Elthosian
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2012
- Messages
- 1,138
Been playing for two hours and it’s niice. I feel like you get to interact with the environment more than in Chained Echoes and the visuals are gorgeous. Music is also 10/10.
Combat is simpler and you don't seem to get even half as many options to customize each character, which was a cool part of Echoes, but I like the timing based elements to keep you engaged. The colored bar in Chained Echoes added some variety but sometimes felt too arbitrary. Also, health not regenerating between battles is a good choice. My only concern is that they make it very clear that you don't have to get the timings right every time and if the difficulty is balanced around not doing them then that might end up trivializing combat. Hope it's not the case but the "training" boss was super easy to beat after getting all the timed button presses right.
Writing is standard as someone said earlier, but nothing jarring thus far. Definitely agree on using ‘cozy’ to define the whole package.
Edit: some more early impressions after continuing to play: the combat feels dynamic despite the lack of customization, the level design of dungeons is overall linear, but there are little puzzles and sidetracking to grab objects the way it would be in the old FF games. The same happens with the world map, it's small and it's clear where you need to go but even in the first three hours you can find a couple of optional locations and spend like 5 minutes on each. There are also some nice minigames that feel much nicer than equivalents in other games and wow the visuals keep delivering. The lighting system is well done and they drew up gorgeous-looking sprites for many items. Playing this close to midnight and seeing those food sprites is painful haha.
Edit2: compared to Chain Echoes the world-building seems a bit more eh, but I'm loving it nonetheless and now after fighting the third boss the difficulty is going up. Had to use almost all of my consumables.
Combat is simpler and you don't seem to get even half as many options to customize each character, which was a cool part of Echoes, but I like the timing based elements to keep you engaged. The colored bar in Chained Echoes added some variety but sometimes felt too arbitrary. Also, health not regenerating between battles is a good choice. My only concern is that they make it very clear that you don't have to get the timings right every time and if the difficulty is balanced around not doing them then that might end up trivializing combat. Hope it's not the case but the "training" boss was super easy to beat after getting all the timed button presses right.
Writing is standard as someone said earlier, but nothing jarring thus far. Definitely agree on using ‘cozy’ to define the whole package.
Edit: some more early impressions after continuing to play: the combat feels dynamic despite the lack of customization, the level design of dungeons is overall linear, but there are little puzzles and sidetracking to grab objects the way it would be in the old FF games. The same happens with the world map, it's small and it's clear where you need to go but even in the first three hours you can find a couple of optional locations and spend like 5 minutes on each. There are also some nice minigames that feel much nicer than equivalents in other games and wow the visuals keep delivering. The lighting system is well done and they drew up gorgeous-looking sprites for many items. Playing this close to midnight and seeing those food sprites is painful haha.
Edit2: compared to Chain Echoes the world-building seems a bit more eh, but I'm loving it nonetheless and now after fighting the third boss the difficulty is going up. Had to use almost all of my consumables.
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