Sometimes, a game can turn out a lot better than what you'd expect. I'm glad to say that such was the case for Antagonist.

First off, the About Line says "Rehash of Vikings of Midgard". Second, he acknowledged the use of its graphics (and gave a link) in the readme.

On the other hand, he just named the readme "readme.txt". I hate when they do that, because I like to keep all my games in one folder.

This game also uses the music from Vikings of Midgard, and not very well. The regular battle music is the normal boss music, and the boss music is the normal title-screen music. (I kid you not!)

ONWARD!


You start as a warrior named Chris. He's pretty much a wuss, despite beginning the game with Excalibur (he later upgrades to the Spell Sword). He seems to swing it around with telekinesis instead of his arm, which might explain why it does so little damage.

He starts off fighting battles against enemies like this:

That's right. The random encounters in the start area are huge, world-shaking beasts. Maybe Chris's wussiness is just relative?


Playing the game the second time, I bothered to read this textbox. Using it to grind to level 3, I got Chris to learn the Apocalypse spell. It did about three times as much damage as his regular attack, so I made short work of the bandits (who have human walkabouts and furry battle graphics).


Then I got a friend; a man named Abel who has boobs (or maybe it's a chick with a guy's name?). Anyway, Abel is mainly a healing character, but he also has a spell that costs twice as much MP as the healing spell and causes the party to flee which can already be done with the escape key. I wish he'd have had a revive, though, because characters can get killed cheaply in this game. And will. A lot.


I made my way to the top of the mountain to find another Frumpy clone. There seem to be twelve or so of them, and they're all identical. I would advise Uncreative Pseudonym to experiment with different colored vestments, variant hairstyles (and levels of male-pattern-baldness), and facial hair. It would give distinct appearances to the different Super Apostles and would be good practice for when he decides to start making original graphics.


What exactly is going on here? It seems to be something about the Purgatory Sphere, a mystic ball made out of Rupees.

Ah, so the furry, the Atheist, the demon, and the guy that used to be on our side broke it?

Well, the Atheist Assassin shows up and is too strong for even my Frumpy clone with 999 HP that knows the Holy spell (and only the Holy spell; no heals, or buffs, or anything else). So he leaves us in an overconfident huff and we go to a place called Crystal Cathedral, despite its lack of anything crystaline.

I go to what I hope is a bar; I really need a beer at this point.


The identical old men at the joint are Catholic-hating teetotalers. That's not very Smur--I mean, Christian.

After a little bit of TL;DR, I get sent to a dungeon.


Another thing, Uncreative Pseudonym, you seem to like using the huge, powerful-looking enemies. That's fine and all, but you'll run out of mini-bosses to use for random enemies at some point, and what are you going to do then?

The battles in this place are actually fairly well paced and well balanced. Ishmael's healing spell is worthless and overpriced, so stick with his attack songs. I also like how I sometimes had to think about what to do, because many battles would contain one enemy that was weak to an element, and one that absorbed it (I would generally cast Inferno and have my physical characters pound the Hati clone). All in all, this seems to be the best balanced and best designed area of the game.

After a while in here I got a shield for my next new character, and a hat for Ishmael.

Anyway, I ran into a bandit who looks like Olaf. Then he turned into a fencer while fighting me, then I left him for dead.

Then I go into a town that is frozen in time and one of the Super Apostles tells me that this whole dungeon was just a test to see if I was a worthy adventurer. Seriously? I thought that was what the mountain was about!



After I leave, the Atheist Assassin appears and tells me that he just healed the bandit. Then he leaves.

That's right. "I'm a bandit that you almost killed. That other guy must be evil because he healed me! I'll help you kill him!" For some reason he doesn't turn on Abel and Ishmael when they heal him.

By this point I noticed that while the Super Potions claim to heal to max, they actually only heal by 100. This needs to be fixed. The game would actually play a little better if they did heal to max. Likewise, the Super Serum actually only heals 25 MP, not all of it. This isn't funny, and is made worse by the later additions of Mid Potion and Mid Serum, which claim to only heal "some", but are actually more powerful than the ones that claim to heal "all."

His RAGE FIST is amazingly cool; it does almost a thousand damage (with most physical attacks around this level doing under 50) and costs 0 MP. It only does him 50 HP of damage which, considering that he begins with around 2-300, is rather modest.


How they can have an infinite number of staffs that were once used by Moses is a mystery to me. Also, the characters' starting weapons all have cooler names than their store-bought upgrades. Seriously, "upgrading" from Excalibur to the Spell Sword? From Mjolnir to a Giant's Hammer? From Chrisao to Divine Knife? From Lugh's Spear to Spirit Spear to plain ol' regular Spear?

Get the Daedric Armor and the Spirit Spear for the useless girl character they're about to replace Isaac with. And no, it isn't

I went to the church to report on my progress.


I talked to him from the right and we teleported to the south of him. After some more TL;DR a girl walks in and Chris says something sexist.


And as you can see, he also faces away from her while accepting her apology for his saying something sexist to her. I remind you, this is an hour into the game after he recruits a man with boobs.

Well, with Isaac learning RELIGION, I'm stuck with Krista. We go to the woods to the east. I keep getting killed by the same random encounter with two Greater Drakes and one Necro Drake. These enemies have an abusively powerful spread attack, and so fighting three at once is simply unfair. Even using Ishmael's Glacier, Krista's Tsunami, and Chris's newfound Oblivion (which is a pathetic spread attack) we can barely kill them off if at least two of them decide to use Apocalypse or a normal attack.


Things get even worse when we manage to make it to the forest itself.

The forest was full of furries. Some of them looked threatening; the other ones actually were.


Insanely overpowered. The Delvire clones have a one-hit-kill attack, making this formation of six Nintendo Hard. I had to replay this stage at least seven times in the course of this review.

The miniboss, who I fought twice, has an interesting gimmick; she spawns two powerful enemies when alone. Since she also knows a spread heal; just focus on her and take out the random-encounter enemies afterward.

Also, furries in the forest (like furries on the internet) are extremely combustible and will be easily slaughtered with just a little bit of flame. Thanks to Ishmael's Inferno, this stage is almost playable.

The boss of this area is a pair of rat/wolf/whatever the heck they are, with snazzy swords. They do around a hundred damage and seem to attack multiple times per turn; SNK Boss Syndrome.

A close call! Chris was only one more hit, and we were out of Resurrection Syrup. I backtracked back to town (holding down the Escape key), afraid that the next NPC I talked to would be another boss. It turned out that there wasn't another boss, but at least I had more revives again.

These next pictures sum up the following cutscenes nicely:


Next I was given a story-split. I decided to go from right-to-left.


This has something to do with a pair of Lone Wolves and stopping the Spanish, British, and Germans from warring with each other.

I got Tammy, who is apparently a reformed prostitute (though they don't say as much here, her dress and her "poison makeup" attack give her away), the useless girl that made me miss Isaac, and two Frumpy clones with powerful attack spells. (I must admit that I giggled at the Death spell being named "Tough Love".)


The most annoying thing in this part of the story was the Bob Surlaw clone. It makes another Bob Surlaw clone unless killed by the Holy spell, when it will still do so roughly 42% of the time. The Big Boned Djinn and the Noble Walrus were okay, but their battle would have been better without all the "slugs".


Chris, Isaac, and Ishmael go into a place that looks and feels a lot like Purgatory. It's a huge, almost circular maze. The battles here are a lot less threatening than the furries in the forest, despite the fact that they seem to be familiar with Chris's Faith Shot attack. The enemies here are Abomination (weak to ice), Old Witch (weak to fire), and Greater Spirit (weak to lightning).

I was somewhat relieving to not have constantly spawning enemies or foes with death spells. I should have bought some equipment for Isaac back in town.

Speaking of which, Isaac's Rage Blow is nowhere near as powerful now (it only does about 300 damage, compared to 120+ for normal attacks by him and Chris). Of course, he now has Wild Blow, which randomly causes about 100-1100. and costs 10 of his 30 MP.
 

After this the other characters tell me that this place is a cave. What?

Well, the miniboss was really easy. After fighting a bunch of Greater Spirits as random enemies, it felt a little wrong to have the Lesser Spirit be the area boss.

It was hard to figure out that I had beaten all of the story parts and had to head South to continue; this could have been done better by connecting the NPCs of the heroes up at the top to the same tag as the NPC that asks if you want to play that part of the story.

This reunion was extra happy (for me, at least) because they think Krista is dead. She's as annoying as Neo Kyrsta.

Anyway, after the fairly well-paced "cave" that Chris and crew just had to go through, I had high hopes for the next area.

Then they had to start throwing squirrels at me.

The toughest beatable enemy yet, though not as irksome as the forest furries (because his attack is still weaker than my HP). But, hey, anything is better than this game's treatment of Bob Surlaw.

After checking an obvious treasure spot and getting nothing, I talked to an old woman who told me that there was treasure there. And there was, suddenly! A weapon upgrade that I was almost tricked into buying from the local store. She also unlocked the desert's teleportation pools. Why I should be expected to listen to this old bat to advance the story is beyond me.


Anyway, there's no boss for this area, which was a little relieving. So was this:


Because I was feeling a little afraid that Blake's wife was going to wake up and kill him for adultery or whatever Christian housewives do to their priest husbands in this game.

Next I get sent to assassinate the Atheist King.


On the way there, I stop at this guy's place and don't bother to buy anything.



One failed assassination later, the demon starts telling me that he's trying to convert the Atheist King of Brite to Christianity.

Then the demon starts praising the intelligence of Blake.


After getting told what horrible Christians we are, we get taken back home.


Six of these seven Super Apostles give me a different mission. I decided to try the dream one out first:


Blake's imagination flippin' killed me. I decided to end the review here, because I didn't want to have to repeat the grinding tactics necessary to get through Anthro Forest. I might write another review, of the last half of this game, in a month or two (but don't hold your breath).

All in all, this game was pretty good for a newbie game. If Fenrir's point for Vikings of Midgard was to give new players a shot at making stuff less crappy than, say, Piccolo's Adventure or Dogworld, then it was a smashing success.

To Uncreative Pseudonym:
The difficulty was extremely jumpy. The worst enemies were the Anthro Kage (Delvire clone), Anthro Soldiers (boss battle of the furry forest level), and the Great Slug (Bob Surlaw). Fix the descriptions of the healing items; lies like that aren't funny. Make differences between the Super Frumpies, other than their names (Ken and Kent are too similar as it is). Reduce the difficulty curve; not even I like grinding enough to play this game the way you clearly intended.

To Everyone Else:
This is the best explicitly "Christian" or "Spiritual" game I've yet seen in the OHR. Better than my works on this subject, and better than STOP (because STOP was just an extended cutscene and a forest). It still isn't really any good; only play it if you have about four or five hours to kill, love grinding, and want a game to be as preachy as I used to be.

As much as I hate to admit it, this game is about 90% similar to what my newbie game would have been like if Vikings had been around back in '02 and '03.