A nice looking title screen, but backed by a pretty poor
remix of a Chrono Trigger tune. Is this a sign of the game's
mixed qualities?
After reading Only One In All's fairly positive review in a previous
issue of Hamsterspeak, I decided to give Stenmele Osmium a
try. I was honestly disappointed at first, but perhaps I
expected too much. It is only a short demo, and there are
certainly some good points, but there are enough bad points that I
really wouldn't recommend the game in its current state.
I will begin with the aesthetics, which least influence my enjoyment of
an RPG. The graphics in this game are very good.
There is good attention to detail in all aspects here, and although
there is little that truly stands out in memory, that may be more a
sign of consistent care applied to all areas. The only things
that I remember looking a bit funny were the NPCs in the
town. I don't have a lot to say about the music.
Like the graphics, nothing about the music stands out in memory, except
that overall it seems less care was put into it than into
graphics. I only remember it seeming kind of bland, but at
least never intrusive or annoying.
It's hard to say much about the story, as nothing is explained by the
end of the demo. That's not to say that the storytelling is
bad, though. The three missions are enough to go on, and
their conflicting nature leaves a lot of questions (not to mention
wondering why any of the missions were assigned in the first place),
but it doesn't feel like the story has holes, rather that it is
unfinished and ends before the explanations would naturally
occur. It's too bad, because I did end the demo interested
enough to want to know some of the answers.
Unfortunately, as the gameplay stands right now, I'm not sure if I
would have stuck around long enough. The main problem lies in
the random battles. They are long, but they are not dangerous
at all. For example, the player will often find himself
fighting a party of three enemies all of which take more than one
attack to kill, and all of which will attack him for minimal HP
loss. This could work if the damage slowly built up, but it
never does. First of all, healing is incredibly cheap (even
at level zero all of the characters have access to a healing spell that
only costs 1 MP). Secondly, the characters' stats are
restored on level-up! This eliminates any possible
accumulation of damage, and with the battles as singularly easy as they
are, this means that they all end up feeling pointless. Long
battles that feel pointless are not a good thing.
However, there are ways to shorten battles. All of the
characters have access to a 'shop' that sells abilities in limited
quantities. Unfortunately, when the player is forced to
switch characters (there are three in this demo, and are controlled
separately) it becomes difficult to buy anything. After the
first character swap, I found myself wondering who I should be spending
my money on, and ended up spending almost nothing from that point
onward. I didn't know how many characters I would end up
controlling, or if they would join together at some point, so I
couldn't judge who to give what abilities to. This is very
unfortunate, because I think that money was awarded at a good pace in
battles. For these reasons, I had the most fun playing with
the first character (I didn't yet know how the swapping would work),
even if the battles were still pointless.
Honestly, would you buy things from a shop that advertised
its wares like so?
Bosses are somewhat of a joke. For one thing, they seem to be
thrown in randomly just to trigger a longer battle. These
battles aren't really any more difficult though, given the cheap cost
of healing. On the other hand, there is one very long,
unavoidable boss battle that needs fixed. Basically, both the
hero and the boss can barely hurt each other, and so we have the
classic LONG battle of nothing but attacking over and over until the
enemy dies (and I mean, OVER and OVER, healing once maybe every ten
turns or so).
There are other small problems too, outside of battles. First
of all, the maps are either incomplete (most likely) or very poorly
designed. There are places with no graphical indication for a
door, especially on the outer map, that make it difficult to decide
where you are trying to go. There are also places where walls
are placed very strangely, sometimes again with no graphical indication
at all. In the town some of the wallmap is just plain broken,
and you can end up walking through rooftops. Also, for some
reason you can enter certain doors in the village outpost, but doors
with the exact same graphic can not be entered in the village
itself. This is very perplexing given that there is a
separate door graphic for the one house you can enter in the
village. Why not use this graphic for the one enterable door
at the outpost?
Finally, there is the whole system of choosing what stats to increase
at level-up. This is well-executed for the most part, but I
found the stats "attack" and "special attack" quite
confusing. It was not obvious at all to me what things
"special attack" affected, although it became clear from damages given
after the fact that it did not affect all special abilities.
This needs renamed, or attack descriptions need to make it clear which
stat they utilize, if the player is going to be responsible for all
stat growth.
Of course, this is just a demo. If the author ever comes back
to it, I would suggest fixing/finishing the maps, and getting rid of
stat restoration on level-ups. This will require some
re-balancing of costs for some attacks, and perhaps some kind of
healing points along the way. Also, I would suggest giving
the shop unlimited stock for most items, as that would encourage an
unknowing player to make use of it. There is certainly a
solid foundation here for a good game, but work is needed.
