| Story Of Atria Land, The [K] | Jamie System Development / KOGA | 1997 | |
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Quite unusually for an RPG, Atria's battles are fought brawler style in real time. The player can switch around between party members, everyone else is controlled by the AI. Dungeons are focused on puzzles, and the idea was to give each member of the party a special purpose in solving them. It seems Jamie forgot about that concept after implementing the first two characters, though. The story around the search and battle for 12 mythical artefacts is much more conventional, and haphazardly written. The villains' plot to trick two nations into war is quite interesting, on the other hand stands the usual crappy romance that comes out of nowhere and a main protagonist whose only motivation to take part in the quest is because he's got nothing else to do. It's also quite mysogynistic, putting all the female characters in the most miserable roles. The graphics are a nice lookout of what hi-res spritework was headed to before everything was taken over by shitty rendering, although the characters retain the expressive range of 16-bit Final Fantasy heroes. There's a lot of goofy slapstick that is in no way related to the narrative. The ending is also quite the downer, it literally closes with the typical game over screen that is displayed after losing in a battle. There's not even a credits scroll (though Jamie announced that programmers of Astonishia Story, Cheonha Mujeok and The Romance of Forgotten Kingdom worked on the game1). There have been allusions to a hidden "good" ending after unleashing the powers of all 12 artefacts, some of which have their own sidequests and dungeons, while others are just hidden invisibly at arbitrary and inconspicious locations. However, either it's not in there or the trigger is broken. Finally, the game has the usual balancing issues at their worst. The whole quest takes no more than roughly ten hours, but the final couple of bosses have so ridiculously high HP that they alone account for two hours, the alternative being grinding for another ten. Optimized for Windows 95/98, it's also very hard to get running properly in modern operating systems. | ||
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