SDHawk wrote:No More Villians: Part of me wishes the contest results themselves were more integrated with the game part. But on the other hand, it's pretty hilarious to just list them offhand at the end like an afterthought.
This game is pretty okay! Given the focus on unique gimmick battles, I think making the battles a little more puzzle-oriented would have made it cooler. Partially my own fault there since I played one of the betas and grinded up in advance of the surlaw fight in fear (which ended up perhaps unnecessary). I wonder if it's more interesting with a less power house of a party (I went Gahn/Vlad/Mu/Slith, which was quite self-sustaining).
I feel like the part at the end is rather misleading since you can't read most of the villian graves, leading you to miss the plot-critical ones. Not a huge deal to save reload but felt like a strange omission.
Officially I'd like to state that I would have liked to cover as many games in the entire history of the Terrible Games contest as I could, but simply ran out of time and had to settle on the few that there are mentioned in it. The general idea is that the first few "games" are really demonstrations of how each individual character performs in combat, and grow progressively more difficult/complex as the main game proceeds. In essence, it plays a bit like you'd expect an ACTUAL RPG should in that it gives you time to learn how the game's rules are set up, but by the time you're allowed to actually swap out your party members and play around, the game's pretty much over. JUST LIKE Final Fantasy XIII and Xenosaga with their hour long cutscenes with 5 minute sprinkles of actual gameplay. If there's a joke to be made about modern console RPGS, this is it. At least in this game, the cutscenes are generally pretty darn hilarious, and the main characters don't do nearly as much complaining and whining.
Going back to the rushing through content, I originally planned for the villains to each confront and fight their respective heroes, which likely would have doubled the amount of work that went into it. By that time, October had just finished and I realized I had far too much to cover before the contest would have ended, and I had resolved NOT to have another unended game on my hands. The fact that the villains only ACTUALLY fight half the heroes and just cheese their way through the other three is pretty hilarious in my opinion, but was also ultimately a conscious decision on my part to shorten the length of the game and keep it under an hour or so. There's a FEW parts where some of the old "this could be a 5 hour OHR game" still peek out in the free roaming areas, but for the most part the length and amount of actual content are wholly a result of time constraints and not wanting the game to get dull before its time. Incidentally, if you skip some of the content, most of its optional and has ZERO effect on the endgame, except for a whole whopping total of TWO things you have to do to progress through the game. In fact, you could probably completely ignore all the shops.
Gahn/Mu/Slither/Vlad is probably the ideal party combination since all their abilities play off each other, but for the most part every Villain's moveset is roughly based off of Final Fantasy XIII's job classes again. I'd imagine most people used that one at the endgame, though maybe someone swapped out Vlad for Billy once they discovered Billy's secret 20-hit Fist of the North Star combo.
The only character who DOESN'T fit into the whole party mechanic is Cthulhu, but the game outright says over and over that "Squid are Different". Case in point: you can PROBABLY win the last battle with ONLY Cthulhu in your party. In retrospect it seems to fit, because he's the only character who doesn't have any obvious party combinations with any other characters.
And really that's where the whole puzzle-battle mechanic dies, is when the player can simply change their party around until they find an optimal combination that works every time. When the player is limited to only one or two commands that actually allow them to advance in a battle, a puzzle works, but when you can sit back and pump up a character whose actions trigger a boss's counterattack, eventually you can just one-shot the boss and brute-force your way through whatever the developer throws at you. The alternate way around this is to simply give the bosses more health, but that's really only a way to drag out the length of the fight and NOT make it more interesting.
To friends long gone, and those I've yet to meet - thank you.
