First Playthrough Impressions

[Valishan]

I recently finished this game on Normal with Thief Elenor, apparently putting 24
hours worth of time into the game (though probably more like 15 if we take off
the time I just left it sitting and all the time spent jumping from shop to shop
looking for gear). Overall I'd say it was worth the price, but that's from me
looking at it more as an interactive book with RPG elements rather than just
another RPG, if that makes any sense. I don't have any complaints about the story
aspect because, while maybe not perfect, it is very in-depth and reveals a whole
lot about the world and people, and that's exactly the sort of thing that
interests me in a story. Clearly a lot of work went into that part of the game,
and even though it all ends at the same place there are a few different branches
you can take to get there, which is a nice touch. I'm also a fan of the 'use your imagination' style battle system; it gives that feeling of playing the earlier RPGs, which I suppose is either good or bad depending on your opinion but it works for me.

The things that I do have complaints about are the more traditional RPG aspects of the game. I know this game has been released for a while now, I don't expect any of this will change for this game but maybe it will help with future releases. I'll try to be brief, but I'm wordy by nature and some of these might take a bit of explaining.


General class stuff: I really dislike the way Warrior, Thief, and Hero were done. I especially dislike that the PC is stuck with those classes. The way it really panned out was that, despite explicitly choosing the thief class, I was actually expected to be a Healer class. If the Hero class had some sort of attack skills it would be less of a blow, but as is I avoided that class entirely and resigned myself to only occasionally being able to use my class skills. It only makes matters worse that most other characters also have Warrior or Thief available, but there is literally nothing interesting enough about either class to tempt me away from spending skills in the character-specific sub-classes.


Hero: Somewhat off-putting that the "twist" of the game is that you don't play the hero, yet your PC has the "Hero" sub-class.

My other issue with the class is that most of the stuff it can do is done better/faster by items or other characters. If a character or two die in battle, it's either going to be unimportant because the fight is nearly over or too urgent for me to wait for the PC to get their turn if that means waiting for 3+ other combatants to move, especially if one of them is in my party. If I ever needed debuffs removed, it was from multiple people and that isn't helped by the Hero's Neutralize ability since it's single-target. Ward may have been worth a few points for some boss fights but in general it would've seen zero usage. Energy, meanwhile, would've just tempted me towards making the PC an SP bot, and that would've been even less fun. All in all, the class felt more and more redundant as the game progressed.


Thief: There is nothing 'Thief' about the class. I went in looking for passives for better loot drops, attacking disabled enemies, or actives that allowed me to, you know, steal. Instead the class is built around conditionals that are more like mage abilities than anything else. Every debuff that the Thief can be inflicted is one of the debuffs that lowers a resist; sure, they're also DoTs, but it really just diminishes the feel of playing a Thief class to nothing.

To top it off, if you want to make use of the Thief skills you have to either spend a turn using the Thief-only potions on a single enemy or depend on someone else, likely the front-line warriors, to hit someone with a necessary debuff that lets you use the skills. The problem with that is that Thief is built around Skill, which means speed, which means more often than not going before anyone else, which means your first turn is completely without the option of using *any* Thief skill. What's more, if you're planning around the front-liners to land the debuffs, you still have nothing else to do if they don't land the debuff and you'll likely only be able to use your skills on the enemy's front line as well, which is almost never where you'll find the people you want taken out first.

In my opinion, the Thief would have been much better off having the Fire and Cold bombs as items and replacing those skills with a passive to gain more gold and/or loot after battle and an active that would cause one of the necessary debuffs to use its other skills. I would likely go even further and change one of the conditional skills to a similarly conditioned skill to actually steal gold and/or loot from an enemy within melee range. That would at least give a Thief a reason to be in the front lines at all.


Warrior: The skills here aren't as lacking as the Thief, but they still miss the mark as far as being attractive to anyone but PC Warriors. Toughness is hypothetically good, but with Strength as prime stat I never found a need for more HP on my Warriors. Stun might have some uses, but Confusion is not that important of a debuff and Loren has that covered with Knockdown, which is on the route for Wide Slash. Power Attack debuffing speed is a pretty serious drawback considering how slow Warriors tend to be as is, and 30% of end-game speed on my slowest Warrior (110 speed) is a heavy 33 points; too much of a penalty when even the mages have 125+. Taunt seems like a mixed bag, but without using it I can only say that it seems like a really good way to get heavily debuffed and no one but Ramas could handle that potential. Even worse would be drawing too many Strike Throughs on one back-row character. Push seems like the most interesting of the list, assuming you could get things timed right so that an enemy front-liner gets staggered before the Pusher's turn and a push means you draw a caster to the front for easy pickings. Even then, killing things in the back row is much easier with archers and mages.


Misc Class stuff: Something I found out later about spending skill points is that skills which require other skills to learn don't actually require previous skills in the same line. That is, while you might need Toughness I and II to learn Stun II, you can actually take Stun II without taking Stun I. Figuring this out was immediately very frustrating since I felt like I wasted skill points that could have been better spent just saving for the 3rd tier skill on certain trees, like Loren or Ramas' full-row skills; in those cases, it makes a full 4 levels difference in when you get the better skill.


Personal Quests: The quests themselves were pretty great (solidified Ramas as the best character), but they were a bit uneven. Some of the quests were much easier than others, which only becomes a problem when the rewards don't match-up. Karen's quest was pretty simple and gives her a great spear. Dora's quest was pretty rough and the reward was 2K. That's pretty terrible for Dora since she's already competing for a back-row spot against some stiff competition and even Rei gets something unique, even if still not as valuable as any given multi-target spell. It's one thing to have the personal quest also as the recruitment quest as is the case for the DLC characters, but poor Dora just gets shafted hard and that really shouldn't be happening before before the Ramas/Dora subplot is wrapped up.


Combat log: Minor nitpick really, but having the chatlog show new messages at the top rather than the bottom was disorienting. It took me a while to make sense of that one, and while I did adapt to it, it would be nice if there were an option to change it. Being able to see more lines at a time would be nice, whether it was just always bigger or if there was an option for a bigger pop-up log to review whenever necessary.


Itemization: This was probably the most frustrating aspect of the game, if only because shop-hopping for gear was both necessary to fill some slots and completely random and unreliable. I have so much to say about this one that I'm almost certain to miss a few things, but I'm going to try anyway.

*Item rarity: This one really turned my head. There are a slew of items that are unexpectedly and unjustifiably rare, and I can't wrap my head around it. In all my hours of shop-hopping, I found a whole *two* belts that mages could equip, both of them showed up at the same time and *only* that one time. Meanwhile, Morte's Mantle, the most expensive item I found, showed up in nearly every shop at some point and in certain shops on nearly every visit. I've seen a few other one-time-only items, some of them very cheap, and I've seen a lot of top-end gear show up as if it's something every middle-class citizen in the game would own at least three of; this is really confusing since even late in the game, most battles are still dropping Old Crossbows, Standard Swords, or maybe a Tempered Sword at best.

*Item Consistency: Certain armors seem to be mirrors of each other, such as the various Chain armors that resist one of Burning, Frozen, Tired, Shattered, or Poisoned. This is fine, except that sometimes one of these will be worse than the others for no apparent reason, i.e., the Chain Leggings of Woods that resist Shattered have a -1 speed more than the Leggings of Breeze or standard Chain Leggings. Leggings of the Death Knight also have -1 speed more than other similar leggings, but they have 7 def to compensate, making the Leggings of Woods outright inferior to all similar leggings. The lackluster Girdle of Determination (1 attack, 3 def, -3 speed, 1 Threshold) costs 250g, while the much better Mercenary Belt (3 attack, 2 def, 0 speed, 1 SPR, 1 Threshold, Resist Confuse) costs 200g. Ring of Accuracy (10% Crit) is nearly 1K, while Mercenary Ring (2 Attack, 2 Damage, 2 Speed, 8% Crit) is only 250g. There are other examples, but I think that should be enough to illustrate my point.

Weapons aren't immune to this either. When I found out that you can freely change weapons in battle, taking advantage of resists became mandatory; that meant keeping a stock of various weapons that hit each resist. For swords, I seemed to be stuck with Air and Water at only 14 damage compared to each other element at 17-20 damage. That wouldn't be such a concern if not for the fact that each element for Crossbows can be found almost uniformly at 22 damage and 5 Attack, with some variation in crit, and Water again being the oddball with 20 damage. I haven't looked as closely at most of the other weapons, but it does seem like most of them have tighter clusters of tiers with few exceptions.

*Item Logic: This is where things get really confusing within the game itself. In the inventory/quest/status screen, you can hover over the Battle info under a particular character and the left side will populate with an overlay that plainly tells you, "Magic is a Mage only statistic;" why, then, can none of the mages equip the various Battlemage gear that gives 4 Magic and little else? It would be very helpful if they could, especially since one of these Battlemage items is a belt, and Mages have a very, very, very short list of belts they can wear, never mind find useful. I'm noticing now that my PC has Spell Points rather than Stamina like other Thieves, but I can't imagine why the Magic stat would help him/her at all; the Hero skills are set in their effects and the Thief skills are based on the standard skill+(str/2) formula.

What is the purpose of including daggers? Any character that can equip a dagger can also equip something else that is better for them (exception: ranged characters can benefit from the crit and other stats from daggers, which is 3 speed and 9% crit in the case of 'Skullscream' (which also costs 300g, nearly 700g less than a ring that does less for you)). The same can be said of maces, two-handed swords, and even bows; the alternatives to these items are almost always better, especially with regards to characters who get weapons from personal quests. Some of this is just the nature of having tiers of weapons, but in the case of a particular weapon type versus another weapon type it ideally shouldn't be as much of an issue as it is here. In some cases it's just inexcusable; only Ramas, Loren, and Amukiki can equip two-handed swords, but Loren and Amukiki are made for one-handed weapons and will never want to bother with two-handed anything so it doesn't make sense to even give them the choice.

*General Shop-hopping: It would have done a lot for me if the inventories were at least somewhat consistent, but it looks like a mostly random assortment of stuff each time you visit a shop. There are a few exceptions, such as spears generally only appearing in the Citadel, but that only makes the matter worse; why couldn't all shops be set-up this way? IIRC, Horus was the city with the academy that Draco was kicked out of, so why couldn't it be the prime place for cloth armor and staves? Why not have Grandtree the place for bows? And so on. It would've taken so much of the hassle out of shopping if I knew there was a particular place (or two) to go to for certain items.

Taking into account the stage of the game would have also been a plus; I shouldn't be seeing Standard x weapons or Cloth Bracers and so on in Chapter 3, when it should be a given at that point that I would be looking for something better because everyone shows up with at least that level of gear.



After saying all that, I feel like I should add that I have enjoyed the game thus far and have already started my second playthrough with Saren on Hard to get everything else (mostly the DLC since I missed it playing on Linux the first time) and to make a few different choices. I really would like to see more games like this since there's so much about it that was done well. The pacing of the game was done really well; getting through the story was pretty simple and didn't require loads of battles to finish a single plot/subplot. The camp aspect reminded me a lot of the KotOR series, which is definitely a good thing. Seeing more interaction between other party members in camp without the PC's involvement would be welcome though (i.e., you go into Camp and for no reason get a scene between Ramas and Rei bro-ing out), especially if it could lead to a jealousy plotline that pit the PC against someone else for a third person's affections. The combat, aside from the issue with the log, was also very clear about what was going on and the debuff effects were thankfully spelled out very well. The only improvement I'd really like to see there would be an option to look-up what the effects do when not in battle. All in all, it does a whole lot more good than it does bad. It's been an enjoyable experience so far, and I'll probably be looking at whatever comes next.

[Elysion]

Yeah thief sarelenor is kind of gimped. Warrior is good only because you can wear heavy armor and use that skill that defends back row characters for your first three turns, then sit there healing people.

You are supposed to be lorens sidekick though, so focusing around supporting her/her party is i think the point.

It has the side effect of making a thief main kind of pointless unless you really want to use those thief bombs a lot, and have another warrior in the front to do tanky things.

But i find the best front line is really warrior sarelenor, loren, and karen. Get her whirlwind and shes pretty awesome.

The advantage to this is that sarelenor can always afford to raise will stat, and have higher skill than other warriors since strength really only becomes your hitpoint skill anyway, and you dont need massive hitpoint when you are geared up and have high defense and magic defense (the magic stat is also the magic defense stat, game doesnt clarify this)

[Storm_at_Sea]

**SPOILER - READ AT YOUR OWN RISK OR NOT AT ALL**

I just finished the main game yesterday, (will probably wait for a sale on the dlc, unless someone tells me it has so much content to be worth $7, not likely), and I overall enjoyed the game. Simplistic yet it kept your attention and the story mattered. 1 thing that annoyed me was, upon the last decision, I was playing a warrior Elenor, and I chose to sacrifice myself of course, well the achievement pops up for using Elenor or Saren to defeat Fost, yet, I have to do a playthrough with a character I don't want to use to max all achievements (use Saren alone to romance different ppl- instead of 'use Elenor or Saren to romance whoever'. That's annoying, simply because it takes my choice away- I know -I don't have to max the game out like that, (and that some characters only romance w/Elenor or Saren not both- like others), but I like to when I can. It just struck me since the rest of the game they gave me choices then made one I wouldn't have for me. Oh well- it's not a huge deal, more of an annoyance. This is the first 'video novel' I've played and it was pretty good. I'll be waiting to see what else comes from this dev.

[Separa]

I'm not far into the game, only played a few hours of it so far (I'm playing the uncensored version, if you are wondering why it is only showing 3min or whatever on Steam) but I have been enjoying my time with it. The game definitely is not as refined as it could be but, despite having some rough edges, it is very enjoyable. The gameplay is pretty solid and fun, and the story is well written; even if it is not as thorougly edited or as thought-out as it could have been, or as I would have liked. I've noticed a handful of typos and oversights already, but this hasn't detracted from my enjoyment of the game at all.

As for the main character and the class system; yeah; I was disappointed with how that was implemented as well, but I am managing to work around it so far. After looking at the available skills and realizing that I would either be stuck working on a melee focused build or sticking to healing abilities, I decided to go ahead and just invest in the healing abilities while pumping as many attribute points as I can into damage stats (Skill so far, as I am playing a Thief). With the way that the healing abilities work, they do not seem to require much if any investment in Will and so it's pretty easy to make a strong hybrid character. Will I have any AoE? No; but I'll be strong enough in the areas that matter the most. The other characters can handle the AoE, when it is required.

[lys_xen]

@ Valishan, let me first say your analysis very well detailed. I can also guarantee the developer is well aware of some of the problems you mentioned and hopes to address them in Loren 2 (tentatively title Tales of Aravorn - Reign of War).

For example, the class system for the Hero is going to be redesigned from Loren 1. Obviously in what shape it ends up is still up in the air, but it will retain some of the Rogue/Warrior classes, but it will also allow the hero to play a true Mage Class. Hopefully this will also solve some of the other issues you noticed.

I do know there was some heavy discussion about items as well (touching on a lot of the ones you mentioned).

@ Storm at Sea

The developer has at least two more rpgs in development set in the same universe as Loren 1. I mentioned Loren 2 above, and there is another game in development, and it may see release later this year, called Seasons of the Wolf set a few years after Loren 1.

Of course, when/if they get on Steam is a different matter. Greenlight, and that whole process.

[Storm_at_Sea]

Originally posted by Temerity:

I'm not far into the game, only played a few hours of it so far (I'm playing the uncensored version, if you are wondering why it is only showing 3min or whatever on Steam)

Just in case you may want to know, all you have to do is load the demo, it will update the Steam copy to uncensored, and will track your time and achievements afterwards, you don't have to play the demo copy itself to get uncensored. I update my Steam and time/achievements worked normally. It doesn't interfere.

[Separa]

Originally posted by Storm_at_Sea:

Originally posted by Temerity:

I'm not far into the game, only played a few hours of it so far (I'm playing the uncensored version, if you are wondering why it is only showing 3min or whatever on Steam)

Just in case you may want to know, all you have to do is load the demo, it will update the Steam copy to uncensored, and will track your time and achievements afterwards, you don't have to play the demo copy itself to get uncensored. I update my Steam and time/achievements worked normally. It doesn't interfere. :gold_loren:

Huh, alright, good to know; thanks for the tip.

[Valishan]

Originally posted by lys_xen:

I do know there was some heavy discussion about items as well (touching on a lot of the ones you mentioned).

I was doing some thinking on this a while ago, and I'm wondering if there isn't a bug of some sort at play in the shops. Since I've started on the DLC portion of the game now, I'm realizing that there are a few things that show up in shops that probably shouldn't. Maybe something is going on in the shop inventory generation that makes it such a hassle and spawns items it shouldn't and/or over-writes some things that should be showing up more? Or maybe it's just two or three items that don't have the flag to not show-up in shops set.

Knowing nothing about Python, I'm not the guy that can look through the code and say for sure. It was just some random thing that came to me.

[Winter Wolves]

What are those things/items you talk about ? can you make some examples?

[Valishan]

Off the top of my head, Morte's Mantle and Raven's Bandana. I haven't done everything with the DLC, but I have recruited Chambara and I see there's an achievement for Mother Morte, so I'm guessing those two are supposed to be unique drops from bosses, like the Lizard King Shoulders and a few others.