This game seems like a good idea at the beginning... but it becomes quickly annoying as there is no strategy. It's just too linear.
Reviews for "Primal Champions"
While this game is great, it has a lot of flaws that need to be addressed.
- I have Cog and Wyvern on my first playthrough, and when I learned Wyverns shield, I noticed...
WHY THE HELL DOES HE ALWAYS CAST IT ON COG???? Cog already has a reflect move, so when I order you to cast the shield, I want you to shield yourself, dumbass! And you know what's even worse? If you use Cog's reflect and Wyverns shield, Cog will do 0 damage with the counterattack, because all damage has been reflected by the shield!
TL DR: Wyvern needs to learn how to cast the shield on himself. In my case, he only does that when his ally, Cog, is dead.
- I created new games in order to try out the other characters, and I realised the game is A LOT harder if you don't have wyvern. The area attack is overpowered compared to the other characters, up to the point when I die in almost every battle. In my second slot I tried the knight and the healer, and I wasn't able to beat the goblin king at level 4, when with cog and wyvern is piece of cake, and on my 3rd slot I tried the rogue and the hunter, which brings me to my third point:
- When I fought the goblin king with the rogue and hunter, the hunter died first, and I was with my rogue vs the king, both at low life. I used stealth, and just as the animation finished, he attacked me, and the game over screen appeared, but I was still alive, and able to attack. So I killed him while being in game over screen, and got the victory.
I like the style of this game. However the balance of this game is really poor, Actually you have very few tactics but spamming skills; There is no point to order your skill since their CD are too long to save til the right time before you are defeated.
The last Boss made me upset because he is about 50 levels stronger than the one before, yet my level stops at 20 and I can not reset my abilities to make another try. Also there are many glitches that are easy to notice e.g. if you warp to kinguard and move forward you will then get stucked and have to warp again.
I will say this is an epic game if you made the upgrade much clear and able to reset and add certain weakness to each boss so that players can beat them will own skill.
This is one of those badly designed and programmed games that if you reach the end and you have either chose the bad team mates combinations or stats its impossible to complete the game.
Its Impossible to beat the game if you choose Nesyss and Tindra not only because I can't do it but because others can't do it too based on the other comments I read.
Even the damn youtube walk though they can't beat the damn last boss !
I know there has to be a challenge but its ridiculous hard.
This is not about been hard this is about been badly designed...
I manage to defeat his first form but when he turns into a wolf my team is badly hurt! and he can hit both team mates at the same time! + HEAL + each damage does like 80 Damage per hit! and he hits Twice! in a single turn!
160 per turn! I only have 475 hp and 540 hp!
that means I would be dead in 4 turns or less If I had full hp...
So in 2 turns = dead on average...
Nesyss Stealth is USELESS!
Boss can hit her when she on stealth and damage her + is timed buff that wear off in seconds making it an useless skill for the last boss...
What this game needs:
Story
More NPC
Cities with people instead of some weird engineer version of Drunk Santa Claus..
Weapons
Skill reset system
It also sucks that skills are on cool down when you start a battle. They should not be in cool down when you start a battle you should be able to use them first.
Getting stat per level especially HP. Its stupid if you are level 10 and have 80 hp same hp as you had when you were level 1... Yes you can put stats per level but it stops you for aiming for a pure build.
Heal Skill that do not SUCK! Seriously Tindra healing skill sucks it barely heals you. and the pet are you kidding me??? It only heals 25 hp!!!! That only heals 1/3 of a single attack from the last boss and he hits twice per turn!
This game has really great art and the battle system seems ok but it could have been way better programmed and planned.
Some Game Spoilers below? If you're the kind who doesn't want to know anything about the game, then definite spoilers below.
Two notes,
1) I have not completed the game. I wanted to, but fighting Larris ground me down. If the game instantly gets better after you beat him, well… I’m probably never going to. But any notes I have here reflect everything that’s possible to do up until the fight with him.
2) The party I chose was Tindra and Nesyss. So all the discussion points below might not apply to everyone:
Well, first off, this is probably one of my favourite Newground RPGs currently. The bad news is that, in all honesty, I don't love the rpgs which get popular on this website, though I do love rpgs in general. I have a few guesses as to why (mostly about how a lot of them over rely on genre awareness to derive humour, and combat, though I'll get that too) but that's neither here nor there.
I'll split this up into a few different areas:
Glitches (just so there's a comprehensive list since there are a couple)
Presentation (Controls, Graphics, and Voice Acting)
Combat
Story and Characters
Glitches/Bugs/Whatever you want to call them:
I, like others, have had the: Once I reach Level 20 I advance no more on quests, even if I actively do them. Also, (I haven't seen this mentioned earlier but it might have been): I began the game with having completed the 'Acquire the Warp Shard' quest (though I didn't actually receive it until the proper time in game), while conversely never been able to complete the Feast with Thalquin quest.
In the category of nonquest related glitches:
In two places, a set encounter is seemingly replaced with fight.
1) In trying to get meet Thalquin in the Afterlands for the free orbs he gives, I get attacked by a Bestial Servant. Thalquin's dialogue still runs though.
2) After I beat Hadrick Thatch in Swifthold Cliffs, I presume that I have to fight Blee, but instead I get into a fight with a Swifthold Brawler. Again, Blee's dialogue still runs.
The Warp Shard, also, seemingly caused my party to be separated if I warped to Kingsguard or Orchid Swamp. In Kingsguard, this meant I could only move one space before having to warp elsewhere: in Orchid Swamp, at least, eventually my party would catch up together. Though, if I warped to Orchid Swamp, then travelled to Kingsguard, the game worked fine.
Also, the fight against the Mountain Spirit (who might be tied to the quest the Mountain Empress? Didn't check before another boss fight so I don't know) Doesn't give XP and always respawns the same fight. Don't know if this is intentional or a glitch (it was the fact she didn't give XP that made me question this)
If you try to leave to leave the Afterlands by foot, the game doesn’t let you.
In the final against Larris, the game popped up that my party died, even though clearly there was still health left in one of my party members, and indeed I watched Larris finish the job. I think this might be specific to Nesyss, though, when she uses stealth, as the game does seem to in some way count the damage she takes.
That was all I found, so now to the next section:
PRESENTATION:
First off, graphics and voice acting, since this is quick. Both were fine, adequate. Didn't love the voice actors, didn't hate them. Again with the art and graphics: none of it felt overly amateurish, none of it was AAA material (obviously). It did it job. So this gets a passing grade.
Now, we come to the controls. I did see, below, how you admitted to wanting the players to figure out stuff on their own, which is fine and admirable, if done correctly. However, I still feel like basic concepts were not explained as well as they could have been. Which button is the select button? Q? That's weird. What are these special coloured dots that I can walk on? Oh, what are these orbs that I'm collecting? I forgot what button fires that special attack that they do, what was it again? Is XP and orb gathering random, since I can't figure out the correlation for who got how many orbs or what xp? Not all of these questions needed to be answered, but some of them would be nice.
This brings me to the movement controls on the overworld. Admittedly this might all be just me, but three things.
1) It was a bit weird to me, that when I go and try to get free orbs from Thalquin, that it would start up a battle sequence that never happens (though after a while, every time I did, one of my party would make a noise as if they were injured). I don’t know why it’s like that, but I’ll admit that it might have to be like that, for however you made the game.
2) The characters sometime move really fast, and sometime move really slowly. The only correlation I could find was that the further the next spot was, the quicker they moved, but I couldn't figure out why. Admittedly this might just be the engine you work on, and feel free to ignore this if it is.
3) I expected to be able to return to the last spot I was by clicking the opposite arrow to the one that I clicked to get where I was. For example: If I clicked right, I expected to return to the spot where I was by clicking left. This... wasn't the case. Much maneuvering was had, and honestly it was probably one of my least favourite parts of the game.
None of this is deal breakers, but it did take me out of the experience.
To end this section on a higher note. I enjoyed the music. Set the mood perfectly well. The only thing I can think to mention is that it has a nasty habit of turning off when a fight drags on a for a bit (like the fight with the Earth Elemental at the beginning). But beyond that, it worked for me.
Combat:
I will reveal my bias now. I am not a fan of this hybrid real time/turn based combat. Either let me plan it out, weighing up the best options, before seeing if I get my face based in, or at least give me an attack or two to bash constantly, while I wait for maybe some higher level skills to charge. This is one of my major complaints about a lot of RPGs that make it here on Newgrounds, and this is no exception. So the best I can honestly say is that this isn't the worst iteration of it: it works most of the time (sometimes the button clicks don't respond, but I'll allow that for user error) The difficulty of it wasn't too difficult; only a little bit of grinding, but again, I'll allow for user error and a badly optimized party. The RPG element was a bit limited, but again I can work with that (I tend to find that RPGs that go out of their way to have deep skill trees tend to revel in their fiddliness anyway). I wasn't a huge fan of the pressing q,w,e, and r as my only point of interaction, but I'll grant that that's ultimately the best/only way to implement the hybrid system.
I only have a couple of changes that I would ask, without asking for a whole overhaul of the combat system.
1) The ability to pause mid combat. An error message on my computer came up halfway through a fight once, and well, it was annoying to hear my people getting injured and I couldn't have them fight back.
2) Do something about the fight against Larris. The smallest thing I can think of is when he transforms, don’t reset my button timers: even if I get a rhythm going, that little feature destroys it, especially since he gets what amounts to 2 health wrecking attacks right off the bat. But beyond that he was a difficult fight for me, and after fighting him something along the lines of 15 times, I had no more grinding to do, so I just gave up.
End result: An average to good implementation of a system I don't like. I tried not to let it colour my opinion too badly, but it's still there.
Story and Characters:
There really seem to be none of either. While there’s a vague plot of: Bad Guy is doing Bad Things over there! And every boss we meet goes: Larris is the one who ordered us to do these evil evil things! There’s also some token world building: There are these Primal Champions which imitate animals, and there’s all these nations/regions to the world.
But there’s nothing really beyond that. Nothing comes of it. The characters are flat, only speaking expositionally. I don’t know who Tindra and Nesyss are, even though I spent several hours with them. I know how they’re supposed to be like. Tindra is honourable. Nesyss is prideful. But I don’t get that beyond the opening text. Nor do they interact. They converse, but only to pass along information. I wanted to know how Tindra and Nesyss feel about each other.
Same thing with the story: I’m told that Larris is a blight upon the land. But I don’t really see it. Kingsguard attacking me didn’t matter, because everyone was attacking me. The only reason that I would is because I (the player) know that Knights in shining armour tend to be good guys, while bandits and goblins and the such are bad guys. But there’s no reason in game why that’s the case.
This would be fine if the game didn’t pretend to have a story or anything. I mean, my favourite thing tends to be the story, but that’s just me ,and I can enjoy storyless games. But the fact that there’s a story presented, made it quite the disappointment.
The TL;DR:
The story and characters are nonexistent, mixed with combat that I didn’t like and a final boss that I couldn’t for the life of me beat. And while it presented nicely, bugs and glitches took me out of the experience somewhat.
So why 3/5, if I’m so critical? Because, it was fun enough that I wanted to finish it, even though I didn’t. Take that for what it’s worth.