False Skies: Boring, and a waste of good ideas

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MorpheusKitami
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False Skies: Boring, and a waste of good ideas

Post by MorpheusKitami »

False Skies is a JRPG designed by human beings for the express purpose of being consumed by other human beings for entertain purposes.

Story:
You're some generic mercenary recruit, plucked from training to discover what's caused a communications blackout in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, and I have no doubt whenever the game is finished going on an epic quest to find 4 crystals of the elements before some evil character uses them to plunge the land into eternal darkness. The plot is unimportant to the goal of fighting monsters.

Graphics:
False Skies is an "8-bit" "Gameboy Color-style" game. This is because this game is neither of those things. It might have the palette of a GBC game, but that's where the resemblence ends. The maps look like someone repaletted SNES tiles to work on the GBC, but didn't bother to do anything else. It looks like something someone would release as a joke to mock bad retro game developers. It's the sign of a bad artist that can't commit to doing anything different than he was already doing.
Now, this isn't to say this would be the greatest thing ever if it was in a more normal palette. All of the portraits look like there's the same character, just from a different angle. The author seems to have made the same mistake a lot of weebs make in their attempt at making anime-style graphics. There's lots of anatomical errors and really, the only thing he seems to have down is shading.
The battle system is done in a really lazy way, with a flat background with a few graphics to the side. What's really the problem, is that the player sprites, which are their portraits, are located in the center of the screen. During the best of times and the best of portraits, you want this somewhere off to the side so you aren't staring at them for 95% of the time. Because, staring at portraits for two hours is going to be bad even if you resurrected someone like DG Rossetti to do your portraits. This? Just shoot me.

Gameplay:
False Skies lets you make your own party. In a good game, this lets you design a party based on the way you want to play, either a normal way, a completely broken way, or even a challenge way. Pick from a list of classes and skills, and hope that you can find some portraits that don't look awful. In a good game, you'll get two or maybe even all three of these options. False Skies lets you pick a class from a choice of four, no skills, and four different portraits of the same character. But you can change the PC's color, which negates all of these problems! Later, you do get four more classes, but they're not worth selecting by the time you get them.
The most promising feature of the game is the unique equip system. Any character can equip any equipment, but they're less skilled at using it. In practice, it's useless. There aren't really enough items for you to say 'Yeah, this'll screw up my mage just a bit, but it's just going to be worth it'. It's really sad to see someone put all this work into something that effectively functions no differently than the standard equipment system.
Once you get past all that, well, it's just a boring, uninspired RPG. Hammer enter for a while until you see a boss, then use the strong attacks. Sometimes something interesting is tried, but it's not like you have to really counter anything, just hammer enter for a little while longer.

Conclusion:
If I were to compare this game to another game, I'd compare it to Might and Magic 6. Both games stories have highly questionable graphics and stories that are just kinda there, but MM6 has fun combat. You want to kill these monsters, even if they're something you just spam attack through. Because you know there might just be a dragon hidden behind that corner, and you're going to need that experience. It has an interesting level-up system that gives you more freedom than other games of the same caliber. False Skies promises that and offers none of it. You're playing an uninteresting game in a different, ugly package. A lot of work needs to be done to be anything remotely entertaining, and quite frankly, it'll probably never be done.
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Feenicks
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Post by Feenicks »

I'll take everything else, sure (even if I probably won't act on a lot of it), but post-apocalyptic? How did you end up seeing the setting like that, especially when the game I did in the past that was specifically that used a completely different palette for getting the tone across?
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MorpheusKitami
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Post by MorpheusKitami »

The way the technology is set up makes it come off that way. If it's just low tech, people would be more in awe. "Look at this radio tower, it lets you talk to people half-way across the globe without having to know magic!" Rather than not knowing what this strange communication method is and making it seem like magic. The rest just fell into place like that.
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