[h1]A game that gets most of the way there, but falls short[/h1]
I want to like this game more than I do, because it does some good things, but those good things are negated by a lot of annoyances. There's roughly 60% of a good game here - because there's sound mechanically sound ideas here, they just don't cross the finish line.
Let me break it down:
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-- I do like the fact that you have full control over your party creation, along with a variety of races and classes to use. Each race has its own advantages and disadvantages, however, due to the abundance of gear (which I'll be discussing later), a lot of these advantages & disadvantages are negated (outside of any bonuses/penalties to experience gain). Maybe these bonuses/penalties become more important beyond the 8 or so hours I put into this, but I felt like my characters could have been any class/race combo and had succeeded. Which, for a game that has no real story, makes me feel like I'm dealing with 4 blank slates instead of characters I've built up into a deadly squad.
-- While I do appreciate the amount and variety of gear presented, it just feels... [i]meh[/i]. It didn't take me very long to start finding gear that increased resistance (or outright rendered a character immune) to various status effects or gave a decent increase to some elemental resistances. Considering that a few races get a bonus to some element resistance at the cost of some penalty, having easy access that spreads that all characters, regardless of their starting race, it starts to make those bonuses feel a bit... useless. Granted, those gear-based resistances can be stacked, but even then, I never encountered any situations where those resistances felt [i]meaningful[/i]. Again, maybe beyond the areas I explored (I made it to Midport, in case anyone is curious) they start coming into play more. As it stood, more often than not, I was being showered with gear from combat and quests that was worse than what I had equipped.
-- Item drops from combat are kind of a mess - in the early stages of the game (like in the Gnoll Cave), it's not uncommon to receive 10-15 different items after combat. I know this is probably to alleviate some of the stress of having to get a lot of early game crafting items, but it's just overwhelming, considering the [i]sheer[/i] amount of items I had in my inventory. This started to thin out after the opening dungeons, but even then, it still felt silly.
-- I like crafting systems, and I do like the fact that you can make a lot of stuff in this game, but the sheer amount of craftable items is just, again, like the combat drops, kinda silly. When a good chunk of the items you can craft have duplicate uses (and most of the non-potion consumables are better utilized as quest turn-ins than anything else), it creates another "why bother?" issue. Like why include all the basic weapon/armor pieces for a specific material when, by the time you can actually [i]mine[/i] those materials, they're practically useless, even from a vendor trash standpoint.
-- The quest design in this game is... very, very bad. I don't mind having a plotless game (as I'm a very big fan of the SaGa series, which the plots of which take a very distant backseat to gameplay and mechanics), but considering that all the quests I found were literally "get me (X) of (Y)" (sometimes not even getting the [i]amount[/i] needed other than 'some'), it just made me feel like a group of errand runners than adventurers. Just because there isn't an overarching plot to this game doesn't mean there can't be smaller plots in some of the areas (especially with the reputation system in place). It would stand to give [i]some[/i] purpose to putting our nose to the grindstone (as the game quite literally tells you to do if you talk to the information NPC in the starting town) other than "just do it."
-- Backtracking. Holy cow, the backtracking. Considering that you move at roughly half the speed of town movement while in dungeons, it makes going back through places (which happens quite often, as towns are separated by them) very excruciating. Doubly so considering that most of the time, I was powerful enough to chew through combat with very little reward when I did have to backtrack. By the time I got to Kelece and explored the mines near it, I was thinking "is this [i]really[/i] worth it to trudge back through these dungeons to turn in these quests?" (as it turns out, yes, it was, because the gear I got from them was [i]way[/i] overpowered, but I can easily imagine plenty of times when the answer to that question is "no").
-- A lot of minor bugs and annoyances. There were plenty of times when I saw spelling/grammar issues that would have easily been caught with an editing pass. For example, I encountered multiple enemies with all lowercase names. I also encountered multiple NPCs that while a dialogue box popped up for them, had empty text boxes. I also had multiple instances where open treasure chests would reset their state, allowing me to open them and collect their contents again. When you take the ship to/from Southport, the ship will snap back to what I assume is whatever the center coordinates for that scene right before it fades out. And one I found particularly annoying is when you talk to ship captains, the confirmation choice is to [i]refuse[/i] travel - if you cancel out of it, you actually go on the boat trip.
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I wouldn't be so harsh on this game if it was the dev's freshman or sophomore effort, but considering that they have put out a number of RPGs before this is making me wonder if they learned anything from previous projects. I know this is a solo dev effort (as the game says so), but even then, a bit of polish and refinement would make this game a whole lot better. Plus with the $20 retail price, it's asking a bit much considering most games of this sort go for $10-15 - I know people have to recuperate their dev costs and deal with Steam's cut and all that, but... it's still a bit of tough swallow.
