The Ember Saga: A New Fire

I received a key for this game from Forthright Entertainment upon my offer for an objective review. I have to admit that I'm rather disappointed with the overall quality of the game. It's not at all what I expected. To begin with, I realize that this game is currently in Early Access, and I've reviewed several EA games. My goal is always to evaluate what's there while keeping in mind the potential for the game as a whole. In this case, the developer does seem to be actively seeking feedback, and that I commend. However, the limited content, unbalanced gameplay, confusing or incomplete game mechanics, and bugs encountered during gameplay have caused me to not recommend the game in its current state. For starters, F12 doesn't work for taking screenshots. This became relevant to me early on when my character got "stuck" in a cabbage patch in the first town. http://imgur.com/a/WCSxB I quit to title and continued the game to find that this bug can be recreated every time I talk to the character Yiza Sutan, regardless of whether I talk to her in the garden, out on the path, or by the buildings. I also found some bugs related to surfaces not being solid. For example, my character was able to walk through this table from one side to the other, and after about the third time, he got stuck in it. http://imgur.com/a/TgmkP Another example of that is this sign, which again, my character was able to walk through repeatedly. http://imgur.com/a/22knS The same was also true for beds, like this one http://imgur.com/a/TbpJ9 and this one http://imgur.com/a/3XQjb. You can't sleep in the beds, so being able to walk through them like this just feels sloppy to me. I spent roughly 2 hours searching for new things to discover but was ultimately disappointed. What I found instead was a rather spread out RPG Maker product with repetitive images that I wouldn't be surprised to find were stock or public domain images. None of the items in the houses or towns can be interacted with. The food can't be eaten, and there are no books in the shelves to read. You can't sleep in the beds or sit in the chairs, and the signs can't be read. I played for over an hour before my first "random" battle encounter, but then after that, I could only move 1-2 steps before another battle instance. This felt very unbalanced to me, and after about an hour of incessant and uneventful combat sequences, it became annoying. Combat is turn-based and rather simplistic. Combat should be much more interesting in my opinion. The churches seem to be a healing mechanism, but at this time, they don't serve a function at all. My characters received no health or mana by visiting these churches, even though the character tells you to "sit down and be restored." You can't sit or interact with the altar, so if there's a function to these churches, I honestly don't know what it is at this point. It's more likely that this is an unfinished element. Additionally, the food wasn't working to heal, either during or outside of battle. The number of items I had would decrease, but my characters' health/mana didn't change. Thinking this was related to the classes I chose, specifically not having a healer, I started another game. This made absolutely no difference. Again, the meat and cheese could be used on any character, but while the number of items decreased, no change was noted in health or mana. If there's another function for these items, I sure don't know what it would be. I also discovered that it's impossible to skip the intro when creating a subsequent game. I'd like to see a quick-choice menu for choosing classes to avoid what is essentially another time waster. There's one more thing that I want to address in this review, and that's my interaction with the developer, himself. My first interaction was very positive. I liked Ryan and thought that this would be a good opportunity to provide the feedback he so desperately needs while also providing some added exposure for his game through my review here on Steam as well as an online blog. I even went so far as to offer a developer interview, to give him the opportunity to respond to anything that I found during my evaluation of the game or to comment on the history and development of the game. He was very receptive to that and seemed pleased to receive my offer. Having had such a positive exchange with him, I was extremely surprised to receive a private message from him 2 days later asking if I intended to review the game or if I just wanted the cards. I found that offensive and very unprofessional. I'd already told him that I was in the middle of writing reviews and would boot up his game as soon as I was finished with those who were ahead of him. I don't feel that a few days is too much to ask to complete this process, especially since I'm a full-time business owner, and all review requests that I accept are at my discretion, including when, or if, reviews are written. I receive requests from developers and publishers on a regular basis to review their games, and I've also been contacted by developers because of reviews I've written of their games. Sometimes they're pleased with the review, and sometimes they badger me to change it. My answer is always the same. I'm happy to re-evaluate any game I've reviewed after a major update has taken place, and if I feel it's warranted, my review will be revised with this additional information. I make this same offer to Forthright Entertainment. Please feel free to contact me after the next major update, and I'll be happy to take another look. Kudos for listening to your playerbase; I can't wait to see what you ultimately come up with. 9/9/16; 7:15 PM CST: Edit to add additional information. I received a very sincere apology from the developer once he read my review. It seems that an erroneous assumption was made, and he took ownership of that mistake completely. He also had a lengthy discussion with me about some of the issues I encountered. Some they were aware of, and some they were not, so the heartfelt gratitude that I received for my time and objectivity was much appreciated. I must say, this is my favorite kind of development team, one that wants very badly to make a stellar product and values the feedback that an EA period can provide. I also found out that while I was correct that the images of houses, towns, and items came with the engine, the characters and enemies, with the exception of the archer, are the developer's own artwork. The team is currently creating artwork for the archer and intends to create custom tiles at a later date. The rebalancing, combat, confusing game mechanics, and pass-through issues I mentioned are also on the table to be fixed in an upcoming update. The dev is also going to create a quest log to aid players by providing a bit of direction for the completion of quests without fruitless wandering. The backstory and character developement are strong, so if we ultimately see more content built around these strengths, I will have no issue whatsoever with changing this to a recommended review. I look forward to the updates!

lol

Early Access review: Game has got real promise and will write a full review once I manage to complete. It still has some bugs that need ironing out but I'm willing to play through these So far my party of four D&D players have been transported to another realm, there they are begining their search for their DM Derek who disappeared before them after reading a rather strange book. Each has a class chosen from theier new D&D game they were palying the night before and suddenly found they can wield magic for real in this alternate world. I look forward to the unfolding tale and the expanding game. I will also add the Devs of the game are good and active in forum. Certainly worth a play if you love old style rpgs with turn based combat ( my personal fav)

A neat little game if you enjoy JRPGs. Reminds me of final fantasy games. I haven't gotten very far into the story yet, but so far it is engaging and well written. There are a few bugs but the developer seems active in patching them and very responsive on the forums. I look forward to seeing how this game progresses through alpha stage.

Really good game so far, love the story...gives you a feeling of attachment to the characters and makes you feel if you are actually on the journey with em. Definitely something different as far as the story goes and the gameplay is pretty good so far. I need to level up and grab more gear so I can explore the map more...lots of locations and sense of exploration. I think this game will be really good since the devs actually update it and take suggestions from the community. Can't wait to see more of it :-)

I got this game in a bundle. I didn't have high hopes considering it's been in early access since 2016, but wow, what a mess. I probably have about 4 hours in the game, but for some reason, Steam thought it was running all night, hence the extra hours. But, I'm giving up on it. I think the game probably has a pretty good story, which was why I played as long as I did. But even using a save game editor can't compel me to keep going. The first problem is that, even in the beginning, there is unfinished stuff everywhere--buildings you can't enter, areas that probably should have a purpose, but don't yet, and quests you can't finish because, after wandering and hitting enter on everything in several areas, you realize that there is nothing you can do. That brings us to the "dungeons." I've gone through two separate forest areas and both are sprawling messes of dungeon with nothing. The mapping is atrocious and the false routes don't even lead to at least some nifty chest/loot. It's just pointless sprawl. Now, during that pointless sprawl, you have random encounters that frequently occurr after only a few steps. This gets old. What's even worse is that the enemies appear to level with you, and no matter what, they are always stronger than you. This makes the battles very tedious and expensive. Add onto that the fact that there is no new gear you can get for your characters. . . Hence the save game editor. I have edited my characters stats twice already, and they and the enemies have leveled up enough where the battles are once again getting sucky. So, despite the fact that I think the story is probably pretty good, I'm fed up with the battles, the sprawling lack of content, and trying to figure out just what I can and can't do as far as quests go.

Verry cool story , tho you need to read a lot.

I'm just about two hours into EV. What is immediately noticeable is the cool set-up and incredible detail that has gone into creating a story-rich environment and fleshing out the personalities of the four main protagonists. The early stage combat of the game is early Final Fintasy style & is pretty challenging. Appears to be a well-written old-school RPG so far.

RPG Maker strikes again! The Ember Saga: A New Fire is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction. In fairness there's a handful of "custom" art models amongst the asset flipped tilesets, but these are of the same poor quality as the usual Kadokawa assets that get flipped by all these RPG Maker construction kit asset flips plaguing Steam and making gaming worse for everyone. As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development. Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. This was going to be a painfully generic fantasy JRPG, with no really differentiating factors, apart from poor design, bad writing, and yeah, the abandoned nature of the asset flip. The game was abandoned roughly a year and a half after launch and hasn't been updated in over 6 years. It blew past the developers commitment to complete the game without any notification or admission of failure from the developer. The game will never be completed. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. Unethically, the developer sold keys to this abandoned Early Access game into cheap, nasty game bundles, where they knew it would be advertised and sold as a complete PC game. This seems to have been done in an attempt to mislead gamers into buying a knowingly faulty, defective and incomplete product. When a developer does this for a game they have zero practical intention of completing, this is essentially a scam, an intention to get paid for a broken/unfinished product. Often this is done as an exit strategy, as the developer takes the money and runs. No refunds have been given, the developer kept all the money they took from gamers. Another unethical act of this developer, knowing full well that this game is abandoned and they will never complete it, they are deliberately trying to scam gamers into buying it by offering it on discount from time to time. It's impossible to "accidentally" discount a game. The developer looked at their abandoned game, and instead of doing the right thing and removing it from Steam, they instead doubled-down and tried to scam even more people into paying for it. Greedy, and completely unethical. Doing the wrong thing, on purpose, for money. This is not okay. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? The Ember Saga: A New Fire is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

Abandonware it is not in a good current state there is no music the first time loading into the game the game crashed you have to sit through about 15 minutes of dialog before you get control of your characters the game isn't balanced at the beginning (enemy's hit by 16 your heath potions heal by 8)