It's arguably a terrible game but it's really memorable the way its kinda melodramatic story, at times really good art direction and linear flow come together. Strong atmosphere despite uh... spectacularly bad fundamentals.
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A shockingly bad action game that somehow is worse to play than Evergrace 1. It's a shame because the Japanese voice acting and story make it pretty fun to follow.
A notoriously unsolved problem in 3D is how to handle 3rd-person combat and aiming. It's very hard to judge depth from enemies and where attacks are going to hit. The modern approach, of course, is lock-on: this has the effect of hackily flattening the game into 2.5D combat, where the other problems (judging depth/attacks) are further band-aided by the use of dodge rolls and iframes, combat becoming a visual Simon-Says.
Forever Kingdom (Evergrace 2 in Japanese) has no lock-on, it also has tiny weapon hitboxes. You're constantly whiffing your attacks, having to switch out weapons when one of your attacks heals the enemy.
These problems aren't a game-breaker - they plagued Evergrace 1. This game is built around using elemental skill combos by triggering two other NPCs' attacks - but you can't line up their attacks that easily since they have AI which tends to stand back and guard.
That still makes for a playable game, but where I draw the line is how poorly the camera is handled in interiors. I have programmed cameras for 3D games before (including a technical platformer) so I'm aware of how tricky it can be, but the way the camera is handled in this game is actually broken. The game seems to have some kind of prediction system of trying to find the best 'view' for a scene - the result is that when walking through corridors or empty areas, the camera will just start gradually swinging or jutting forward. The result of course, is motion sickness!
The game expects you to use R2 to swing the camera forward - this is what Evergrace did, and while clunky (The R-stick is right there... why not use it??) it was fine. In Forever Kingdom, almost always after using R2, the game will just randomly swing off to some other direction.
There's also screenshake from a lot of stuff for no reason. The worst offender is an early dungeon where a troll is rampaging about - never mind that you can't even evade this troll - but every time it steps (4 times a second), the screen shakes a lot - which of course is more motion sickness!
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Other design quirks - half of the treasure chests are empty, or trapped with a little imp that latches onto you for poison damage (You can't get it off or attack in this state). Enemies drop chests with collision, sometimes boxing you into a corner. 90% of these chests contain nothing.
Stores are accessed via a save point. In the store is 6 small stores, staffed by identical tiny blue elephants. Sometimes the elephants aren't there. So you can't buy headpieces at one save point, while you can at another... furthermore, the music cuts out whenever you open a shop menu or the pause menu, which is frightening...
Anyways, if you don't use R2 too much the motion sickness is manageable, but it's still a pretty rough game (and there's a bunch of other small complaints...) Worth trying if you liked Evergrace 1 (Forever Kingdom does have some great music and visual vibes), but if not then I would just pass!
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A shockingly bad action game that somehow is worse to play than Evergrace 1. It's a shame because the Japanese voice acting and story make it pretty fun to follow.
A notoriously unsolved problem in 3D is how to handle 3rd-person combat and aiming. It's very hard to judge depth from enemies and where attacks are going to hit. The modern approach, of course, is lock-on: this has the effect of hackily flattening the game into 2.5D combat, where the other problems (judging depth/attacks) are further band-aided by the use of dodge rolls and iframes, combat becoming a visual Simon-Says.
Forever Kingdom (Evergrace 2 in Japanese) has no lock-on, it also has tiny weapon hitboxes. You're constantly whiffing your attacks, having to switch out weapons when one of your attacks heals the enemy.
These problems aren't a game-breaker - they plagued Evergrace 1. This game is built around using elemental skill combos by triggering two other NPCs' attacks - but you can't line up their attacks that easily since they have AI which tends to stand back and guard.
That still makes for a playable game, but where I draw the line is how poorly the camera is handled in interiors. I have programmed cameras for 3D games before (including a technical platformer) so I'm aware of how tricky it can be, but the way the camera is handled in this game is actually broken. The game seems to have some kind of prediction system of trying to find the best 'view' for a scene - the result is that when walking through corridors or empty areas, the camera will just start gradually swinging or jutting forward. The result of course, is motion sickness!
The game expects you to use R2 to swing the camera forward - this is what Evergrace did, and while clunky (The R-stick is right there... why not use it??) it was fine. In Forever Kingdom, almost always after using R2, the game will just randomly swing off to some other direction.
There's also screenshake from a lot of stuff for no reason. The worst offender is an early dungeon where a troll is rampaging about - never mind that you can't even evade this troll - but every time it steps (4 times a second), the screen shakes a lot - which of course is more motion sickness!
---
Other design quirks - half of the treasure chests are empty, or trapped with a little imp that latches onto you for poison damage (You can't get it off or attack in this state). Enemies drop chests with collision, sometimes boxing you into a corner. 90% of these chests contain nothing.
Stores are accessed via a save point. In the store is 6 small stores, staffed by identical tiny blue elephants. Sometimes the elephants aren't there. So you can't buy headpieces at one save point, while you can at another... furthermore, the music cuts out whenever you open a shop menu or the pause menu, which is frightening...
Anyways, if you don't use R2 too much the motion sickness is manageable, but it's still a pretty rough game (and there's a bunch of other small complaints...) Worth trying if you liked Evergrace 1 (Forever Kingdom does have some great music and visual vibes), but if not then I would just pass!