Imperfect but infinitely charming. One for all the tiny bag fans out there.
Fully customizable combo sequence and command attack slots a whole seven years before God Hand did it!
Combat definitely feels pretty clunky, but it exceeds my expectations. Having different attacks that hit at different heights makes you have to rethink your favorite attacks based on the relative heights of you and your target as well as the slope of the terrain you're fighting on. It's not amazingly deep, and definitely the 踏込み (step in?) slash is the single best move in the game, but the variety on offer is pretty fun to experiment with. Most of the time when I died, I felt like it was definitely my fault, and the game killed me many, many times, so it's earned my respect there.
While you can definitely feel some of Quintet's presence in this game it's very far away from what I think of as a Quintet game. The light/dark dichotomy is present but not at the forefront, darkness is not obviously positioned as a not-entirely-bad entity, and in general it's missing the cycle of life theming and the bittersweetness that I associate with Quintet.
I have to comment on the extremely boring plot. It's got some okay twists and the background characters have some amount of personality but there's nearly no intrigue to any of it.
Minus points for having text that doesn't fit into the text boxes so you only have a brief moment to read the first line before it scrolls off automatically. Hate that.
It feels like a really interesting little bridge between three or four generations of games. The thematically dark, generic fantasy setting and heavily trapped, darkly lit dungeons might show a lot of Kingsfield influence and by extension foreshadow Demon's Souls. The right analog stick almost does exactly what we expect it to from 2003 onwards. Many rooms are made up of two floors which are vertically separated by only about five feet, but your character is barely unable to clear that gap with a jump, so the way that this seemingly inaccessible area is constantly visible to you makes the game feel like a top-down ARPG like Illusion of Gaia even though we're fully 3D and free camera this time. I really enjoyed the two-floor-room trick every time I came across it: the game is directly telling me "there is another path" and the way to reach that path is hidden somewhere. The higher floor is a direct challenge to analyze the level geometry, and it always had a good reward tied to it. After I saw this trick the first time, I wondered if it was a habit of the older members of the team or a trick to make level modelling easier, but immediately after that I visited the Lake Ruins and Inlet Cave (入り江の洞窟) where it becomes extremely clear that the artists and level designers are completely comfortable with their tools and skills. Seriously, the geometry in these two dungeons is some of the coolest I've ever seen, I adore the underground structures that are bent and twisted as if they're older than most geologic events in the game's history.
The final dungeon sucks ass. Hexalchia (ヘキサルキア) is way too huge for its own good, has seemingly no central gimmick, has very bad landmarks, has nearly no places to consistently fill your light gauge, just generally a terrible time. Thanks to Melos for making the gamefaqs guide, or I would have maybe just had to give up in-between the final two bosses. The final boss itself was some surprisingly cool body horror though.
The quality on offer here is totally at odds with the extremely low amount of documentation this game has available. Even on the Japanese side of the Internet, there's more or less no comprehensive guide or wiki. A lot of the katakana names don't seem to have been transliterated anywhere yet, and I suspect that they're derived from a culture that I'm not familiar with. Very curious if anyone knows what the game's protagonist and fictional countries get their names from.
The following is a short list of things I've noticed about the game that seem to be undocumented yet:
- The Ring of Clairvoyance 透視のリング allows you to see things that normally you must first reveal with the first person perspective button.
- There are at least two tomes and one NPC hidden in the proc-gen bonus dungeon, Aristocrat's Grave 豪族の墓. I found tome 1 on the 10th floor, the NPC somewhere just after that, and tome 2 on floor 20. Nothing of interest was on floor 30, where I assumed the dungeon was infinite and left. Both tomes can be handed over to the nameless witch in town to later trigger her to have upgraded and doubly-upgraded versions of the four spells she normally offers. The NPC is a child that appears in town in the house just south of the exit, and his mom thanks you for bringing him back, no reward that I could find.
- Skill Coins increase the cap on your skill point combo bonus. Each time you land an attack on an enemy, even if they guard it, with a few exceptions, you will aquire more skill points than you did with the last hit. Your Skill Coin count caps the amount of skill points you can get from a single attack, at the end of the game I was capping out at about +50 before you double it with the Skill Ring. Taking damage in any (?) way resets the counter. Using specific attacks (or specific attacks slots?) on enemies increases the counter faster, or can actually decrease the counter (jumping horizontal slash).
- Caplas gives you the Square Ring and tells you to go back to town to protect everyone right after the big bads use the Sky Ruins to turn the world to night. If you don't do as he says, he'll take the ring back from you at the breakable wall north of the Sky Ruins.
- The Rock Cleaver (maybe Cliff Sword? 断岩剣) does normal amounts of damage to golem enemies :(
- Death Driver is hands down the worst move in the game
- The jumping spin attack is really good for dealing with bats and bees
- The one-two combo that starts with a shield bash will disarm enemies who are blocking, making it godsent against the later skeleton knights
- Charge attacks are, as far as I've found, totally useless
Combat definitely feels pretty clunky, but it exceeds my expectations. Having different attacks that hit at different heights makes you have to rethink your favorite attacks based on the relative heights of you and your target as well as the slope of the terrain you're fighting on. It's not amazingly deep, and definitely the 踏込み (step in?) slash is the single best move in the game, but the variety on offer is pretty fun to experiment with. Most of the time when I died, I felt like it was definitely my fault, and the game killed me many, many times, so it's earned my respect there.
While you can definitely feel some of Quintet's presence in this game it's very far away from what I think of as a Quintet game. The light/dark dichotomy is present but not at the forefront, darkness is not obviously positioned as a not-entirely-bad entity, and in general it's missing the cycle of life theming and the bittersweetness that I associate with Quintet.
I have to comment on the extremely boring plot. It's got some okay twists and the background characters have some amount of personality but there's nearly no intrigue to any of it.
Minus points for having text that doesn't fit into the text boxes so you only have a brief moment to read the first line before it scrolls off automatically. Hate that.
It feels like a really interesting little bridge between three or four generations of games. The thematically dark, generic fantasy setting and heavily trapped, darkly lit dungeons might show a lot of Kingsfield influence and by extension foreshadow Demon's Souls. The right analog stick almost does exactly what we expect it to from 2003 onwards. Many rooms are made up of two floors which are vertically separated by only about five feet, but your character is barely unable to clear that gap with a jump, so the way that this seemingly inaccessible area is constantly visible to you makes the game feel like a top-down ARPG like Illusion of Gaia even though we're fully 3D and free camera this time. I really enjoyed the two-floor-room trick every time I came across it: the game is directly telling me "there is another path" and the way to reach that path is hidden somewhere. The higher floor is a direct challenge to analyze the level geometry, and it always had a good reward tied to it. After I saw this trick the first time, I wondered if it was a habit of the older members of the team or a trick to make level modelling easier, but immediately after that I visited the Lake Ruins and Inlet Cave (入り江の洞窟) where it becomes extremely clear that the artists and level designers are completely comfortable with their tools and skills. Seriously, the geometry in these two dungeons is some of the coolest I've ever seen, I adore the underground structures that are bent and twisted as if they're older than most geologic events in the game's history.
The final dungeon sucks ass. Hexalchia (ヘキサルキア) is way too huge for its own good, has seemingly no central gimmick, has very bad landmarks, has nearly no places to consistently fill your light gauge, just generally a terrible time. Thanks to Melos for making the gamefaqs guide, or I would have maybe just had to give up in-between the final two bosses. The final boss itself was some surprisingly cool body horror though.
The quality on offer here is totally at odds with the extremely low amount of documentation this game has available. Even on the Japanese side of the Internet, there's more or less no comprehensive guide or wiki. A lot of the katakana names don't seem to have been transliterated anywhere yet, and I suspect that they're derived from a culture that I'm not familiar with. Very curious if anyone knows what the game's protagonist and fictional countries get their names from.
The following is a short list of things I've noticed about the game that seem to be undocumented yet:
- The Ring of Clairvoyance 透視のリング allows you to see things that normally you must first reveal with the first person perspective button.
- There are at least two tomes and one NPC hidden in the proc-gen bonus dungeon, Aristocrat's Grave 豪族の墓. I found tome 1 on the 10th floor, the NPC somewhere just after that, and tome 2 on floor 20. Nothing of interest was on floor 30, where I assumed the dungeon was infinite and left. Both tomes can be handed over to the nameless witch in town to later trigger her to have upgraded and doubly-upgraded versions of the four spells she normally offers. The NPC is a child that appears in town in the house just south of the exit, and his mom thanks you for bringing him back, no reward that I could find.
- Skill Coins increase the cap on your skill point combo bonus. Each time you land an attack on an enemy, even if they guard it, with a few exceptions, you will aquire more skill points than you did with the last hit. Your Skill Coin count caps the amount of skill points you can get from a single attack, at the end of the game I was capping out at about +50 before you double it with the Skill Ring. Taking damage in any (?) way resets the counter. Using specific attacks (or specific attacks slots?) on enemies increases the counter faster, or can actually decrease the counter (jumping horizontal slash).
- Caplas gives you the Square Ring and tells you to go back to town to protect everyone right after the big bads use the Sky Ruins to turn the world to night. If you don't do as he says, he'll take the ring back from you at the breakable wall north of the Sky Ruins.
- The Rock Cleaver (maybe Cliff Sword? 断岩剣) does normal amounts of damage to golem enemies :(
- Death Driver is hands down the worst move in the game
- The jumping spin attack is really good for dealing with bats and bees
- The one-two combo that starts with a shield bash will disarm enemies who are blocking, making it godsent against the later skeleton knights
- Charge attacks are, as far as I've found, totally useless