Reviews for Relic

[14xbill]

First, I really enjoyed the game. In my review I will focus in details on the weak points I felt that you could improve greatly. I'll simplify by review by the following points:
Pros:
1. Pleasant artworks
2. Fast paced battle and storyline, no feeling of drag
3. customizable characters
4. dynamic battle system
Cons:
1. No inn. This may not be as bad as it sounds as one could still heal through potions. However, it is tedious to heal one by one, including mana, after taking damages, using skills, and after adding points to stamina and/or magic. Also, the rooks one receives after each battle is quite small (not sure if it's true in the late game as I'm only just done with the ruins).
2. Battle Animation. It seems, especially for Coal, that damages appear even before the character's attack animation hits the target, thus giving a sense of a lag of the attack animation.
3. Battle System. This reminds me of FF7 in which you could turn the battle into complete real time. However, this is definitely not for everyone, as player needs time to scroll to find magic or item or even target to attack. And while enemy attacks in real time, allies take turn-based attack! That kind of defeats of purpose of a real time battle mechanics since enemies have the advantage of attacking 2 times before you cycle through to your main attacker after wasting time with the weak physical attacker such as the alchemist. If you want a real time battle mechanics, then make it for your allies to and allow player to freely switch between characters who are ready to take actions. That gives player much more freedom in strategy.
4. No hot keys. Real time battle mechanics is not bad, but it's worse when the game is completely mouse based. As mentioned in the previous point, player has to waste time finding the right command and click. With hot keys, players could plan what he/she wanted to do and when character is ready just use the hotkey to execute the action.
5. Batlte menu. When character is ready to take turn, player will see the menu slowly scrolls up, wasting precious time as battle is in real time (this, along with many other cons, makes the whole real time mechanics really horrible choice). Get rid of it, just make it appear instead of rolling up.
6. Stats/Description. The statistics part of the menu is too simplified. There are other hidden stats such as evade rate, maybe hit rate (though I haven't seen my character missing), magic attack effectiveness/multiplier. And for the equipment description, player should be able to click on the currently equipped items to see its effects. Right now one has to take it off to the inventory to see its description.
7. Bestiary. It's a good idea to include a bestiary in the menu so one could check the ones that are scanned. You should check out matt-likes-swords' Epic Battle Fantasy 3 to get some inspirations. A good bestiary makes players exploit enemies weakness much easier. Also, if you want the players to use different equipments for diff enemies, allow them to freely switch equipments during a battle. Else how could one exploit certain special effects against certain enemies if one doesn't know who he/she will run into next.
8. Stat points. It is great to be able to customize characters, but each character seem to receive different amount of benefits for each addition stat point. Some are obvious or told in game: guardians receive extra HP for each stamina. But some are more hidden (like dex). Tell players what they're getting out of it, otherwise freedom of customization is just as blind as one without it.

Hope this helps and I look forward to your updates and future works.

Hyptosis responds:

Thanks for the detailed feedback, I'll try to do better next time.

[Berder]

Yeah, it's good.

I agree with most of Ferphlyss's advice below. His suggestion to upgrade only strength and stamina except for Cinnacat, the healer (who gets magic instead of strength) was a good one. I upgraded magic instead of strength on Jahti, the archer, as well, because she had a couple of good mass attack spells, and that worked out OK, but by the end I was wishing I'd upgraded strength instead of magic for her too because she was often short on mana and her spells didn't deal a lot of damage.

I beat the game with the party at level 6. I didn't have any trouble with enemies dealing too much damage. Ferphlyss, maybe you didn't find all the good armor?

The magic system is indeed poorly designed as Ferphlyss pointed out. You can optimize a character for regular attack, OR for special attacks, but not both - and if you optimize them for one, they are useless at the other. And special attacks other than healing are barely stronger than regular attack, if at all.

Another thing to add - the only potion worth buying is the smallest mana drink (the Huchukalaki drink). One of those lets Cinnabar cast 5 healing spells which is like 250-400 hit points depending on his magic. It's way more cost effective than any of the alternatives.

I also didn't have much success trying to match enemy weaknesses. There are too many possible elements and not enough options especially since most of my characters were terrible at magic. For example, there was one enemy whose weakness was "water" but I don't have any skills that use water, just ice (and there was another enemy whose weakness was specifically "ice"). I think there were 2 different kinds of enemies one of whom had "cold steel" as a weakness and another of whom had "iron" as a weakness, and it seemed that Coal's basic attack worked on one but not the other? And the green slimes were weak to crushing, but the black slimes were apparently not weak to crushing. It was pretty confusing and didn't make a lot of sense. You should lay out a system of a few basic elements with symbols, and add the element symbols above enemies who are weak to them, and put the element symbols on the button to attack or use a skill.

[jason52]

too many fights but really good game.

[aaaadd23]

Well done! BUT,there's a minor bug. I sometimes can't use the skills. (Okay, its like this. When you are in a battle, you press the "skills" button with full mana, you roll over the skill you want to choose, you click on it, but it does not work.) Could you fix it?

[TharosTheDragon]

I remember testing like an alpha version a while back and it's good to see you took some of the advice to heart, but there are still many big problems. I always think it's funny how with so many big budget professional games they manage to include all manner of ingenious gameplay mechanics but fail when it comes to readable font. Likewise, you've done very well with the animation and many aspects of the coding but the controls fall flat on their face. I like that you've added the ability to interact with enter instead of just clicking. That's one improvement. But here are some simple problems to fix that are vital to a game's playability.

There's no reason to have to choose between arrow keys and WASD. The game should respond to both simultaneously. That's even easier to code. I have a class that handles it automatically and I use it in every game.

If you are using the mouse instead of enter to interact, you click on a person and then have to click all the way down in the corner to progress the dialogue. That's nuts. You should be able to just click anywhere.

Space should do the same thing as enter. M should mute.

Why are there no hotkeys in battle? Battles are when you would want hotkeys the most. You don't want to have to move the mouse around to click every option. Random enemy encounters should be as expedited as possible and that means having the option to use the keyboard.

Apart from the control problems, battles seem a little slow by making you wait for a character's options to come up. Maybe there's some kind of Final Fantasy real time combat thing going on, but it looks like it's just making you wait for no reason. And this might be a little much because you clearly put a lot of work into your battle animations but sometimes it's nice to be able to skip or turn off the animations or something to make the battles go faster.

Also, what's up with the level ups? It doesn't seem to say how many attribute points you have to distribute and there's no way to undo the points you've spent.

I'm actually a big fan of your work and I know this is something new for you and I'm really impressed. I don't mean to sound pompous or anything but if you'd like I can help you out by giving you code for some things like a simple quality button etc.

And is it just me or is the opening dialogue exactly like Crystal Story?