Score: 8
"A fantastic game... probably."
date: June 17, 2009
Just finished it, even with the saving difficulty. You CAN save (it is invisible though) and CAN load if you die. However after finishing the game I can no longer access my save? Which I shame as I wanted to go back and find all the treasure I missed. I also didn't get to save at the very end so won't get to load my game into Chapter 3... bugger! Hopefully your starting chars in chapt 3 are at a similar stage to end game chapt 2 (I had everyone level 13, and about 13k gold +many many items).
Anyway, a very enjoyable game, and the best web RPG I've found around here, and one of the better freeware ones too.
Battles are great. Perfect difficulty. I only died once in this game - to the 4 heroes. I wasn't entirely prepared for such a tough battle, and let the healer survive too long at which point killing anyone became impossible. The next time I killed off Bernard first, then focused on the healer. With those two down it became an easy battle. Heal with Mardek, attack with the rest. I've noticed a lot of complaints about the difficulty... but I think people are simply missing something. Always use the ASD reactions. The Paladins spirit powers are great against Undead (which is most of the end game). Mardek is a healer, don't bother attacking bosses with him, cast shields and heal instead. If you master all of that you shouldn't be troubled too much. The other bosses are tough, but far from impossible. I'd say combat is definitely one of the games strengths.
The only thing I can say is that magic is way more powerful then physical attacks. I found myself usually constantly waiting for Emela's turns, as she did by far the most damage - one-shot-killing anything that wasn't a boss. A few more physical abilities could help perhaps - things like channeling certain elements into your sword (not just the spirit one, but earth, fire etc so then you can use the appropriate one vs enemies).
The story was good. I loved the intro in chapter 1.
I love the discussions the Magi have at the end of both chapters, those are by far my favourite peices of dialogue. Very funny. The rest of the story mixes a lot of humour with some serious themes... I think humour within the game is fine, I found a lot of it great but some of it just broke the atmosphere far too much t i.e. 'ZOMBIE LOCKSMITH.... WTF IS THIS? WHO KNOWS!' Humour within the context of the game is fine, and is good writing, but things like that just broke the illusion too much for me and reminded me that this is just a game afterall, nothing more. That said, I loved how detailed you tried to make the world. The Encyclopaedia was a fantastic addition. Some of the dialogue could also do with improvement... I see you have plenty of potential (i.e. that discussion about the killing at the start, but that kind of stuff is rare, you should explore some of the themes you bring up more) so I'd love to see you use it.
Oh and the final part... where a character dies, I found a bit unbelievable. I still had 7 minutes on the timer dammit, we could have killed that thing! Perhaps a shorter timer may be needed. (tbh I didn't like how that whole event was handled in general, but I won't get into that here, suffice to say he was my favourite character though)
Anyway you've created a very interesting world and I look forward to seeing what is to come!
