Part 38: Bonus - Goons Chatter About Other RPG Maker Games
Bonus - Goons Chatter About Other RPG Maker GamesOn Vampires Dawn, Part I:
a cartoon duck posted:
If nothing else this is really making me wanna play Vampires Dawn again. VD was the only RPGMaker game I played when they were a big deal here, and even then only because it was practically impossible for a while to buy a gaming mag that didn't include a cd with the game on it. I was only dimly aware of UiD because it usually got mentioned whenever VD came up, but by the time I completed VD I was pretty burned out on RPGMaker stuff already so I never bothered with it, so I'll be following this thread closely.
fake-edit: I just checked the VD website, the first game got a novelization last Halloween. It's kinda amazing how long a somewhat obscure RPGMaker game series managed to survive.
Tin Tim posted:
To be fair, VD was long as hell. Being fed up with Maker games after finishing it, kinda comes with the territory. Still, it was very popular back in the days, and pretty much deserved it. No matter what you think about the whole vampire thing, even though it was long before the mainstream hype, the story is neat and the game scratched at the limits of what you could do with the RpgMaker. I remember how impressed I was with the system behind your powers, and the humanity scale that was connected to it. Iirc, there were a lot of things that would have a lasting impact depending on what you did, and of course, there are also the different endings that you could get.
TheMcD posted:
Yeah, VD was fuckhuge, and VD2 was even worse. I spread the game out over months and still ended up burnt out.
There are even plans for a third part being made, but they're stalled after a failed Kickstarter.
On Vampires Dawn, Part II:
Tallgeese posted:
My girlfriend and I tried out Vampires Dawn. Let me break it down.
Well, it's got funny dialogue. Though the question is how much of it is funny due to the astoundingly terrible translation.
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The combat is eh, and the encounter rate is astoundingly high. It is just a chore to play once the world opens up, because 95% of it will destroy you immediately and there is no hint where to go.
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There's interesting ability selections every five levels. The problem is that you're not told what the possible selections are until you hit the level requirement, and you cannot undo the selection.
So you wind up going "Why pick this single-target fire spell now, when chances are in five levels I might be able to pick a stronger and also multitarget version?"
This game has no qualms about screwing you like that. For example, one character's level 15 spell selection list includes "Dark Blades", a useful party wide attack buffing spell.
Seems good, except that his level 20 selection includes "Freezing Blades", which you would think might be a better version since it costs 50% more MP. Wrong, sucker! It's worse! Hope you picked Dark Blades earlier!
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Adding to that, there's other questionable decisions like the fact that your buff spells (see: Dark/Freezing Blades) can and do flat-out miss. In a game where if your MP runs low you enter a berserk state, and the spells are not cheap.
a cartoon duck posted:
I actually did power through Vampires Dawn just because of this thread and well, I guess the polite way of putting it is that it's a product of its time. Either I just had way lower standards as a teen or the game plain didn't age well.
I didn't bother looking at the English translation, but by funny I assume you mean funny in that horribly cheesy way? Because that's definitely true to the German original. The blood font narrator in particular makes me cringe a little whenever it comes up.
Continuing your questionable game design decision list, by the time you get your bat transformation and the game world opens you're probably around level 9. The next story dungeon expects you to be level 18-20. I guess you're expected to visit every town, do whatever side quest you can at your level and explore some low-level forests and caves, expect even when knowing which side quests I can do early I still only ended up level 14 and still had to grind for an hour, and I never even found a low-level forest or cave to begin with. At the very least by the time I hit 18 the crazy-high encounter rate meant I was always properly leveled for the next story dungeon, and after the second dungeon after you get the bat spell the game does a pretty good job nudging you in the right direction. It's just the initial lack of sense of direction can leave a bad taste.
The game has a single consistent party of three, but you have the option of summoning some monsters to help you out for a short while (as in, 30-60 seconds outside of battle short, the timer doesn't tick during battles though). Of the four summons in the game two are useless by design because they always start at level 1 rather than scaling to your level, and one of those two is hidden in an optional dungeon that requires you to be about level 25. The third is your reward for doing a goose chase through your unintuively-designed home base, so you're pretty much forced to do a pretty long tutorial-ish thing just to get one of the useful summons. The fourth one is found in a late-game optional dungeon and is hilariously overpowered, but comes with the shortest default duration of 30 seconds. The joke here is that bosses in this game are wordy as fuck so if you don't figure out how to extend its summon duration not even mashing enter through dialogue boxes will let you use it. The best part is the game creator, Marlex, obviously knew this, as one boss talks your ear off in in-battle mode so your summon won't run out, while another talks your ear off pre-battle but then does that cliché "and now I give you a moment to prepare!" thing, which I am pretty convinced Marlex only put in so you can resummons your dude after getting pissed about him expiring mid-cutscene.
Speaking of bosses, as much as this game has/had a reputation of being really fucking hard, Marlex only really knows two ways of making things hard on you: Putting you against multiple enemies with hard-hitting multi-target attacks or giving a single powerful enemy multi-target multi-status effect attacks. Halfway through the game absolutely every boss, story or optional, has some Final Fantasy Morbol Bad Breath attack doing the usual cocktail of RPG status effects including my favourite, confusion. Other than a fairly well hidden item that has a 60% chance of blocking all negative status effects nothing protects against confusion that I only remembered existed after beating the final boss, there's no item that can cure it and only one of your characters can learn a spell that cures it in the late-game, so if she gets confused you're shit outta luck. This isn't even the nice polite confusion where your characters occasionally still attack the enemy, in this game confusion means your characters exclusively hit themselves and ignore the enemy. If the RNG feels extra spiteful a boss will keep spamming their bad breath attack, effectively stun-locking you into confusion until your team killed itself before the boss even had a chance to. Casual reminder that bosses are wordy as fuck so you get to sit through a wall of text a couple times before moving on.
My absolute least favourite thing though is that you have a limited amount of saves. Instead of having the gold-standard of the game providing you with game-saving pentagrams, the game instead hands you some consumable save stones, so you always feel a bit coerced to either keep playing for long stretches of time or just let the game keep running in the background. The game hands you a pretty generous amount of save stones, but the mental effect is still there. If any of you ever feel like playing this, go grab the cheat patch that Marlex provides on the same site as the download to VD so you can have infinite save stones and don't have to feel like playing for 15 to 30 minutes is a waste.
But despite all this I am apparently still nostalgic enough about this that I genuinely enjoyed my time through it because I'm some kinda masochist for games or something, or at least care enough about it to type out a wall of text for some obscure German RPGMaker game most of the world doesn't know exists.
TheMcD posted:
I feel similar. Reading through that, I can't imagine just how in the fuck I managed to play through both VD1 and 2 without any real problems or ragequitting, and when I think back to the time I played it, I only remember good things about it.
And thinking about it now, I suppose it could be explained with "product of its time" how Vampires Dawn was much more popular than Unterwegs in Düsterburg, which is definitely designed a hell of a lot better, but doesn't have the "edgy" story VD had (for lack of a better term - UiD gets pretty hardcore in some places, particularly Rabenstein, which I notice I'm apparently building up by mentioning it several times already as being a pretty interesting place, and Königsberg has some pretty rough shit too, but it doesn't go as far as VD does), which was apparently "a thing" around the time the German RPG Maker scene had its renaissance.
Nostalgia is one hell of a drug.
a cartoon duck posted:
In conclusion:
Lots of tales about different heroes. For example, here's one about a certain Grandy defeating a vampire called Wahnfried.
Wahnfried? WAHNFRIED? Poor guy...
Musta been bullied all the time with a name like that...
On other games:
Tin Tim posted:
So, since TheMcD earlier said that it's okay for me to talk about other games, I'm going to do that!
Sternenkind-Saga
The trailer is rather old, but still gives a short peek at what the game is about. Also, it's one of those "labour of love" type games.
The title translates to "Starchild Saga", and the game is only in German. It has been in development for quite a while, and the final version is announced for this year(with some hope). Basically, the game is heavily influenced by Nordic mythology. If you like Vikings, you're gonna love this game. It's set in a fictional medieval world, and the humans are at war with a race of werewolves. The war isn't going very good, and you play a young recruit that has been drafted after the last major battle ended in a catastrophy for the humans. Your character is the titular starchild, because you can pick from a range of star signs at the beginning. Each sign makes playing the game a bit different, because each one has a choice between three different advantages, and each sign also dictates how your character talks and what his motivations are. Your sign will also influence the look a special place that you'll get access to later in the game. There's more to say about the importance of the stars, but that would lead into the plot behind your character
The writing also deserves a mention, because it's pretty faithful to ye olde language. It doesn't shy away from violence and some genuinely sad stuff, but also has a sense of humor. You can find a ton of lore, poetry, and little stories if you explore the world around you. Seriously, the amount of writing and world building is pretty impressive. The visual design is also neat, has a lot of custom art and lots of details and secrets. There is so much effort in this game that I could gush about it for ages, but let's just stick to a list of bullet points.
-Custom attribute and skill system for your characters
-Custom talent system that dictates what sidequests you can solve, and what secrets you can find
-Custom Karma system that shows your standing with the different gods in the world. Karma is directly influenced by your actions, and rising in the favor of a god can unlock powerful gifts or more content
-Custom art, animations, sprites, lightmaps, and lots of charm in the design
-A lot of different and fun minigames
-Several subsystems like town management, orc-ball games, and war battles in the late stage of the game
-Lots of quests for nosey players to find
-And many more things that add replay value because you have to make choices
The current demo is pretty large and can be found here. If you can read German, and found some of my points interesting, then it's worth a try!
If you want to check some visuals, there is a development thread here. Though, keep in mind that like the first third of the screens are from an early build that got scrapped.
And lastly, the main reason why I bring this game up is that it also has a reference to Düsterburg.
This can be found among the books in the grand library, and one of your characters has something to say about it.
"How sad. The title suggests that it's the account of a journey through a far off land, but it's the story of a country that's stricken by vampires....but the writing is very gripping!"
