Them's Fightin'
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Never in all my time of playing OHR games have I played a game quite like this one. When I first played Arfenhouse I must admit, I thought it was rather stupid until I got into it. This game reminded me so much of Arfenhouse. From the backdrops to the way the heroes moved. Even the dialogue seemed similar.
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Graphics |
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Sadly, this game had bad graphics. They were nowhere near super great and extraoridnary however. For in battle graphics none of the heroes moved around at all. It was just them mysteriouslly moving forward and damage just being inflicted to the opponent. The same applied to the walkabouts. No animations, nothing amazing at all. There was no shading applied to any one of the graphics. Very poor graphical qualtity to say the least. And the maptiles were outright awful. I mean I know PHC is a good game maker and all but dang. I've seen newbie games with better graphics than this.
The only major good thing I would say about the graphics is the backdrops. There was an over abundance of these. And they never really fit their purpose. They would just pop in outta nowhere sometimes. For instance in one scene someone in the party says, I bet this would make you feel better. And then bam! about three animated scenes from an anime play. Perfectally, frame for frame. I know these were imported but why couldn't you put more effort into your OHR graphics like you did for your backdrops and such? Laziness? Or did you just think they looked funny to you like this?
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Storyline |
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Bob Surlaw, a Walthroian fish wakes up one morning and decides to venture off towards a creepy blue shrine. When he does so he fights a Blue Spirit and then wakes up the next morning with a blue crystal in his back. Creepy. Yes. Why does he have it? Probally because of the Blue Shrine. Anyways, Bob is forced by some weird decision he made to gather all 5 of the crystals of Walthros and destroy them. Along the way he meets up with some freaky companions. Such as SUPER WALRUS MAN. A walrus intent on killing and taking over the world. How does this character fit into being a hero when he is so damn evil? Who knows. And there are other various characters. Which the list goes on unfortunately and the more characters the more that you have to expand on their storyline. And in 2 hours it really didn't happen as well as I thought it could have. Yet for the length of this game it wasn't entirely neccessary. The storyline reminds you much of an oldschool Final Fantasy game where you have to go to several different towers and get the crystals to save the day. Yet, you won't see this crazy crew of people/things in a Final Fantasy game. It was also quite funny to see the cast of Totally...Gihern in the game. Grimace had hilarious dialogue as like before. The story was actually quite pleasant to see and read. Although it was a bit tiresome at times.
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Gameplay |
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Two hours of gameplay. Not bad. The story really helped bring this part of the game together too. Without the slightly interesting story, I don't think I would have been very happy playing this game. But seeing SUPER WALRUS MAN killing and stuff, it brightened my gaming experience. Anyways there wasn't anything special as of gameplay. It was a short game and the interest and appeal wore off every now and then. And the battles were tiresome as well, which I will explain later on as well. The scripting talents brought to this game made it look like PHC was just starting to learn how to plotscript. Which when you make a game that gets a decent score and a fair amount of reviews you would think he was doing something right. Well this game didn't offer the same quality features the other's brought to the OHR world. Other than SUPER WALRUS MAN.
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Battle |
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Nonstop button pushers. Every hero had the same amount of HP and the same amount of speed. A quick way to sum up what I thought about the speed for the heroes...FAST. Every time the hero attacked that ATB gauge would shoot to another attack. And to make matters worse the enimies had a very unfair amount of HP. At least from the enimies' perspective. Because one attack from the hero and they would die. With the slight exception of the bosses. The graphics didn't benefit any area of the battles either. Because standard attacks were just... not there. Simply only displaying numbers. And the so called "Special" techniques were not much better. They were the size of a full Attack graphic and were one color that would change to a different shade of it. And unless I look in custom.exe which I doubt I will, those will be the only attack graphics drawn for this entire game. That's either out of laziness, not caring, or just to make the game appear lame.
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Map Design |
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The graphics didn't help this area at all. As mentioned they were drawn like a newbie would draw them. Or a 10 year old. Whichever is closer. Anyways, the maps weren't complex. They were actually very simple to get by and there were no puzzles to solve through the game at all. It was a shame to see such potential to waste in this area of the game. In my game, Mr.Triangle's Shitty Adventure 4 I used one maptile set for the entire game but one area. I kinda got the impression that for "Walthros:Crystals", the same thing happened here. So the variation of the tiles were very bland. And the colors used really strained the eyes. All those awfully bright colors. ARGH! Burned. But for the style of the game you could say the map design was alright. Yet I think there was a large room for improvement.
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Balance |
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Okay, I can't say the game doesn't have any items. Because it does. Even though the majority of them are perverted pictures of anime and video game characters. But that's beside the point. There were no healing items at all. And only two of the what seems like hundreds of characters could heal. BobSurlaw and the rat Mustard. That was alright, from the standpoint you only healed when you get to the end of the game because of the lack of damage intake. Your characters do 200+ damage and the enimies do a measely 3-15 damage. Now where does this seem fair? Or balanced in this case. Because the battles were no threat at all. Not even boss fights which you would think would be different and more difficult. For the most part though, it wasn't like OHR ARena in the respect that the final boss is so much stronger than you are in the beginning of the game. Because unlike OHR Arena, in Walthros:Crystals, you don't level up hardly at all if any. And when you do your stats don't change. (Seems I said this in another review this week...). Anyhow, the random battles were pretty balanced. Which is such a relief to me, because of the fact that other games with such an annoying random battle rate like Nordomin and Ska-Drummer Man that just make you wonna cry and give up, but you couldn't because that damn F4 button didn't work!
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Music |
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My computer doesn't play BAM so I cannot judge this area.
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Enjoyment |
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SUPER WALRUS MAN ROCKS!!! I loved this game. It was fun. Yet there were certain areas of the game I think could have been worked on more, such as graphics and other stuff. Because I like to see a character with more of a look than a bunch of geometric shapes (circles, squares, etc.). But the storyline was real fun and seeing some of the stuff that may happen later on was just so great. *Thinks of the game that might be mentioned at the end of Walthros:Crystals "SUPER WALRUS MAN".*
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Final Blows |
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If you were trying to impress the community with graphics and scripting knowledge then I'm sorry... you failed. If you were trying to make us laugh with an allstar cast and crazy dialogue, then you succeed with five stars. The gameplay and other stuff could have been better, but I'm sure since when you open this game and see that it was made in January 2004 that it didn't take PHC long to make it. And in one part of the game a random text box pops up saying that it was the 500th text box. Some of my games haven't reached 500. Or barely did. So this is a great undertaking. Anyways, if you want to make a high quality game all the way around work on the areas I had mentioned throughout the review and you will have an even better masterpiece.
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