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It's been a nice surprise so far. Aside from some anime portraits, it feels more like a Western, P&P-styled game than a hobbyist JRPG. About to pick my first class, but if it holds up, it might deserve its own thread on the main forum.
I started it and its great so far. You choose your character out of a few backgrounds. These decide about the skills you start with and the point cost of leveling up in a different class. From what I have seen I can only choose one extra class and maybe later a prestige class. Companions are set in their class. Classes come with a variety of combat skills which depend on the weapons you use and non combat skills.
You walk through world via a map and points of interest (similar to how crimson shroud did it with its rooms) you chose one point and the game tells you what you see and what happens. You may also chose non combat skills to use if your cursor is on one such point for example to use a lantern which you filled with oil to lighten a opening in the wall into which you couldnt otherwise see.
Saving is limited int hat you can only save in town or if you use one special item in the dungeon but you can do that only once per day. You will have to go back to the city to rest or find some places where you can safely do it in the dungeon. If you gain more than a certain amount of exp before you go back to the city you get bonus points for class levels and you also get them if you finish certain parts of the dungeon without resting to much.
I havent explored outside the first city and dungeon yet so I cant say anything about how big the world is, its not small going by the map I have found. From what I have read there are two general endings with one assuming you use NG+ but I have read its also possible to do it in the first try but a lot harder. Every origin should play different storywise from the other but ssince I only started I cant say much about that either.
The only negative point I have seen so far is the crafting. You can cook and mix materials and you can also go to the smith in town where you can buy but also forge stuff. If you do it only tells you the name of the item and the costs but not what it actually does so you have to save beforehand and try. I dont know if thats a flaw of the game or if thats because they had to do some ui stuff with the translation.
I am now at a point where I can fight two demon bosses, none of which I can defeat and I have no idea how to change that. I also get heavily damaged by them without being able to change that in the slightest. The main flaw the game has (again I dont know if thats because of the translation) is that some things arent really explained clearly. There are for example skills you can only use with specific kind of weapons but it is not really explained with what weapons. The menu tells you that you have slash weapons bludgeoning weapons heavy and light weapons and so on. But choosing a skill for attack the symbol is only a small sword so you may have two skills both with the same symbol but only one you can actually use with your weapon, which means its trial and error again. (I assume the skill for damage all enemies with one weapon needs some heavy equipment liike a battleaxe but I didnt try that out.)
I checked the autotranslated japanese wiki for something about the bosses and it seems some of them have specific weaknesses (or rather strengths against all other shit) you have to exploit but I didnt find a way to actually know this from ingame info. There also seems to be a limit of things you can gather per day (for example digging ore out of veins in dungeons with the pickaxe) which the game also didnt explain.
while you can technically grind by going to points of interest again and again hoping monsters will spawn the exp you get is minimal, the most exp you will get by defeating larger event monsters and exploring and doing stuff, which would mean the game doesnt expect you to grind to get stronger.
Some bosses in the beginning I killed with mixed Flame bottles and Explosive Flasks and a witch is something I vaguely remember killing this way. About the other one if you are you talking about the one on the island where there's the bone dragon then the Acid Breath of Enda is the single only thing that worked for me.
Here we go. I put screenshots inside spoiler tags so it's easier to scroll down. The review is probably boring so don't hesitate to just browse the screenshots.
Monsters are spreading. It seems linked to ruins above the small town where your character is living and he or she is going to investigate. You start the game by creating one character, choosing a gender and an origin which provides a personal background, plot and an archetype. Then during the game you will be able to change 2 companions at will when in town among a cast of characters representing the different classes available to you as well.
You choose an origin for the main character at the start of the game. It will have a big influence on which classes he will choose.
The game starts with a prologue.
The most important feature of the game is that exploration consists in checking points of interest, presented the same way a Game Master would present those. The overarching plot is standard, for better or worse, it involves some politics, some personal plot, some villains and it is really nothing special. The settings is closer to western fairy tales and traditional western fantasy than your average mainstream JRPG. The dialogs with other possible party members are mostly not cringy, which I really appreciated, I can bear pregenerated characters in such a case. However where the writing really shines is during dungeon exploration and the events especially. The game reeks Pen and Paper like few other games do, the presentation, art and writing are atmospheric and there are many appropriate open-ended events, puzzles and fixed encounters. If I had to name a similar game then it would definitely be Unlimited Saga, with the board game presentation, the choice of a character's origin and skill checks among other things. Ruina contains none of the weird, questionable and controversial mechanics of Unlimited Saga though', so this should not make you flee if you hate those, but if you enjoyed Unlimited Saga then you'll likely enjoy Ruina too.
The maps looks cool and the pictures do too.
I don't want to presume about the differences of plot and especially exploration between choosing different origins, likely most of exploration is the same and only one small part may differ while some dialogs change but that's only speculation.
This may have to do with the origin of the main character.
You generally get to control your created character, two recuited companions, and sometimes an additional temporary fourth character, which can be plot related or a summoned creature. 3 is a bit of a small party size but that'll do.
You'll probably use a party which covers all utility skills.
The game is heavy on text, if you don't like text-heavy games then you won't like this one.
A main town hub covers your basic needs of resource repleshiment. Apart from some rare parts where you're stuck the town is generally a few clicks away from your party but the experience system encourages you to get back at lately as you can, we'll go into more details later. Resting brings back your fallen characters to life, by the way.
You can explore some surroundings but will spend most of your time in a big dungeon. Exploration takes place on a board with exclusively – literally - points of interest. A point of interest is often a room, basically. Each point contains a sometimes straightforward but unique event you'll be presented the way a GM would present it, you're sure you'll find something there. The different dungeon area reeks of atmosphere, the description of the places and events is great and if out of any context they're probably, overall, not that original, in practice it's a pleasure to discover what's going to come next.
You can explore the close surroundings of the town. This ogre? won't let you cross his bridge without paying a toll. You can attack it but it's not an easy fight if you go there as soon as you can.
If you flee during an arena fight using the regular command you'll get sentenced to death. The game is certainly polished.
More than once there are more than one road to go forward, and it's not just two different empty roads but two roads presenting a different challenge along the way. In practice you'll eventually take the two roads for the extra experience but this does not matter and is not even essentialy a bad thing, it's cool.
One of the early sequences have you stuck on a lower floor trying to find a way back. You can directly fight a statue or try to sneak by demons.
Some events are optional while some are mandatory to proceed forward. Talking to a character in town with a specific companion in your party can trigger a special dialog, while something special can happen on some points outside town with a specific character in your party, I can think of at least one, and it's possibly the only one, where I got an extra reward. For the rest I am not sure if some of the character lines I got while exploring and in theory could be specific were actually specific to the involved character or if another would have said the same thing, so I am not sure about the impact.
Having a specific character in your party can unlock extra dialog lines.
Events can include multiple kind of things. A point is represented differently base on whether 1 it's important, 2 there's something you can find there or 3 there's nothing to find, generally because you've already solved it. It means you get to know when something new can be found somewhere or if there's more of it than what you dealt with
Conspiracy!
There can be a relevant or irrelevant CYOA part where you decide how you'll deal with an event. You gain most experience from events rather than from defeating enemies so the game does not, even loosely, force you to fight rather than making another choice whenever such a dilemna is proposed.
There must be a way to deal with these skeletons without fighting, I did not find it though'.
Of course events can eventually triggers an encounter, and combat is a big part of the gameplay of the game, but we'll talk about this part later.
Bad things can happen during fights.
A couple of tools can be used during events. This is limited, you've got ropes , pickaxes and fishing poles. The tools can allow to gather consumables, by picking ore or fishing, on certain spots. You can search at will but after getting a couple of consumable you won't get anything anymore before resting to the next day. It might be slightly more nuanced but overall you exhaust all spots at once for a day, if you get nothing anymore from one spot you won't find anything from any other spot either during the current day. That's not completely dumb anyway, if you're often specifically told to use the tool sometimes you're not, and there are more than one secret to find by fishing especially, by searching in a specific spot based on a hint. Therefore as limited as it may be it definitely enhances the exploration experience anyway.
I did not dig that further. I prefer to see it as a cool moment with nothing more unto it, is it or not it's cool either way.
Many events involve an automatic skill check. There's, basically, no direct use by hand of a skill, all checks are automatic. If not a big feature like in some specific games over there, at least it's there, skill checks are really something which make a game feel more like an RPG. Survival allows you to swim instead of drowning, for example, and Gnosis allow you to decipher documents. Perception allows a character with the skill to tell the party when something could turn bad in an event so the party may decide to look for another way or heal before going forward. If you don't want to use a magic key onto the lock of a door or chest, you can try to force or pick the lock. The lock can be trapped and you'll trigger the trap, typically losing some life, each time you fail to pick the lock. Coupled with the perception skill you can know whether it's trapped so if it's not you can try again until it works while if it is trapped then depending on your situation you may prefer to use a magic key or not. Why skill checks are important anyway is that you may want your party to cover the skills you want to cover. It's possible to cover all of these, at the very least as soon as the different characters you can bring with you each have several of these, but it can influence how you build your party, and I always covered all skills. By the way it's possible that dealing with some situations get more interesting in some way because you don't cover a skill, I can say for sure though'.
A skill check.
Perception allows to make more informed choices.
You can catch unusual things.
You'll deal with a few escort quests during the game where whether you bring back the escorted character to town alive or not will change the outcome, while bringing to town one of your characters uncounscious is never a problem.
You'll get to roam a dwarven place.
You've got a Stone which allows you to save inside dungeons but the game tells you to be careful about this, in practice I never tried to use it so that it's there is the only thing I can tell.
Finally the games contains a substantial amount of puzzles, which can take multiple forms and some are optional while some other are not. There are some basic instant riddles, whose only problem is they're generally the exact same you'll find in one million other games, and except for a tease game I think the pacing of such a game is enhanced by such puzzles so I am not saying they're a plain negative anyway.
Original this sure is not.
Then there are rooms where you directly need to choose a path, and they go from retarded easy to easy but a good change of pacing. Sometimes I felt the handholding was misplaced, but what I can't remember for sure is whether the extra hint came from a successful skill check, in which case it's in fact not that bad.
Then there are riddles based on hints, and those can be very good, they are among the things which make the game go from good to great to me. You can find a couple of treasure maps (one literal maps but more generally texts hints) which invite you to look for a specific spot (which is not a regular point of interest) on a certain map and you will solve some events using a hint you'll find, for example, inside an in-game book.
A hint.
Books.
There are also a few cases of enemies you will not defeat via bruteforcing, with or without hints, I won't go more into details in order not to spoil, but I think that at least some of these feel like organically presented puzzles, so overall they are a plus to me but opinions may differ.
Let's talk specifically about handholding. Because it's an important aspect. What's easy is easy, and that goes below the tutorial parts, for example there are many places where the game will state “if the party had a rope blablabla”, more than once you'll think that they could have gone a little less handy. However what makes this game stands out is that, partly due to the fact you know when there's nothing to find on a point of interest at the moment, the harder figuring out thing parts are mostly fair and so they are very interesting to solve, there's no sequence of doing some random unrelated things in various earlier parts of the game to advance, the kind of things which people would, rightfully or not, call stuff made to make people byu a guide, there's none of that here. Anyway there's no real hard puzzles, I doubt anyone would hate the game due to the difficulty of the puzzles.
This last "But could that have something to do with [pitfalls]" sentence is superfluous to say the least. Fortunately the game does not always treat the player as a retard.
Whenever you enter an event you can trigger a random encounter occuring before the event. Also plenty of events have an associated fixed encounter.
Your party is small and the set of available spells and combat skills is banal. I would still call the combat part at very least above average for multiple reasons. First the fights are shorter and more lethal than average, including boss fights. Besides you're encouraged to be aggressive because the risk of being punished by a good roll of an enemy really exists and the best way for this not to happen is to kill the enemies as soon as possible.
What makes combat interesting is also that resource management is good. Given you don't want to rest every two fights MPs are a precious resource. Fire bombs in the beginning or potions made from dragon blood at the end are powerful. During the early parts especially you are really not flooded with healing items and if you try to get back to town as rarely as possible then HP management is also a big thing. The fall of a character is a big deal, resting will heal him or her but dealing with “death” without resting is not as easy because revival items are rare and you don't want to rest too often.
Bombs are very powerful in the beginning of the game.
Building your party is fun enough, we already said that covering utility skills is something to take into account and different characters have a different enough use during fights that choosing your companions is interesting.
Dragons can be tough.
Elemental resistances and weaknesses are a thing and you want to but don't have to exploit these. The status changes, the tempory bonuses to stats, the efficiency and (random) duration of stunning effects from both sides feel on point and instant death effects from enemies are sparse except from during the ending parts, which is probably how it should be.
You can gather info about elemental weaknesses.
The monster roster is alright, its variety is nothing to get impressed by but it's not shameful either. I like that you can stumble upon a hard enemy, and fleeing is generally fine. Some boss fights especially during the early parts of the game can be challenging and some hard ones you can try to fight before you're strong enough so it's fun to finally beat those. A few bosses require to use a more or less logical special skill.
It won't attack you as long as you don't attack it.
You get a mix between fixed items and random items as rewards for fights and events. Equipment is overall boring, both very basic with only stat bonuses and the difference of bonuses between two weapons is not even important enough that you really care. In theory choosing the good type of weapon against one boss especially could be important but in practice I never cared, although' to be fair it probably does not help that my main character is a mage.
Junk.
There is a crafting system for consumables as for weapons and armors and it's average. Basically I consider that a bad crafting system is a system where you can't use a same ingredient to make different things while a good one is when a same ingredient can be made into different interesting things which makes for interesting choices. Here it's a middle ground. Weapons and armors are boring as already stated and the most important choice will be to use a piece of ore to make either a weapon or an armor, sometimes the upgrade between a new weapon and the current one can be big but it's often not. And I would mostly make the same consumables with the same ingredients. In the end the choices exist but I did not think they were that interesting
Crafting.
A couple of thing can be noticed. First there is an inflation in prices during your game, basic healing spells will get about 10 times more expensive in the end than they were in the beginning. I've got no opinion about whether this is good or bad though'. Secondly, the number of consumables you can gather and buy during a single day is limited. This is probably a real feature although' I am not sure if there are any actual backlashes for resting too much. Granted there's any backlash, and I assumed there was some when playing, then it's cool, choosing what you'll gather is a fun part of resource management during a big part of the game (I think it was not during the ending parts anymore, when I'd just buy a single type of tiems).
You can only bought a limited amount of consumables per day.
Number growth is kept reasonable by modern JRPG standards. Overall despite its limits I think combat is balanced well enough that your choices feel useful and interesting. I died quite a bit for various reasons which is a good indication tha the combat is good as far as I'm concerned and what's certain is that I enjoyed it.
It is possible to summon a fourth party member.
The different characters can wear different types of weapons or armors. Besides you will find a couple of single use books to learn a specific new combat skill (it's a combat skill available to one class, not an original one). I think that the main character like other available party members can learn any skill that way but you must be careful anyway because the skills a character can use in combat depend on the weapons he's using so some choices may not be good ideas. By the way depending on the weapon a character is using there's already a good chance that he can't use some of his or her own skills, that's fine but a problem is that there's no way to know before entering a fight because the way to know is meant to be an icon but several types of items use the same icon.
The game uses a job system for your main character (while the job(s) of companions is fixed). There are two types of levels for your main character, a general level (gained via XP and the only one companions has) and a level for each class. At various points in the game you'll gain a consumable which allows to choose an additional class, or an additional advanced class.
Your origin determines an overall archetype, it loosely dictates which classes you're going to choose along the game. In practice when a class is unlocked you get to spend SP to gain levels in the class, up to the 5th level in each chosen class. The thing is that, depening on your origin, a level will costs 2 SP for some classes but 4, 6 or 8 for some other ones (4, 8, 12, 16 for advanced classes). Typically the character I created was raised by a sage and the different magician classes were the cheapest ones. If you choose only the cheap classes you will always be able to instantly reach the 5th level of the class as soon as you unlock it, but if you choose more expensive classes then you will really not have enough points to cover everything you want by the end of the game, I always chose the cheapest ones and had only very few remaining points at the end. And upgrading the classes is important, because it is not only how you get new skills, and by the end you could probably do without more, but that also increases stats (and decreases some other stats too, by the way) just like regular levels do. This stat rise can sometimes change drastically between two classes, for example I chose Sage over Spiritualist because he gains 9 MP per level instead of 4, and at the end of the game the character had 221 MP so a difference of 25 points in total is not neglictible.
You'll unlock several classes during the game.
Note that the stat system is disappointing especially given the game seems somewhat influenced by Pen and Paper, the characters only have 4 stats, namely Attack, Defense, Magic and Speed, you really can't go simpler than that.
Only 4 stats.
You gain most XPs via solving events, not directly by defeating enemies. Many events involve fighting, but many other involve a puzzle, or a skill check, or choices which bypass an encounter and you'll gain experience either way. Nevermind the reason (possibly they don't gain XP from combat), the characters which are currently not in your party gain XP only slightly slower than the ones in your party so you will be able to change at will during the game, the new character will be a couple of levels behind at very worst. The characters other than the main one will gain their new skills by gaining levels.
SPs are gained via two ways. First you gain some by reaching some checkpoints or by solving some important side events. The others are gained by gaining a lot of XPs (clearing a lot of content) before two visits in town or two rests in the case you can rest out of town. Note that only the biggest sequence you ever made counts. You reach tiers, when one tier is reached then it can't be reached again and you can reach all tiers at once. Therefore you just need to do one long sequence in the game, there's no need to be paranoid about this, and one sequence of the game is obviously appropriate, you'll know when you'll be there and I think it's much worth pushing forward to the top tier at that point.
I never got this one.
The game says I got the true ending which means there must be a not true ending. There are a few remaining events I have not managed to deal with. I think I spent something like 25 hours on the game, while some early sequences I've retried several times and I died a few times during the late sequences. Due to the structure of the game, for better or worse there's no backtracking, going back and fourth to town takes five seconds and then you're always pushing forward or dealing with earlier side content. I got exactly 3 crashes during my full playthrough and the translation is clean, there are some very rare japanese occurences ; I think the translation is good but I'm not the best at judging english language. The game looks cool and the music is overall nice. If you really hate any possible form of puzzle solving then you might not like the game as much as I did and obviously if you hate the presentation with points of interest and events instead of seamless movement or don't like to read a lot of text then you'll probably not like this game. Although it is far from terrible in that aspect If you're really only interested in combat then you can surely find better alternatives to this game. However I would call the big dungeon of this game among the best out there and the main reason to be interested in the game is the overall P&P-ish dungeon exploration. If you're even very vaguely intruiged by these aspects then I highly recommend the game.
You get bonus SP mechanic for staying in dungeons as long as possible. This is one of the most interesting game mechanics I've seen, it rewards those who plan their expeditions well. It's also impressive how many lines the party members have
Guangzhou Tianwen Kadokawa Animation and Comics has announced a remake of RPG Maker 2000 title Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins for PC (Steam). It will support English, Japanese, and Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) language options. A release date was not announced.
