one of your other games, in fact.)

I just can't seem to figure out...


I hope you're feeling kind enough to let me know what I missed and where. If not, I hope I can at least get some general hints? I don't want to beat my head against the wall.

I got bored sitting through the intro. I wouldn't have skipped it because I actually wanted some backstory before playing, but it would have been nice to have an option to speed it up a bit.

Not that I was able to make much sense of the backstory; the font in the dialogue boxes was both small and blocky, so even at full screen, it was VERY difficult to read. Not only did the letters run together, but the lines of the letters were overlapping gaps.

I'll be deleting this rather than trying to play again, as I have a limited amount of patience for squinting at letters that look almost exactly alike. (Is that one G or S? Is that lower-case A or E?)

Tried to play it, but the dialogue loaded way too slowly. I looked for an option to turn up the speed or even switch it to "instant" but couldn't find a setting for it. Had to quit almost immediately because watching text appear on screen way slower than my normal reading speed was driving me nuts.

I wanted to like this game, I really did. There were just so many flaws, though.

- The storyline is on-rails that it should have the Amtrak logo on it. Some parts of the map consisted of just one very obvious route from Town A to Town B. In areas where it looked like you had a choice of where to go, that turned out to be an illusion -- one of the characters would invariably say something like "We shouldn't go here until we've done X."

- The dialogue was frequently awkward. Often it sounded unnatural because contractions weren't used by the characters, even though they would have been said in any normal conversation. Other times the wording just seemed a little off, or an odd phrase was used. In a few places, the dialogue should have been conditional based on player actions, but it wasn't. In other words, I was told how to get past a certain obstacle before even encountering it, or I was warned about a potential problem I had already taken care of.

- Encounter rates seemed way too high in some areas. I expect to get pounced on when I'm dungeon-crawling, sure, but I'd like to be able to take more than three steps between battles.

- Rewards for defeating monsters -- both gold and XP -- often seemed much lower than the effort involved in defeating them. The situation is made worse by having to buy increasingly expensive gear for an increasingly large party, so after a while I was grinding not for levels, but for money to buy upgrades.

- Some powers/skills were much weaker than would be expected for the amount of MP or TP required to use them. Your typical "all enemeies" attack (for fire, ice, and the like) is more effective at 8 MP than an equivalent attack costing 10 MP. I tried using the bodyslam technique probably two dozen times and only had it work once. When I finally saved up enough TP to use the light/holy "all enemies" attack that required 50 points, I was expecting it to be devastating; turns out it was weaker than the one that could be cast at any time for 30 MP.

- Some monsters didn't seem to have the vulnerabilities that common sense would suggest they would have.

- Intervals between gaining abilities are too large. Other RPGs give you (or allow you to buy) something for practically every level you advance, but this game only gives you a new skill or spell every five levels. On top of that, all of the characters have the same Level 5 ability, and some of the higher-level abilities for certain characters seemed pointless.

If I have to choose between a character who can cast a spell that *might* put one character to sleep and a character that can cast a spell that will *always* do damage to the entire enemy group, guess who isn't going into combat rotation? Plus, when I did try one of those special abilities -- sleep or stun or confuse or something like that -- the description said it worked against all enemies, but it made me pick an individual to target.


I loved the idea of people's pets becoming world-saving adventurers, but by the time I got to the final town and was told *yet again* exactly where I was allowed to go, I didn't have much will to continue. It didn't help that even though I thought I had maxed out the gear on all of my characters, I discovered that this magical place had even better gear that was even more expensive! I'm sorry to say that the world will remain forever in need of saving because I deleted the game.

Not a bad game! The interactions were frequently pretty cute and actually made me care about the characters -- which is more than I can say for a number of games I've played.