Recent reviews by flarefan

After Last Heroes 2 and 3 took the series to rock bottom with endless backtracking, pointless story, and game-breaking bugs, Last Heroes 4 is a return to form and is surpassed only by the original Last Heroes as the best installment of the series.

But that's not saying much. At all.

Give credit where credit is due: With Last Heroes 4 developer Warfare Studios seemed to have finally learned that padding a game's length by forcing the player to slog through every encounter and traverse every dungeon multiple times is a bad idea. Enemies aren't quite as slow-moving and paths not quite as spacious as they were in Last Heroes 1, but you can still make your way through without having to fight too many enemies if you take a little care. And while there is backtracking, it at least fits with the story and is not at the insane level seen in Last Heroes 2 and 3. My first playthrough clocked in at 3 hours and 45 minutes, making it the shortest game in the series by a hair. Which is a good thing, because Last Heroes is always at its best when it's fast-paced.

However, if you were hoping for a satisfying resolution to the series storyline, you're going to be disappointed. Amelia's long-awaited reunion with her mother is stiff and awkward, even by this series's low standard for writing, and the mystery of her mother's identity and reason for abandoning her has as cliche and uninteresting an answer as you could possibly imagine. The game doesn't even have a real villain; like in Last Heroes 2, the final boss is just a couple cultists who you meet five seconds before you fight.

Indeed, throughout it feels like Warfare Studios was bored and stopped caring about the series with this installment - and given that even the original Last Heroes showed minimal creative enthusiasm, that's saying a lot. They didn't even bother to give the final boss fight multiple phases; you just beat them once and that's it. More importantly, there's really nothing new with this installment. It's the same playable characters, the same enemies, the same dungeon design aesthetic, and the same canned town designs with four buildings: an inn, an item shop, an equipment shop, and a house where you get information on where the next dungeon is.

So Last Heroes 4 still doesn't come close to being as good as the original Last Heroes, and even that game felt like a perfunctory effort at RPG-making. If you've already played the first three installments, go ahead and get this one; it's at least short and well-balanced. Otherwise, don't bother.

The Last Heroes series continues with an installment in the same vein as Last Heroes 2. Once again returning heroes Amelia and Roland are joined by two new party members who are functionally equivalent to the ones from Last Heroes 1, the touch-based encounters are designed to be unavoidable, backtracking through dungeons is excessive, stock RPGMaker assets are used, and everything has a slapdash "There, I made an RPG. Can I go on lunch break now?" feel. Even the plot is re-used; once again, you ask around for the whereabouts of Amelia's mom without getting anywhere and fight some cultist for unexplored reasons. But there are a few differences.

The enemy encounters' movement on the overhead screen is generally a little slower, so it is at least possible to avoid them in many cases, though not all. The "escape" option in battle is again enabled. The backtracking is toned down a little, though it's still excessive. The final dungeon is normal length (as opposed to the ad nauseam 14 levels of the final dungeon in Last Heroes 2). A playthrough takes 4 hours, the same as the original Last Heroes, though that feels like it's also in part due to less story content. And this time the final boss is someone you've at least met before you fight him, though he doesn't have much in the way of motive or personality.

But these are minor improvements over an utter disaster, and Last Heroes 3 has its own set of problems. For instance, there's an absolutely confounding bug when approaching the end of one of the dungeons: normally, the cutscene fails to trigger, leaving you no way to progress through the game. The pathway forward widens slightly as you approach, and only by continually hugging the West side of the path can you make the cutscene trigger. How something like this could get past even the most rudimentary playtesting is beyond me.

Overall Last Heroes 3 is an improvement over Last Heroes 2, but still nowhere up to the sloppy standard set by the original Last Heroes, much less an RPG that stands out from the crowd. If you're one of the few who played and enjoyed Last Heroes 1 and 2 but haven't yet bought Last Heroes 3, well, it won't disappoint you. But if like me, you thought Last Heroes 2 was a serious misstep, rest assured that Last Heroes 3 doesn't bring the series back on track. And if you haven't played any of the series, I recommend that you either start with Last Heroes 1, or better yet, don't bother with the series at all.

Last Heroes is an ultra-generic but enjoyable RPG. In short, Last Heroes 2 is the same, but without the "but enjoyable" part.

Perhaps Warfare Studios thought it was a problem that players could complete Last Heroes in 4 hours. That's the only explanation I can think of for the design choices they made with this game. No longer can you avoid enemy encounters; they're still touch-based, but now most enemies move like jack rabbits, dungeons are loaded with passages that are too narrow to go around enemies, and even the "escape" option in battle has been disabled. So fast is their movement, often times you'll be swarmed by multiple enemy encounters as soon as you enter an area. It would be laughable if it didn't mean wading through far more battles than you need to get your characters up to decent levels.

Compounding the problem is the insane amount of backtracking through dungeons. Now, I'm actually a proponent of backtracking; it can add depth to the challenge of conquering a dungeon, and it's usually more realistic, because honestly, if you make your way to the deepest reaches of a cave that's miles deep, you're going to have to find your way back. But it is possible for backtracking to be excessive and contrived, and in Last Heroes 2 it definitely is. Not only do you have to make your way both in and out of every dungeon (except the last one), going through all the unavoidable enemies both ways due to respawning, but you're commonly asked to re-enter dungeons in order to complete side quests or even progress the main story. That means you have to go through some dungeons four times.

All that repetition and requisite random battling means that Last Heroes 2 takes 6 hours to complete. So the game is 2 hours longer than Last Heroes at the price of having about ten times the tedium.

The story also takes a dive. The plot of Last Heroes was "Fight the evil overlord for the items of power." Generic, but at least it gives you a reason to care. The plot of Last Heroes 2-4 is "Go from place to place asking if anyone knows where Amelia's mother is, occasionally fighting some cultist you met five seconds ago." I sympathize with wanting to find the mother you've never met, but there are no stakes. If you never find her mother, Amelia will still have everything she had before. And while Viper wasn't a hugely interesting villain, at least he had a tangible motive, a strong association with the player characters, and a well-defined threat. The final boss of Last Heroes 2 (and of 4, for that matter) is just some vaguely evil guy with vaguely evil intentions that he might follow through on some day.

Last Heroes 2 is still a completely functional RPG, but one that's a drag to play through and never offers any payoff for the time investment.

I rather like Warfare Studios's RPG offerings Shining Plume 1 and 2 and Valiant: Resurrection; though they are RPGMaker games riddled with balance issues, they have deep and memorable stories and distinct character borne of obvious enthusiasm on the part of the developer.

Perplexingly, Last Heroes is the reverse of that. Almost everything about the game is not just generic, but so perfunctory that it feels like the developer hated RPGs and was pressured into making one. It's not just that the assets are all from the RPGMaker library. The town and dungeon designs are so bare bones that it's like the developer is saying to you, "Okay, there are your towns and your dungeons. Happy?" Your party members get character development, but just the minimum needed to make them actual characters rather than just names and stats and a profile picture from the RPGMaker library, and the NPCs get no development at all. The plot is a linear "chase the MacGuffin, beat the evil lord". The one real curve in the formula is the way the player characters are each introduced with their own individual adventure.

Yet Last Heroes is much more well-balanced than Shining Plume 1 and 2 (I wonder why, since Warfare made Plume later). Spells are effective (both your party's and the enemies'), item usage is necessary, and there's a genuine challenge. Little that would make an RPG veteran blink, mind you, but simply selecting "attack" every turn won't cut it in this game, and the three-phase final boss sequence is satisfyingly epic.

Moreover, the pace is so fast that things seem to move along at the blink of an eye compared to today's filler-loaded RPGs. The touch-based encounters are a big part of it; most enemies move slowly, so you can easily avoid most encounters and finish the final boss without even getting your characters past level 20. It took me four hours to finish Last Heroes on both my playthroughs, which in my experience is not long enough for the game's generic style to get dull.

So I'm recommending the game, but with the caveat that there are better offerings in the turn-based RPG field. Try Shining Plume, Valiant: Resurrection, Girlfriend Rescue, and too many more to list before turning to this one to satisfy your appetite. And whatever you do, don't get the Last Heroes bundle. The series took a huge dive in quality with Last Heroes 2 and never fully recovered. At the same time, the series recycles the formula of the first game to such an extent that you get nothing new out of 2-4. There's no cliffhanger at the end of Last Heroes 1 like the end of Shining Plume 1, just a dangling subplot which is not very intriguing (yet still manages to disappoint when it is resolved in Last Heroes 4). So Last Heroes 1 offers a complete experience, modest though that experience is.

As typical for Aldorlea Games, this is an RPGMaker-built game, but with pronounced survival horror elements: Your party spends the entire game trying to escape a haunted mansion, with no stores, a limited supply of items to acquire, and no inns or other cheap ways to restore HP (though skill points recover during battle, and some skills can heal HP).

The gameplay offers quite a bit of fresh air. You have the usual leveling up by getting experience points from battles, but you can also choose a special upgrade from a selection after defeating a boss, such as increasing a certain stat or increasing a skill to a different tier. The skills themselves are delightfully oddball while also useful. For instance, one does extra damage if the enemy is afraid, and another does a whole onslaught of hits to randomly selected foes.

Oh, and you have a whopping six party members. I've played dozens of RPGs over the years, but this is the first time I've seen that outside of a Tactical RPG. You'd expect having that many party members would make the battles too slow or too easy, or both, but the design avoids both those pitfalls. As many as your party members are, enemy parties at times outnumber them, and they can throw out plenty of hits. Once all commands are entered, combat animations play out so rapidly that it can actually be hard to follow what's going on. If you like being able to keep track of every move in a turn-based RPG, that may be a problem, but it certainly keeps the pace of battles nice and fast.

There are two difficulty modes, Illusion and Terror. Illusion is a bit easy once you figure out the game mechanics, but even then it's not so easy that you don't have to think about what you're doing. I wanted to try the game on Terror before writing this review, but life is so busy that I can't commit to that in the near future, and assuming there is a significant difference between Illusion and Terror, it's safe to say that this game offers sufficient challenge to those who want some.

In fact, in one sense the challenge is too steep. While the game involves little backtracking, there are a couple parts where it's difficult to figure out where you need to go next. In particular, after beating the spider boss you must return to a previous room, to a specific generic tile, and press the action button - without any hint whatsoever that you're supposed to do this. In fact, the resulting cutscene opens with the party members basically saying "What the heck do we do now?" That's too obscure even for a secret area, much less a required task to progress. And wandering around long corridors, fighting enemies you've since leveled beyond while you search for where to go next outright kills the pacing - a big problem in a horror game.

Which brings us to story and atmospherics. You can already see in the game's trailers that it has strong, distinctive character art and doom-laden music, the latter of which you may recognize as the same stock music used in Aldorlea's earlier Fortress of Hell. In fact, a number of assets are from Fortress of Hell, including the battle pacing, so if you've played that game you'll feel right at home. On the downside, it may be *too* familiar, and the character art could use more images; some party members only have one facial expression.

This is all the more a shame because the characters do have considerable depth. As you wander through the murky halls of the haunted house... or is it a castle?... you're increasingly teased with the characters' relationships and the mystery of the macabre world they've fallen into and why they're seemingly trapped there.

However, without spoiling anything, none of it ever pays off. At all. The ending is frustrating rather than scary, offering neither triumph for the characters you've worked to defend nor the slightest explanation of where they are or who their enemies are. I realize that copping out of any why or wherefore is a commonly accepted foible in the horror genre, but it is a foible nonetheless.

Still, the game has to be given credit for atmosphere. After viewing the disappointing ending, I turned off my computer, brushed my teeth, and strangely started to feel a bit... on edge. As I opened the door to my bedroom, the plastic covering for the suit hanging on the door rustled, and the sound made my insides clench with dread.

Stepping into my bedroom, I seriously considered whether there might be something evil inside my closet. It was a relatively cool night, so I turned the ceiling fan off. I got in bed, pulled the sheets over me... and soon conceded that I had to get back up and turn the ceiling fan back on, because the silence was just terrifying.

I'll leave you with that: Despite some considerable flaws, A Plunge into Darkness offers a spooky, often surrealistic, and haunting experience. Since that is, after all, its advertised selling point, it's worth a buy for those who want a horror RPG.

While it makes a few curious changes to the gameplay that you have to watch out for (e.g. Jun is now equipped with two swords instead of sword and shield, so if you give him only one sword he'll be at half strength), Shining Plume 2 is essentially a straight continuation of the original Shining Plume - not a sequel, but the second half of the game.

Thus, it is rather frustrating that, contrary to the original Shining Plume's prompting you to create an end-of-game save, Shining Plume 2 does not allow you to transfer any data from its predecessor. You have all the same characters, but they start over at level 1, and have to re-learn their skills. This makes no sense, particularly since in the undoubtedly rare occurence of someone playing Shining Plume 2 without having played Shining Plume, they'd quickly realize they need to go back and play Shining Plume to understand any of the story.

It's also disappointing that the original game's poor balance is even worse in Shining Plume 2. Bosses still do laughably little damage no matter how low-level you keep your characters. That is, except when they get a critical hit, which wipes out 80% of a character's HP. Bizarrely, Jun's regular attack does far more damage than any of his skills. The stat-buffing spells Hone and Buffer, already excessively useful in Shining Plume, are now modified so that they boost the entire party with a single casting. To top it off, the game's mansion sidequest allows you to acquire endgame equipment for your characters by the time you're 1/3 of the way through the game. Not that it matters much; boss and non-boss enemies are all so horrendously weak that you could probably beat the game with starting equipment.

Yet, when it comes to Shining Plume's strong point - the story - Shining Plume 2 does not disappoint. Once again you've got Working Designs-style pop culture references and fourth wall breaking, and once again it manages to do so without taking away from the game's dramatic weight. (With one exception, some uncomfortably self-deprecating humor before and after the final boss.)

In fact, in terms of drama Shining Plume 2 hits harder than ever, as we finally learn the truth of Jun's past in a heart-rending, even brutal scene. The script is consistently intelligent, heartfelt, witty, and just plain deep. The plot is engaging and unpredictable, and if you don't care about the characters by the end, you should question whether you are completely jaded on video game storytelling.

The gameplay also does get a couple of improvements. Gone are the mostly fun but unimaginative fetch quests of the original, replaced with the major side-project of restoring Jun's wrecked family manor. Undertaking this project involves gathering specialists from around the world and paying them to restore sections of the manor. Some of these sections contain shops and special services, some allow you to learn skills not available elsewhere, and some simply look cool. Most importantly, big projects like this give the player a greater sense of freedom and accomplishment than straightforward fetch quests.

Long story short: If you liked the original, this game won't let you down. It brings the epic story to a satisfying conclusion with all the breakneck pacing of the original (once again, a first playthrough took me just six hours).

Short version: This is a fun little RPG that is highly recommended to those who like turn-based combat and Working Designs-style scripts.

Details: The game does have some major weak points, one of them the lack of an instruction manual or tutorial. While I didn't find the controls too hard to figure out, I see that some of the negative reviews for the game were written by people who clearly did not know about the run button or thought the mouse is the only control option. In actuality, Shining Plume supports mouse, keyboard, or USB controller, with USB controller being the best option and mouse by far the worst.

Another major weak point is the balance. It's not just a matter of the game being way too easy; it's a matter of all the fearsomeness the story builds up in the bosses going down the drain because their strongest magic attacks do single-digit damage to characters with triple-digit HP. Even the final boss can barely scratch your party. You might think I over-leveled, but in fact I avoided a majority of non-boss enemies, completing the game with no one above level 14. Defensively the enemies are uninteresting as well; elemental weaknesses have little effect, so just use regular attacks on non-boss enemies, use your character's strongest special attacks on bosses, rinse and repeat.

Finally, the dungeons are lacking in mazes, puzzles, and traps to give them character. Mostly you run around enemies (encounters are touch-based), grab items from chests, and that's it.

But all that feels forgivable because of the excellent story content. Shining Plume is set in a fantasy version of feudal Japan, and ironically is steeped in more Japanese tradition and folklore than any Japanese-made RPG I've yet played. The setting is consistent and immersive.

The plot starts out conventionally enough, as you take control of a samurai tasked with protecting a beautiful and good-hearted princess. But the game plays with nearly every convention it introduces, while still treating all of them respectfully. I'll say no more to avoid spoilers.

Finally, the script evokes the Working Designs translations of the mid-1990s in its use of pop culture references, anachronisms, and breaking the fourth wall in the name of humor. However, unlike most Working Designs scripts (perhaps a better comparison would be to the TV series Moonlighting) it pulls the remarkable trick of doing these sorts of jokes without taking away from the story's dramatic potency. The humor is at times uproarious, but it doesn't stop you from feeling the somberness of the protagonist's fatalism, the menace of the assassin Naga, or the warmth of Akira's compassion. The cast all have distinctive, compelling characterizations which are never broken.

The game also benefits from some beautiful character art, atmospheric music, and fast pacing (my first playthrough took just 6 hours). Plus, in spite of the balance issues, the gameplay is just plain fun.

I advise against getting Shining Plume as a standalone purchase. Shining Plume 2 is in essence not a sequel, but the conclusion to this game. So unless you like the idea of being left with a cliffhanger, take advantage of the Shining Plume bundle.

I approached this game with some trepidation. I was intrigued by what I'd read of the gameplay and the atmosphere, but on the other hand, it was one of the big two video games which boosted sales of CD-ROM drives - the other one is Myst, and I agree with those who call Myst one of the worst games of all time. Well, the 7th Guest lived up to all my hopes, and then some, and substantiated none of my misgivings.

The story hooks you from the get-go; not only is it full of conventional intrigue, but it has the clever twist that the story sequences are not experienced as events in the here-and-now, but ghostly visions of past events. This enables you, in the first-person role of the game's protagonist (who is not identified until the end), to take on the role of a voyeur, viewing events throughout the Stauf mansion that all took place on one fateful night, some which no other person was privy to. The sum impression is of a dread fate looming: these events have already happened, and there's nothing you can do to alter them or prevent the final outcome.

The ending is, for me at least, a satisfactory payoff. It doesn't explain everything, but it works in the same way that supernatural horror in every media so often gets away with leaving no logical explanation. The acting is solid, and the game is peppered with bizarre ghostly visions to add to the overall creepiness.

The music is nothing short of terrific, setting just the right tone of inviting mystery while being melodically gratifying enough that I more than once just sat back happily enjoying the tunes.

All this would be for naught without gameplay that is at least endurable, and The 7th Guest comes in safely under par. Apart from navigating the Staur manor in the node-based manner seen in D, Lunacy, etc., the gameplay consists of an assortment of 19th century puzzles with no connection whatsoever to the story. Of course a strong link between gameplay and story is always appreciated, but this works just fine in The 7th Guest's case. More of an actual problem is that in many cases you're given no hint of what the objective of the puzzle is. This is especially embarrassing because several of the puzzles, while complicated in concept, offer just a few possible moves; as a result, I solved a few without ever figuring out how the puzzle works, including the final puzzle.

For the most part, though, the puzzles are quite well-balanced, and there's a good mixture of easygoing ones which still get the brain cells working and solid brain-teasers which challenge your mathematical and logic skills rather than your ability to pick up on obscure and/or vague clues. If you dig puzzle and riddle books and a good creepy story, The 7th Guest is a most satisfying experience.