![]() ![]() They’re merely serviceable on the whole, and slightly improved by the presence of multiple enemy types within each encounter. The vistas are beautiful, combat animations are well-crafted and convey a menacing weight to the hero’s sword strikes, and a dynamic fantasy soundtrack gives the world a magnificent amount of magical atmosphere.Ĭombat encounters are built in a standard isometric format, usually involving a cluster of enemies with varying strengths and abilities. They’ve crafted a stylized, fantastical world lit with bright, airy colors, set on environments floating suspended in the clouds. It is sometimes painful to watch, because the amount of care put in this game on the behalf of the creators is impressive. Merely being told of Reynardo's affection for someone is a poor way of connecting a player with a story's characters. Worse, I never felt any impact when characters met a bad end, because I'd never grown attached to them or had any reason to care about their fate. Context is slowly gathered and understood over time, but its insistence on introducing new characters at such a rapid rate never allowed me to fully appreciate the individuality and motivations of each character before ushering them off Stage Right and promptly replacing them with another. Instead, I used deductive reasoning and eventually parsed out a way to successfully complete my adventure.īringing this to life in the pages of a virtual story book is a nice evocative touch, but one core element frequently hinders the impact of the narrative: the plot itself is hacked apart and shuffled haphazardly as to make the actual overall story a mess of names, places, and out-of-the-blue all-powerful weapons. Once that happened, I knew I couldn’t’ t make the same decisions again and expect a different outcome. The system made me recall the old days spent reading CYOA books and keeping a finger on the previous page when making a decision just in case there was a bloodthirsty Polar Bear in the ice cave or a cliff to mistakenly fall off of while exploring the mountains. One play through is typically anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour, and they start off around where they ended in the previous run, side-stepping the potentially tedious pitfall of backtracking. ![]() Once you’ve completed a run, it’s best to take this newly gleaned information and apply it to make different choices and steer the narrative in a new direction. Every story yields new information about the world, whether it’s the secrets of a new environment or the potential threat an ancient weapon poses to the fabric of the universe. In an effort to save the world, Reynardo will be given several options from the start, including visiting friends for information or chasing down powerful weaponry to be used later by the Resistance. Stories centers on the rougish Reynardo, an ex-fighter thrust back into the fray of battle when the emperor begins sacrificing citizens in dark rituals to awaken a host of ancient Gods. It has endings that aren't really the end. The ability to explore all of them based on the decisions made in a previous thread takes some of the finality out of an ending, meaning the failures aren’t likely to sting as much. Much of the story will result in failure until players are able to navigate the story’s best possible outcome, and going back in to try for a different ending will allow players to meet new characters and travel to new places. In Stories, you fail, you learn, and you fail again in an ever-repeating pattern. ![]()
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