Weekly Try A Thing: Reflection of a Fallen Feather cleared
It's fascinating how three people can approach the same game and have three completely different game-ruining complaints about said game, all of which are fully accurate and easy to see in the game itself.
Reflections of a Fallen Feather is a free game on Steam (or $1 on XBLA, I hear) about a bunch of lost souls in maybe-Hell that fight monsters and then become those monsters and then move on to kill other monsters. It's all very Final Fantasy Legend 2.
Celine tried it and found the very abbreviated, incredibly terse menu design and battle system impenetrable, not being able to decipher what the hell made moves good versus bad versus "what the hell am I even doing".
Then Xyzzy tried it, and being my partner in "understanding how the fuck SaGa games work", she was able to get a pretty steady grasp of how to progress, but burned out due to how barebones the game was, and its utter lack of compelling writing hook.
So I figured, oh hey, I've played (and beaten) roguelikes, who the fuck needs a story for a dungeon hack?
Turns out, "dungeon hack" is pretty goddamn accurate, since this damn game is labrynthine. There's no in-game map, no out-of-game map (the game has no guides and no discussion on Steam, the closest you get is that the developers themselves posted a walkthrough on their website (which should always be seen as a red flag), and even that doesn't actually have any maps, save for in the one region where your visibility is limited and you can't properly orient yourself for THAT reason. You start out in a confusing, tangled open space with filled with monsters (the game takes the Mystic Quest mindset of having stationary enemies that you have to actively rub against in order to fight, but that don't respawn unless you leave the screen) and stumble around, then you find an item that lets you advance (a "switchblade" - namely a blade for hitting switches) and move to the next area, where all the corridors are 1 tile wide so avoiding enemies is impossible and oh, now half of the map is invisible because it's separated rooms!
And then you go from there to a water-themed switch maze, which leads to a multi-layer teleporter maze, which leads to Mt. Moon, and then everything culminates in all of the gimmicks knotting around each other in one final headache of a clusterfuck. All the while, you have to slog through mountains of encounters, because even though you don't gain anything tangible from them unless you're changing into one, EVERY LAST ONE IS BLOCKING THE GODDAMN PATH. And god forbid you get lost and hit a screen transition or OOPS EVERY ONE OF THOSE MEAT WALLS CAME BACK.
It started out interesting, then in the middle it hit a portion where monsters were too rough to handle with what you had and you needed to get lucky and punch up (which was about the point where Xyzzy got disheartened and wandered off), and then after a few difficulty spikes I managed to faceplant into endgame monsters (including one bonus boss, I think?) and I steamrolled over the rest of the game, more or less, up to the penultimate boss. That was a bit of a challenge, and then the final boss was a snooze.
So it all comes back to the battles, which start out varied and interesting but then rapidly devolve into "hit pikachu with ground-type moves or get your ass handed to you". Weaknesses are huge in the game, as is paralysis, and if you have ways of exploiting either you can coast. Otherwise, it's an uphill struggle.
I dunno. It took me about six hours to push through and I'd say a good four of that was either being frustrated by the battles or annoyed at not being able to orient myself. Only got 89% of the items, which was good but not great, I guess. I'm probably not gonna go back.
It was someone's very first game and it shows. But for a first game, it's acceptable. C+.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Original at https://swordianmaster.dreamwidth.org/112151.html
Reflections of a Fallen Feather is a free game on Steam (or $1 on XBLA, I hear) about a bunch of lost souls in maybe-Hell that fight monsters and then become those monsters and then move on to kill other monsters. It's all very Final Fantasy Legend 2.
Celine tried it and found the very abbreviated, incredibly terse menu design and battle system impenetrable, not being able to decipher what the hell made moves good versus bad versus "what the hell am I even doing".
Then Xyzzy tried it, and being my partner in "understanding how the fuck SaGa games work", she was able to get a pretty steady grasp of how to progress, but burned out due to how barebones the game was, and its utter lack of compelling writing hook.
So I figured, oh hey, I've played (and beaten) roguelikes, who the fuck needs a story for a dungeon hack?
Turns out, "dungeon hack" is pretty goddamn accurate, since this damn game is labrynthine. There's no in-game map, no out-of-game map (the game has no guides and no discussion on Steam, the closest you get is that the developers themselves posted a walkthrough on their website (which should always be seen as a red flag), and even that doesn't actually have any maps, save for in the one region where your visibility is limited and you can't properly orient yourself for THAT reason. You start out in a confusing, tangled open space with filled with monsters (the game takes the Mystic Quest mindset of having stationary enemies that you have to actively rub against in order to fight, but that don't respawn unless you leave the screen) and stumble around, then you find an item that lets you advance (a "switchblade" - namely a blade for hitting switches) and move to the next area, where all the corridors are 1 tile wide so avoiding enemies is impossible and oh, now half of the map is invisible because it's separated rooms!
And then you go from there to a water-themed switch maze, which leads to a multi-layer teleporter maze, which leads to Mt. Moon, and then everything culminates in all of the gimmicks knotting around each other in one final headache of a clusterfuck. All the while, you have to slog through mountains of encounters, because even though you don't gain anything tangible from them unless you're changing into one, EVERY LAST ONE IS BLOCKING THE GODDAMN PATH. And god forbid you get lost and hit a screen transition or OOPS EVERY ONE OF THOSE MEAT WALLS CAME BACK.
It started out interesting, then in the middle it hit a portion where monsters were too rough to handle with what you had and you needed to get lucky and punch up (which was about the point where Xyzzy got disheartened and wandered off), and then after a few difficulty spikes I managed to faceplant into endgame monsters (including one bonus boss, I think?) and I steamrolled over the rest of the game, more or less, up to the penultimate boss. That was a bit of a challenge, and then the final boss was a snooze.
So it all comes back to the battles, which start out varied and interesting but then rapidly devolve into "hit pikachu with ground-type moves or get your ass handed to you". Weaknesses are huge in the game, as is paralysis, and if you have ways of exploiting either you can coast. Otherwise, it's an uphill struggle.
I dunno. It took me about six hours to push through and I'd say a good four of that was either being frustrated by the battles or annoyed at not being able to orient myself. Only got 89% of the items, which was good but not great, I guess. I'm probably not gonna go back.
It was someone's very first game and it shows. But for a first game, it's acceptable. C+.
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Original at https://swordianmaster.dreamwidth.org/112151.html