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Summary
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Ratings
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Graphics
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Perfect
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High quality stuff. Some boards had odd little nicks from tiles not fitting perfectly together, but I'll let it slip.
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Audio
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Very good
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Apparently, half of this is Juice's old stuff, half of it ripped in the demo. It's nothing to write home about, but not bad, either.
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Story
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Average
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I'm not sure if the story in the demo is various parts of the game hacked together, the opening proper, or just something entirely new for the demo's sake, but it's rather rough at any rate. Typos and sentence fragments abound, and it seems like sometimes entire parts of conversations were missing.
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Fun
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Poor
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Constant battles that you really don't have much say over or add up to anything in the end don't amuse me much. Doubly so when you fight double-digit encounter numbers just trying to get down a flight of stairs.
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Stability
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Very good
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In and of itself, it was stable and fully runnable, but there's a couple of quirks. The game said it was making autosaves, but for some reason, the Load option on the Title screen wouldn't let me select it, and kept doing the same fading text thing that the tutorial did. Characters move overly fast in the cutscenes, but I'm pretty sure that's at least partially a machine-based issue. And, as you're fully well aware, sometimes foes just failed to damage you. Mostly it didn't happen, but the Whratt itself tended to do zero damage (though sometimes its poiZon still hurt).
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Length
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Decent
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Well, the demo took something just shy of an hour for me to complete. That said, all but about ten minutes of that was fighting Runners (and ONLY Runners for some reason; I know you already had a cactus, a snail, and a rat enemy lying around. Why didn't I fight any of them?). Let's just say that got annoying fast. By the end of the demo, it said that I had fought 489999 battles, which certainly felt accurate. So, it has length, yeah, just not really of a good kind.
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Thoughts
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The very nature of this demo is a bit murky to me; it seems like it's trying to show a part of the story, a somewhat complete battle and menu system, and all-in-all be a full-fledged demo. It seems to me it could have used more focus, as neither end is really strong.
The battle system has potential, it just never makes any use of itself. Options are limited, and in a sense mostly made moot by the fact that you're fully healed after every single battle. I'm not sure if that's going to happen in the game proper, but, while debately necessary in the demo (seeing as you lack any stores to buy potions or an inn or whatever), it pretty much kills any strategy or conservation for battles, which pretty much ruined battles for me, if they didn't already annoy the life out of me with their frequency and unchanging nature.
Speaking of those numbers, it seems the balance is a wee wonky. Xzarren did just shy of a thousand damage with her magic attacks, while Emanuel was doing maybe twenty damage with each swing of his sword. Sure, he's probably designed to be mostly defense-oriented, but he dies about as easily as her. Ryuu was doing about double EB's damage, and died about twice as fast. However, Ryuu did have the ability to heal as well, so yeah. You have the ability
Story is pretty weak at this point in time, too. It might fall into the trap of being essentially placeholder but not look/feel it, thus causing me to think poorly of it, where I might just sweep it under the rug if it was clearly temporary.
There's a lot of good concepts and perhaps a good story deeper in Sin Eternal, but a lot of that didn't show through in this demo, making it somewhat lacklustre and a bit of a disappointment.
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