thundermonkey said:
For its time SoA was a beautiful game, filled with intentional camp, and a nicely realized world. Overworks wanted it to seem like an old school RPG, they achieved it with great success. Likeable characters, very fun gameplay, (better then any FF to date) regardless of the excessive random battles.
The game was fun.
Right...can anyone explain to me since when I brought up FF? SoA is a really bad game, in every aspect. It doesn´t need to be compared to anything to realize it´s absolute lack of qualities.
Ok, international camp. What is so international about badly executed american clichés? I wasn´t pleased to see such a ridiculous portrayal of mayans in the game, and the rest of the game follows the same structure.
What was so realized about its world, really? I want details, your claims are all vague. Also, you can´t speak of its gameplay as a plus. The rate of battles was one of the biggest flaws in the game. The battles themselves were too slow, which made them boring and the fact that they were very easy affected it even more.
Magic isn´t balanced and there´s hardly any strategy in the battle system as a whole. Why? Simple, enemies as a general rule in the game were very weak, and the different "colors" hardly made any difference in the final damage count. Most of them can be conquered with any of the character´s weapons effectively, enemies are also very weak, which contrivutes to the ultimately broken fighting system. The way battles are carried out is very limited, and the "action points" idea was badly executed (inspired definitely in Chrono Cross). Not to mention that the visual aspect of the battles was nothing to write home about either.
Exploration is very tedious, battles come up too frequently, which makes traveling (one of the game´s main aspects) a pain in the ass.
I´ve covered all of the aspects of gameplay, what is so great about any of them?
And please don´t compare it to 16-bit RPGs. As bad as they look, they´re much, much better games than SoA.
[quote = "CeiserSöze"]
It's a lot harder to write a good character driven story than your average "heroes have to save the world"-plot.[/quote]
I agree, but you do need to have some skill to tell a story that manages to entertain and keep the player interested. SoA doesn´t achieve this, it´s so badly written that it´s completely predictable from day one. The world is filled with idiotic clichés (even if they were intentional, that doesn´t excuse the fact that they´re badly executed and ridiculous in every way) and uninteresting, stupid characters (both "heroes" and "bad guys").
Let me explain. First, the world. The world where the story takes place, the place your party must travel has to be interesting, in order for you to care about it in the first place. This is crucial because if it isn´t, why would you be interested in characters saving a world no one cares about? If it´s a light-hearted game, it needs a colorfull world with many interesting details about it, with interesting contrasts.
Now, let´s analyse SoA´s world. It´s filled with badly executed clichés. There´s a desert island, a jungle island, a chinese island,there´s an island for merchants... all of those presented with no uniqueness or qualities about them. They´re ordinary, not a single "touch" about them. It doesn´t follow an interesting theme, nor does it have interesting contrasts between their inhabitants. All of the things happening in those islands, what their habitants "thought" were a direct result of badly written clichés, (in short, contrived and forced). Which is undesirable, since the world itself must provide those interactions and contrasts.
Ok, now let´s analyse characters. Character driven or not, your game needs characters with depth. The game demands them in order to remain interesting, how deep you want them to go (along with how you design your world), will ultimately decide the tone of your game.
However, you just can´t have characters without any depth. Any character quickly becomes boring if there are no ocational ups and downs, the events must let you see more and more of the character to make the player feel attached to it, the character must grow. Vice and co never step out of their roles, which is still fine if they showed something interesting about their personalities.
The design mistake is that they don´t. Vice, even in the most precarious of situations, never losses the huge grin, and in every single event he reacts identically, which quickly made him a boring character. Fina is equally uninteresting, she never steps out of her role of quiet, restrained girl that uses mana. Nothing beyond that is shown in the game, and her character fails to grow in any way in the game. The above holds true for any character in the game.
I just don´t see what is so interesting about characters that don´t grow and react identically during the ~30 hours the game lasts.
