Game News Arc Legacy Demo Available

[Sol Invictus]

Tags: Abstract Productions; ARC Legacy, The; Mark Hall

I'll let <b>Mark Hall</b> do the talking since he sent this to me. Gamers rejoice!
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The first demo of The ARC Legacy has been released! This independent RPG, reminiscent of the older Final Fantasy games with just a little taste of Fallout mixed in features an original soundtrack, a deep storyline, and graphics much improved from the original game (which was made in QBasic).
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The demo contains about 30 minutes of gameplay, including several plot-advancing cutscenes. You might want to check it out for a nostalgic "old school" gaming experience.
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Check it out <a href=http://abstract-productions.net>here</a>

 

[Anonymous]

No matter how old Final Fantasy gets, it'll still be 'Dogshit' instead of 'Old School'.

 

[XMark]

What's so bad about the old Final Fantasy games? I'll agree that from FF8 on they became not much more than flashy linear movies but FF7 and the SNES Final Fantasies were solid games all the way through with tons of replay value, great storylines, and craploads of stuff to explore. And don't forget Nobuo Uematsu's amazing awesomeness! (If you say "Nobuo who?" I'm gonna cry)

Note: The above comments were written by a complete and utter FF fanboy, so take with a grain of salt

 

[Sol Invictus]

Chrono Trigger beats the hell out of FF, though.

 

[Elwro]

Nobuo who? :wink:

 

[Stark]

Nobuo who? :wink:

Nobuo Uematsu. you know, the guy who did Ultima series.

 

[XMark]

Waaaaaaaaah! *sniff*

 

[Avin]

ff6 kicks chronno trigger ass.
seiken densetsu, of course, wins all.

 

[Surlent]

Which Seiken Densetsu ? 3 ?

Anyway Chronotrigger is the best 16-bit Snes game in the end IMO.

 

[Avin]

Seiken Densetsu 2 is my favorite. My brother like Seiken Densetsu 3 but I prefer Legend of Mana and the Seiken Densetsu 1 remake to it...

And Chronno Cross to Chronno Trigger.

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Seiken Densetsu 3 (aka Secret of Mana 2 overseas) is one of the better action JRPGs that ever came up in the later years of the Super Nintendo's life. The combat is fun, the character development is also fun, and the multiple paths and endings based on who is in your party also add to the overal enjoyment. Unfortunately it does get repetitive after a while.

Chrono Trigger was a pretty good concept, probably limited in scope and size due to the platform's restrictions than anything else. Still, the overal story arc wasn't bad, and there's many interesting twists on the whole time-travelling thing. The main character, however, is one of the most forgetable ones in JRPG history.

 

[XMark]

heh, probably because he doesn't talk at all through the whole game

 

[Araanor]

Yeah, they pulled that stunt in Seiken Densetsu 2 (Secret of Mana) too. What kind of hare-brained logic would spawn that kind of design decision? "Let's immerse the players by making the main character so generic that anyone could relate to him!"

 

[Surlent]

Unfortunately it does get repetitive after a while.

And after that you don't want to never even see that game again. After you have tried all the final classes there's not much in that game then. I prefer Secret of Mana (SD2) over it for music, overall atmosphere and nostalgia.

heh, probably because he doesn't talk at all through the whole game

This is common misundestatement with Chronotrigger. In one of the extra endings Chrono indeed has one dialogue.
In SoM, the protagonist does have some dialogue, but the sidekicks do the most talking.

I don't know if this was Square's bizarre concept of roleplaying to try to put the player in the shoes of the protagonist or then they just wanted to have more silent main character and make conversations more like monologue.

But Chrono as character is very memorable. There's more in a game to express a character than just dialogue. Consider his actions in the game like sacrificing himself in front of Lavos or jumping into the time portal to save Marle. He doesn't talk much but his friends speak for his behalf like when he has died all the characters in the end of time talk about him.

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Yeah, they pulled that stunt in Seiken Densetsu 2 (Secret of Mana) too. What kind of hare-brained logic would spawn that kind of design decision? "Let's immerse the players by making the main character so generic that anyone could relate to him!"

Well, the problem is not necessarily with him being generic, the problem is that he doesn't talk at all (only on some ending, as Surlent points out).

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

But Chrono as character is very memorable. There's more in a game to express a character than just dialogue. Consider his actions in the game like sacrificing himself in front of Lavos or jumping into the time portal to save Marle. He doesn't talk much but his friends speak for his behalf like when he has died all the characters in the end of time talk about him.

You are usually given more reasons and situations to find characters like Robo, Frog or Ayla as memorable. But Chrono? I can't even think of why people would care for him. When a character doesn't express himself in almost anything, that complicates things. With Chrono, this is no different. There's no given past attributed to him. His motivations are rarely his, as he just seems to be the party's whipping boy and all purpose dummy; when they are his, you're left wondering why exactly did he made them. I suspect even his sacrifice against Lavos is contrived. Robo or Frog, for instance, would have been preferable, as the first acted like he was alive and that situation could bolster not only people's reactions towards him, but would also make him experience a human feeling; the second is a bit more obvious - chivalry, honor, courage, sacrifice.

 

[Ap_Jolly]

Right. DL't it, tried it. Very similar to that Elf Detective game that won the prize on the last game competition at RPGDX.NET

The story and the world design is comprehensive and believable, and presented very nicely. Tile art is inconsistent - some of it is fairly detailed, and some is ugly and two-dimensional, but overall okay.

Okay, the bad - documentation is shite. No control description, no game mechanics, nothing. Interface is "quirky" - sometimes you don't know what you have to press. Dialog boxes are annoying; so is the screen scrolling on player movement (too slow w/o an option to speed it up, and slightly disorienting, then again maybe it's just me). I don't care for their combat system either.

Bottom line - promising. I'm aware it's a demo, so maybe the next releases will address that.

 

[XMark]

Yeah, about 20% of people who played the demo have complained about slow and jerky frame rate, and for some people the overworld map doesn't show up. I highly suspect that the frame rate regulation/skipping code is to blame for that little bug. I also should have mentioned that holding the shift button makes you run faster.

As for the Chrono Trigger thing, in storytelling in general it's fairly common practice for the main character to be the most boring one, just so that the reader/viewer/player can identify with him. Take Star Wars for example: Han Solo is a hell of a lot more interesting than Luke Skywalker, but he would make a shitty lead character. And if you've ever seen the cartoon Undergrads you'll notice that Nitz (the most boring one) is the lead character, and all his buddies in the secondary roles have all sorts of weird personality quirks.

 

[Ap_Jolly]

If you can, please add an option to just turn off the scrolling animation.

 

[XMark]

You mean tile*tile movement? I don't think I'm gonna do that, because it would make the cutscenes look like crap. I could, however, just have an option to change the default speed of the player, maybe put it in the game menu. Then again, it could be a bit of an atmosphere-killer to have the player zipping around at the speed of light all the time.

As for the general interface, that's something that I'll probably be tweaking around constantly through the entire development cycle, so it'll eventually evolve into something much better. I've already thought of some easy improvements to make:

-When using healing spells or items, instead of dumping back into the item menu after using one, it'll stay in the player selection screen so you can heal someone else with way less keystrokes/mouse clicks
-Going to fix the stores. Right now there's a "buy" and "sell" button that are meant to select between buy and sell menus, but it's a natural tendency to click on "buy" when you want to buy something you've selected, instead of "okay". So I'll just replace it with one button that says "sell" in buy mode and "buy" in sell mode.
-Need to add something to fix the few menus where it doesn't wait for you to de-press/de-click before entering.
-Whoops, mouse pointer is on the enemies when you're not doing anything in the battle engine. No biggie, but it's a little ugly and distracting.
-The pointer should automatically zip to "magic" when viewing stats of magic users, just 'cause that's what you'll be doing with them most often.
-Should provide an option to disable automatic mouse pointer moving, for people who only want to use keyboard for movement and mouse for everything else.
-Remove silly text box sound, or at least change to something less annoying, or maybe drop to 50% volume.
-Fix the keyboard menu interface so the directional keys actually move you in the right direction instead of "tabbing" through the menu options.

 

[Anonymous]

EarthBound is the only good console RPG, all the rest suck.

Noobs.

 

[Fez]

I've still got a soft spot for Terranigma.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Chrono is only memorable as a character similar to how Gordon Freeman is in Half Life. Basically - you are Chrono, and the world is your oyster. Therefore unlike most of the FF games, it doesn't feel like you're watching a movie. You're in it.

 

[Ap_Jolly]

Lack of screen scrolling animation didn't hurt Wasteland; besides it's an option, not some core feature.

 

[XMark]

Okay, I just re-released the demo with a bunch of changes from the feedback I received for the first demo release. Not much more content than the original demo but here's a list of the changes I made:

- Caps-lock now serves as "always run" button.
- Menus are easier to navigate, especially the stores, and left and right buttons actually move the cursor left and right now
- When loading and saving games, information about the saved game and pictures of the characters are shown in the menu
- Frame-skipping has been removed, as it caused game-wrecking problems with some people. Vertical sync also added to make it look smoother. (I may remove this or make it optional if Vsync causes problems for people)
- Two more town NPC sprites (one male, one female) added just to break up the monotony
- Bug if Bokk leaves out the back before meeting Rydar and Malcolm on the second day fixed (well, Bokk just can't leave out the back until he meets them now)
- Some minor dialogue changes
- Some minor character sprite changes
- ANNOYING TEXT BOX POP-UP SOUND REMOVED! YAY!
- Eliminated mouse pointer visible during "wait" mode in battle
- Groovy install program added