The next time you’re making a video game, or playing one, always make sure to look back on this game and realize how good this game was.  What is the purpose of this? I have no idea.  But this game is great, so do it anyway.

Having only HnG music, i.e. the tracks derived from the 1st and second season OSTs, as well as character discs is because for one, it makes the game much more consistent and “professional”, albeit this being an indie game, but you get the idea.  Having so much music from so many different sources, no matter how much better it conveys the area or how much kick ass it sounds, gets out of hand pretty quickly.  It’s like the naive kid who has just created his first website and wants to cram as much stuff he likes into one super home page.  There is no organization and no focus, which are two of the aspects I feel that are very important for a game.

Another reason is that it will make the game size a lot smaller.  In this day and age, it probably doesn’t matter with those 1TB or greater HD’s floating around getting cheaper and cheaper, but for a game of this caliber to exceed 150 MB or something solely because of the purpose of music is a little absurd.  This is observing the fact that the game, as of now, only heavily parodies two series, Mushishi and Planetes.  The idea is that I’m going to parody a major game or anime per area as I continue to develop this game, and with that in mind, the OST can only get larger and larger with music from all those respective series if I’m not going to be reasonable and put a cap on it in any sort of way.

The third reason is that… HnG, the anime adaptations that is, are excellent examples of parodies and references to hundreds of series, and yet, they do not necessarily have the soundtracks to those series (exceptions are of course in order, I’m looking at you Cruel Angel, but even so, it had its own twist to it), and I think I should follow the example of the great series that I’m essentially basing my game on.

Enough of the boring stuff (though I am looking for feedback, opinions on the boring stuff.).  Let’s dig into some of the new stuff I’ve been realizing.  First of all, there will be a grade system implemented for the final release.  For all those who’ve played Tales games should have a good idea of what this is about.  This system also has a heavy tie with the New Game + feature that I’m most likely going to implement.  Essentially, during battle, you have actions that will increase your grade, and actions that will decrease your grade.  For example, using items will get grade points deducted, using techs will increase your grade, and running away will completely destroy your grade for your current battle.  At the end of the battle, that grade amount, whether positive or negative, will be added to your aggregate grade, which accumulates from the beginning of your game to the end.  Once you beat the game, you will be able to spend your accumulated grade points and buy “features” you can use in a “New Game +”, whether it would be carrying over your GYEN, arsenal, items, etc. or gaining x2, x10, or  x100 experience per battle.

I’ve also found an easy way to have different difficulty settings that you would be able to toggle any time during the quest.  This more or less only has to do with the difficulty in fighting the enemies in the game and has nothing to do with the dungeon set ups, etc.  It also affects the yields you receive after defeating the enemies.  There will be extra grade benefits or penalties depending on your difficulty.  Say if you are playing on Easy mode, your grade will be cut in half from the amount you would get if you played Normal, and it will double if you attempt to play in LUNATIC mode, in which an enemy deals x3 the damage per hit, have more HP, give less TP, etc.  Hopefully, this will increase a lot of replayability in the game and allows the player to be much more engaged with the game, i.e. trying to beat the game the best way possible, as oppose to “just beating the game”, though both endeavors would be supported, if you don’t care about grades or something.  Basically, I’m trying to add depth while trying to appeal to the widest audience as possible.  Maybe players with high grades can send me their save file for me to confirm it and add their name to the websites wall of fame or something.  Anything is possible.

That’s all for now, hope enjoyed the update

The original template can be found *here*.

Now I know these aren’t my characters, and the purpose of the template is to help character creators with their creation process, but I had fun nonetheless.  It was more of a test of my knowledge for the characters/map out my interpretations for the characters exercise.

Few noteworthy things: Obviously, this chart is not absolute, both in the sense of it is my opinion, and that the categories does not consider all positives and negatives of a character (i.e. Hayate has super bad luck, but that wasn’t a category.) – it can’t, for it is subjective, but again, it was fun.  From this I can conclude that Nagi really needs some help and that Hina is super human.

If you have a better interpretation of the HnG cast (I understand this is not the entire HnG cast, but there are only 7 spaces, and I thought that it was perfect for my playable characters to go on there) then by all means give this character template a whirl.

The music is amazing, the custom graphics and cut-scenes are impressive, the interface and style is sleek – play it or regret it

–>DOWNLOAD<–

I’m currently trying to decide whether techs should be regulated to their respective classes or that a character can learn all of his/her techs regardless of class.  However, one thing is for sure, there is an ultimate tech that a character can only learn when he/she is promoted (all classes have a respective, “promoted” class), so if Nagi is in the Sensei class (promotion of her mangaka class), she is able to learn Summon Ryu (to pay homage to the fact that Nagi can summon beings in her mangaka base class and the fact that she is a dragon whereas Ayumu is a hamster), but she is unable to learn HAAAYYYAAATTTEEE!!!!!!!! (A powerful version of HAAYYAATTEE!!, as seen in the previous demo; this new attack will, “summon” Hayate, as in change your character back into Hayate fully healed and having him be pretty much be invincible with insane attack stat), which is only exclusive to her Lord class (the promotion of her Lady class).

Currently, every character has 4 classes, 2 classes and 2 promotions.  I’m contemplating whether to have the option of having a character be in any class they want (Hayate the Flame Haze 0_O).

Also, some small updates.

Every character now has a critical rate, in which he/she deals 3x the damage.  Enemies also carry different crit rates now.  Also, botherers now only hurt the active player.

What else… ah! Now there is damage variability, as in every time you attack, your damage output varies a little bit to add a little bit of spice, this goes vice versa with enemies as well.  This potentially makes monster crystal captures much more difficult, but I’ve changed it so that you only have to get the enemy’s HP to half to do a successful capture, I might raise it a little bit later on though, because half is a little too easy.  Again, nothing is final.  Who knows, I might run into a mega bug and the whole project will have to be canceled, j/k.

One last thing, I’ve made it so that whenever you exchange damage, numbers jump around the screen indicating the damage given or taken, kinda like FFXIII.  It is really cool looking and I think it adds a lot to the aesthetics of the game.

Ciao!

This review is also hosted on RMN.

Drunken Paladin is one of those games in the RM community that has managed to grab the attention of a number of people few games only dream of having.  The praise for this game is strong, not in terms of general consensus, but in terms of the fanbase this game seems to have generated that is filled with zealots that will have none of the criticism that this game actually deserves.  How this game managed to form such a strong following is beyond me, for there are major and glaring flaws design-wise, gameplay-wise and writing-wise that seriously hinders me from enjoying this game.  Despite all of my initial harsh words about this game, I will say that this is a game of meticulous effort; blood and sweat was put into this project and it shows, though, blood and sweat alone does not warrant any exemption from criticism of its flaws.  This game had a lot of effort put into it; it was just that effort is not enough to save it.

First off, I would like to state that this game took me months to complete, and I will try my best to recollect my experiences with it accurately.  The reason why it took so long can be summarized by the first paragraph you just read.  I have a policy in which I must finish the game before I consider myself adequate enough to review it.  It is more or less true that after you traverse though a good bit of a professional game, you can safely say that the quality of it will project throughout the entire project, though in terms of amateur designed RM games, this is not always the case, for a project designer very well can improve in the middle of a project and make the project better and better as time rolls on.  This is a burden I carry myself and it has its pros and cons, in this case, the cons definitely weighed more heavily, as this game was consistent in its quality level – quite shoddy.

Design-wise, this game was very inconsistent.  An immediate example that I can think of is that at certain points in the game, you can dash, and at certain points in the game, you are forced to crawl-speed walk to traverse through its superfluously decorated and unnecessarily difficult to navigate areas (The mining village took ages to just go from one end to the other, not because of its size, but because of its convoluted passage ways and cliffs).  This isn’t on a bases of if you are in a room or not, whether it is in a situation in which running wouldn’t follow proper etiquettes (?) – No, it was completely random, sometimes, you just couldn’t dash for some reason, and other times, you could, and this bugged the hell out of me.  This of course, is a design mistake than a design flaw.  Word to the wise is – just make the character auto-dash; unless it is something like on a overworld map, in which the scale of distances is altered, auto-dash could mean the difference between a impatient gamer dropping your game or not, and there are a lot of impatient gamers out there.

Speaking of world maps, the world map of this game was ugly.  The mapping, i.e. shapes of the islands, where you can and can’t go, was perfectly fine, but it was the selection of the tileset that made it very unpleasant to look at.  The world map mixed actual world map tiles with in-town, or rather, when-the-protagonist-is-normal-sized tiles.  If there is any way to make tiles from the same tileset clash, this is it.  The inconsistency of the sizes of the trees often made it look like a bunch of sequoias randomly spawned amongst a forest of “normal” trees.

The gameplay was boring.  There was nothing wrong with it, though I will say that it was on the difficult side, but it was just very generic and lackluster in terms of originality or quirkiness that would otherwise allow battles to intrigue me.  You recruit party members as the story progress and each of them has a role, whether it would be healer, caster, status-inflictor, damage-giver, etc. and these characters have their typical helpful skills, with relevant HP and MP count and you go to town with them with the slew of random encounters you will face in this game.  When boring battles and difficulty collide, that is when we have a problem.  A challenge is only a worthy endeavor when the challenge itself is interesting – picking up spilled toothpicks after I’ve just gotten my nails clipped will never be a fun activity for me no matter how difficult it is.

The biggest problem I had with this game was the game biggest alleged selling point – the writing, or more specifically, the humor.  The writing was just not very funny, and often times, was rather contrived and vulgar.  Sure, there were a lot of NPCs and even more interactive objects in the game (which is one of the factors that shows intense effort and devotion to detail of the creator) that spewed out original dialogue from the characters, mainly “witty” one-liners from Anebriate, the main character, but none of it is humor, unless you consider two tasteless characters trading crude and unimaginative insults at each other to be funny.  I think the entire script of the game can be summarized by, “Fuck you, you horse-shit eating cum bucket filled with turd,” and “No you, you fish-smelling bag of vaginas that fell from the butthole of a bird that was also a bird prostitute!” I’m improvising for a bit, so bear with me.  But honestly, this kind of trite and tasteless dialogue will appear every other minute on your screen if you dare to play this game.

None of the characters are interesting, the story was boring, the pacing was repetitive and monotonous, ugh, as you can tell I downright did not like this game.  Sorry if this review seemed like the next level of harsh, but after months of arduously trying to inch my way finally to the finish line of this game, it so happened that it was only the bad points of this game that I remember, and they were numerous.  I will end this review on a happier side – I’m not saying this game is equivalent to garbage, that space in the trash can is reserved for things like Saint Seiya, but… ugh… this game was just bad… I’m sorry, I’m truly sorry, I can’t end this on a happy note, I tried.

Nothing too new, just a promotional video. It showcases every characters’ techs and gives you a brief description of how to use them. This video also features a sneak peek of the new HUD I’ve been developing, as well as the stamina system.
Enjoy!