Reply With QuoteI salute you for taking the plunge on a game that on the surface looks incredibly appealing. Keep plugging away and let us know if there's a game here or not.
It's an rpg! It's an adventure game! It's a simulator! It is a game about you attending the Hogwarts school for wizards and witches. Well, ok, it's not about Hogwarts per se. I'm pretending it is, though.
So where does Impulse store manuals again? I may have to check the game's homepage tonight to see if there is any online documentation. It needs documentation. Badly. Well, that and an interface overhaul. I haven't gotten very far. The character creation process is very detailed. And it's here that the interface fails the player.
You get 10 points. These 10 points can be divided up amongst dozens and dozens of things. You can spend no more than 5 on your innate ability scores, which each start at one. You can also spend it on things like educational background, a starting familiar, your family history. There are something like 7 or 8 sections where points can be spent. And it is bewildering. Some choices will cancel out other choices in the set. But you are often chosing from something like 10ish things, with the somewhat small display area for the choices needing to be scrolled to see them all. Call that problem the first; there is plenty of room to display the entire list.
Problem the second? You can select something to see what it imparts. There's flavor text and then a list of the exact bonuses you gain. But it's in an exceptionally scrunched display area, so you usually have to scroll that box to see the bonuses. Absurd. Again, there is a crapload of real-estate available, there's no reason why the bonuses shouldn't be always on display.
Problem the third is the process in general. It's a wizard. But you can't see your overall progress in the wizard, you just spend points on a given page and then hit the "next" button, unsure of where the end is. So you might spend your 10 points on the first 4 screens only to discover you have like 4 more screens with options waiting. And maybe some of those will be better? So then you're looking at all the options in the section (typically involving some scrolling of the "options" list and lots of scrolling of the "description of the option" box. Character creation in Academagia is hard work). And some of these things provide 3-5 statistical boosts. And you're hitting forward/back and trying to decide what's the best choice. And then you realize. . .
Problem the fourth: you don't really have the slightest idea what the hell you are doing. Oh, if something says "strength + 1", you know it'll give you + 1 strenght. But a lot of these things boost skills. What skills? You can't see them in the character creation wizard. Once you get in game, you'll find dozens and dozens. And many skills have sub skills. It appears to be a deep/complex system. But you can't see what you've accumulated bonuses in during creation (I don't think you can even see which abilities will be boosted).
One of the last sections of character creation is chosing your house and class schedule. Again there are dozens of subjects (and I think ~10 houses).
And speaking of in-game, your wizard has something called "phemes". They're apparently the result of certain character creation choices. There's a luck stat but also a "lucky" pheme. I wound up with 7, including some that appear they might be negative. I'm not sure I understand the usage of the term "pheme" here. Anyway, it's not clear that you'll be getting all of these during creation. Which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, per se. But character creation as it exists is far too confusing for the player. So I needs a manual. I spent over a half hour in the game yesterday and I felt exhausted at the end (and went to play Rise of Legends instead), and I barely did anything with either of my created characters.
To come: tonight I hope to meaningfully play the game.
I salute you for taking the plunge on a game that on the surface looks incredibly appealing. Keep plugging away and let us know if there's a game here or not.
Dammit!!! I meant to get this first and pot about it, but WoW enveloped me this weekend. :D Also, I was not keen on the $24.99 price point and that contributed to my reticence.
Thanks for the early impressions. Keep us up to date.
I've had a full copy for a while. Prodded at it a little, bounced off the surface, went "hmm" and decided to save it for going to have a look another time.
No, it doesn't do a particularly good job at explaining himself though. I think it's a brilliant idea for a Princess-Maker clone, however.
KG
I don't think there is any question. Who doesn't want to play a fantasy adventure where you attend magic school and have adventures and shit? It's a terrific setup for a game.Originally Posted by KieronGillen
Do it like Bully plz.
A wiki/manual (strictly speaking, a wiki that appears to house the manual among other things. I guess).
I'll be reading this some tonight and tomorrow, and getting back to the game tomorrow night.
Man, I wish I had the patience to do that. I mean, take more than an hour to skim and then just dive in, lost. ;)
This game sounds awesome, and I've just bought it. I won't have time to play it right now, unfortunately, but thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I'm faintly amused that the official site suggests this as being suitable for 9+, if it's as complex as you say, peacedog.
This sounds fantastic, though. In terms of having billions of skills with little idea of what's important, it reminds me of an ancient game called Defender of Boston which I loved dearly despite having next to no idea what's going on, so that doesn't put me off anywhere near as much as it should (although judging from the screens of this, it's got way, way, way more.)
I'm so in love with the idea that I might pick this up tomorrow despite a complete lack of disposable cash. Loads of work to do this week, but if I take the plunge and get time to squeeze a few hours in, I'll post up some impressions.
As of right now the wiki is roughly as helpful as a second asshole right next to my elbow.
Yeah, not a classic 9-year old, shall I say.
I've got a couple of thousand words of impressions going up on RPS in 40 minutes, which give a load of stuff. In short: FUCKING UI.
KG
Fucking UI is right.
I bet journalists hate it when you grab a sentence fragment and quote it out of context.
"It’s the Fallout of Princess Maker games."
This is something that hits me right where I live, I fucking love Princess Maker 2 and return to it year after year, but without a demo I'm not pulling the trigger. Not at $25.
I'm intrigued by this but the cynic in me is guessing this is an overly complex choose-your-own-adventure wrapped in a bad UI.
Looks very cool. I don't really care about the UI as long as it's usable. However I do want to hear a bit more about the gameplay, positive or negative, before I pull the trigger on purchasing this. I looked around for reviews but they were all pretty useless.
So someone give me some more impressions already! :-)
For the lazy....Here are Kieron's impressions.
Ahh, somehow I missed that. Thanks!
Keiron is pretty much spot on. It feels like there is an interesting game in Academagia, somewhere. It's just absurdly complicated. And it's impossible to get all the information you want without a ton of work. Nevermind the RSI complaints (absolutely valid, don't get me wrong). It's so much mental work to figure out what you want to do and how you want to do it that it just sucks the fun out of the game. I feel like I'd be better off if I could just set a few "attend classes" activities and have the rest be chosen at random.
Also, when you're in an "event", sometimes they have a shitload of descriptive text (the worst had 13 pages, where a page was maybe 6-8 sentences). The key choice events tend to have less in my very limited experience, but it would be easy to miss details especially since the text is rather scrunched at higher resolutions. The description text is trying to be a book about Hogwarts (et al). Its too much and doesn't fit.
Also, when chosing your actions the choices themselves are color coded. I have no earth idea what the codes mean. I assume red is bad since the two times I've been stuck with red (other choices failing but not ending an event) I've failed. I can't tell the difference between blue or purple, though (also, green is apparently "leave it a lone", which seems like an odd color choice for a neutral, "exit" response).
And I can't begin to imagine trying to track relationships with each individual student - there appear to be dozens in each of the 8 or 10 or whatever houses. And I'm not even sure if I'm seeing *every* student or the ones in my year. I couldn't find my mentor (I half suspect she's a plot character, but I don't know that) when trying to find someone to gossip with, for example.
I managed to squeeze in some play time yesterday, and I agree with most of Kieron's complaints. I find the fact that a sub-skill can sometimes be hard to find very annoying, and it's hard to keep track of skills/locations/spells/phemes and so on.
However, the game is perfectly playable, as long as you don't try min-maxing your way through it, and it definitely has a lot of soul, if you don't mind reading the text. If you do mind reading a lot of text, this probably isn't for you.
I imagine that the replayability factor must be off the chart, considering the amount of events. In this sort of game, I usually start seeing the same events after a while, but after about 10 hours or so this still hasn't happened. I am a bit annoyed, though, that random events don't seem to be tied to whatever you're doing when they happen (I've gotten several class-related events on weekends, for example).
@Peacedog: As far as I understand it, the colours in the events tell you how likely you are to succeed at that action: red is almost impossible, purple is unlikely, black is 50/50, blue is likely and green is almost certain.
Keeping track of relationships is pretty easy, actually, since you can sort people by relationship, in the relationship list. Also, I believe that it only lists professors and students of your year, which is why the mentor isn't there.
Really long post ahead, beware. If you're a TLDR type, then: yeah, everyone's right.
I'm actually starting to understand the 9+ age thing, now, in that if a 9 year old can stomach 13 pages of text for one of the first events they'd probably kinda enjoy it. Thanks to the interface it's really not a game that lends itself well to attempting to understand the entire thing and work around the system, but if you're capable of deciding "I want to be the sort of wizard who's really good at Incantation and sneaking around being a dick with practical jokes!" and then focusing on that, then you'll likely enjoy it.
What makes it really annoying is that there are some obvious tweaks that would make it a hell of a lot easier to play around with. The ability to alphabetically sort subskills, for instance, rather than having them hidden away in their parent tree. A display for the level you have a subskill at when you're looking at a choice that uses it. The ability to set a default weekly calendar of your own, so that you can make minor tweaks as things require them rather than, every week, going "Okay, we'll study Negation then, and then we'll skip class to do this, and then instead of resting on Wednesday we'll talk to this person..." and having to navigate the goddamn sub-trees and skill lists every single time.
Pretty much every problem I have with the UI is tied to the skills, because there are so damn many. I've probably got 15-20 parent trees, right now, and I know I haven't unlocked all of them because more keep popping up. Each of these appears to have 3 or 4 subskills attached, and again, I know there are subskills I don't yet have access to because I keep learning more. It's ludicrous, and there's no easy way to sort through the fucking things. Even a search box would help, and normally I'd hate a game using such an inelegant method every time I wanted to find something. It's hard to tell how important half of these are, too - is there some reason we couldn't have squeezed a few of the Arithmetic ones together? Do we really need Arithmetic Theory and History of Arithmetic, along with two others?
I'm curious as to the replayability myself, and whether or not there are sufficient events that you won't see them repeat that much in second or third playthroughs; I've already seen one event repeat. That said, I am utterly astonished at some of the attention to detail. As an example, you get the option during character creation to choose a familiar, and I decided to go with the "exotic" option, which apparently assigns you one of around 20 random familiars as opposed to Cat, Owl, Rat, etc. I ended up getting a Shade - basically a living shadow. Kinda cool, but not something I thought would have that much of an impact.
Apparently, this Shade has a unique Adventure tied to it. At first, I figured it would be the same for any familiar, with "owl" switched to "Shade," but apparently not - the fact that it's a Shade is inextricably tied to the Adventure, from mentions of enchanted torches through to its incorporeal nature and the way it deals with a guard, which is Dementor-level creepy. If the game really has this many Adventures tied to little choices and decisions, then...
It helps that it's pretty well written, too, albeit again in a slightly pulpy Harry Potter way, and it's nice that the characters appear to be genuine characters. Unlike, say, Kudos, everyone seems pretty individual and they all have their own agendas. A few times, people I'm friends with have cast beneficial spells on me (which is only visible if you trawl through the end of day report, admittedly) while I've got a nice rivalry going on with one of the dickheads in another house.
Despite everything that's great, I can't overstate how utterly horrible the UI is. It's kinda hard to qualify how "good" it is because I'm pretty much just going with the flow, but I'm enjoying myself. This is absolutely not for everyone, though - I think it takes a certain mentality to actually have fun with it. I'm probably making it sound more fun than it is, but it's certainly got that "just one more turn" quality.
Damn, Kieron makes that game sound awesome, yet incredibly frustrating :(
Having not skipped out on this one, I am going to tell others to do so. There is a bit of an acquired taste thing going, and the interface is bad. Not bad in a lacking in aesthetical appeal way, but bad as it does a horrible job conveying information to player. The gameplay is almost entirely text based, and the text was to small for my not that small CRT monitor.
However, the biggest complaint I am going to throw at the game is I never got a feel for my character. What does an Intelligence score of 3 versus 1 actually mean? I think if they had taken more of an RPG character sheet approach to character creation and representation, a lot of the gameplay would fall into place. That, and there is just to much going on and not enough depth anywhere. Fewer, but more interesting adventures would have made the game stronger.
Well, poop. Having no time due to re-addiction to WoW, looks like it means my submersion in that game saved me $25 on this one.
Oh, you know what else I do not care for? It isn't just that the AI is convoluted, burying a million important details in a million places. Or that it makes terrible use of screen real-estate.
Some of the key buttons (like "comfirm orders") aren't responsive. Maybe this is a problem local to me, but I click that area but I get nothing, not an animation indicating I clicked a button or a cursor change indicating magic is happening. This drives me crazy.
Well, I don't want to double post, but it turns out Academagia is a .net Application with the UI done in WPF. And it's supposed to be moddable.
I bought this on sale, remembering full well that you guys didn't recommend it, and now I totally see what you mean. SO MUCH STUFF. Everywhere! What does it mean? WHAT DOES IT MEAN???
Holy crap, you're not kidding about the wiki. It's just a mess of game terms all linked to each other.
Here's a manual for anyone interested.
I bought this for my wife on the sale yesterday, but didn't see this thread until today. I'm going to stay quiet about this thread until after she gets her own first impressions. This should be interesting....
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