This game was so addicting!
It'd be awesome if you make a sequel, I know you don't want to but pleaaaaaaaassseee
Reviews for "First Fantasy v1.1"
bcdefg123 responds:
Thank you for enjoying the game :) As far as a sequel goes, see the response for the review below yours. - Brian
Great game dude!
Well programmed, nice enough graphics, good writing, overall a great game!
Only thing is that the text is difficult to see. Make it bigger or bold or something? And use less grey in the interface. And make the interface prettier. Even though prettiness is obviously not the main thing of the game, it certainly helps!
Bug
Great, great, great game. I love these kind of text based games.
I found a bug. When you rename Daisuke, when you go to his house, it still says Daisuke, even though I renamed him Saskue.
bcdefg123 responds:
Caught it, thanks -Brian
I think your hour and a half estimate is a bit low
There's way more than an hour and a half here. It's very impressive you managed to fit so much in such a small size. Gameplay was good, but pressing "attack" all the time got really repetitive. The balance wasn't bad, but I feel that having the main way to level up being "train" basically screams "I designed the game to force you to grind constantly." Grinding isn't fun. Don't design games around it. Every sidequest boss and the side chapter was much harder than the final boss. Very annoying. You get to the end of the game, but if you want to do sidequests, you have to find somewhere to train and spend hours clicking the same two buttons repeatedly. The main reason there was more than an hour and a half of gameplay is that once you get to where you can do sidequests, you have to spend hours grinding to get from where you can fight the final boss to where you can do the sidequests. After playing the game several times, I figured out how to spread the grinding out so that you never need more than 5 minutes or so at a time, the game gets really easy, and you can go to the sidequests with little wait. But there's just no way to prepare for that damn floating head. Seriously, there's no chance of beating it unless you're around level 50. I tried 45 and 48, but 45 got me creamed and 48 ended with a stalemate where the battle took so long I almost reset the game. I beat it and got the medal at level 51, but holy crap. That was completely unnecessary to get the point across that it was a tough boss. That's 30 levels higher than what you need for the Omega Guard! You have to earn more experience between fighting the Omega Guard and the giant floating head than you earn in the entire rest of the game! The writing was very good, but I must say, for having ten endings, they were all horribly unsatisfying. A one screen summary that ranges from a few sentences to a paragraph after I just spent several hours on this game? I think I deserve a bit more. I have no problem reading more. Good grief, I just played a text-based RPG. I just did a LOT of reading. Reading isn't a problem. I'd have liked a decent length epilogue. I mean sure, the one where TM wins doesn't really need one, but it was really annoying when it was just like, "Yep, they won, and even though there was a betrayal, everyone made up and lived happily ever after." Some of them are a bit more elaborate mentioning Haruka going to jail, but then you cut it off saying "and then they waited for them to get out of jail and lived happily ever after." (Yes I know those aren't even close to actual quotes, but it's basically what was said). So really, giving us this much of a story and then cutting the ending off abruptly like that was not cool. You could have done better. A couple more screens of text wouldn't increase the file size that much, it's not like it's a cutscene or music. And the other issue I had with the story was the heavy implications that Haruka and Ryou had romantic feelings, then not developing it at all. Seriously, why is the medal called "Eternal Friendship"?!? There was at least more than that at the end. I played through enough to get New Game Plus hoping either the ending or the romance subplot would get extended somewhat, but the endings were the same, and there was a bit more development to their relationship in Haruka's thoughts, but not much. If you go so far as to make a relationship sidequest with dating and whatnot, you should at least develop it a bit more. At the very least a brief mention in each ending of the relationship going somewhere would have been fine with me. That said, it was an excellent game. Obviously, since I actually played it 4 times. I got all the medals except the one for being enemies with Haruka. That was too hard, and I hate that kind of ending too much to try for it more than once. One other thing. When you fight the doctor, the final phase with the "link helmet" made NO sense. I had no idea what was happening! How can a metal exterior become "real" but no longer be made of metal? What the heck? Still, I really liked the game.
bcdefg123 responds:
*New Game Plus and general spoilers in this one*
The hour/1 1/2 hour estimate was for a first-time playthrough without seriously making an effort for any of the sidequests. If you do the sidequests, then of course it's going to be longer. If you're trying to take on the Giant Floating Head, then good luck, because that will take exponentially longer.
I didn't design the game around grinding. I'm only talking about the main story here, though. I think I struck some sort of balance between the grindfests of yore (and, er, Korea) and the less-involved games of today. As for the sidequests, they are going to be tough, yeah. But the catch is, you don't have do them. Frankly, I've had more people try (and subsequently succeed) the harder sidequests than I originally thought would.
Longer endings are something for me to consider. I guess the main reason that I didn't do it in the first place is because there is a limited amount of text that could be shown at once, and I never try to have more than two or three screens in a single text-based scene (as opposed to the art-based ones, which have more screens for obvious reasons). Usually I try to keep it in one. I wasn't really sure how having a game heavily devoted to text would go down, but it seems to be fine with most people (not many people are complaining about it at all), so it's something I'll consider in a future update. File size definitely wasn't the issue here ;)
Personally, I beg to differ about the feelings between Ryou and Haruka. At the beginning, they have feelings of general indifference (well, New Game Plus shows that that's not true, but to the average player, it's just indifference), and then it shapes itself depending on choices. The best you can do is, in my mind, a rather good friendship. If I wanted it to really be love, then I would have had it much more explicit in the game (random kissing scene or something). Since Haruka was depending on Ryou to crush her master (again, New Game Plus stuff), and feigned politeness to Ryou in the beginning, it might have SEEMED like love, but it isn't.
As for the link helmet thing... the animal robot looked more like a genuine animal after the link (of course, forgetting the fact that there were tubes and stuff coming out of it). The metal was made to look more like actual animal skin. But it just LOOKED more like it, and it was still metal. I made a small change to clarify that will go out with the next update, whenever that is.
Thanks for the detailed review! - Brian
good game
the game is good, the music is good and all, but one bug, troubles me, sometimes your level goes down, so your stats go down, (except for health, it stays were at your previous max health). A recommendation is multiple saves, something to use when someone else wants to play this game beside of you in the same computer.
bcdefg123 responds:
In the Island of No Return, it is not a bug. - Brian