Reverie - A Heroes Tale

Pros: * Gameplay is smooth and easy to jump right in * Nostalgic (reminds me of early Final Fantasy days) Cons: * No clear direction on where to go next. * I've found that in some towns in the Church, there is someone that will give you a clue on where to go next. I started playing the game today and I haven't been able to stop. It reminds me of the early Final Fantasy games as it has a very similar feel and gameplay. At the beginning of the game, you select 4 characters from a selection of about 20~ classes. I chose: * Warrior - for brute strength * Paladin - for redirecting attacks from my magical users * Wizard - for the magic attacking user * Priest - for my magic support character You are then told you can select 1 of 3 gifts from the "king" to help you on your journey. I chose the Airship because....why not?!? :-) I also think me selecting the airship hurt me as the map is pretty big and I went to many areas where I was overpowered quickly. Makes me further realize why FF didn't give us the airship right off the bat. Tip: I don't remember where the cave was, but I found it with the airship early on. The cave monsters were WAY too powerful for me but there is a chest near the entrance to the cave with a Colorless Ring. You can get in and get out before being attacked. :-) That ring gives the user 50% off magic costs!!! Spells that cost 1MP with the ring are then FREE. I consider it to be a cheat as it gives me such a great advantage. :-) I'm not complaining.... ;-) To the devs: Good job! Overall, a very solid game! Only bug I've found in the game is in River Run. To get the well key, I had to push one of the boxes. I found that if I tried to push that box three times, my character would freeze and not move. To resolve, I simply used my save point when entering the village.

This game started out good, but it soon falls into the same trappings that a lot of games this style do. Due to a lack of creative design, the game increases difficulty by continually making everything more and more complicated, without becoming interesting. Dungeons become increasingly maze like, with no indication of where you're supposed to go. Enemies gain more health, but prove no challenge. And then throw never ending random encounters on top of it all. Eventually, the dungeons become a slogfest of boredom without any real reason to push onward.

A few bugs. Underflow of HP (i assume) caused a few monsters to become unkillable & unrunable. (vagabond randomlly nuking and your party dying >.> ) Wish there was a back button in the hero create menu at the start. Controls/menus are old school, and somewhat clunky because of it. Otherwise solid game good number of characters, solid map, reminds me of FF1

TL;DR: I bought the game at half-price and so had low expectations. I got a poorly plagarized Artifact Adventure made with resources that may be copyrighted and thus illegal to use in a commercial product. I play and have played a lot (and I mean A LOT) of old school RPGs and newer games inspired by older games, which made me interested when I saw a game that looked kind of like Artifact Adventure (which I love), but using some game materials that seemed somewhat familiar (ie fonts from Soulblazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigma). Sadly, I didn't have to go far to see what a subpar ripoff of Artifact Adventure this is. This quote from the game designer from a discussion post sums up what I think their thought process was: "Wasn't expecting anyone else to have played that game and then Reverie." I played through the first dungeon/2nd town and not only is it clear the game designer copied AA's plot/sidequest/game system ideas (shard=artifacts, Dreaming King=Swamp King, Special shrines, the opening airship/key/shard choice, conquering towers to weaken said villain, shard/artifact in a well in the first forest town, etc. etc.) outside the leveling/skill buy system, but what few "choices" there are are so poorly constructed that what impact they could've had on the player is blunted. The general NPC text isn't great either. Artifact Adventure isn't a masterpiece, but it certainly did these things pretty well. If you enjoy oversold RPG systems--the additions/character builds aren't quite as innovative as claimed--you might enjoy this game, but I cannot recommend a game that so openly plagarizes another--and not particularly well at that. For all I know, the creator may have illegally used the fonts in this game too (I don't know if the Blazer/Gaia/Terranigma font is open source or copyrighted). Even though it's cheap, my moral compass and taste compels me to tell you to stay away.

A game that gives off a classic JRPG feel for that nostalgic experience. A lot of people say this game gives them the FF1 vibe but I've never played FF1 so I can't guarantee it. Reverie - A Heroes Tale definitely deserves a second/third/fourth playthrough using a different combination of classes.. because there are tons of combinations to use (I believe there are more than 15 classes to choose from). At first I had a really hard time with the game because you won't be guided as much as other games typically do. I went to the discussion board and the developer responded to one of my posts and that helped me understand the game a bit more and now I'm having a blast! The game isn't perfect though and the maps are somewhat bland. There are a lot of symmetrical elements you'll find but maybe that's just me and my hate for those kind of maps.

A note: I did back this game on Kickstarter, though that will not affect this review. Reverie - A Heroes Tale was quite a fun trip down memory lane for me. It has obvious callbacks to early Final Fantasy games (I-III), and similar RPGs from that era. By far the biggest selling point of this game is its replay value - with over a dozen classes to mix and match together, each with their own unique skills to learn as they level up, combined with the simple yet welcome ability to choose what stats you gain from each level up, you truly can have your own very unique party. In addition, the shards you find on your journey allow your characters to even break from the mold further if you desire! Want a Wizard that equips rods to boost their magic, but smacks enemies with it when they run out of MP? You can! Want your Dark Knight to take advantage of that nature spell you picked up off the ground? Boost their magic score! As I journeyed through the world, I also found myself seeking each and every NPC, because the dialogue was equal parts amusing and interesting! Amusing acknowledgements of well known RPG tropes (stealing from someone's pantry, vendor in a dungeon) brought a chuckle out of me. And even with a couple of lines, certain characters did wonders explaining the lore of the world without feeling like exposition. Add in the music that set the mood perfectly in every situation, and I found myself looking forward to each new place to explore! I do have some complaints, of course. The UI could be a bit easier to traverse (backing into and out of menus to learn new skills or change equipment on each character gets rather dull fast). Once I got past the first 'checkpoint' of the game, I also felt that comabt never quite balanced out again: It kept jumping between too easy (I use attack, or my most basic spells) and frighteningly resource consuming (get ready to shell out a few thousand on ethers after a dungeon). Some of the equipment options also suffered, I feel. While there were some very cool ones, that had a huge 'risk versus reward' ability attached to them, they never felt necessary or desired, outside of one weapon I received perhaps a tad bit earlier than intended that let my Alchemist wreck everything we came across at the cost of a massive reduction in maximum HP. But others, such as lower defense (i.e. are you wearing paper) gear with modest offensive stat gains (strength, or health etcetera) just never felt necessary or enticing, especially when enemies felt like they were slamming tanks into me at times. Much better to just throw on the highest defense gear possible and run with it. To note, part of the fun of the game is finding those game-shattering strategies and applying them. The discovery of a ring that halved the cost of skills was amazing, especially combined with the capstone abilities on my Alchemist. Or when I found MP regneration skills and equipment, which made my worries of resource management a thing of the past. On the story, like I said this is an early RPG style story. The closest comparison could be made to Artifact Adventure, another indie title with some similar ideas. However, the plot has enough dark elements to make you ask yourself questions about your journey that it left me looking for more. As it stands, I have not yet found out if there are ways to act on some of the information you discover about the world. Hopefully I can, but as it stands the ending I did receieve felt a tad bit hopeless. Pros +Replay Value to the extreme! +Awesome Music! +Explore the world at your leisure! +Amusing NPC dialogue! +Intruiging world lore! Cons -Archaic Design Decisions -Strange (usually not game-breaking) bugs -Combat difficulty spikes at seemingly random times Overall, if you enjoy old-school RPGs, Reverie - A Hero's Tale is for you!

So, I got this game from one of the Kickstarter backers and I must say...this game is fantastic. To be perfectly honest I had no idea what to expect when I dove into the game and I believe the creators have outdone themselves. To give some info to people who are thinking about purchasing the game for themselves, I personally enjoyed it, though some people may not. But for now I will place the topic on how I went through the game. The game starts you out with picking a slew of classes; some better than others. Already, the game has an incredible amount of replayability to work with. For my first playthrough of the game, I picked the following: [list] [*]Thief - Pepper [*]Paladin - Dachi [*]Priest - Miafey [*]Sage - Kurrie [/list] For me, I like the idea of just casual grinding, as I did and got enough gold to purchase what I could say is the most powerful weapon in the game, but I won't spoil what it is at all cause then people will just try to find it. However I found using that very expensive and powerful weapon didn't make the game that fun, but it led me to use something else I enjoyed. There is one sidequest that I enjoyed, and this might be the only spoiler here, [spoiler](I personally enjoyed the Wispy Essence quest, where you traveled through just about every catacomb and a few other places to get the legendary Esper Blade)[/spoiler] but safe to say it wasn't that gamebreaking at all, and it was pretty fun to find everything. When I play through the game again, it'll be a blast. The game was challenging, the sprites for everything was great, and though there were some minor bugs I think I can deal with that. Not every game is perfect after all. Welp, I think that's everything that I wanted to go out on. So buy the game if you're interested; it'll be a blast for sure.

Great game. The game tells its story. It has player made towns and side stories. Any job party mixup, and weapon armor swap. You can turn a mage into a melee. Have fun. By the way he has a kickstarter going for second game. Reverie - A Heroes Fate, via @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1487194831/reverie-a-heroes-fate

I purchased this because I'm a big fan of the resources used - but I'm a little disappointed in the glaring graphical inconsistencies. PROS [list] [*]Character/class selection reminiscent of old school Final Fantasy games [/list] CONS [list] [*]Glaring graphical inconsistencies (1PX characters, 3PX tiles and vector(?)-based enemies) - it just looks really thrown together because of this - and doesn't build it's own "brand". [*]Unbalanced battles - this might be because of the party I chose but I felt very "meh" about battles overall. The difficulty spikes felt really bizarre. [*]Can't change party members/classes (I think a better idea would be to have chosen the main character's class - and then be able to hire the extra people in your party/dismiss them). [/list]

Fun game! Found a few bugs regarding the Vagabond... Also Bardos! He can inf chain combo you with sleep and charm... Not really that fun. Team kept getting wiped clean because of that combo of charm and sleep.