Aveyond: Lord of Twilight, Final Fantasy VIII, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, .Hack//

I've finished Aveyond: Lord of Twilight.  It's the first 'chapter' in the third Aveyond game.  There are four 'chapters' each of which cost £6.99.  The first game in the series, Ahriman's Prophecy, is available for free, but the quality is terrible.  I downloaded it, but the font used is illegible, so I gave up on it fairly quickly.

According to Steam I spent around 20 hours playing this game, although my final save file was just under ten hours, so while some of those 20 hours were me dying and reloading the game, some of them were just me leaving it open while I did something else.  There were many elements of it that I liked.  I liked the characters and I like that the plot feels almost Shakespearean.  I also liked the 'realism' - the environments in the game felt realistically large, there were loads of cities, and, after killing something, you had to search its corpse for loot.  However, there was one big flaw and that's the fact that this isn't a complete game.  There are subquests you can start in this game but not finish until the sequels.  There are chests you can find which you can't open until the sequels.  Finally, the plot just doesn't advance well.  It doesn't feel like a satisfying character journey or ending.  Honestly, I resent the fact that I'll need to pay another £20.97 to finish the story.  I can't remember how much I paid for this first one, but since I probably got it off Humble Bundle it was probably between £1 to £3.  For 20 hours of gameplay, assuming I paid £1, that's 5p per hour, which is 10x as much as Final Fantasy X and X-2 (400 hours to finish the first, second, and third games, all of which cost me £19.99 on Steam).  This game is pretty good, but this first chapter wasn't worth 10x as much to me as Final Fantasy X, and then they want another £21 for the rest of the story?  Fuck right off.  If they pop up on Humble Bundle at a discount, I might spring for them, but I am not paying £6.99 for a 20-hour segment of a game that doesn't even feel like a full game in its own right, and I am definitely not doing that three times in a row.  Knowing that that was what I'd need to do to finish the story just made me resent playing this one.  Oh, also there's only one achievement.  Since there's no indication of which side quests you can finish in this game and which ones need to wait for the sequel, the achievements could have been a way of giving you a hint.  The game just does not reward exploring, because you don't know which blocks you can breach during this game - for example, you do gain a way of blowing through doors blocked with planks, but you don't learn how to pick locks - and which subquests you can finish in this game, or which need to wait.  After the first hour or so I just followed a guide.  Oh, that reminds me - I did like that the puzzles had an element of randomness, so even if you followed a guide there were still some things you had to work out yourself.  That was a nice touch.

The description of the game also claims that "laughing is not optional".  It absolutely is.  The dialogue is human and realistic, but it's not particularly funny.

I've played - and enjoyed - the .Hack// series, which had a similar set-up.  Four chapters, each sold separately, adding up to a complete story.  I enjoyed those games a lot more, and I think a big part of it is that they did feel like complete games, with satisfying story arcs.  I paid more - about £10 for each if I recall correctly - for each one, and I didn't resent that.  I've replayed the series multiple times, and each one came with an episode of an anime series, telling another story that happened alongside the events in the game.  I also enjoyed a sequel manga and the longer anime series, but the biggest difference between .hack// and Aveyond is that each of those things felt like seperate stories.  They were all sparked by the same event, but each had their own events and character arcs.  Plus, my ending save files generally had about 20 hours on them, so they offered approximately twice as much gameplay.

Anyway, in summary, Aveyond: Lord of Twilight is an enjoyable game, but it is not worth £27.96 - the price for all four games without any discounts - and while, theoretically, you could just pay the £6.99 - still way too much - to enjoy just one game, the game is not designed for you to do that.

The next game on my list is actually The Banner Saga, but I just bought several more games from Humble Bundle; 1bitHeart (99p), Désiré (£2.15), Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy (£14.99), PSYCHO-PASS: Mandatory Happiness (£9.99), and The Sacred Tears TRUE. (£3.24).  I've noted down the prices because I quite like "cost per hours of enjoyment" as a way to compare games.  I'm going to play the Phoenix Wright games next, because I have been waiting for them to arrive on Steam for just the longest time.  The whole point of trying to play through all the games I own is to make sure I'm actually, you know, getting value out of the things I buy, so it would just be silly to avoid playing the game I just bought.  I've also been replaying Final Fantasy VIII (and reviewing my guide) and I'm in the end stages of that, so I'll probably finish that as well before starting on The Banner Saga.

I made a game! God Only Knows

I created a game using RPGMaker XV Ace.  I've been wanting to create a classic RPG-style game for a while, but what prompted me this time was proposing to my fiance.  The proposal happened today, February 9th, and was successful!

The game is a fantasy, and is designed to be an easy, beginner's RPG - I didn't want him to give up before the end.  It's about an hour long, and focuses more on story/events than on battles.  I also made it using only resources provided by the program, rather than creating my own, as that would require an entirely new skillset.  I didn't use any playtesters except myself, to preserve the element of surprise.

The title is God Only Knows, purely as an expression of surprise rather than any expression of religious belief.  You can download the game from the indie games site, itch.io.  Please comment if you find any errors or have any trouble downloading.

Anodyne, Artefact Adventure, and Aveyond

So, Anodyne is a weird little game.  It's Zelda-style (apparently, I never played the early Zeldas), with a very symbolic, eerie atmosphere, not I'm not really sure what it's symbolic of exactly.  I'm not really up on my Jungian psychology, which is apparently what it's inspired by.  Possibly, it's just that everyone is Jesus in purgatory.  A lot of it seemed to be about being a gamer - some of it referenced things people say to gamers when they want them to stop playing, other parts referenced how weird it would be for an npc to live in those worlds, and at one point someone starts talking about how repetitive the days are, which makes a lot of sense when you're trying for a speedrun.

My first playthrough took 7 hours, but a lot of that was exploring, getting lost, and forgetting which exit lead where.  I quit my second playthrough at just over 3 hours, since the speedrun goal is 3, but, again, a lot of that was getting lost and forgetting which exit went where.  You get exactly one save, and the game autosaves, so you can just reload and do it more quickly.  On my third go, I finished in around 2:40, and then I went and got all 48 cards - there are 37 to collect in the main game and another 11 post game - and all 13 ??? items, little easter eggs spread throughout the game.  One of them involves waiting nearly 2 hours for a bunny to move across a screen, which is very reminiscent of one of the seven stars in Braid.  I left the game running and went and sewed myself a shirt.

I don't like that the game played in full screen.  I did get an x-box controller just before my second playthrough, and that was definitely a lot easier than using the keyboard.  I got the controller to play FF-Type-0 because that game is absolutely impossible without it.  I had been using my old PS2 controller - and when I say old, I mean 16 years - but Anodyne didn't accept its input.

I didn't enjoy the game at first, though the difficulty in downloading it was probably a part of that.  I got into a little bit more once it started to make sense to me, and I enjoyed it enough to do the speedrun, which I don't normally do (see, for example, FF9 and Braid).  It helped that the speedrun time was quite generous.  You don't have to do everything perfectly, and you can get lost a little bit, just not quite as lost as I did the first time I attempted it.  Overall, I spent around 19 hours playing this game and, considering I bought it for 69p, that's a really good deal, that's less than 3p per hour of entertainment.

The next game on my list is Aveyond 3-1: Lord of Twilight.  I have no idea what this game is.  I didn't buy it on steam, so presumably I got it as part of a humble bundle, alongside a game I actually wanted.  Apparently it's the first chapter in a four part series, all of which are prized at £6.99 and which, together, contain 20 steam achievements.  Honestly, it seems like they've tried to milk as much money as they can from it.  I'll try playing the first one and see how it goes from there - either it's good enough to buy the rest or it's just...not.

The next game on my list would have been Artefact Adventure, which is another game I didn't actually buy on Steam.  I deleted that one because I played the first few minutes and there was a coding error.  If they can't be arsed to check their code, I can't be arsed to play their game.  Maybe it got better after that point, I don't know, but I'm currently making a similar type of game and you can be damn sure I'm checking it for bugs throughout.

ETA:  I had a quick read of the TV tropes page to see if they made any sense of the symbolism, and learned about a 49th card.  So I went and got that one and opened the damn gate.  I'm pretty sure there is nothing else in this game, since there's no way to open the 50th gate.