Part 32: Postmortem: Thoughts on the Project
Postmortem: Thoughts on the ProjectFirst and foremost, the LP Curse on this game has been broken!
Back a year ago, when I started this LP, I really didn't expect it to drag on this long. still faster than the bn3 lp Still, it was a game from my childhood, back when I only had two PS1 games and this was one. The other was Rayman 2, so, uh, rock and a hard place.
I'd say childhood me had worse taste, but nah, I knew it was a bad game even then. Still, I'd always wanted to finish the game, and this was a good excuse for it.
As for me, I had Digimon World...2? The dungeon crawler one, and I can safely say I hated every aspect of it.
In a way, I'm glad I got to finish this game, even if I very quickly got infuriated and fed up with this game's bullshit. It's one of the games that I never managed to finish - hell, I never even managed to get halfway - and finally being done feels pretty great.
That's the abuse talking.
I did have a lot of fun (at times) even if playing the game was pretty damn boring when I had to grind.
What parts did you have fun except for a few sparse moments. What parts. I want to know, MISTER.
Fighting the bosses was actually fun. They were the only things in the game that were challenges that seemed reasonable, instead of just being walls labeled must be this level to ride.
From what I can tell, the game does have some charm and fun at first. The Overworld does look very pretty, and some of the boss fights looked engaging as can be for a turn-based style of combat. It isn't like it's all bad.
Like, I'm not going to lie, Lord Megadeath and everything to do with the A.o.A was
and stupid as fuck, but at the same time there was a weird sort of charm to making fun of the game. Or maybe I'm just trying to convince myself I didn't waste a year of my life doing this thing (minus like the month I took off to focus on not failing college classes).The story and characters is where everything fucks up. Hell, it doesn't need to be great storytelling, just competent. The number one issue with this game was its pacing, all said. The story's pacing was fucked up, either revealing too much in one time frame, or forcibly elongating the plot points with pointless backtracking.
Backtracking can have its merits: sometimes there's a new way of traversing an area and you want the player to go through it. Sometimes there's a new instance for the player to check out, and you're making them learn how to get to it. Maybe there's a new enemy set. These have merit. What this game did constantly was force us to backtrack simply to extend the playtime.
The grinding as well, is included in the pacing. The dojo mechanic can permanently screw you, making you reload your nearest save to get the right stat increases. The random encounter rate seems pretty high, so you're inevitably forced to fight a ton of battles, bogging down everything.
They need to do away with the Dual XP system entirely. Just have Digimon gain moves by levelling. Adjust EXP rates to be better to compensate for the reduced encounter rate and you'd have a better flowing game.
I'd put some thought into how to make the levelling system better, and 90% of it was 'don't make the player have dead levels'. Only one in five levels MIGHT have something happen, and even then there's no guarantee; you'll only learn moves or digivolutions on levels 5, 10, etc. etc. and then finally level 99 when you hit max. I figure what would be best would be to drop the random stat gains from training, flatten the hell out of the level curve so that it doesn't take forever to level up, and then add in bonuses for maxing out a Digimon's Digivolution, like permanent stat buffs or something.
At least they weren't total jerks about the Digivolution paths, aside from a few ridiculous ones like Imperialdramon-P, which requires Omnimon and Imperialdramon-F at level 99, which respectively require WarGreymon and MetalGarurumon at level 40, and Imperialdramon at level 99, and the requirements chain just gets stupider and stupider. Most of the Digivolutions, though, are pretty easy to get (so long as you put in a little bit of effort). You'll probably end the game with two or three Megas per partner, all told.
There were parts of the game that can fuck right off, and the less said about the card game the better. All in all, the game is super rough around the edges and is pretty much just a blatant cash grab on the franchise to coincide with the new series that released at the same time, but I can see some good ideas in the execution. Maybe with a little bit more polish and love, it'd be a pretty okay game.
Particularly the Seadbed and the Circuit Board. I don't know why fast travel becomes slow travel, but it's a thing. That's one of the first things that should be overhauled ASAP.
There's a lot of stuff I did gloss over a bit, so we might not be entirely finished. There's a lot of Digivolutions that never showed up in the LP itself, and once we hit the postgame I kinda just did whatever, so who knows, I might get around to making a video showcasing all of the Digivolutions.
Or maybe not, since now that I've finished playing this game I really don't want to touch it again. You jerks shouldn't be playing it yourself, either, so not like any of you care.
Show me all the Digivolutions. I want you to suffer.
All in all, the game is FINALLY finished. After like, three attempts by other people, Digimon World 3 has been LPed successfully. Thanks for sticking around, folks, it's been a wild ride. I'll be going back over the old updates to fix up a few things and get ready for archival, so the thread's gonna be open for a bit longer in case anyone has last-minute comments or art they want to post.
Giver+Yeti: Breaking the curses on games.
Please don't make us do more of these.
Yeti+Giver, this is my LP so I get top billing, alphabetical order and better parsing be damned
