The Legend of The Philosopher's Stone: Part 1 by
XxNemesis29xX and LiteArc* *Editor's note: I understand that this game was released
by Nemesis, and he regularly is |
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Impression
The above two screenshots fairly well summarize all of the hype surrounding The Legend of the Philosopher's Stone, the hype that surrounds it, and what it has to offer: a straightforward RPG with a neat battle system, a menu system that does a whole lot of very ordinary things, a markedly generic style, and such a heavy Squaresoft influence that one would be hard-pressed to believe this wasn't one of the Final Fantasy 6 ROMhacks that were so popular a few years ago. As far as Indie RPGs go, this is a game where one can't go particularly wrong in any area. At the same time, there are also so many areas where one can't go particularly right, either, and the end result is the epitome of a higher-than-average RM2k3 experience. For those unitiated with the scene, I'll give a brief explanation of why this game's battle and menu systems are so notable. It is made with the program RPG Maker 2003, which is essentially an engine for SNES-era RPGs that comes with a handful of basic template of a game. While some people make use of the Run-Time Package stock resources and the default code, these games tend to be not-so-good and not worth the player's time. Legend of the Philosopher's Stone uses none of these packaged utilities, and instead features a game whose resources and code are completely "new" to the engine (more on this later). In short, LiteArc has spent dozens of hours toiling away to rebuild a game engine from the ground up to create something very smooth, functional, unoriginal and slightly cumborsome. In terms Indie Developers will have an easier time understanding, what I mean to say is: FRIGGIN CUSTOM SYSTEMS! At first glance, one will come into this game thinking its battle system is the coolest and most innovative thing around, and in many ways, it is. This is because of the magic of the CR system. It has no magic points or skill points of any sort, and rather, using your special abilities will delay your next turn by a longer period of time than a basic action would. Furthermore, attacking or defending will delay you next turn less than a less aggressive action like trying to escape. In short, complicated actions take longer to execute than simple ones, and you get to use special skills in the random battles. These things are cool. If there is a single reason I would tell someone to play this game, it's because the CR system is amazing
That is not to say, however, that the combat system is revolutionary or that the battles are by any means thoroughly good. Other than the CR system, the battles here are pretty much what we've always seen. You can attack, defend, use items, attempt to escape (which, appropriately, is a pain in the ass because it never works and adds a ton of CR to your counter, AND only one person escapes at a time), or blast the enemy away with your overpowered magic spells. The way CR is allocated is unbalanced in various ways, particularly in the case of magic, where Christy was able to deal 900 damage per round with a level 2 spell (unfortunately, I have lost the screenshot that proves it). This is a huge balance issue, since my other characters were able to deal no more than 300 damage in the same round. Enemies will die in one hit from magic, which is less than twice as slow as normal attacks, whereas the meatiest physical characters will require about six hits to take down a typical opponent. And, towards, the end of the demo, I would win every fight in one round simply by casting one very powerful spell on the entire enemy party. If this were Final Fantasy 7, where being overpowered is the norm, this wouldn't be such a problem, but up until the point where the player is given the oppoertunity to learn some really powerful magic, the game is very, very tough. This lack of balance, combined with a host of petty annoyances that made the game a chore at times, almost lost my interest as a player. The Legend of the Philosopher's Stone is plagued with little design slips that poke holes in the battle system. For one, the encounter rate is far too frequent in some areas. More importantly, there is a serious lack of variety -- all but one or two monster encounters consisted of three enemies who had about the same number of hit points and generally behaved in exactly the same way. There was a specific pattern I followed for all random battles, and I deviated from that ONLY in boss fights (and in perhaps four or five random encounters). And, though this is obviously an intentional inclusion, the enemies always get the first move. This means that even though my party could slaughter the entire enemy party in one round, I would still have to heal afterwards. It was a cheap gimmick to create the illusion of real challenge that I saw through fairly quickly. Not all is bad with the battle system, however. It, for example, represents the greatest bulk of the original resources provided for this game (which, other than LiteArc's programming, are nearly nonexistent). These come in the form of dozens (?) of frames of animation for sprites during battle. Unfortunately, not all of these frames ("poses," in community jargon) were drawn by the author, and it shows. Some I recognized from QHeretic's 2000 release Kindred Saga, and others I recognized from the SNES game Treasure of the Rudras. The animation done by the author is painfully obvious, as it is enormously less fluid and a great deal more awkward looking. bad character animating aside, the animations for skills were all loud, violent, and very-cool looking. I'm not sure which game they were adapted from, but they were well-implemented and all looked very cool (except for the enemy skill Blood Bite, which was a leftover from the Run-Time Package; just goes to show you this game can't do anything 100% right). And, despite all the flaws, and the times I just had to shut off the game in abject frustration, the battles were extremely fun. The CR system is a simple and effective inclusion, and the graphics, though for the most part balatantly stolen from Final Fantasy 6, where crisp and attractive. The key word here is fun. I had fun hacking my way through the hundreds (yeah, that's right) battles this release has to offer, and so will you.
Much of this fun is due to the magic system that I have already mentioned earlier as being too powerful. Does anyone remember Final Fantasy 7? That's pretty much what we're dealing with here. You can collect orbs, and then the characters can "draw" spells out of them with ability points that they have acquired. Afterwards, these spells can be equipped to four slots made available for them. It's a slightly modified materia system that copies everything down to the spell names (my favorite spell in Legend of the Philosopher's Stone was Firaga, followed closely by Stop, Cura, and Esuna, which all tie for RIP-OFF). Regardless, it added just the right amount of customization to keep me fighting. I paid attention to how much AP each enemy was worth, and got excited when I'd fight the monster group in the area that provided the most (which was usually, for better or for worse, one of only two or three). And when I learned a new spell, I was excited to use it, the same way I was excited when I'd find a new orb or when I had a new character I could customize differently. Unfortunately, as I've said before, the magic is way too powerful, and I think that it might be too "cheap." Much of the excessive power my spells possessed I'd bet was due to the fact I was casting the most powerful series of magic near the end of a game that ends with "part 1." All things considered, I did like the magic system, even though I don't respect it or admire the authors for how it was implemented. There's not much more to say about the menu system. It does all the basic things, like inventory management, item usage, equipping of items, et cetera. If you have ever played any RPG before, absolutely nothing will be new to you here. Or, specifically, if you have ever played a Final Fantasy game. This game's menu setup is so similar to Final Fantasy 7's it approaches blasphemy - you have three characters in your active party, each of whom can equip a weapon, an armor, and an accessory, who use Hi Potions to recover their hit points, and draw Thundara and Haste spells out of orbs they find laying around in convenient locations. Huge props go to LiteArc for getting it all working, particularly the inventory management portion (since I know from experience it's a real pain to manage dynamic lists of items like an inventory in an RPG), but it's all so generic it seems like a wasted effort. This feeling is amplified by the notion that the included menu system with the game engine is nearly identical, albeit less attractive or neat, which is reason for a new menu system enough. Of course, this game has battles and it has a menu system, since it is an RPG. But it also has maps, right? And a story? And all those other things?
Of course, this wouldn't be Legend of the Philosopher's Stone if Nemesis didn't screw something up, and he certainly did. There were a huge number of tiles that were on the wrong "layer;" where I'd walk under a railing, or through a roof, or be standing in front of a chair with the back of the chair somehow being over my head. They are minor bugs, but once you catch one, it ruins an entire map. The suspension of disbelief is destroyed, and everything starts to look fake. It may seem like I am nitpicking here, but I think that the layer issue was a serious enough problem to warrant an entire paragraph (even though my review tend to be so long they throw out paragraphs like free condoms in South Africa). Don't get me wrong; I am not disappointed with these maps in any way. I'd compare it to titles like Abstract Paroxycysm and Solar Tear in terms of mapping; just a step away from the best.
These thumbs are smaller, because they are uninteresting.
Basically, just a few screenshots of random map bugs I'd found. I really appreciated the little bits of animation during map exploration. I'm pretty sure they came from QHeretic's frames from Kindred Saga, since the main character in this game was also the main character in that game, and they're based on templates from Final Fantasy 6 anyway, but either way, the sprites looked good on the map screen. They had been editted to make them look like they were running on the map, rather than walking ridiculously fast, which tends to be the trend with games done in this engine. They would also jump down from a ledge, crouch down to open a chest, or climb up a ladder. These sorts of tiny environment interaction details can really add a lot to a game, and they did so here.
The Legend of the Philosopher's Stone carries a story that, appropriately, does not disappoint but does not excite; primarily because it disappoints so often and excites so frequently. There a few scenes, like the one in the forest at the campfire, that were positively beautiful. Two of the heroes sat, worrying about their friends, making jokes about their idosyncracies in a desperate cover to stay happy in an unhappy situation. At other times, such as when the main character suddenly decides it's okay to commit murder as long as it's for the personal good, were extremely mediocre. The characters often seem to be acting in the interest of the plot, rather than in the interests of the writing. Every choice seems to be made for the sole purpose of keeping the plot moving on, which is only believable half the time. At other times, it simply seems like Nemesis needed yet another dungeon idea, which was probably the case. This is especially clear near the end of the demo, where the party makes a certain decision that is quite of character and seems really silly. However, I suspect that once the plot develops a bit more, in the next release, it may be a lot more complicated than it seems, and I am giving Nemesis the benefit of the doubt here. If my suspicions are confirmed, then it may turn out the Nemesis is a much better writer than it seems at first glance. The characters themselves were a mixed bag, but weighed in on the side of being better than worse. Most of the characters had distinct personalities; particularly the ones that were in your fighting party. Fausto consistently delivered aggressive, random lines, while Kris was quite macho and the central character never let up his indecisive act. There are a total of 15 characters in your "group," about 9 or so of which are actual fighting characters, and most of them had a fairly prominent role in the demo, each fully equipped with factory-installed distinct personalities. This, much to my chagrin, means everyone always wants to get their two cents in, which could be infuriating at times. Many of the cutscenes degraded to dialogue-fests where the sprites wouldn't budge an inch and all the characters would try to be as absolutely verbose as possible. Sometimes, I really didn't feel like reading that much, especially when the event didn't seem particularly important. Perhaps the worst moment of the game's plot is the very beginning, which the author has since pledged to completely rewrite due to an enormously negative public response. Basically, the introduction is lifted straight from the pages of Chrono Trigger's script, right down to the quiet, scrolling helicoptor shot of a town at the beginning. It even has bird sounds, if I remember correctly. And yes, the hero is laying in bed, and yes, that map is a graphic taken from Chrono Trigger in a room built out of Chrono Trigger tiles.
I had a huge pet peeve with this game's music: half of it was written by Yasunori Mitsuda! This really irks me, since the tracks were taken from games like Xenogears, Xenosaga, and Chrono Cross, which not only are some of my favorite games but also my favorite soundtracks. Tiles and sprites are one thing; they're like pieces of the whole, and a developer can make an original maps out of unoriginal tiles. Music is another story, however, and if I can easily recognize the source of a particular piece of music -- and if it's one of my personal favorites -- it really detracts from my gaming experience, and did so in several instances as a I played through this game. I really did enjoy most of the musical selections throughout the game, as they wer appropriate, good, yadda yadda yadda, but the Mitsuda stuff came off to me like an attack on something sacred. This is probably due to the fact that Mitsuda is my hero. Results may vary.
Technical Graphics There weren't any particular innovations in terms of graphical presentation in this game, but there were a lot of typical things that were done well. A few light overlays were used on the maps to make them look more full, and it was done tastefully so as to make the maps look nice and not cheesy (as overlays often do). There were a surprisingly small number of general graphics glitches, considering the number of tilesets and the enormous depth of detail, as well. There were a few uses of more detailed animation while on the map, which all worked and worked well. I want to note the battle system here, since it really pushes a lot of graphics through and does it with style. There are no weird, random graphical glitches in the battles, which is definitely a plus. I was expecting at least one, but I can't remember any. Every animation, damage readout, and target flash comes off without a single hitch. Overall, I think the accomplishment in the technical side of the graphics department is not that anything was particularly creative, but that everything worked so smoothly and was so well polished. Code I've covered my thoughts on the menu and battle systems above, but I didn't really explain just how well everything is programmed. The battles would lag occasionally, but I think that's because I'd always have Trillian running, and Trillian does weird things when I first get messages. Overall, however, I did not encounter a single bug in a single fight. The battle system was pushing through a lot of lines of code, and it didn't hiccup a bit. This is extremely impressive, especially considering the difficulty of performing actual programming inside of the confines of the RPGMaker interface. The menu system also worked very smoothly and was extremely satisfying to me. There were a lot of items, pieces of equipment, and orbs to collect, and the modular nature of LiteArc's programming handled it all extremely well. I was particularly impressed with the item menu, which handled a dynamic, sorting list of items, like one you'd expect to see in a Final Fantasy game (the inspiration here is clear). You could rearrange things how you liked, have them automatically arranged, or even leave big gaps in your list. Neat. I also liked the game counter, which I understand takes a little bit of extra work to pull off in RM2k3. There was only one (1) critical bug in LiteArc's code, and that had to do with cutscenes, so I suspect it's really Nemesis' fault. When a cutscene would change the members of my party, it would not always change the skills my characters had equipped. This means a character who had not learned Firaga could now suddenly cast it, even though they had not earned that ability yet! While I personally did the dutiful thing and unequipped the skills so as not to be one who takes advantage of glitches, it represents a big, open bug that needs to be fixed. Sound Nothing really interesting. There weren't a lot of atmospheric sound effects or anything, so nothing that I could analyze from a technical standpoint. The music would often have looping issues, though, which was probably caused from using mp3s from a soundtrack release. Like a track would loop, fade out at the second iteration of the beginning, and then start playing again. Other than that, there's nothing special about the sound effects other than what one would expect: the click of a door latch, the creak of a treasure chest, or the giant swooshing sound effect usually associated with people who wear suits of armor when they jump. Artistry . . . and this is where The Legend of the Philosopher's Stone falls flat on its face. For all its other merits, like the custom systems, the pretty maps, the amount of animation, the passable plot, the rich cast, there is nothing expressive or beautiful about this game. Everything about this game is trite and done-before. While it isn't boring, it isn't specially fun, either. The story is sort of well-written, but it delivers no touching or profound message of any sort and has no overtones. The characters are diverse and believable, but they satirize noone and serve as no sort of allegory. If anything, the cast in Nemesis' release advertises that High School kids are in general mature and brave, which is exactly opposite of the truth. From a technical standpoint, The Legend of the Philosopher's Stone is a by-the-numbers, bread-and-butter, popcorn style role playing game presents you with a simple premise and invites you to fight simple battles as you troll through simple dungeons and read simple dialogue. This is the sort of game that results when the author tries to cater to everything the target audience asks for, and in the process loses sight of any particular vision he may have originally had. The fantasy world the characters are in is generic, their cause is generic, their weapons are generic, the overall game design is generic, and their spell names are from Final Fantasy. There is no artistry to the gameplay in any sense, since it plays like a mishmash of the features every RPG fan has played in games before and enjoyed. Basically, this is a game that you will play, and you'll probably like it, but there are a lot of things you won't like and you probably won't remember it for a very long time. It's extremely straightforward and uncomplicated, and will be fun since it has all the right ingredients for a fun game. The only thing it's missing is a bit of creativity. It's really very unfortunate, since a title like this has enormous potential, but I feel that it hasn't been realized because everything about it is just so damn been-done-before. In simple terms, Legend of the Philosopher's Stone has the same soulless, produced feel as a typical Hollywood summer blockbuster or a game produced by an extremely large team.
Play or Not? Play. For what it's worth, it's a fun, well-put together game that isn't missing anything except for a personality. Reviewer's Notes Start 11:21 PM, April 12 2005 - The opening is very quiet, that I like End 12:31 AM April 13, 2005 Start 10:35 AM April 13 2005 - Okay, review time. End 2:19 PM April 13 2005
- BUG! You can run onto the roofs in northern town End 10:34 AM April 18 2005
- BUG! When the system arbitrarily swaps your party members,
skillsets don't get changed (as in when the ladies leave before the
manhole dungeon) End 9:05 PM
- Can't sleep, must finish review. GAME FINISHED 3:07 AM April 21 2005
REVIEW FINISHED: 5:29 AM April 21 2005. I have officially pulled an all-nighter. |
