I went back and forth in writing a review.
Mostly because it's impressive to see young people put such together.
As a product, it's bad though.
Yeah, anime girl action RPG is cool and a good point to draw you in.
The setting is generic, but that's fine.
It pokes some fun at you with winking dialogs to read in the quests.
Apart from that. Well. The hit-box doesn't match the swords, the combat is fine, but not good.
It's kind of a stiff variant to TERA.
There are some balancing issues that make some fights a bit tedious.
My play-time represents 2 full play-throughs and some roaming around.
At last, there is the issue with some menues not being updated when you go to the next site.
So over all: It's a good tech demo for someone who's put together something after completing all tutorials.
Therefore it was interesting to me - and might be to you.
If you expect a game to buy & play, then stay away.
That much should be possible to conclude from the trailer as well, trust your judgement.
[b]Edit & Update (25th aug. 2019), should be v.1.1)[/b]
Alright, I gave it another spin.
But here's an update. As I made a little program myself recently, where I had 300 users (nothing as complex as a game, but it did what it was made for), but only feedback from 4 people, I'll try to lay out a bit more of what I think.
First. Heads up to the dev for keeping at it. I was surprised to hear from this again.
Props for your dedication as this seems to be completely rebuilt. The trees are different, the shaders are different, the buildings are different. So. Wow. The developer stated at some point that the source code was lost - so this underlines that.
Well. First I played with my old save and didn't see much difference. I just had a hunch that Kazuko used 2 swords. Seems that was the case, she uses one now. Her stance seems more agressive now. Gameplay seems unchanged, the jump is just very awkward. I'm aware that animations are very time consuming and hard to get right. It's not something I expected to be improved. But this is something that should be considered as improvement - probably later in a successor, but an improvement would be nice.
I restarted with a new character to get a better impression and comparison.
I still don't particularly like the combat as it's quite stiff and clunky. Part of it is that it's not easy to read the hit-boxes, a part is the animations. Not sure, but I think this version is a bit more dynamic - so probably there was some honing.
As an example: Early on you fight a hobgoblin. That's where you find a first design flaw. You could go with the mechanics of the game and attack - block, but you'd loose. More efficient is attacking two times the shins, and when the hobgoblin turns, just walk two steps to the left. While the Hobgoblin is in his attack animation, you can poke his shins two to three times.
So. Walking aside is a winning strategy, the mechanic with blocking is useless. It's slower, traps you in hit-drag for so long that you get hit a second time and costs you stamina. Why would this go through to a release candidate?
Sure, the walk-aside strategy could be seen as a more advanced strategy as you need to understand the hit-boxes, so there should be a benefit to finding out. But at the same time, the dev build a defensive mechanism that is always to your disadvantage. That's bad in the most basic and very primal game-loop.
There is a lot more to find and improve, but that's the job of the dev team. But such a mistake means the dev doesn't balance out the primary game-loop. What I described is not a diamond in the rough, it's an error.
I didn't expect that this game would be rebuilt especially considering that a successor seems to be coming to first alphas. The most common feedback that I remember reading was about menus. There is a shop in the first town. It's a list of items you can buy, ranging from potions to armor and accessories. When get to the second page, it has less items on the page. But. As it doesn't clear the items from the first page, they stay on the "empty" spaces. If I tried buying an item it would be 999999 Cash. I bought something later on and from there on the empty spaces with the items of the last page just had the price of the last item bought.
Why I get so much into detail with this? Well. This is the kind of bug that I expected to be fixed. It still works as described. A lazy solution would have been to not ever have any empty fields on the second page. Still there.
All the menus seem to be rebuilt. Some look nicer, especially the skilltree is worth mentioning. Maybe the quest dialogues too. If you walked up to an NPC, there was an indicator that said [E], but it was very hard to read. Now it's in a turquoise box (much like speech bubbles in old Final Fantasy games), so that's good. You need to get really close to the NPCs to get it, but okay. The quests and dialogues are very basic and only send you kill 5 or 10 somethings. Afterwards the NPCs will only ever say "Thank You". Even dailies in MMOs tried harder to provide a little bit of story. It's fine, but it wouldn't have hurt to have one quest-giver telling you to walk to the other NPC because they've heard that they have some trouble too (for example the Hobgoblin). The way it is now you sometimes roam the land without any purpose but killing what stands in your way. It's more flexible, but less engaging. Knowing where to go and still going on a killing spree is different to walking around killing and then stumbling on a quest-giver.
Another short annoyance is that I only noticed level ups by the number of my level. I didn't notice any notification. Although it's not my first playthrough, I forgot about the character stats again. I just wanted to check if I had any stats and pressed [C], where 30 points waited for distribution. I cannot remember any mention of [C]. Yeah, it's expected to be [C], but not every game has +5 points for level up.
A similar problem goes for notifications for a skill learned. Although there is a notification that I saw, it's plain black text in 12pt. So it's really easy to miss. Not that it needs to be there (as the skill gets available anyways). But if it pops up, I want it designed in a way that it really pops.
Also: Why does the menu have no option to go back to main menu or quit the game? Is [Alt-F4] really the intended way to quit?
A last example will be the spider cave. There was an improvement as far as I can tell. The old spider cave was interestingly hard. You see, if you killed a spider, it respawned again. But if it respawned, it knew where you were and followed you. That means, if you went through the dungeon, there'd be more and more spiders following you. Spiders have a ranged attack (a spider-web), that stuns you for some time. So it got extremely annoying. That kind of mechanic isn't "difficult" or "challenging", it's just bad. Gladly, it's gone in this version. But. Spiders still respawn quite fast. They don't respawn and track you down, but there'll be a spider every few steps.
I haven't played further yet. The problems that brought me to not recommend this game are still there. I can see that there was a lot of work spent - considering that many models looked different. But imo the effort was spent on the wrong issues. All these lines should be taken as feedback and possibilities to improve - most likely in the upcoming successor (I don't think it's viable to patch all the things I mentioned, although one might consider the one or other little thing to improve). I'll basically repeat my statement from my original review. It's impressive as a first project. Considering there was another game done in the time since it's release, an alpha for Farstorm 2 and the rebuild for this - keep at it, that's impressive. Looking forward to where the dev takes his games in the future.
Sorry, Cory, my impression did not change with the updates.
