bcdefg123's game Reviews on Newgrounds

[TDR RPG: The Quest for Xirang]

Well, this was a nice surprise this morning! It's been a long time since I've heard anything from this project. Glad to see you saw it through! :)

Some of the similarities to First Fantasy are rather striking, including the UI layout, battle system, and even the style of humor. Yet there are some nice touches that I wish I had thought of at that time - like green and red highlights for stat changes. The story, though, definitely makes this its own game. Either way, I'm still very flattered that you took inspiration from FF!

And now for the actual review, with far less comparisons :P

I'm impressed with the depth of the story. Not that I have ANY knowledge of Chinese myth, folklore, or history, but it does seem like you have a lot that you pull from here, both in terms of the breadth of folklore and your knowledge about it, and the popup text is great for learning more about a subject - but it's never required (yes, that's a good thing). The popup manner of that text, though, is odd - you could have skipped the popups and implemented the text into the game window itself somehow. I don't have a problem at all with user-initiated popups, but I've been here long enough to know that some people simply just love their adblocker.

Art is fairly minimal but what's there does its job, I suppose.

Music is just about exclusively piano and ambiance. Not too memorable either. It seems like more Chinese-sounding music would have gone great here.

The battle system is solid, and easy to get the hang of, with a couple exceptions - cultivating qi is basically a way to ensure death never happens if you start early enough, so it might have been wiser to limit that capability. Similarly, there is no penalty or chance of failure (at least in my experience, even though the tutorial says it may fail sometimes) for running away. And this was a problem in my game too (actually, a WAY bigger one in my game), but when you attack with the same results as the previous turn, sometimes the text won't change at all, so you don't know if you actually attacked. Some feedback would be welcome when attacking, even if you miss for that turn.

A more visual movement controller would have been nice too - for example, if the 'up', 'down', 'left', 'right' buttons were actually arranged like arrows or something (like Halsaban in FF 1.1). Just for us visual people. Especially if the button text shifts a lot.

I think that's everything I have right now. I like this, and I'll be looking out for a Part 2!

FlyingColours responds:

Thanks for the detailed review! Again, thanks for the inspiration and for the advice you gave me when I was in the middle of making the game.

Art and music... aren't the greatest, as I'm aware, since I'm mainly a programmer/writer and was going solo. If I make a second instalment (likely now, considering the score I got), I'll get an artist and a musician :)

I agree, cultivate qi was OP, and another user has told me about it. It is something I will definitely alter that in the next episode. Escaping depends on the Vision stat, though maybe I made the probability too high.

I agree, a more visual controller will be good. The reason I didn't implement it after you suggested it for the first time was because it would require important changes in the game engine. Implementing it would be tedious and tormenting, so I had to give it up, though this is something I‘ll implement in the next episode.

Again, thanks for the review and everything! :)

[Hunters - Relic of Stars]

Pretty darn good

It's great to see you can do serious stuff as well, and do it well. This was actually kind of addicting for me. Some of the later stages were challenging, but sometimes in an odd order - when I got to the warehouse-like part of the stage, that was way harder for me than the boss that came afterward (or maybe it would be more appropriate to call it a miniboss - whatever). Then the game got a bit easy until the final boss, which beat me about 10 times until I actually passed it. The first boss was also a bit easier than the platforming that surrounds it.

One little unnecessarily tough part was in the portion of the game where you teamed up with that one guy. You seemingly arrive at a dead end, and by chance you discover 'oh, that's not a floor, that's an elevator'. It blends in perfectly, which isn't too great. Also, the machine gun feels useless - you don't have to use it at all, and indeed I didn't - there's no knockback when enemies are hit.

I won't spend too much time on the art. I figured people have said enough already. I do realize, however, that it doesn't make the game alone, and in all honesty, you did about as good as I could. Maybe even better. You do have time to improve for future stages, so that's something you might want to consider. Nice talent in the voice-acting department. I especially like the conversations during playtime - they add a lot of atmosphere and dynamics to the game (which is part of the reason why I like Sonic Heroes so much, when few others do). Unlockables are also a plus.

In addition, many nice little touches (thank you for skipping cutscenes if you have to redo portions of the game) demonstrate that you know what you're doing. I can't wait to play the next stages.

Rhete responds:

Thanks for the very detailed review. About the elevator part in particular you made an extremely good point there, I've changed the elevator graphics so they stand out more, to make it more obvious what to do when you reach that room a second time. I'm not sure the update has gone live yet as it needs to get approved, but I posted it last night so hopefully it has.