The ones by the two people who [s]can't help but subtweet one another[/s] are making big longform RPGs and aren't me
Starting with the review scores for reasons.
Walthros: 8*/10
Axe Cop: 8**/10
Why am I grouping these two together. Well, read the top of this post. More importantly, though, there's an interesting number of similarities between them:
- Both involve eclectic casts in strange, not-quite-modern-day settings
- It's a bit self-evident, but both have a party of characters with fairly set in-battle roles [Walthros moreso]
- Both have fancy scripted menus and, in general, interesting ways around interacting with the party and extended cast [Walthros with the phone, Axe Cop via the radial menu]
- Both have on-field enemies
- Both feature scripted minigames as part of dealing with dungeons
- Both put fancy titles up when you enter new areas
Of the two, I kinda prefer Walthros, since its focus on side stuff, interactions between the various characters, and dungeons that aren't aggressively long are all plusses.
They're both pretty alright, and being on the internet for so long has made me incapable of writing reviews that don't lean negative, so take what's below as you so wish.
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Axe Cop
At the start of Chapter 2, Axe Cop and crew get pushed off a mountain by an evil santa. Thinking quickly, Axe Cop uses his axe as a snowboard and rides down the mountain ahead of the avalanche.
It's neat and looks cool, but it extremely simple mechanically, and seriously started to seriously drag after a while. The segment would be cooler if it was half, or even a third, as long. It's also a microcosm of the game as a whole, for good and ill.
Lets stick on minigames for the time being. RMZ has implied on multiple occasions that he wants his money's worth for them, but there's something to be said for making the initial pass of something almost too short, and then later on having the more involved version be some side content. You may have this already [I didn't look around town all that much], but an arcade would be neat. And if you do have an arcade? Throw in some difficulty levels to pick from; for the snowboarding minigame, the current one could be level 3 or something.
Moving on. I feel that plenty of people have said this already, but the areas are too long for their own good. If the ice caves didn't have their own music, I'd probably be going mad having had listened to the snow planet's theme for over an hour. I didn't get to the third area, but I'll let people who have gone there speak for themselves.
The whole overly large map issue isn't really helped by how field enemies are dealt with. You see, they have a tendency to pop up again upon scrolling where they'd pop up offscreen. You're going to be walking back and forth through some areas, especially given that some of the puzzles demand retraversal, or just looking around a map for a hidden trigger you have to sniff out for. You're going to be hitting those enemies again. Field enemies can and typically are better than random encounters, but this is pushing it.
Speaking of battles, the MP recharge thing bothers me a bit. I totally understand why it's there - it's a fallback option in the event you run out of MP and also don't have any MP healing items, so it's definitely useful in the dinosaur area.
By the end of the snow area I was hitting close to 50 of the items that healed 25 MP, which may as well make that command obsolete. I can only assume that this trajectory will continue through the game in some form.
Also the title theme is far too close to the Crazy Frog theme for comfort.
Walthros: Renewal
I'm choosing to view the Surlaw bits that bookend the demo as deliberately melodramatic/tonally dissonant. Otherwise, they run into the same problem the tower scenes in Ghosts Towns did, just even more out in the open: it feels out of place, the characters aren't suited for that sort of tone and plot, and Surlaw's doing this while throwing around penguin summons. If it is in fact intentional, good; ignore this entire paragraph.
My major sticking point is that the battles in this don't feel great, and it took me a while to figure out exactly what the cause was. To use an obnoxious term, they're boneless.
Let's start with the battle music: it's kinda just there, and the boss music is some kinda droning thing that doesn't feel that ideal for battle against something called a Book Yuk.
Battle issue #2: skills just don't feel great to use. This is also primarily an audiovisual problem. The menus don't have any sort of sound effects to them, and that makes the act of selecting them a middling experience. When it comes to the skills themselves, they feel weak. Not in the sense that they're weak - they're all good and useful, even if I have my own preferences as to how powerful buffs and debuffs should be [stronger]. They just fall short visually.
Yes, this is the OHR, whose animation limits are often griped about. But you still have three frames of animation to fully use, and the ability to make things big and use the high-saturation parts of your palette.
Battle issue #3: the Hurt animation on the heroes basically isn't there. Yes, this is minor, yes the other animations on the heroes really aren't there either, but I feel it's the final piece of the puzzle. Maybe there's some animation there I'm missing, but it's so minor it may as well not exist. Walthrosian Fish seem pretty pliable; show that in battle!
All these add up to battles that don't do much conveyance visually and catch me off guard when a piddly-looking attack knocks off a quarter of a character's HP. Wobbler mentioned on twitter about one of your testers not wanting to use skills, and honestly? Sure, I get it - if they don't feel better to use than a regular attack, why bother?
Getting things to feel nice to use is a thing even people whose job it is to make that happen mess up all the time. But when you get it right, you get
people writing thousands of words on it. Renewal's attacks just aren't there yet, not matter how useful Salom's dragoon jump is.
I also have my reservations about the captions for skills being a single, endlessly repeating phrase, but that's an OHR thing at this point so it's not really something I can really gripe about
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but yeah they're both neat
* I'm avoiding the juvenile gross bits of Axe Cop here, as otherwise I'd be giving it a 1/10 for Chapter 4 out of principle and that's not useful.
** I muted the game, played Final Fantasy 3 DS's battle music, and battles immediately felt better. Fix the audio half of your battles and you're golden.