Review anarchistica 1/5 · Oct 17, 2018
RPGMaker was a mistake
Games made in RPGMaker generally suffer from the same handful of problems; They use generic assets, combat is dull and maps are a maze. SLD actually has rather nice graphics and music, but it does suffer from the other two problems.
The first hour or so you only have one party member with one attack. You trudge through a maze, …
Games made in RPGMaker generally suffer from the same handful of problems; They use generic assets, combat is dull and maps are a maze. SLD actually has rather nice graphics and music, but it does suffer from the other two problems.
The first hour or so you only have one party member with one attack. You trudge through a maze, spam your one attack and after a few battle trudge back to the entrance you get healed. I've played a bunch of games that started like this, it's awful. But wait, it gets worse!
So another problem is the movement. The environments are littered with objects that don't look like they will block your path yet do. You constantly have to swerve left and right/up and down around them, which is really annoying. It doesn't help that while walking vertically you can't move left or right while holding up/down while this does work vice versa. But wait, it gets even worse!
You're introduced to the real story with unicorns and a fairy godmother and stuff. After navigating another maze-like environment, furnishing your home and picking up sidequests you can finally start the game in earnest. And the very first environment is entirely white and it's 100% unclear what will and what won't block you. Brilliant design, guys. And, yes, it does get worse from here.
Right at the start of the game you have to pick Lily's elemental power. I picked the "default" option, the left-most one. Guess what, most enemies you encounter in the first dungeon get healed by her Thunder attack, so now 1/4th of your party is useless. You can't seem to switch this power early on either, and she has no other skills. Ugh. And of course it gets worse, of course it does.
You sit through a couple of boring fights until you reach the hypercube. You have to move rooms around on a 4x4 grid to open the doors to the key-rooms, pick up those keys and put them into the console. But you can only see adjacent rooms and some rooms have multiple doors but can't be travelled through, which is also not shown on the map. At this point i quit, i can only handle so much incompetence.