Post by P-chan on Apr 17, 2009 15:21:14 GMT -8
Release date: 3/10/2009
Genre: Action Role Playing Game
Platform: Nintendo DS
Avalon Code was a game I'd been looking forward to for a while. I heard that the main thing of the game was to hit things with a book and mess with their coding. When it came out I was excited to finally be able to mess with everything I saw. I thought that if I put a fire code on a person they'd light on fire, and even though I found that they didn't, (and many things I thought were going to happen didn't) I was still somewhat glad with how my experience with Avalon Code came to play out.
Story: 7/10
The world of Kaleila is going to be destroyed. It's a fact. However, a new world is going to be made, and it is your job as the player to choose between what's worth saving and what's not by whacking everything with your Book of Prophecy. Through your journey you travel through cities and dungeons hitting everything in sight - people, monsters, plants, weapons, really everything - and you decide on what the new world will look like. No one gets any way except for you, the chosen one.
Of course the journey can't go smoothly, though. You get jailed a few times along the way, fight in wars, meet spirits, lose spirits, take down bosses, annihilate dragons, the usual stuff seen in RPGs. The story in Avalon Code is essentially something that we've all seen already. We all know about the two empires that are fighting each other, the four spirits that represent the elements that also help you on your quest, the possessed seemingly bad Prince who is obviously actually not bad at all.
Though the story itself isn't anything very innovative once you get down to its core, at least Avalon Code paces its story well. The story isn't rushed and nothing happens too quickly. If you feel like you are being rushed, you don't have to progress the story. You are usually always free to explore the world and only have to keep going on the storyline when you want to.
Characters: 9/10
The characters were my favorite part of the game. I think that no matter how good a RPG's story is, no matter how fun the gameplay is, even if the graphics are the most beautiful thing ever, if you don't like any of the characters you won't enjoy the game. If you don't care about even just one character in it why will you care what happens to them in the story? Why will you want to fight beside them? Why will you care how amazing they look on screen? Avalon Code's characters kept me playing the story through the end.
You get the choice of being a girl or guy at the beginning of the story and off you go on your journey. The most important characters other than you are the four spirits you work with while evaluating the world's state before it is destroyed. The first you meet is Rempo. He's the fire spirit and is the most energetic and upbeat one of the group, which is to be expected given his element. He was my favorite spirit out of the four and the only one I bothered to unshackle (giving him more power. His hands were shackled, by the way.) The others include Mieli, Neaki, and Ur. Mieli is the spirit of the forest - her feet are shackled - and she's the calm, levelheaded one. Neaki is the spirit of Ice and she can't speak since her voice is shackled. Ur is the lightning spirit and he can't see with his eyes shackled. He's the smart one (that all those fangirls love, too.)
For the guys playing, the girls they can raise affection for are Dorothea, the spoiled princess brat, Fana, a sickly girl who you need to cure, Sylphy, the elf who thinks all humans are evil, Nanai, a psychic witch, and Lauca Meia, a feral girl who lives in the jungle. I didn't spend much time with these characters since I played the girl character, but none of them sparked my interest except Sylphy. (She's kind of pretty, I guess, and I like how she stands up for herself.)
The girls can go out with Rex, the best friend from childhood, Duran, a wannabe hero with a sword, Anwar, the silent swordsman who's lost his heart, Heath, the thought to be evil soldier who's not so evil after all, and Valdo, the posessed prince.
You can also go out with your spirits if they like you enough.
My favorites were Rempo, Anwar, Valdo, and Rex. I found myself really attached to them after doing their sidequests and progressed through the game pretty much just to do those sidequests. I liked most of the spirits as well, save for Mieli who was boring, and they were also a reason why I pressed through the plot and gameplay.
Avalon Code doesn't have my favorite cast of all time but there are some characters in it that I'll remember for a while.
Gameplay: 6/10
I would have given the gameplay a 5, but there were two things that kept me going with it. The most innovative part of the game was the Book of Prophecy, holding everything you need. The items are in it, the beastiary, your weapons, armor, save page, character list, and most importantly, when something is hit with the book you can view its "code" from the its page.
For example, say you whack the Goblin monster. You'll see that it has some iron code on its grid (I don't really remember if it's iron or stone but it's something) and that's raising its HP up. You drag the iron code off and the HP drops down dramatically. In addition, you drag an ill code onto the grid, dropping the HP down even further. Removing and adding the right codes to anything is the key to getting through the game. Without taking a code off a monster you could do just 1 damage to its 1200 HP. With just a few codes switched around, you're dealing 200 a hit and it only has 400 HP.
Monsters aren't the only thing you can mess with. You get weapons and mess with their codes. You switch up the codes of your neighbors. A cookie that can heal your HP slightly can be modified and heal it almost completely instead. There are seriously endless possibilities of what you can do with the codes.
The codes are the best part of the gameplay and were a promising concept, but after a while it gets way too tedious to put up with. After scanning every monster, person, weapon, shield, headgear, wing, hat, helmet, on and on, the pages get to be over a thousand. Since the beginning of the Book of Prophecy has an index you would think there wouldn't be a problem getting to a page, but the index only has broad subjects. Say you want to see what's on that zombie you scanned two dungeons ago. You click on the index, go to the monsters section, find the undead subsection, but then scroll through pages and pages. After ten minutes, you finally find the zombie's page. However, it doesn't have that silver code you're looking for so you scroll through a few more dozen pages and ten minutes later you find the measly silver code you wanted.
Code management and being able to find the codes you want is a hassle. Not only that, but you only have four slots to store codes in. When you want to swap codes from storage onto a grid you can only bring four with you at a time. This is extremely tedious since if you finally find that silver code and want to take it with you to your sword's page and your storage is full, you need to find an empty grid, put something on there, find the silver again, put it on the sword, find that old code you put somewhere on that empty grid, and put that back into storage.
Fighting on the world map outside of dungeons (oh jeez, the dungeons, more on those things later) is something I started to avoid doing after half of the game. You just push the X or Y button to use your weapon and after spamming it the enemy dies. Then they respawn about 20 times before finally dying. You can use MP to summon one of the spirits you've befriended, but MP is a hassle. The only ways to replenish it is through sleeping at your house, breaking a healing urn, or doing a judgment link.
Judgment links also got to be annoying after a while. Once pushing the A button to initiate a link, the enemy is thrown into the air. If you time it right and push the button as the enemy almost hits the ground, it's thrown into the air again. This is all there is to it. You typically have to judgment link the enemy about 15-20 times in the air before it explodes high up in the atmosphere and you finally get some MP back. The most annoying thing about judgment linking was that while you juggle one enemy in the air, other enemies can still attack you while you juggle and you can't do anything about it. Then your juggle is interrupted and you need to start over again, but the other enemy can still freaking attack you mid-juggle. I suppose that you can juggle them both at the same time if you want, and when a third enemy comes to attack you you can juggle three at a time, but I found this ridiculous.
Another part of the gameplay that was boring were the dungeons. There are "puzzle rooms" that make up dungeons and most have about 15-25 rooms. Though the puzzle rooms may seem to sound interesting on the outside, there are essentially only a few types of rooms. Defeat all the enemies is the most generic room. Beat all the enemies and move on. Not much of a puzzle. Flip all the switches is another. You flip or step on all the switches they give you to move on. In the beginning of the game it starts out as simply standing on one switch, but it moves on to the switches being timed and monsters distracting you while you hit the switches.
Those are the two types of rooms. Depending on how well you do with time in each room you can get a bronze, silver, or gold medal. Gold medals sometimes give you recipes (Metalizes) for the codes needed to make special weapons. They'll switch things up sometimes and tell you to "Defeat gold enemies!" or "Use fire weapons!" to boost your scores, but they're usually dull and, again, tedious to the point where I stopped caring about the score and just wanted to get out of the monotonous dungeons.
And every single dungeon is all just puzzle rooms. I doubt I'm ever going to replay the game again just because they were so boring and unimaginative. I think the concept of the Book of Prophecy took everything out of the developers and they were too tired to be creative with most of the rest of the gameplay.
While running around the world, each map has points that you can examine in order to increase the value of your book. In towns these can be flower beds, benches, signs, lumps on the ground, pretty much anything. On the roads between towns it's more of the same. The points can be clumps of sand, trees, grass... It was really, again tedious to find these points. They'd be in the silliest places. What is the point of putting an examination point on a pile of sand in the middle of the screen that says "The sand is white" when you click on it when you can instead put it somewhere it can stand out and make more sense. If finding the points in the most obsure places possible wasn't enough, they also made the A button both to do judgment links on enemies and examine points at the same time. I ran around a specific section of the desert for 15 minutes and every time I pressed the A button to find a point my character squeaked and tried to judgment link everything instead. The animation and noises she made got annoying and I stopped examining things anymore.
The only other part of the gameplay I liked was the affection system, but though I liked it, it also seemed out of place. By giving your friends of the opposite gender presents you raise their affection for you. If it gets high enough you can do sidequests for them and eventually get them to confess their undying love for you. They'll even wake you up in the morning just to scream "I love you" before running off liking they never said anything at all. Though it was nice to hear your favorite characters declare that they're in love with you, with some of them it's just so awkward, especially coming from the used-to-be evil Prince Valdo who wanted to kill you before and the swordman-void-of-any-feelings Anwar. Their "confessions" were like cheesy lines from movies that have all been heard already and could have been said by any of them. The lines weren't personalized or heartfelt and felt empty.
Even so, I still enjoyed the "dates" and was amused at how the only way to get a second date with a guy was to cheat on him. I must have gone back and forth between Valdo and Anwar 6 times at least, but I was disappointed that the "date" scenes were all the same for a character.
Sound: 7/10
I don't remember any memorable songs from the game. The soundtrack - if there even is one released - isn't one that I'd be geeking out over buying. The voice acting was okay. I remember getting annoyed everytime I had to listen to the main character grunt or squeak when she did anything.
I think the music fit the surroundings, but I don't remember. The only track I remember was the annoying thing that played during the judgment links, but I stopped doing those after a while anyways.
Graphics: 8/10
Considering it's a DS game, the graphics are well done. Actions like running and swinging swords are fluid in the game. None of the animations are awkward, and I appreciated how different weapons actually looked different on screen. Equiping equipment changed your character's design, and I especially liked how the wings and king's crown looked.
During the game they have some cutscenes, but they're the same quality of everything else in the game. They don't have a single scene where they go into a FMV, and I felt like they could have done so. It would have been great if they were even anime FMVs, they didn't have to be like Final Fantasy quality or anything, but they were the same as everything else in the game.
While the towns and character designs were vibrant and colorful, the dungeons were very dull and boring to look at and they're where most of your time is spent. (In those damn puzzle rooms. >.>) However, the monsters are unique and there are lots of different ones to look at.
Replay Value: 9/10
After finishing the game, there is no New Game+ mode. However, you can still continue to play on the same file and complete everything that you want to. One of the first things you do is see how your new world will turn out once the current one is gone. Other than that, there is a lot that you can do. The affection levels of your friends can be raised, and you can still go on those dates and get confessions from your boyfriend/girlfriend(s). (They can move in with you, too, I think, even though you and most of them both look about 13 years old. ._.;
Your spirits can be unshackled by raising their affection, and then they gain more power.
The puzzle rooms in dungeons can all be done over again and you can try to get a gold medal for them all. Most bosses can be refought to get a gold medal as well. Since you obviously are better equiped endgame, the rooms and bosses are usually easier to take on a second time. When you get gold for some rooms, you can get more Metalizes. The rooms also can have HP or MP increasers.
There are postgame News Flashes that can be done. Lots of sidequests are available after the main game is done. You can change the answers you put for what you wanted in your new world and see how it will affect it. you can go for a perfect book of prophecy if you want and find every examination point and scan everything you see (though I don't see why the hell you'd want to do that tedious activity.)
Overall: 7/10
Pros:
- Book of Prophecy is a sweet concept
- Some characters are memorable
- Colorful towns and character designs are aesthetically pleasing
- Lots of extra stuff to do after the main story
Cons:
- Gameplay is monotonous
- Code management is a chore
- Dungeons are unimaginative
Tedious and innovative are the two words best describing this game. The concept of the Book of Prophecy is just so addicting and experimenting with codes is so fun, but the process you have to go through with limited storage for codes and thousands of pages to flip through is just too much. If there is a sequel and the book is made more efficient to go through maybe it would be much better, but the flaws of the game are just too prevalent to overlook.
I must admit that even the fun of discovering code combinations wasn't enough to keep me going in the game. The single thing that kept me playing through the end of the game was being able to get Valdo to go out with me at post-game, but now after seeing how out of character he was, I almost regret it.
Genre: Action Role Playing Game
Platform: Nintendo DS
Avalon Code was a game I'd been looking forward to for a while. I heard that the main thing of the game was to hit things with a book and mess with their coding. When it came out I was excited to finally be able to mess with everything I saw. I thought that if I put a fire code on a person they'd light on fire, and even though I found that they didn't, (and many things I thought were going to happen didn't) I was still somewhat glad with how my experience with Avalon Code came to play out.
Story: 7/10
The world of Kaleila is going to be destroyed. It's a fact. However, a new world is going to be made, and it is your job as the player to choose between what's worth saving and what's not by whacking everything with your Book of Prophecy. Through your journey you travel through cities and dungeons hitting everything in sight - people, monsters, plants, weapons, really everything - and you decide on what the new world will look like. No one gets any way except for you, the chosen one.
Of course the journey can't go smoothly, though. You get jailed a few times along the way, fight in wars, meet spirits, lose spirits, take down bosses, annihilate dragons, the usual stuff seen in RPGs. The story in Avalon Code is essentially something that we've all seen already. We all know about the two empires that are fighting each other, the four spirits that represent the elements that also help you on your quest, the possessed seemingly bad Prince who is obviously actually not bad at all.
Though the story itself isn't anything very innovative once you get down to its core, at least Avalon Code paces its story well. The story isn't rushed and nothing happens too quickly. If you feel like you are being rushed, you don't have to progress the story. You are usually always free to explore the world and only have to keep going on the storyline when you want to.
Characters: 9/10
The characters were my favorite part of the game. I think that no matter how good a RPG's story is, no matter how fun the gameplay is, even if the graphics are the most beautiful thing ever, if you don't like any of the characters you won't enjoy the game. If you don't care about even just one character in it why will you care what happens to them in the story? Why will you want to fight beside them? Why will you care how amazing they look on screen? Avalon Code's characters kept me playing the story through the end.
You get the choice of being a girl or guy at the beginning of the story and off you go on your journey. The most important characters other than you are the four spirits you work with while evaluating the world's state before it is destroyed. The first you meet is Rempo. He's the fire spirit and is the most energetic and upbeat one of the group, which is to be expected given his element. He was my favorite spirit out of the four and the only one I bothered to unshackle (giving him more power. His hands were shackled, by the way.) The others include Mieli, Neaki, and Ur. Mieli is the spirit of the forest - her feet are shackled - and she's the calm, levelheaded one. Neaki is the spirit of Ice and she can't speak since her voice is shackled. Ur is the lightning spirit and he can't see with his eyes shackled. He's the smart one (that all those fangirls love, too.)
For the guys playing, the girls they can raise affection for are Dorothea, the spoiled princess brat, Fana, a sickly girl who you need to cure, Sylphy, the elf who thinks all humans are evil, Nanai, a psychic witch, and Lauca Meia, a feral girl who lives in the jungle. I didn't spend much time with these characters since I played the girl character, but none of them sparked my interest except Sylphy. (She's kind of pretty, I guess, and I like how she stands up for herself.)
The girls can go out with Rex, the best friend from childhood, Duran, a wannabe hero with a sword, Anwar, the silent swordsman who's lost his heart, Heath, the thought to be evil soldier who's not so evil after all, and Valdo, the posessed prince.
You can also go out with your spirits if they like you enough.
My favorites were Rempo, Anwar, Valdo, and Rex. I found myself really attached to them after doing their sidequests and progressed through the game pretty much just to do those sidequests. I liked most of the spirits as well, save for Mieli who was boring, and they were also a reason why I pressed through the plot and gameplay.
Avalon Code doesn't have my favorite cast of all time but there are some characters in it that I'll remember for a while.
Gameplay: 6/10
I would have given the gameplay a 5, but there were two things that kept me going with it. The most innovative part of the game was the Book of Prophecy, holding everything you need. The items are in it, the beastiary, your weapons, armor, save page, character list, and most importantly, when something is hit with the book you can view its "code" from the its page.
For example, say you whack the Goblin monster. You'll see that it has some iron code on its grid (I don't really remember if it's iron or stone but it's something) and that's raising its HP up. You drag the iron code off and the HP drops down dramatically. In addition, you drag an ill code onto the grid, dropping the HP down even further. Removing and adding the right codes to anything is the key to getting through the game. Without taking a code off a monster you could do just 1 damage to its 1200 HP. With just a few codes switched around, you're dealing 200 a hit and it only has 400 HP.
Monsters aren't the only thing you can mess with. You get weapons and mess with their codes. You switch up the codes of your neighbors. A cookie that can heal your HP slightly can be modified and heal it almost completely instead. There are seriously endless possibilities of what you can do with the codes.
The codes are the best part of the gameplay and were a promising concept, but after a while it gets way too tedious to put up with. After scanning every monster, person, weapon, shield, headgear, wing, hat, helmet, on and on, the pages get to be over a thousand. Since the beginning of the Book of Prophecy has an index you would think there wouldn't be a problem getting to a page, but the index only has broad subjects. Say you want to see what's on that zombie you scanned two dungeons ago. You click on the index, go to the monsters section, find the undead subsection, but then scroll through pages and pages. After ten minutes, you finally find the zombie's page. However, it doesn't have that silver code you're looking for so you scroll through a few more dozen pages and ten minutes later you find the measly silver code you wanted.
Code management and being able to find the codes you want is a hassle. Not only that, but you only have four slots to store codes in. When you want to swap codes from storage onto a grid you can only bring four with you at a time. This is extremely tedious since if you finally find that silver code and want to take it with you to your sword's page and your storage is full, you need to find an empty grid, put something on there, find the silver again, put it on the sword, find that old code you put somewhere on that empty grid, and put that back into storage.
Fighting on the world map outside of dungeons (oh jeez, the dungeons, more on those things later) is something I started to avoid doing after half of the game. You just push the X or Y button to use your weapon and after spamming it the enemy dies. Then they respawn about 20 times before finally dying. You can use MP to summon one of the spirits you've befriended, but MP is a hassle. The only ways to replenish it is through sleeping at your house, breaking a healing urn, or doing a judgment link.
Judgment links also got to be annoying after a while. Once pushing the A button to initiate a link, the enemy is thrown into the air. If you time it right and push the button as the enemy almost hits the ground, it's thrown into the air again. This is all there is to it. You typically have to judgment link the enemy about 15-20 times in the air before it explodes high up in the atmosphere and you finally get some MP back. The most annoying thing about judgment linking was that while you juggle one enemy in the air, other enemies can still attack you while you juggle and you can't do anything about it. Then your juggle is interrupted and you need to start over again, but the other enemy can still freaking attack you mid-juggle. I suppose that you can juggle them both at the same time if you want, and when a third enemy comes to attack you you can juggle three at a time, but I found this ridiculous.
Another part of the gameplay that was boring were the dungeons. There are "puzzle rooms" that make up dungeons and most have about 15-25 rooms. Though the puzzle rooms may seem to sound interesting on the outside, there are essentially only a few types of rooms. Defeat all the enemies is the most generic room. Beat all the enemies and move on. Not much of a puzzle. Flip all the switches is another. You flip or step on all the switches they give you to move on. In the beginning of the game it starts out as simply standing on one switch, but it moves on to the switches being timed and monsters distracting you while you hit the switches.
Those are the two types of rooms. Depending on how well you do with time in each room you can get a bronze, silver, or gold medal. Gold medals sometimes give you recipes (Metalizes) for the codes needed to make special weapons. They'll switch things up sometimes and tell you to "Defeat gold enemies!" or "Use fire weapons!" to boost your scores, but they're usually dull and, again, tedious to the point where I stopped caring about the score and just wanted to get out of the monotonous dungeons.
And every single dungeon is all just puzzle rooms. I doubt I'm ever going to replay the game again just because they were so boring and unimaginative. I think the concept of the Book of Prophecy took everything out of the developers and they were too tired to be creative with most of the rest of the gameplay.
While running around the world, each map has points that you can examine in order to increase the value of your book. In towns these can be flower beds, benches, signs, lumps on the ground, pretty much anything. On the roads between towns it's more of the same. The points can be clumps of sand, trees, grass... It was really, again tedious to find these points. They'd be in the silliest places. What is the point of putting an examination point on a pile of sand in the middle of the screen that says "The sand is white" when you click on it when you can instead put it somewhere it can stand out and make more sense. If finding the points in the most obsure places possible wasn't enough, they also made the A button both to do judgment links on enemies and examine points at the same time. I ran around a specific section of the desert for 15 minutes and every time I pressed the A button to find a point my character squeaked and tried to judgment link everything instead. The animation and noises she made got annoying and I stopped examining things anymore.
The only other part of the gameplay I liked was the affection system, but though I liked it, it also seemed out of place. By giving your friends of the opposite gender presents you raise their affection for you. If it gets high enough you can do sidequests for them and eventually get them to confess their undying love for you. They'll even wake you up in the morning just to scream "I love you" before running off liking they never said anything at all. Though it was nice to hear your favorite characters declare that they're in love with you, with some of them it's just so awkward, especially coming from the used-to-be evil Prince Valdo who wanted to kill you before and the swordman-void-of-any-feelings Anwar. Their "confessions" were like cheesy lines from movies that have all been heard already and could have been said by any of them. The lines weren't personalized or heartfelt and felt empty.
Even so, I still enjoyed the "dates" and was amused at how the only way to get a second date with a guy was to cheat on him. I must have gone back and forth between Valdo and Anwar 6 times at least, but I was disappointed that the "date" scenes were all the same for a character.
Sound: 7/10
I don't remember any memorable songs from the game. The soundtrack - if there even is one released - isn't one that I'd be geeking out over buying. The voice acting was okay. I remember getting annoyed everytime I had to listen to the main character grunt or squeak when she did anything.
I think the music fit the surroundings, but I don't remember. The only track I remember was the annoying thing that played during the judgment links, but I stopped doing those after a while anyways.
Graphics: 8/10
Considering it's a DS game, the graphics are well done. Actions like running and swinging swords are fluid in the game. None of the animations are awkward, and I appreciated how different weapons actually looked different on screen. Equiping equipment changed your character's design, and I especially liked how the wings and king's crown looked.
During the game they have some cutscenes, but they're the same quality of everything else in the game. They don't have a single scene where they go into a FMV, and I felt like they could have done so. It would have been great if they were even anime FMVs, they didn't have to be like Final Fantasy quality or anything, but they were the same as everything else in the game.
While the towns and character designs were vibrant and colorful, the dungeons were very dull and boring to look at and they're where most of your time is spent. (In those damn puzzle rooms. >.>) However, the monsters are unique and there are lots of different ones to look at.
Replay Value: 9/10
After finishing the game, there is no New Game+ mode. However, you can still continue to play on the same file and complete everything that you want to. One of the first things you do is see how your new world will turn out once the current one is gone. Other than that, there is a lot that you can do. The affection levels of your friends can be raised, and you can still go on those dates and get confessions from your boyfriend/girlfriend(s). (They can move in with you, too, I think, even though you and most of them both look about 13 years old. ._.;
Your spirits can be unshackled by raising their affection, and then they gain more power.The puzzle rooms in dungeons can all be done over again and you can try to get a gold medal for them all. Most bosses can be refought to get a gold medal as well. Since you obviously are better equiped endgame, the rooms and bosses are usually easier to take on a second time. When you get gold for some rooms, you can get more Metalizes. The rooms also can have HP or MP increasers.
There are postgame News Flashes that can be done. Lots of sidequests are available after the main game is done. You can change the answers you put for what you wanted in your new world and see how it will affect it. you can go for a perfect book of prophecy if you want and find every examination point and scan everything you see (though I don't see why the hell you'd want to do that tedious activity.)
Overall: 7/10
Pros:
- Book of Prophecy is a sweet concept
- Some characters are memorable
- Colorful towns and character designs are aesthetically pleasing
- Lots of extra stuff to do after the main story
Cons:
- Gameplay is monotonous
- Code management is a chore
- Dungeons are unimaginative
Tedious and innovative are the two words best describing this game. The concept of the Book of Prophecy is just so addicting and experimenting with codes is so fun, but the process you have to go through with limited storage for codes and thousands of pages to flip through is just too much. If there is a sequel and the book is made more efficient to go through maybe it would be much better, but the flaws of the game are just too prevalent to overlook.
I must admit that even the fun of discovering code combinations wasn't enough to keep me going in the game. The single thing that kept me playing through the end of the game was being able to get Valdo to go out with me at post-game, but now after seeing how out of character he was, I almost regret it.
