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    1) Sword of Jade: Parallel Dreams reviewed by JSH357
    2) Vikings Of Midgard reviewed by MirceaKitsune
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    4) Tightfloss Maiden reviewed by yhposolihP
    5) A Blank Mind reviewed by Dorumagesu
Verdimea vs. Uncommon
Verdimea Die...I know it's the wrong word, but is it supposed to be
Calehay
Download: 79 KB
V.S.
Uncommon
Play Time: 0 hours and 40 minutes
Review # 20 for Uncommon Die...I know it's the wrong word, but is it supposed to be "dye" or "kill"?
Them's Fightin' Words
    Pretension. It is a great destructive force. To believe your work to be so incredibly brilliant that others should be clawing for a download can cloud your judgement to no end. You make little mistakes. You make a spelling error here or there. You miss HUGE GAPING ERRORS while playtesting. You generally fail to live up to your own hype. Such is the story of Verdimea: Green Heavens.

Like a truly pretentious designer, Calehay has insisted that people download this game and tell him what they think of it, totally discounting that they all have their own things to be doing instead. So, to save you some time in deciding whether you want to waste your time or not, I'll examine whether this really is worth the download.
Graphics
    Graphics are generally pretty bad. The grass is airbrushed and griddy, the houses have a REALLY BAD gradient on them, the forests just don't look right, and the flowers put in for variety are badly overused. All the tiles are really awful, except for the stone paths. Those generally looked good, except that they were hardly used practically.

Walkabouts are decent at best. Hair designs are outlandish and silly, and rather goofy looking, anyway. Color selection is poor, and all the bright colors look bad. The hero's side graphics looked suspiciously similar to Crescent Dreams' hero. Animations, like so many other things, were goofy.

Battle graphics are less than tolerable. The hero didn't have much of a forehead, but he did have selective outlining in the worst way. If possible, his hair looked even worse than it did in the walkabout, and his stance and animations were highly awkward. Enemy graphics were goofy and vague. There weren't too many, anyway. The Slime looked and acted more like a bouncy ball, the birds were really bad, and what-ever-the-heck-else-it-was didn't even look like anything.

The title screen looked alright, at least, except that it didn't relate to the story in any perceivable way. Battle backdrops were tile-based, and poorly so at that, especially since there was only one, an outside scene, which was still used in an indoor battle. It wasn't a pretty game.
 
Storyline
    And it wasn't an interesting game, either. The plot never really came on strong. You just did what people told you to, without having a lot explained or justified. There was something about being a protector, something about a green orb, something about angels. Yeah, a lot about angels. And all of that was practically force-fed to the player. No showing, just a lot of expository, and it didn't make much sense, either. Just poorly worded, poorly coneyed, poorly written. There're a few story battles that didn't seem necessary, too. Just kind of like, "Oh, I think this should happen here for no particular reason!" Rubbish.

Did I mention that the characters are totally flat? Very goal-oriented people that don't have any personality at all? And their dialogue is so corny and pretentious that you can't help but groan at this thing. The way they talk is just so contrived and unrealistic. Fits the flat characters, I suppose.

Again, it had a few parellels to Crescent Dreams, what with the intro and the battle against the hero's master. Stolen ideas, perhaps?
 
Gameplay
    Stolen ideas or not, the gameplay's nothing new, either.
This game claims to use an "anti FF" system. What that means is Calehay wants to make levelbusting completely essential to the gameplay. How this is anti FF is beyond me, and how it's supposed to be entertaining and fun is a mystery of life that will remain unsolved till the end of time.

When you are forced to fight Master Ree (he wants to TEST you!), the battle will frustrate and enrage you so much you'll wonder why you haven't quit yet. With him healing about every three turns, this battle will go on for about 7 minutes. 7 minutes. I'm serious. And that's just you hitting him and healing as needed. It's like a normal battle, except a lot longer and 20 times more hateful. And when it's over you get to do it again! With no break in between! It's just another "I won't hold back this time" device, except that he's exactly the same the second time!
Did I mention that you won't make it anywhere in this battle unless you've levelbusted for an ungodly amount of time?
 
  Battle
    The battles in this game are really just like the battles in almost every other game. Attack diversity is awful. You have a normal attack and a cure spell, and you just switch between the two until you get through. When you do get different special attacks, they're not at all useful, not at all different, and are very obscurely named. With titles like Broken Sword and Destuctio, you'd expect a lot, but you get nothing.

These battles are a huge bore.
 
  Map Design
    All of the maps are huge. Unreasonably huge. There is never a clear direction of where to go, so you'll likely get lost, and the paths you have to wonder down are really long. You will get bored almost immediately, just walking through these maps. Battle frequency doesn't seem too high, so that's a plus, but the map length more than cancels that out.

The town is haphazardly thrown together. It has a total of five buldings, most of which don't have interiors. The first three are shops, but they're all the same shop, which has only three items for sale and more menu items then this game will ever need. The fourth is pretty...blank. The first time you walk up to it, nothing will happen. After talking to Master Ree's, whose particularly large and especially empty house is the fifth building, you'll meet your second hero outside this fourth building, which, according to Master Ree, is an inn. I've learned long ago to never believe when NPCs tell me things like that.

Anyway, Calehay really needs to tone down the size and the bore and the emptiness and the suck.
 
  Balance
    There's a big difference between challenge and difficulty, between fun and mindless tedium. This game is on the sucky side of the scale. You'll find yourself getting bored very quickly. At least the battles give decent amounts of EXP...

As far as pacing goes, uh uh. Nothing.
 
Music
    Knowing Calehay's reputation as a composer, I'll have to assume that most of the songs in this game are original. A few of them are nice. The boss theme invokes a boss battley feeling, the pieces for the two maps blend pretty well, but they get pretty repetitive after a while. Also, the battle theme was grating and evil and he used engine music for the victory theme.
 
Enjoyment
    In every single trait, Verdimea is a failure. Can one really consider a failure enjoyable? Certainly not, especially not in this case. There are too many problems to make this game even remotely interesting.

One thing it certainly needs is playtesting. It didn't seem like Calehay even tried with this thing. Multiple NPCs would pop up on more than one occasion, other times you could run through a conversation again (though lord only knows why you'd want to read that awful dialogue again). He actually warns you against this in the generally laughable readme, begging you not to "ruin the experience". What experience? Am I supposed to be having an experience here? If any experience was ruined, it wasn't my fault for playing the game, it was Calehay's fault for not caring enough about his game to do these things right.

There're a few tutorial games that come with the engine. Maybe he ought to try them out, since he obviously doesn't know how to work tags. The HOWTO is an invaluable tool for people like Calehay who don't know what they're doing.
 
Final Blows
    So, let's see. There is nothing that should draw your attention to this game in the first place, there is nothing that should keep your attention once you've downloaded it, and there is no reason you should ever want to play it all the way through, or ever, for that matter. This game has no redeeming factors.

There is absolutely no reason you should download this game.
There is absolutely every reason Calehay should totally rework the entire thing.

Drop the the pretension, lovey, it's not going to get you anywhere. Take a long, hard look at this thing and try to understand what's wrong with it. Read a few articles, go over some tutorials, play a few games. Most importantly, GET SOME PLAYTESTERS. You have a long way to go before you'll be a great game designer, and this is hardly an acceptable start.
This is bad even for a newbie game.


"The forest is after you, run!" Verki instructed, as he left his doppelganger-shadow behind him to distract the enemy, erm, enemies.
Final Scores
Graphics: 2/10.0
I suggest a major overhaul.
Storyline: 1/10.0
Vague, vague, vague. Oh, and bland, unoriginal, and uninteresting, too. Did I mention that I hate the dialogue?
This thing tries to be serious, but it's poor execution makes it come off as goofy.
Gameplay: 1/10.0
Levelbusting is not a good gameplay system. Seriously.
Music: 4/10.0
We commend the original soundtrack, but BAM doesn't look good on it.
Enjoyment: 1/10.0
This game has nothing to offer.
Overall Grade: F-
Final Thoughts
    Calehay attempts something new, but ends up making a game just like every other one.  


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