終わりっ？ っだなぁ・・・

[marchionessofmustache]

I played my first 1.5 hours of I Am Setsuna, which in this kind of game is pretty much nothing, but... it felt a little tedious to keep going at this point so I had to take a break. It sounds like this is probably what I'll play if I need a break from Dragon Age :P



The game starts with you, the hardened sellsword who is severely strong and powerful... needing assistance to go fight this baby penguin thing in the snow. It doesn't even look menacing!

Right away the graphics are very... iffy. A lot of the background elements are amazing hand-painted animated sprites, very beautiful and interesting. Then the 3D models range from decent to extremely simplistic, like something out of Hello Kitty Roller Rescue. It's extremely jarring to see this majestic, detailed, highly-animated tree next to a big clump of white nothing with a Computer Graphics 101 penguin tutorial slapped in the middle of it.




The UI is also like this, some things look really nice and some things look rushed or badly designed. The main menu is this weird monochrome stuff with white text on top. It's kind of hard to read because the range of values used in the background of buttons is too much -- the greys get too light and compete with the white text. The button prompts for the controller buttons look like they were 5 times the resolution they're displayed at and then scaled down in MSPaint, making them look jagged and awkward.

Being a SaGa fan, though, things looking rushed and awkward is normal so it's not that big of a deal. But one thing I was really looking forward to in this game was the aesthetics and I've felt mostly let down so far. But some stuff is nice, but it's not as epic and awe-inspiring as I was hoping. And the intro of your game should really show that off. Instead, it was this snowy forest with very little detail, and then the town you go to was just okay. It felt cozy and nice, but... just wasn't what I was hoping for.



The title credits reminded me a lot of Final Fantasy VI's title credits -- the player character, setting out on their vile mission, trudges through snow as the credits play. Actually... a lot of this game seems to be 'nods' to other games. Some music after fighting the first boss sounded like a piano remix of the victory music from the first Final Fantasy and SaGa titles. And the main story seems to closely resemble that of Final Fantasy X (guy from another place/tribe that people don't know about meets sacrificial girl who must go on a journey to eventually die to stop the baddies from coming out...). And the battle system, as it was heavily promoted, is similar to Chrono Trigger. The character art is done by the person who did Final Fantasy Tactics and stuff.

It's kinda cool to see all the references and familiar things, and this game was promoted as a nostalgia-inducing game and a love-letter to fans of these classic titles, so I guess it makes sense... but so far there doesn't seem to be much original about the game. All of the "lore" is just really basic stuff you see in every RPG -- magic is the spirit of living things!! monsters have a reason for being here that you've heard 100 times before!! people hate monsters!! this is a monster that looks exactly like a human animal called penguin, but it's not a penguin, it's a monster called a panguin!!!

Stuff like that lol. So far there hasn't been anything particularly unique or interesting. Just a lot of tired cliches and references to other games.

But like I said, I've only played the first 1.5 hours. I've seen almost nothing. I pretty much haven't even set out on the real adventure yet.



The character's legs are like pegs??? Everyone is chibis. It's cute but I kinda don't like chibi games unless they also have more properly-proportioned artwork or models elsewhere. I like the character art for the main player characters, but that's very few. Everyone else is just a chibi. They don't even have noses. I appreciate the cuteness, but it makes every character look exactly the same. The only difference is hair color and stuff like that. Old people and young people look the same. Masculine and feminine people look the same. They're all the exact same person with different clothes and hair colors ... not that fun. Characters and their designs are very important to me, and when everyone is the same shape and size just different colors, that ruins all the characters. The main characters at least have tons of adornments all over them to make them stand out a bit, but... that's about it.

As you can see, though, the town is very pretty. I took a screencap in a good place. Some places are just so much snow you don't see much.



The interiors don't look as good as the good exteriors. But overall, the interiors look better than the exteriors when you're counting all the empty space or dull areas in the exteriors.

It's really a good-looking game, very pretty, but just... I had higher hopes and because they were let down it makes it feel worse than it is.

Also they really wanted the treasure chests to stand out or something so they look hideous on top of those nice backgrounds.



This little thing looks like Duskull. The ship looks really nice!! If only the environments always looked this good XD

The battle UI is a little annoying -- It's often hard to tell what you're doing and sometimes the game shifts focus to an area where you don't realize you're supposed to look, and you have to actually search around the screen for the information, rather than it putting the information in an intuitive place (for example, who you're targeting when you're curing... I always have to take a second to figure out where I'm supposed to look to figure out who I'm even targeting...)

The battle mechanics are fun in theory but so far the game has been 'mash attack and win.' I didn't even realize how to do the power-up thing that the tutorial taught me because it didn't explain when to press the power-up button thing, and so I ended up just doing regular weak attacks to the first boss over and over and it died and I never had any threat of dying. Subsequent bosses were pretty much the same, using the healing character's turn to heal whoever had the lowest HP. No strategy. No thought. I could program a robot to beat this game in like 10 minutes. Well, that's if it continues to go this way.

The mechanics seem to have a lot of potential, though. When it came up and said "ATB!" I was like oh god please no, because ATB is ... the worst battle system ever. But it seems to try to actually use it, at least. If you don't take your turn, a special power-up gauge thing will fill, and you'll get these little like... spark balls of energy that you can use to power up your moves.

Enemies have a bunch of kill conditions (killing them with certain elemental attacks, overkilling, status effect, etc.) that guarantees drops. Killing them with the powered-up moves is one, too, as is killing them within a small range of their max HP. So it seems like the game is going to revolve around hunting these item drops, but you are guaranteed them if you meet the conditions, which can be fun.

But as for now, it's just all this fancy for-show mechanics, and no battles yet have been interesting or fun. You could sit there and chat to your friends and check facebook while the ATB sat and the enemy attacked you over and over, and then go "oh yeah, the game" and mash the 'attack' command over and over (and heal with the heal character) and you'd beat every boss I've faced so far. Which is like three or four. There is no point in having all these random mechanics when there is absolutely no reason to use them.

Map exploration is equally uninteresting. Everything has been extremely straightforward. I'm talking more linear than Final Fantasy XIII or Final Fantasy X. They haven't introduced the idea of hidden paths or even branching paths yet, which if your game contains those, is something you should have done by this point. So they're either not there, or the game isn't designed to be intuitive to the player.

But again, I only played 1.5 hours, and went through only a couple of areas and only fought a few bosses. It could just be that this game is ridiculously slow to get started. Many games are like that. This is just a first impression. I really appreciate the artwork, when it's not ruined by ugly 3D models or a complete lack of detail in giant snowfields or whatever. The character voices are kind of annoying and I might turn them off. They say like the same three things constantly so you're hearing the same voice clips back-to-back, over and over... In fact, the game asks you from the beginning if you want to turn them on because they're off by default. I guess even the developers realized they were annoying!

Apparently the game gets more complex and interesting later, though, but it leaves a bad first impression. I'll keep chugging though. Considering I've done much of nothing, and probably 30 of those 90 minutes were spent not really playing but doing things like going to the bathroom or folding some clothes, I can't really say I have any kind of accurate idea what the game is really like.