Bocian
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2017
- Messages
- 1,912
Despite its flaws I think it's worth playing. Most characters and the general story seem interesting despite bad writing; art and music are superior.
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Ash of Gods: Redemption - Banner Saga-like with CCG elements
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
Daniel Pacheco
Educated
The art of the game amazed me so thanks Bocian.. maybe I´ll buy it in the next sale.
panda
Savant
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2014
- Messages
- 398
Wolfe
Arbiter
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2015
- Messages
- 432
Finished my first playthrough in about 20-25 hours and I'm not sure how to feel about the game. Yesterday something outrageous happened in the story which made me immediately want to leave a negative review on Steam and drop the game, but after cooling down and going through to the end I'd say my like/dislike ratio settled around 55% to 45%.
The story is intriguing, I liked the three narrative arcs and all of the protagonists. I was always excited to switch characters and continue the others' stories and switch things up in combat since all of them play differently. That's great. I have to say however that either the translation from Russian to English is absolute crap or the writing is quite bad to begin with. The game drops massive lore dumps even from the start, I usually don't have issues getting into the lore of a game but here for example there are I don't know how many kingdoms which are either allied or at war and there's no encyclopedia or highlighting of terms like in PoE to assist the player. Then there are several events where I just didn't understand what happened, at some point someone gets killed by some crossbow bolts which flew out of nowhere and the party has no reaction, they don't investigate, there is no surprise, nothing. Another example would be how two characters in Thorn's party disappeared in the final chapter without anyone mentioning this, just to find them in one of the final fights allied with someone they claimed they despised. No idea what happened there.. It also feels like emotions and subtle ideas are lost in translation, sometimes the replies to what characters are saying seem completely unrelated. It's disappointing and confusing because the overarching story is quite interesting and the protagonists are very different in personality, goals and objectives and that kept me excited to find out what's going to happen next.
The world exploration was alright, I liked having to manage strixes even though I never had any issues affording the items which granted them because I never spent gold on card fragments (which feel quite underwhelming in combat, by the way, although there are some interesting synergies between some). This and the possibility of choosing different routes to go through on the map made me prefer it to Banner Saga's approach. It's also great that time passed actually matters, there are some events which happen or can be missed if you get somewhere in time or are too late.
The combat was also pretty good, I thought it provided just the right level of challenge without changing the default Reaping level. There's a good variety of classes for party members, unfortunately the same cannot be said for enemies, you end up fighting the same enemy compositions way too many times. I also think that being able to take turns in combat in whichever way you choose is preferable to the fixed initiative order in Banner Saga. What I thought was both retarded and interesting in a certain way was that if you're fighting against a single enemy, he takes one turn for each one of your party member's turns. Obviously, this turns that unit into a monster which actually works wonders when playing with Lo Pheng or Hopper and makes the player feel great, but it doesn't work as well when regular units are involved. It is counter-intuitive that as you kill enemies the ones that remain alive get to act more and more often. Overall, I'd say I preferred the combat in Ash of Gods to Banner Saga's and this is one of the reasons I will be replaying the game in the distant future, to try some different party compositions and play another protagonist solo mode.
I loved the music, it is absolutely superb and I must've spent at least half an hour in the main menu just listening to that theme. There are some brilliant songs in the final chapter and the combat music is really good as well. Visuals are solid as well, from the art style to animations in "cutscenes" and fights too. Sadly, the UI is not great and lacks some basic functionality such as being able to scroll through conversations (really..?). The map exploration screen doesn't let you plan routes and sometimes doesn't even indicate the location of your main objective. Sometimes text pops up on top of conversation menus. The party member icons seem very low quality, almost at a pixel art level of detail, I'm not sure if that's an intentional effect or not because it isn't consistent with anything else in the game.
Now the thing which infuriated me to no end and which might be a bit spoilery. Lo Pheng died in my playthrough in chapter six because of a choice I made around five hours before when I refused to save someone from dying. Now, choices and consequences are excellent when implemented PROPERLY, and in this case there was zero correlation between the two. The game effectively kills Lo Pheng if you want to roleplay him as a Shadow Clan warrior instead of a feel-good character that saves people and makes good decisions. I even wasted one hour backtracking and doing something differently because I refused to believe that you could get locked out of an entire story arc on the basis of ONE CHOICE. It's unbelievable that someone gave the go ahead on the design of this crap.. so that really tanked my enjoyment of the game, otherwise I would strongly recommend this game. Instead, my final impression is lukewarm.
I will probably replay this at some point to make some different choices and see where the story goes, from what I've been reading the game is quite good in that aspect.
The story is intriguing, I liked the three narrative arcs and all of the protagonists. I was always excited to switch characters and continue the others' stories and switch things up in combat since all of them play differently. That's great. I have to say however that either the translation from Russian to English is absolute crap or the writing is quite bad to begin with. The game drops massive lore dumps even from the start, I usually don't have issues getting into the lore of a game but here for example there are I don't know how many kingdoms which are either allied or at war and there's no encyclopedia or highlighting of terms like in PoE to assist the player. Then there are several events where I just didn't understand what happened, at some point someone gets killed by some crossbow bolts which flew out of nowhere and the party has no reaction, they don't investigate, there is no surprise, nothing. Another example would be how two characters in Thorn's party disappeared in the final chapter without anyone mentioning this, just to find them in one of the final fights allied with someone they claimed they despised. No idea what happened there.. It also feels like emotions and subtle ideas are lost in translation, sometimes the replies to what characters are saying seem completely unrelated. It's disappointing and confusing because the overarching story is quite interesting and the protagonists are very different in personality, goals and objectives and that kept me excited to find out what's going to happen next.
The world exploration was alright, I liked having to manage strixes even though I never had any issues affording the items which granted them because I never spent gold on card fragments (which feel quite underwhelming in combat, by the way, although there are some interesting synergies between some). This and the possibility of choosing different routes to go through on the map made me prefer it to Banner Saga's approach. It's also great that time passed actually matters, there are some events which happen or can be missed if you get somewhere in time or are too late.
The combat was also pretty good, I thought it provided just the right level of challenge without changing the default Reaping level. There's a good variety of classes for party members, unfortunately the same cannot be said for enemies, you end up fighting the same enemy compositions way too many times. I also think that being able to take turns in combat in whichever way you choose is preferable to the fixed initiative order in Banner Saga. What I thought was both retarded and interesting in a certain way was that if you're fighting against a single enemy, he takes one turn for each one of your party member's turns. Obviously, this turns that unit into a monster which actually works wonders when playing with Lo Pheng or Hopper and makes the player feel great, but it doesn't work as well when regular units are involved. It is counter-intuitive that as you kill enemies the ones that remain alive get to act more and more often. Overall, I'd say I preferred the combat in Ash of Gods to Banner Saga's and this is one of the reasons I will be replaying the game in the distant future, to try some different party compositions and play another protagonist solo mode.
I loved the music, it is absolutely superb and I must've spent at least half an hour in the main menu just listening to that theme. There are some brilliant songs in the final chapter and the combat music is really good as well. Visuals are solid as well, from the art style to animations in "cutscenes" and fights too. Sadly, the UI is not great and lacks some basic functionality such as being able to scroll through conversations (really..?). The map exploration screen doesn't let you plan routes and sometimes doesn't even indicate the location of your main objective. Sometimes text pops up on top of conversation menus. The party member icons seem very low quality, almost at a pixel art level of detail, I'm not sure if that's an intentional effect or not because it isn't consistent with anything else in the game.
Now the thing which infuriated me to no end and which might be a bit spoilery. Lo Pheng died in my playthrough in chapter six because of a choice I made around five hours before when I refused to save someone from dying. Now, choices and consequences are excellent when implemented PROPERLY, and in this case there was zero correlation between the two. The game effectively kills Lo Pheng if you want to roleplay him as a Shadow Clan warrior instead of a feel-good character that saves people and makes good decisions. I even wasted one hour backtracking and doing something differently because I refused to believe that you could get locked out of an entire story arc on the basis of ONE CHOICE. It's unbelievable that someone gave the go ahead on the design of this crap.. so that really tanked my enjoyment of the game, otherwise I would strongly recommend this game. Instead, my final impression is lukewarm.
I will probably replay this at some point to make some different choices and see where the story goes, from what I've been reading the game is quite good in that aspect.
Last edited:
Bocian
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2017
- Messages
- 1,912
There goes my desire to continue playing this...
Multi-headed Cow
Arcane
Since this thread's bobbing around near the top, anyone have any idea when the rejiggered English text is supposed to be patched in? I bought the game earlier this year and played an hour or two until I noticed on the Steam forum for it that they were doing cleaned up English, so I set it aside until that hits. It's not like it was unplayable without it, but given that I've already waited so long and (IIRC) they were supposedly almost done cleaning it up I figured I may as well wait.
rusty_shackleford
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2018
- Messages
- 50,754
this game was one of the most awkward games I've ever played
daughter has hard nips in the concept art though
fantadomat
Arcane
I tried twice to play it and ended up getting annoyed. Still butthurt that the game doesn't have medium difficulty. You either one shot everything or you get raped.
fantadomat
Arcane
cheatengine
Modron
Arcane
- Joined
- May 5, 2012
- Messages
- 11,162
Parabalus
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2015
- Messages
- 17,521
I started this up again (finished on release) and seems like they added a new, middle one in some of the patches I guess.
Sarissofoi
Arbiter
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2017
- Messages
- 770
If only this have some sensible combat system instead of Boring saga one.
Parabalus
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2015
- Messages
- 17,521
fantadomat
It's actually even better, in addition to the new middle campaign difficulty you can individually set a 1-10 difficulty slider at any time.
It plays a lot differently despite the superficial similarities - here attack and HP are decoupled, energy is very different from TBS armor, there's no pillage, you can choose your chars order each turn and manipulate it further with cards.
Biggest difference is that it's a lot harder and there is supporting attrition gameplay in the campaign.
It's actually even better, in addition to the new middle campaign difficulty you can individually set a 1-10 difficulty slider at any time.
It plays a lot differently despite the superficial similarities - here attack and HP are decoupled, energy is very different from TBS armor, there's no pillage, you can choose your chars order each turn and manipulate it further with cards.
Biggest difference is that it's a lot harder and there is supporting attrition gameplay in the campaign.
I enjoyed this more than the Banner Saga games ultimately. The aesthetic and setting seemed very cool (mixture of East Asian and Imperial Russian stuff with a hearty dash of Highlander) even if some felt like it was lost in translation.
rusty_shackleford
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2018
- Messages
- 50,754
meh, banner saga series peaked with the first, they really fucked up by not changing the combat imo
I didn't even finish the third, story wasn't engaging enough and the game has nothing else going for it at that point
first one was pretty good though
Smoker
Scholar
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2017
- Messages
- 120
Man this game has some of the worst translating ever but I keep playing. The ninja guy's scenario is the ultimate weeaboo fantasy with his 6 buxom babes.
Combat is fun except the ending sometimes when 1 person can wreck your entire shit. Liked BS where you ganged up better. Still prefer Banner Saga 1,2, 3 over it.
Combat is fun except the ending sometimes when 1 person can wreck your entire shit. Liked BS where you ganged up better. Still prefer Banner Saga 1,2, 3 over it.
Sarissofoi
Arbiter
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2017
- Messages
- 770
its janky but have its own charm
Terra
Cipher
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2016
- Messages
- 925
Finally forced myself to finish this. As others have said, the writing really drags it down, particularly late in the game. Towards the end I felt like I only had a surface level understanding of some aspects of what was going on as the writing and general flow of events made things tricky to follow. There is probably a decent story in here somewhere but it's hard to appreciate it due to the translation.
I was also reminded as to why Banner Saga always turned me off; so many battles here are you facing off against the same enemies. The battlefields are all perfectly flat with a couple of props blocking certain tiles but the overall strategy is always the same; abusing defense buffs via one tank to get the enemy to waste their moves/energy on the buffed unit. It wasn't an interesting system for me at all.
It's a shame, stellar art & music pretty much go to waste due to the shoddy writing. Maybe worth a single playthrough but temper your expectations. I'm somewhat reminded of NISA's botched localisation of Ar Tonelico 2, where sections of it were seemingly machine translated and you're just doing double takes trying to fathom what people are trying to say.
I was also reminded as to why Banner Saga always turned me off; so many battles here are you facing off against the same enemies. The battlefields are all perfectly flat with a couple of props blocking certain tiles but the overall strategy is always the same; abusing defense buffs via one tank to get the enemy to waste their moves/energy on the buffed unit. It wasn't an interesting system for me at all.
It's a shame, stellar art & music pretty much go to waste due to the shoddy writing. Maybe worth a single playthrough but temper your expectations. I'm somewhat reminded of NISA's botched localisation of Ar Tonelico 2, where sections of it were seemingly machine translated and you're just doing double takes trying to fathom what people are trying to say.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 100,004
Why are they doing this? Combat definitely wasn't the best part of the game. Also:
this game was one of the most awkward games I've ever played
daughter has hard nips in the concept art though
That's not the daughter, that's the grandma, you fucking donkey.
What is the right language to play it in?
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