CryptRat
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2014
- Messages
- 3,625
First thing first, there's a demo included, so you can give the game a try before buying it for $10 : https://lordofpotatos.itch.io/adventurer-academy-heroes-of-the-new-dawn.
I played the demo for about 1h30, the game seems cool enough. I did not reach the end of the demo so for sure there's enough to play to know if you're going to enjoy the game or not. Per usual I'll put screenshots into spoilers so it's easier to scroll through.
When you start a new game you can customize the difficulty.
You create a party of 5 + more you can carry and swap. You can also create several parties and switch between them. For each character you get to choose a gender, a race, one strong and one weak attribute as well as 3 personnality traits.
Races come with a special ability in the beginning, for example Salamanders come with a strong dragon breath and synths with a fun ability making them stronger but then overheating.
You're travelling between towns and dungeons through a relatively open top down world map, and there's a day/night cycle. There's a mini-automap when inside dungeons. You can save on the world map but can't save inside dungeons.
Towns are menus and contain their own shop and quests, and on the world map there's no encounter, I think, but a travelling merchant met my party once.
A journal tracks your quests.
The game uses a job system. According to some NPC you'll unlock extra jobs when reaching new schools, and the beginning roster is not shameful to begin with. Each job comes with its stat modifiers and abilities. You gain more abilities when levelling-up. You can change jobs at will.
There's an affinity system, no idea how it works nor what any of the consequence is (the following screenshot describes the relation between the different characters and Bobba).
You'll buy equipment from a decent stock in the beginning, which is cool but does not mean different items are game changing, I'll need to play more to know if it's interesting or not. Chests are fixed and might contain fixed content or not, stack of consumables seemed to indicate it does but finding a harpoon -3 was weird (unless the -3 here means something else but I think that's what it means, it does seem pretty weak judging by the stat changes).
Character sheets contains some damage type resistances and such.
Enemies are visible and moving slowly, you can avoid them. I'm still not sure you have to go through the dungeon map again when travelling across a "dungeon" map so this should come handy.
Combat is Grandia-thing, which might be good, according to the tutorial fight you can interrupt long charging time attacks but in practice it's something I've not got to do yet. Area of effects are exactly how they look like judging by how they do target more enemies when they're closer to each other. I got killed by an enemy linked to a quest in what's the easiest dungeon, my party seems just a bit too weak right now. There are at least three types of resource besides consumables (I have not use any consumable yet so I can't comment) : Cooldowns carry from one fight to the next, I think I don't have any ability which uses MPs and finally TEN are reset between fights, they increases just a bit with time during a fight and a lot when the character gets hit. Abilities are far stronger than basic attacks from what it seems, and warriors still make some damage from basic attacks while other characters don't, things seems right so far.
You can buy and equip books to learn new abilities. I've not dug further yet since all the books currently available in the first library seem to only provide abilities related to crafting. There's a crafting system, by the way.
That's about it, not sure if I'll play further right now but it seems like a game I could play and would probably enjoy.
I played the demo for about 1h30, the game seems cool enough. I did not reach the end of the demo so for sure there's enough to play to know if you're going to enjoy the game or not. Per usual I'll put screenshots into spoilers so it's easier to scroll through.
When you start a new game you can customize the difficulty.
You create a party of 5 + more you can carry and swap. You can also create several parties and switch between them. For each character you get to choose a gender, a race, one strong and one weak attribute as well as 3 personnality traits.
Races come with a special ability in the beginning, for example Salamanders come with a strong dragon breath and synths with a fun ability making them stronger but then overheating.
You're travelling between towns and dungeons through a relatively open top down world map, and there's a day/night cycle. There's a mini-automap when inside dungeons. You can save on the world map but can't save inside dungeons.
Towns are menus and contain their own shop and quests, and on the world map there's no encounter, I think, but a travelling merchant met my party once.
A journal tracks your quests.
The game uses a job system. According to some NPC you'll unlock extra jobs when reaching new schools, and the beginning roster is not shameful to begin with. Each job comes with its stat modifiers and abilities. You gain more abilities when levelling-up. You can change jobs at will.
There's an affinity system, no idea how it works nor what any of the consequence is (the following screenshot describes the relation between the different characters and Bobba).
You'll buy equipment from a decent stock in the beginning, which is cool but does not mean different items are game changing, I'll need to play more to know if it's interesting or not. Chests are fixed and might contain fixed content or not, stack of consumables seemed to indicate it does but finding a harpoon -3 was weird (unless the -3 here means something else but I think that's what it means, it does seem pretty weak judging by the stat changes).
Character sheets contains some damage type resistances and such.
Enemies are visible and moving slowly, you can avoid them. I'm still not sure you have to go through the dungeon map again when travelling across a "dungeon" map so this should come handy.
Combat is Grandia-thing, which might be good, according to the tutorial fight you can interrupt long charging time attacks but in practice it's something I've not got to do yet. Area of effects are exactly how they look like judging by how they do target more enemies when they're closer to each other. I got killed by an enemy linked to a quest in what's the easiest dungeon, my party seems just a bit too weak right now. There are at least three types of resource besides consumables (I have not use any consumable yet so I can't comment) : Cooldowns carry from one fight to the next, I think I don't have any ability which uses MPs and finally TEN are reset between fights, they increases just a bit with time during a fight and a lot when the character gets hit. Abilities are far stronger than basic attacks from what it seems, and warriors still make some damage from basic attacks while other characters don't, things seems right so far.
You can buy and equip books to learn new abilities. I've not dug further yet since all the books currently available in the first library seem to only provide abilities related to crafting. There's a crafting system, by the way.
That's about it, not sure if I'll play further right now but it seems like a game I could play and would probably enjoy.
