Interesting but flawed

[Ryu_Sheng]

So, been playing this on the PS4 the last few days and figured id post my thoughts.

TL:DR = Do not buy the physical edition, not worth it. Digital (if the price quoted on twitter is true) is maybe worth it, if the patch the flaws.

Graphics:

Not the best, and certainly not what you'd expect in 2018 on PS4 and PC. Frankly it looks more like PS3 era. Which dosent make it bad, but it's not very good either.

Music:

After 5 minutes i'd had enough and turned it off, repetitive and a frankly annoying. Sound effects arent bad, but arent amazing either.

The English VA is okay, not a lot of it but what there is it's not to bad.

Story:

meh, there's a story lol.

Gameplay:

The combat is litterally button mashing, and not very suprising. You have skills, but i've found the game tends to ignore my button press on the first press.

The school building would be interesting, but its stale and not very interesting. Maybe it gets interesting later on, but for the first few hours your hampered by story. This really becomes a problem when i was given a task to graduate scouts. The problem was you can't graduate ANY of the professions during the first season, because you don't start to unlock the mentors until the next term. So you fail the task, and lose all the rewards (and possibly negativly impact your rating).

Not fun.

Then you have the little 'events' that take place. After 14hours i have the same 3 poping up all the time. Late student, lost purse, and something making foot prints in the armoury.

Now, admitedly if that was all i could get past it. However the game makes the biggest taboo of all, taking your game away from you!

Early on you get introduced to the 2 missions types. The first you go on yourself with a party of students (which makes no sense, why the hell would the principle go on these!) You run around the same few maps over and over, kill a few critters, gather some resourcesm and then return.

The other are once you just send the kids off on there own. However these take an INSANE amount of in-game time. In my first playthrough i sent both of my parties off on these missions, thinking they'd be gone for maybe 5mins max. Half hour later i'm still sat there twiddling my thumbs bored out of my mind waiting for them to come back. And when they did finally return what they brought back was pittance.

Conclusion:

You can see the origins off the game, and it's these origins that are IMO holding the game back. They need to patch this to make the game more fun to play, and get rid of the huge time sinks where you're doing nothing but twiddling your thumbs!

[benj]

Good post, thanks. It's a shame, this one looked exciting to me because I think combining base building/management with JRPG stuff is a great idea.

[Ryu_Sheng]

I was the same, the concept is really good, it's just the mechanics that let it down. The biggest flaw is the down time, half hour with nothing to do (litterally) is just plain wrong. And that was just the shortes job. I hate to think how long it would take on some of the longer missions.

Thankfully that can be fixed just by changing the the timing

[Culgan]

The whole having nothing to do situation when you send all of your students on errand quests can be avoided by, you know, not sending all of your students on errand quests at the same time.

The errand quests are a way to get some exp for characters not in your main party while the main party is doing the playable quests.

I also made that same mistake on my first playthrough. Thankfully I made it right at the beginning so I done a quick restart and it took less time to get back to where I was than if I had waited for them to finish.

You do bring up some good points though.

The errand quest rewards are awful. By endgame I was only getting around 1250 XP for 10 week long quests. The reward just doesn't cut it for the time investment.

The same handful of events happening constantly was quite disappointing. It was almost always lost wallet, pop quiz or late student. There were a few others that popped up here and there such as footprints in the armory, noise at midnight in the dormatory, a student and teacher incident in a class specific classroom like challenging a teacher, practice or dropping something. There was no variety and the outcome was set in stone, there was no randomization so you always know what option to choose. After a few hours of play I felt like not doing them anymore because I knew exactly what the event was and what the reward would be based on the room it was happening in. More variety in those events would've been nice.

I did have a couple of issues with the game myself.

The student names for example. It feels like there's not a lot of unique student names. Almost half of the students who were trying to enroll in the school during my playthrough were from the Seven family. Every time I'd get a batch of 2 new students 1 of them was always a Seven. I also saw many students with the same name as someone I graduated previously only with a "II" after their name. A large pool of first and second names would've been nice with any new character spawning in taking a random first and last name from the list. That might help with the "sameness" if you will.

The 5 Queendoms. In game when you start getting missions from the Queendoms you're told that doing these quests will earn you favour with them. That line in game combined with the description on the store page that says "Forge alliances with one of five rival queendoms to influence the fate of all Valthiria and experience different endings" made it seem like there would be more to it than it was.

Having finished everything in the game 2 days ago and started another playthrough yesterday I can say that I have not seen anything about forging an alliance with a queendom nor have I seen anything that earns you favour.

Either this description on the store page and the line in game are an outright lie, a poor translation or they're simply not in the early release and are being held back until the game launches I have no idea, but it was disappointing. It led me to believe there was going to be more depth than there was.

The only thing I can think of here is that if you don't do their quests you don't earn favour which causes them to not help you at the end. But even if this is the case it still doesn't really match up with the store page description of "forge an alliance with one of the five rival queendoms."

That said, despite those flaws, I did quite enjoy the game for what it was. I thought it was pretty fun and had a good time playing through it. A $14.99 price tag is fair for what it is and I'd definitely recommend it to anybody who is interested.

[RPGenie]

Originally posted by Culgan:

The whole having nothing to do situation when you send all of your students on errand quests can be avoided by, you know, not sending all of your students on errand quests at the same time.

The errand quests are a way to get some exp for characters not in your main party while the main party is doing the playable quests.

I also made that same mistake on my first playthrough. Thankfully I made it right at the beginning so I done a quick restart and it took less time to get back to where I was than if I had waited for them to finish.

You do bring up some good points though.

The errand quest rewards are awful. By endgame I was only getting around 1250 XP for 10 week long quests. The reward just doesn't cut it for the time investment.

The same handful of events happening constantly was quite disappointing. It was almost always lost wallet, pop quiz or late student. There were a few others that popped up here and there such as footprints in the armory, noise at midnight in the dormatory, a student and teacher incident in a class specific classroom like challenging a teacher, practice or dropping something. There was no variety and the outcome was set in stone, there was no randomization so you always know what option to choose. After a few hours of play I felt like not doing them anymore because I knew exactly what the event was and what the reward would be based on the room it was happening in. More variety in those events would've been nice.

I did have a couple of issues with the game myself.

The student names for example. It feels like there's not a lot of unique student names. Almost half of the students who were trying to enroll in the school during my playthrough were from the Seven family. Every time I'd get a batch of 2 new students 1 of them was always a Seven. I also saw many students with the same name as someone I graduated previously only with a "II" after their name. A large pool of first and second names would've been nice with any new character spawning in taking a random first and last name from the list. That might help with the "sameness" if you will.

The 5 Queendoms. In game when you start getting missions from the Queendoms you're told that doing these quests will earn you favour with them. That line in game combined with the description on the store page that says "Forge alliances with one of five rival queendoms to influence the fate of all Valthiria and experience different endings" made it seem like there would be more to it than it was.

Having finished everything in the game 2 days ago and started another playthrough yesterday I can say that I have not seen anything about forging an alliance with a queendom nor have I seen anything that earns you favour.

Either this description on the store page and the line in game are an outright lie, a poor translation or they're simply not in the early release and are being held back until the game launches I have no idea, but it was disappointing. It led me to believe there was going to be more depth than there was.

The only thing I can think of here is that if you don't do their quests you don't earn favour which causes them to not help you at the end. But even if this is the case it still doesn't really match up with the store page description of "forge an alliance with one of the five rival queendoms."

That said, despite those flaws, I did quite enjoy the game for what it was. I thought it was pretty fun and had a good time playing through it. A $14.99 price tag is fair for what it is and I'd definitely recommend it to anybody who is interested.

This was very helpful, thank you for going into so much detail. Considering this for the switch.

[keylocke]

Originally posted by Culgan:

The student names for example. It feels like there's not a lot of unique student names. Almost half of the students who were trying to enroll in the school during my playthrough were from the Seven family. Every time I'd get a batch of 2 new students 1 of them was always a Seven. I also saw many students with the same name as someone I graduated previously only with a "II" after their name. A large pool of first and second names would've been nice with any new character spawning in taking a random first and last name from the list. That might help with the "sameness" if you will.

the "seven" family is a strange bunch. a lot of them often appear with very high luck stat.

at first, i thought these characters are just randomly generated so it was just a coincidence (just as i mistakenly thought the dungeons was also randomly generated), but it seems they're not.

the "seven" family might be an in-joke FF7 reference about 7777.. just as there were numerous pop-culture references in the game.

anyway, the lack of randomly generated dungeons and characters make the level grinding a lot more intolerable.

[bilbobaggin]

Originally posted by keylocke:

Originally posted by Culgan:

The student names for example. It feels like there's not a lot of unique student names. Almost half of the students who were trying to enroll in the school during my playthrough were from the Seven family. Every time I'd get a batch of 2 new students 1 of them was always a Seven. I also saw many students with the same name as someone I graduated previously only with a "II" after their name. A large pool of first and second names would've been nice with any new character spawning in taking a random first and last name from the list. That might help with the "sameness" if you will.

the "seven" family is a strange bunch. a lot of them often appear with very high luck stat.

at first, i thought these characters are just randomly generated so it was just a coincidence (just as i mistakenly thought the dungeons was also randomly generated), but it seems they're not.

the "seven" family might be an in-joke FF7 reference about 7777.. just as there were numerous pop-culture references in the game.

anyway, the lack of randomly generated dungeons and characters make the level grinding a lot more intolerable.

That's interesting to know. I don't thiin randomly generated levels will help with the grind tho, random generation can't replace good level designs. I think it would be better if devs put in some other created maps with interesting scenarios.

[keylocke]

Originally posted by bilbobaggin:

That's interesting to know. I don't thiin randomly generated levels will help with the grind tho, random generation can't replace good level designs. I think it would be better if devs put in some other created maps with interesting scenarios.

the problem with scenario designed maps is the lack of replayability.

sure it might be fun for main quest scenarios, but for grinding? it gets repeatitive really fast.

a good referrence for random dungeon similar to this would be recettear.

torchlight might also be a good example of good random dungeon generation.

[Anonymous2012]

Originally posted by Ryu_Sheng:

The school building would be interesting, but its stale and not very interesting. Maybe it gets interesting later on, but for the first few hours your hampered by story. This really becomes a problem when i was given a task to graduate scouts. The problem was you can't graduate ANY of the professions during the first season, because you don't start to unlock the mentors until the next term. So you fail the task, and lose all the rewards (and possibly negativly impact your rating).

Not fun.

Obviously you didn't pay attention to it or maybe the PS4 version is bugged. Of course you can graduate scouts. They only need to reach level 10, which is very easy to get. Later, if you upgraded them to knight, mage or that 3rd class they need to be 15+.
Best I managed was to graduate 18 scouts in 1 semester.

[Ryu_Sheng]

Originally posted by Anonymous2012:

Originally posted by Ryu_Sheng:

The school building would be interesting, but its stale and not very interesting. Maybe it gets interesting later on, but for the first few hours your hampered by story. This really becomes a problem when i was given a task to graduate scouts. The problem was you can't graduate ANY of the professions during the first season, because you don't start to unlock the mentors until the next term. So you fail the task, and lose all the rewards (and possibly negativly impact your rating).

Not fun.

Obviously you didn't pay attention to it or maybe the PS4 version is bugged. Of course you can graduate scouts. They only need to reach level 10, which is very easy to get. Later, if you upgraded them to knight, mage or that 3rd class they need to be 15+.
Best I managed was to graduate 18 scouts in 1 semester.

Wrong, you can NOT promote scouts or any of the classes until the game lets you after the first graduation. Unless they patched the game post release

[keylocke]

i haven't tried rushing the main quest to unlock the related knight/scout/mage quests.

maybe it is possible though unlikely.. but from what i've seen, the graduation requests can mostly be ignored anyway.

i finished the game without even bothering following the requests.

i mostly graduated apprentices, then i graduated my main students when i upgrade academy rank and new students with higher max levels appear.

[spoilers]
heck, max level 25 student (rank B academy) is more than enough to beat mother dragon and moonlight wolf.

gunners are so OP.. add a paladin and medic for heal/revive and group is invincible.

besides, final boss is a noob anyways. ending is so disappointing. it's like the feeling you get when a cool tv series gets canceled and they had to rush the season ending.

[spoilerspree]

arc draconus are better than paladin , that party attack speed trigger buff are ridiculous. if you pick 14 phy base student as it youll get super tank that only lose health from crits. one of the purple rank sword have life leech too. you could run 1 dragoon and 3 gunner and steamroll anything.

[keylocke]

Originally posted by spoilerspree:

arc draconus are better than paladin , that party attack speed trigger buff are ridiculous. if you pick 14 phy base student as it youll get super tank that only lose health from crits. one of the purple rank sword have life leech too. you could run 1 dragoon and 3 gunner and steamroll anything.

iirc, moonlight wolf has invulnerability.

it's different if you already know the attack patterns, but if you went in blind. players who first time sees him without dedicated healers is gonna get a spanking.

edit : unless you went in at lvl 30 with one of those crafting exploits to pump an OP weapon.

[HeikoFennec]

bought this for ps4 for $20. it's alright, but not the most engaging game to me.