by Niara » Sat Nov 28, 2015 1:42 pm
So, I don't post often here but, now that this is finally finished, I wanted to offer my thanks and gratitude for creating such a profession, fun and interesting game. More than that, I wanted to comment simply on the fact that it got done - this isn't something that ought to be underestimated, because for every designer or team of designers there are out there, the truth is that maybe one in a hundred games actually reach completion. Gorepeat, you finish what you start, and you do so beautifully, and that alone is commendable, so thank you, and well done!
The story of the game flows nicely, and it's got a good pace that makes you want to keep going one mission to the next - it's far too easy to stay up far too late, with this, and that's great (if dangerous). The game itself is the sell, really, with the 'porn' aspect being very minor, and you know I'm completely fine with that. I watched each of the scenes once, upon earning them for the first time (maybe a few more times for certain others.....), but overall they weren't the draw card for me, and truthfully, they were distinctly less polished and professional-seeming than the rest of the game. A nice bonus, but I actually got more tingles from the little mental imaginings that some of the tavern missions gave me. The story itself is more enticing than the sex-shots - I've been as careful as I can be to avoid anything that might be spoilers for me, and if you consider how often something like -spoilers- is a major consideration for games in this genre, that ought to tell you how well you've done it.
I still get some performance issue with playing the game, and I've tried a bunch of things to improve it, but to no avail. It seems to get choppy in places, then smooth up again, then stutter again, seemingly at random... though the more 'busy' the screen is, of course, the harder going it's likely to get. One thing seems to be that the amount of 'stuff' you've got, be it units, equips, runes, etc., seems to increase the difficulty the game has of keeping everything smooth. The other is how long it's been running; a restart of the game often helps performance for a little while.
I've really enjoyed the combat and battle system, and found it fun and versatile - though I admit I do end up feeling rather spoiled for choice with seven races, by five classes, plus the consideration of gender for rune choices, (more than fifty unique units, including the heroes) and only 15 slots in my deck. I'm the sort of girl who likes to be thorough, so I found myself wanting to go ahead and put ten of each race and class in to chant, to make my 70s across the board all nice and neat, and that meant I was never averse to running another repeat of this mission or that to get a few more of this or that unit-type to bundle off to the island, in conjunction with getting a few more runes for melding. This meant that I got a lot of missions done as well, and I would keep two spare of each creature outside my main squad, for doing missions, effectively training them up in the process as well (I got a couple of bovos and phasmos early this way, so my core fifteen sees a lot of swap around as some of them sub in and out for missions variously). It worked well, over all, and I liked it.
Initially, I didn't like that the AI isn't bound by the same rules that we, the players are. I never like that, and this case was no exception. It's subtle, but it becomes very noticeable once you're aware of it - the way that the AI hand-cheats. As players, we're bound by our random draw of cards; we get one guarantee and a 50/50 of two others, but after that it's random, as far as I can tell, and more importantly, aside our starting three we only draw an extra one card per turn. This means that by the fourth turn (due to mana growth), we can be reduced to top-decking a single unit card each turn. Doing that is silly, of course, and not particularly strategic, so it's not a problematic mechanic at all, and is actually kind of nice, except for the fact that the AI doesn't play by the same rules, and can quite happily, provided it's got the mana and room for it, summon three units a turn every turn so long as it wishes to chew through its deck like that.
Added to this seems to be that, while it does have a limit on the number of cards it can play, exactly what those cards are does not seem to be fixed until it plays them - especially in late game, it always has exactly the unit it wants to have, when it wants it, and equipped with the rune that it determines will be the most beneficial to the current field at the time of summoning. The same battle, for example, if you exhaust their entire deck, might throw 4 scouts at you, each equipped with boost or protect runes... upon repeating the same battle, and exhausting the deck a second time, you might find it threw six scouts, four toting thunder runes, simply because at the time of summoning, the field was more usefully affected by that combination. I do not like this - the AI not being bound to all the same restrictions as the player - at all. However! I still enjoyed it a lot, and I worked around it. In the late game I was always working with the assumption that the AI would -always- have the most perfect unit and rune combination for every summon, and would always be able to out-summon me at all times, regardless of what hand count it should rightly have... and that was fine. I wasn't really too bad, honestly, and since I'm intending to have one gripe/question/complaint at the end, I won't make this into one.
I have not found the game too challenging overall. The missions are straight-forward and punish silly moves progressively harder as you go on, and the boss battles are more thinking puzzles, than fights, and I loved that. For each boss fight, I would generally take one or two goes to feel it out and work out how things worked, and then one to actually 'do' it. Overall clever, but straightforward, and merciless if you don't work it out. So, while it's been fun, I've not struggled at all.
I want to be clear that I'm overwhelmingly positive about the game, and I think it's an amazing piece of work... because I also have a frustration that has completely browned me off finishing it at the moment.
Got the the castle, our team are planning the assault, this is it, this is what the war comes down to... this is the final series of desperate battle which you have spent the last thirty battles fine tuning your crack team for, and building it to your preferred play-style and methods, and kitting them out with your favorite choice of gear and runes...
And now you don't get to use them.
Now, you get a set-piece battle with units that aren't the team you built, aren't really your units at all, and which feel like a mixed-bag of faction units that, while they may still get your chanting bonuses, seem to be woefully inferior to your own personalised and cultivated crew. It leaves one wondering what the point of everything you've worked on so far was... it feels like it's utterly negating and trivialising that work, and as though there really was no point in building a team that was to your liking, save to scramble through the earlier missions to get to this point, where it then boldly tosses that all out the window and hands you something completely different... and sub-par.
So, to turn this into a question rather than just a complaint, what am I missing, please? To be clear: so far, I've not struggled with any of the battles; I'd seen failure screens for occasional silly mistakes fewer times than I could count on one hand before reaching this apparently arbitrary set-piece, and while the combats in the claw were a little more challenging than before they weren't so bad that I failed any of them, save once while I was repeating the last one a bunch of times to catch my fifty bovos for chanting... but then coming into this last one, where I'm handed an army not of my choosing, I'm finding I simply cannot make the tools it gives me work well enough to get it done, over many, many tries... It doesn't seem likely that the spike is supposed to be that dramatic, and if it is it's poor design, but I think I have to be missing Something important here, because others are apparently beating it, and others who have reported struggling more with the preceding battles that I did. The few times I've beaten the first stage, with Beezy, I've not made it past the second; strategy falls down in most cases against the AI summoning the most optimal unit/rune combination for each and every situation, and the units I've been arbitrarily given to work with seem so dramatically inferior in most cases that getting through one battle seems to rely at least partially on luck - all five would be impossible. So, since it's not, and others have gone through fine, what am I missing? Is there something that I can do that controls the selection of units you're given, or what they're equipped as and with, or their relative strength?
As it stands, this one thing feels like it's rendered the work I put in so far, to my own units, rather pointless, and it's just browned me right off and sapped my desire to bang my head against it and finish it off... So, any help would be appreciated because I am really quite eager to see how this finishes off, but not while it feels like the game is mocking and disregarding my previous efforts in favour of giving me a set-piece for the final battle.
-Niara
