by synthesis » Thu May 31, 2012 12:20 am
Gamer's Fatigue is definitely showing a lot of potential. The story for Love's Epitaph is incredible, the characters are so well-developed, and the mystery surrounding all the characters and even the plot keeps you going--and then there's the twist at the end. Oh, and the end itself, which made me want to yell "NO!!!" at my screen because I so wanted to keep going forward with the story. The story just draws you in.
However, there are a few "kinks" that could be ironed out a bit. Okay, so a few flaws or things that could be improved upon in the next game for an even better player experience.
1) The cost of healing items. At the beginning of the game, the cost is so high you can't afford them. While you do find a ton of them as you go through each area, I was always afraid to use to many because of the cost. However, by the time you hit mid-game, you just start racking up the money. The downside is, you've accumulated a lot of healing items, but you can't be sure when you'll actually get to another location to buy more items, so I ended up hoarding them.
2) The number of battle areas and monsters was probably the thing that I most disliked about the game (followed by the battles, which I'll get to in a bit). The battle areas kept getting longer and longer as the game went on, with more and more enemies to fight.
On top of that, Once you hit about mid game, you just go from one battle area to another, nonstop with no towns at all (the ship, then the temple, then a cave system, then a swamp, then the bridge to the next town). It gets very tedious.
Yes, you can avoid enemies, but if you're like me, you think you need to clear an area in order to get to an appropriate level. After playing the game, I'm really not sure how necessary that is, and some of the areas the enemies throw nasty crap at you that you can't avoid (especially poison).
Finally, there are few sidequests, but all of them require some sort of maze-like battle area for you to complete.
Basically, the game would be a lot better if a) the battle areas were not so frequent and b) there were more and a wider variety of sidequests and things to do that did not require battle areas.
3. The final problem was the length of the battles. Maybe my second problem with the number of battle areas would not have been quite so bad if the battles were not so dang long. Like I said, for the most part, I was stuck avoiding magic as much as possible because of the cost of replenishing it and later not knowing when I would get to another town to buy more supplies. Most of the enemy encounters involved 3-4 enemies. Without magic, it took a minimum (sometimes more) of one round just to knock out a single enemy.
Even using magic, there was only one character that could consistently one hit an enemy. All the rest still needed at least 1-2 other characters in on the attack before the enemy went down. On top of that, the magic costs for everyone except Lysa were very high for the damage the spells did--combine that with the fact nobody's magic could one hit and the lack of supplies, what's the point of using magic at all?
So, the battles also were long and tedious. At times, I needed 4-6 rounds just to complete a single battle. Then add in a single area with 15 enemies, in a battle area that consisted of 4-5 screens total . . .
Conclusion
Like I said before, the story is amazingly well-constructed and intriguing. Love's Epitaph is definitely worth checking out, but probably not a game you'd enjoy playing in extended sessions (which was part of my problem--I just wanted to keep going to find out more of the story, and then I got all fed-up and almost didn't even finish).
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