Legionwood: Tale of the Two Swords

I'm starting to believe most people aren't looking hard enough for the good developing games out there, Legionwood: Tale of the Two Swords, is one of them! Currently active and floating on the first page, I'm very glad I checked this games despite all the silly technical difficulties I was having, and definitely recommend others to try out this game.

Gameplay
Overall concepts are reminiscent of classic RPGs, rather solid and focused on customizing your characters any way you wish. You buy skills that are available to everyone, characters can equip pretty much everything, only a couple of restrictions, and you get to buff up each character's attributes every level up. So you get to shape each of them in any direction you want, which has a nice old school feel. There's a little bit of a nudge of where they are "supposed" to go, but it's nothing you can't escape if you wanted to. The world is rather interactive, with shimmery spots signifying points of interest, little alcoves of places to revisit, lots of mini quests and activities to do while you're on your journey. You rarely will find yourself just going from point A to point B without something else to distract you. There were plentiful treasure chests (almost too many, but I'm not going to complain!) and other goodies to help ease your adventure for you.

My overall beef with the game has to do with the battle difficulty, the battles are rather intense. I had to start over the game multiple times before I got anywhere, and I didn't find the games challenging in testing my brain and strategy, but just patience and trying to survive. Monsters throughout the game will be able to take away half of a character's health from a simple attack, and others can completely eliminate a character with a skill, and not be a boss. The battle frequency is a touch too high, so I would be dreading anytime I could get into fights. I feel like the difficulty overall should be turned down, or let needing battle strategy play more of a role. You have the skill Study Enemies, to which you can learn their weaknesses, and this is rather imperative, because you could use any break that you can find in battle, but it doesn't really help you in the beginning because you can only afford a certain amount of skills, and your stats are low, so you can only cast about 3 or 4 spells and then you have to heal.

A second difficulty is only having a Sanctuary to revive characters, and there being an extreme shortage of revival items and no revival skills. Couple this with the problem above, and it's very frustrating. I know some people like a good challenge when playing games, but this is a little much. I felt like these details really held me back from enjoying a good game at times. There were also a couple of eventing errors and other inconsistencies that need cleaning up, they weren't dire, but would be nice to get out of the way.

Gameplay: 7/10

Story
The start of the plot begins with the main character, who's name you can change but comes by default as Lann, and is sister Liara, two probably in their teens who live by themselves, going to a festival, which is particularly special because it is inviting top brass from the neighboring country as a sign of goodwill during tense times. They get pulled into their adventure as being two of the few witnesses to a sinister plot to start an outbreak of war between the major countries of the world. I found the opening scenes well done pulled me into the game, with a few new twists on old ideas, for the rest of the demo I had a feeling of apprehension of things to come. Character development is rather well rounded, I personally would want some with more quirks, but none of them were irritating or acted out of character.

In general, I loved the dialogue and interaction messages throughout the game, they added a lot of charm to the game I really appreciated. Little things like the slightly romantic way people speak makes you feel more into the game's world, nothing breaks the integrity of the world Dark Gaia creates for us. I really enjoy political themed stories, and it seems like this game is going in that direction, so I can't wait for more!

The main hitch is an old trap people can easily fall into when starting to write: telling instead of showing. There were instances where characters would just hand you the plot and all the inferences instead allowing the player to figure it out themselves through action. I advise to allow plot events to illustrate what is going to happen, instead of having a character explain everything that is happening. This is mostly done by a certain enemy you encounter, who tells you all of his plans before fighting you. I think it's better for the characters to be oblivious to the real mess they are in, and have the player anxious over when they are going to find out or screw things up without knowing how dire the situation actually is. This is also an example of one of the few cliches that happen in the game, and while I don't think it really hurts the game a whole lot, it borders on cheesy and can be fixed.

Story: 8/10

Graphics
Visually, this game is great. The menus, general interface, the characters... I don't think there's much I can complain about. I felt like everything added to the world overall and didn't disturb the overall flow. I didn't run into any problems or noticed anything low quality. I really enjoyed the dungeons, I felt like they were the best to look at. The paths felt organic and intuitive, and well decorated, cities as well. The ambiance with lighting and other effects really did the job. Battle animations were smooth and looked fine, definitely added to the battle process without being the main focus.

The minor things I would change: The enemy battlers felt a little out of place from the rest of the graphics. They didn't really ruin the game for me or anything, but could use a different set. Also, the cities are a tad overcrowded. I both liked and disliked this; I like talking to the townspeople and seeing movement besides mine going on, but because a lot of the paths in the game are narrow, an NPC will block the way often enough to notice and make you wait around for them to move out of the way.

Graphics: 9/10

Sound
Everything was well chosen to suit the atmosphere of the setting and events going on, Dark Gaia has a knack for engrossing a player into the environment, which is definitely appreciated by me. All the sound effects were reasonable volume and the battle music was fitting. I especially liked the noise of crowds in the towns, it really added to the experience. There were one or two recognisable tracks, but not exact rip-offs I don't believe. None of them were really memorable, but that seems fine for the beginning of the game, hopefully we'll get good ones in the future!

Sound: 10/10

Originality
This seems like a game modeled after more old school RPGs and made to be nostalgic. I think Legionwood did a good job of this, and is a rather solid game without being completely dry. I felt like the added features that gave voice and added detail to the game to make it seem more fantasy like was a nice touch, I don't see many developers putting in those little details. I always want to interact with random objects and research enemies because it'll have this old world description to it. I liked how the equipment of the game adds more bonuses and allows you to customize your characters even more, you don't really see as much variety in most games. Also, I liked that you can gain abilities other than from buying them/leveling up, and I hope there's a lot more of that (won't spoil where it happens)!

There are some cliches that could be taken care of, like the stereotypical adventurous teenagers who lost their parents. I wonder, do you think you could add more to the story if the parents were still alive? There are some others, so I would suggest going through and see where you can find some stereotypical RPG elements and twist them to make them refreshing. I also think you could have something that makes the characters, in battle, intrinsically different from one another. When a lot of them can share the same abilities and have similar strengths, they don't seem unique to one another. Maybe they can learn abilities that only they will have when they level up other than their frenzy attacks. There are some items that are pretty much sell for money items, and I ran into only one or two NPCs who wanted them, and they were only in places I was momentarily, and had no idea in the beginning NPCs would want these. I think you could expand on these and make these items mixable, or have more NPCs who want them that will trade you for other items you can't get typically... Maybe they can be reagents for something? As a player, you end up gaining a lot of items, I think some sort of item offshoot like synthesizing or another idea would be good for this game.

Originality: 7/10

Overall
There are very few mistakes, but ones easy to learn from, that hold back this game from being great, and I see them as simple to fix. I enjoyed the lore type atmosphere the game has and the foreboding and intertwining storyline that is evolving through this demo. The main vice for me was the difficulty of the battles, as they made going through the game painful at times. This brings up an interesting topic of what is considered challenging and what is just frustrating. Just this minor adjustment would shoot up the demo's quality to me by a lot. I think everyone should give this game a change and a little patience, and I'm sure you'll agree this is one of the better games in development.

Overall 8/10

Lost Heaven

I was pretty certain what game I was first going to review, as it was the best game that I knew of in development before I left: Lost Heaven. It had an all around solid story, good resources, and was basically fun to play! I went through the entire demo a year later, and am generally happy with all the changes and additions that took place. Honestly, I think Lost Heaven shows there's hope for RMVX as a medium for quality, community generated games. I was very glad to play through all the way, and will recommend everyone to give Lost Heaven a shot!

Gameplay

The interface and eventing is smooth and lets me forget that I'm playing from RMVX and not a good classic RPG. Everything seemed rather well balanced; there were mini puzzles and winding paths, just enough treasure chests and abilities to work on. The characters are rather different for one another and have an equal part to play in battle, which is nice, as lots of RPGs have a couple of characters you could fair rather easily without using. I liked the mini quests that came along with this game, especially nearer to the end.

I felt like there could have been a little more concept-wise with the gameplay or battle. Right now, I see this as a very solid game, but could use a little more flair. I think there should be more abilities that players would actually want to use, as a lot of them just boost stats or prevent ailments, and once they start to spread around, everyone has similar skills. It was good for the beginning of the game, but later on, it was easy for everyone to have all these skills. As well, each character's battle skill (Flurry, Pious Strike, etc) started to phase out in usefulness after a while, I didn't really need to use them.

We still get some errors from files that corrupted or missing, and before it wasn't a big deal, but the character in question shows up a little more in the game to where it can get a little annoying.

Gameplay: 9/10

Story

The game felt compelling from the get-go. I was hooked and wanted to learn more going through the game. The characters were all entertaining in their own manner, and nothing felt too random or unexplained. I didn't find anything wrong with the length or amount of cut scenes, all of them were informative and not a waste of the player's time. And, of course, lots of plot twists to keep the players on their toes! The dialogue got better as well, it wasn't that distracting other than a few too modern joke references.

There are some clichés this story falls prey to, but it isn't anything that makes your groan when watching the story unfold. I feel like if the story holds strong and we get some good growth in the future, most can be forgiven. The dialogue in some places can be worked over as well, taking out modern jokes and cliché sayings.

Story: 8/10

Graphics

The whole game seems rather well put together. Even if it's not all custom work, enough resources were used and wisely put together. The mapping was organic, and even the starting city was interesting to run through (I imagine the city in the end will be buffed out in future releases), and all of the wilderness that you go through are fun to navigate, I liked it all. The sprites, battlers, facesets, all pretty good, they seemed to run well enough together, and the animations were fine. I wasn't distracted by any errors, and thought the world was created well.

The only hitch I have is when you have more than 3 party members and go to a shop. You can't cycle down to see the armor differences for everyone in your party, so I had to go in separate times to see what was worth buying and such. Not a game changer, but something to work on.

Graphics: 9/10

Sound

Thankfully, this game has plenty interesting sounds and pleasant ambience music. What I like the most, for some reason, are the quality footstep sounds, and how they change over different surfaces. Nice details like that keep the game feeling real.

Sometimes there were sounds that were too loud and repetitive, and are rather jarring. These few SFs need to be found and toned down, as it isn't really necessary to have such loud noises. And I remember for the last demo there being battle music, but there wasn't any this time around... And there weren't any themes or music that I could really find distinct to moments happening in the game, and having good music for these scenes would make them more memorable.

Sound: 7/10

Originality

I felt like a lot of effort and thought went into this game, and it's turning out to be rather solid. I find the spark of the game to come through the characters and their unique interactions, and some of the history behind the game. But overall, I think more pizzazz could be put into Lost Heaven. Most of the game felt reminiscent of other RPGs I've played, and while they were good ones, it was more of the same. I feel like there's a lot of potential for another mechanic or concept to be put in. The most unique feature I really find are the character's sub skills in combat, and that starts to fade as you get further in the game. The abilities as an idea could be expanded into something more creative, or something with equipment, or anything. Something a little different would make this game stellar.

Originality: 5/10

Overall

I definitely think everyone should play through Lost Heaven. It's a great game as an example of how to make something from RMVX. It definitely has faults and has room for improvements, but I'm pretty confident this project will only get better. I enjoyed the changes from the last demo I played, and feel like Ashvir will continue to produce a quality game for the community to enjoy.

Overall: 8/10

Creating A Standard

I decided to pick up reviewing again after my return because of, what I think, a need for acknowledging well made and developing games so the community can see the reoccurring traits that make a good game. I find that many people don't play through games because of the frequency of badly made games, and I think that's a vicious cycle that won't stop without intervention. The community won't know what a good game is if no one points it out and makes it clear, and there's no way to do that unless you go through games and critique the work being output. So I'm going to try! I started before, and that seemed to do it, but now I want to be a little more organized with it. Here are the categories I'll be using to rate a game:

Gameplay - Here, the most important aspect of a game will be fleshed out. The controls, battle, quests, eventing, mini-quests, puzzles, the different concepts and mechanics that the player has to figure out, these and similar aspects making up the Gameplay category.

Story - The overall storyline, plot events, characters, dialogue... Fiction elements will be critiqued as a main part of RPGs is the story. Everything that involves communicating the story and fiction aspects of the game to the player will fall into this category.

Graphics - A game's visual appeal will go here. It comes down to quality mapping, battlers, sprites, animations, and the overall feel of the game. A game can look rather good in RMVX, and having a solid and smooth set of graphics hooks and keeps the player in the game.

Sound - Audio shouldn't be ignored or seen as less important. Having pleasant and fitting music throughout the game will keep the play in tune with the game without irritating them. Sound effects and other audio elements (and quality) will be noted here as well.

Originality - This is more of a bonus category, but it is still an aspect worth gauging. No one wants to play through a game that is just pieces of old RPGs they've experienced over and over again. As well, using straight from the box RTP graphics and sounds aren't as impressive either. Those who put in extra effort to make their game one of a kind will get points here.

Hopefully after a few reviews, some similarities can be seen between better games and we can have a loose standard that people can look to when deciding to make and demo their games.