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Trials of Numanuma is a storyfag game, and as such I am interested in playing it. What is the overall codex consensus on the quality of its story/characters/atmosphere/setting/writing/dialogue/etc etc etc?
If you're such a special snowflake that you can't possibly fit your ultra-sophisticated ppinion into any of my oppressive and narrow-minded options, then post it as a comment!
I more or less remember the squid, the clock and some other stuff from the first city, like a girl playing flute? I stopped playing around the time you collect Avellone's NPC (nothing against him).
There were a few decent storylines. I liked the ones with Erritis & Rhin.
Overall meh. Didn't finish it, made it to the very last part and just stopped playing.
It sure didn't help that the underlying Numegaya material and PnP system itself was a steaming, crazy, dumbed down pile of garbage. Nobody is interested in playing it today.
Erritis and Rhin were interesting, so was the concept of The Bloom (though poorly realized).
Also I seem to remember liking some emo edgelord cult leader whose entire existence was suffering, though maybe I just empathized with him at the moment because that's how I felt playing this game visual novel.
I stopped after the second encounter after entering what seemed to be a city.
At this point, i was fed up with the combat system (after 2 fights) and the incessant and pretentious descriptions of any object of no gameplay interest.
Aside from that, it had no redeemable qualities whatsoever.
It appears i didn't even have time to judge the story but it's probably an insufferable and pretentious one.
Didn’t like the main plot mainly because I thought The Sorrow was a crap antagonist. The way the whole tides thing tied into The Sorrow and the impending doom presented during the end game was just too macguffiny to me. I tend to like plots that are more personal to the PC than world saving plots. And I particularly dislike when the world is in peril because the mystic scale is out of balance and the the macguffin has to be taken to the macguffin to restore the balance because reasons. Divinity OS was very guilty of this too.
I would say at it's core the plot of Numenera is good, but a lot of problems hold it back:
- Because the game was supposed to be bigger and stuff got cut out, some of the cuts weren't as cleans as they should. You could really see, where something else should've happened or were more was supposed to happen, so it was all chopped up. This didn't need to happen, since the first and the last area of the game were connected and it would've been easier to explain the weirder parts, through the last area.
- The Sorrows role in the grand scheme of things was too big. It could've been cut down to just an very angry spiritrobotsomething and it still would've worked out.
-The eternal battle should've been put more into the foreground, since that was one of the bigger aspects of the game, we didn't witness much.
- The game had the wrong theme. Instead of "What is a life worth?" it should've been "What IS life?", since you were confronted more often with that question, than the former.
Stuff I liked about the plot:
- The last twist about the antagonist was quite neat and put the story into a whole new context.
- The sidequests were overall quite good and told nice little stories.
I thought that was a mixed bag. There are some good moments and a few more mediocre moments. Companions aren't the best.
I would also argue that it has too much text.
The whole game should have just been set in The Bloom with some occasional trips to other dimensions.
I was initially pretty hyped and even after somewhat lukewarm reception I was still going to give this game a chance. But yeah, it’s pretty bad. The story is unfocused and lacks any sort of thematic core. It’s like they had a couple of cool ideas, but never really thought about “why” and “how” of them. Eventually everything feels superfluous and random, because nothing is connected to the main theme – because there is no one.
Like, Planescape: Torment was about free will, responsibilities, possibility of change and whatnot. How much of your personality is shaped from external sources, how much depends of your inner self, stuff like that. And every event in the game contributed to that question in some form.
Torment: Tides of Numenera is about nothing. There is no question, no dilemma. Your character is basically just a bunch of disconnected statistics, without any sense of consistency – and very soon you will be steamrolling through every obstacle, so they don’t even matter anymore. Dialogues also won’t allow you to express your character, because they are just bland. They wrote so much text, yet it’s all just a descriptions, not actions that you could perform. So main protagonist is just a passive observer, like a tourist in some kind of of wackylandoo. The game gives you choices, but only because P: T did that. However, this time the main idea doesn’t really demand that, because it’s not the story about you to begin with.
Ultimately it’s about three different characters:
- Changind God: which turns out to be a guy trying to save his daughter… which still doesn’t tell us anything about him, it’s all an external need;
- First Castoff: which turn out to not being a First Castoff, just some random person. The real First Castoff is Matkina - wish that information was available in the game and not in some interview. The game don’t really do anything with her anyway.
- The Sorrow: which turns out to be some kind of ancient device… and that’s pretty much it.
Actually, The Sorrow is somewhat bigger issue. When you are being pursued by main antagonist in P: T, it’s happening because of your past crimes. So that brings a question, to what extent your character is actually responsible for that, since he lost all his memories. Is that means that ones personality is his/hers memories? Or is it something deeper? So it’s still connected to the core question of the game.
The Sorrow on the other hand is chasing you because of some abstract problem that was thrust upon you without your input. You character didn’t have anything to do with that, so there is no reason to care. And it’s some random idea that seems to be made up on the fly anyway. Again: maybe there is cool idea somewhere there, but no reason for it’s existence as ever presented. So it feels random, there is no backbone to any of this.
Plus, there is way too much text just for the sake of having it. There is no point in describing something in 100+ something sentences if you can do it in 2 (and yeah, the irony is not lost on me).
All the problems are quite visible if you would just compare the intro of Planescape: Torment to the one from Torment: Ties of Numenera. P: T is silent, just images and music – yet it set up atmosphere perfectly and tells you anything that you need to know. T: ToN on the other hand starts with this black screen with millions words that last for a couple of good minutes and can be summarized as: “you are falling down and don’t remember anything”.
Ideally, game’s mechanics and story should be connected to express some sort of core idea for a game. Since T: ToN lacks such thing, there is no real reason for their existence in the first place. A shame, because they are some really cool concepts here and there. The Bloom for example, heck – I even liked Sagus’s Cliffs as a sort of subversions of city’s main purposes (though I am in minority in this one, it seems)
tl;dr – too much words hide the lack of any internal consistency and main theme
