_Triple Review:_ _Walthros [complete game],_ _Dimensions I [demo],_ _Motherland [demo]_

RinkuHero

So right now you're thinking: why two reviews for Walthros? Ohrrpgce Monthly and Septaweekly have never done this before. But this is a very special Ohrrpgce game -- for one, it's the first *finished* Ohrrpgce RPG that I actually like. I did like the finished games of Sheep Rancher and Arfenhouse 3, but those are not really RPGs; one is a mini-game and the other is a parody without gameplay. And yes, there were a few RPGs that were finished for the Ohrrpgce -- Ends of the Earth and Ends of the Earth 2 primarily, but they weren't very captivating for me, and in comparison with NES and SNES rpgs they fell rather short. Walthros, on the other hand, is the equal (in both story and design) to most professional rpgs, and exceeds many. So I thought it an important enough game to spread the word about.

Note also that PepsiRanger and myself didn't see eachothers' reviews until publication time. Reading his now, about a week after writing my review, I'll say that his review takes more of a Naturalist or Character-Driven perspective, whereas mine is more in the Romanticist tradition. In other words, he emphasizes interesting characters and world, I emphasize plot and philosophical theme (although of course neither of us ignores the elements the other focuses on). So reading both will give you more of an idea about what to find in the game than reading either one alone.

This is actually a triple review: Walthros, Dimensions 1, and Motherland are all reviewed in one document. The first part is about Walthros alone, the second part is about Dimensions 1 alone, the third part is about Motherland alone, and the concluding part is a summary.

It has several things to recommend it: it's one of the few finished Ohrrpgce games (and probably the best of those that are finished), one of the longest (8 hours for me, with only half the side-quests finished) and its own walkthrough*** on its site*** (so you don't get stuck, which might happen without it); it uses music from Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Handel, and Liszt, as well as a few made just for this game; it has one of the most original worlds in an Ohrrpgce game (complete with history timeline); it has a large and diverse cast of characters, with fairly good character design (all the characters are animal-like in the Charbile-esque way, the TMNT-esque way, not the naturalistic way); and it has a competently written, and at times very well written, story.

It also has a many very minus points: its map or exploration gameplay is almost nonexistent (it even has the cliche of block puzzles, although to be fair it had one original mini-game); its battle gameplay, while balanced, is stale and unoriginal, and lacking the challenge of its earlier demo; its graphics are horrendous (its author says the graphics are "unique and fresh", but I just can't buy that -- the graphics may have had a lot of *work* put into them, but that doesn't mean they are pretty or distinct); its music is translated into the .bam format horribly (with what seems like no insrument adjustment or time spent in the conversion); its music that is original is really bad (and one of them, the abysmal battle and victory themes, you hear several hundred times through the game); and there is a bug near the end which allows you only to bring 3 characters out of your dozen+ characters to the final battles unless you collect all the optional characters (this bug was claimed to be fixed in the FAQ for the game, but it still showed up for me).

So the game has high peaks and low valleys, so it's like a cracked jewel; but I ask you, what original game, made by one person, doesn't have some low valleys? Almost everyone has some areas of ability which they haven't yet mastered, and are progressed less in than others. I'm simply warning you of the bad points ahead of time, so that when you play it (which you should), you won't say "you didn't tell me about this flaw!". But the reason to play it is for its good points -- the bad points are just obstacles in the way of enjoying the good points, but they aren't reasons not to play the game. To me, any game that has at least one good point, something of value, something that it does better than other games, is worth playing -- no matter how many flaws, it if has that one thing of value, it's worth it. And Walthros has several things that make it worth it. I'll try to restrict the rest of the review to talking about its good points. This doesn't mean I excuse the bad points, it just means I don't think them worth talking about except in reference to the good points. This isn't a critique or advise on how he could make it better (although I could write one of those very well), this is a review on why someone might want to play it.

The game itself is huge for an Ohrrpgce game, although small compared to console-style RPGs: it is around 10 hours long for most players (I play faster than average because I've played hundreds of Ohrrpgce games). And, it's complete! It has an ending, it's all play-tested, and it's not going to be updated (except maybe for bugfixes), so unlike most Ohrrpgce games it won't make your play-through obsolete in a few months. You won't get stuck half way through the game, because there it has its own 40-page guide, written by the author, in case you need it. The number of locations is staggering: there are 12 chapters, some with more than one town and exploration area. There is a huge world, an airship-type vehicle, a base to reorganize your numerous allies, and lots of secret options. 

However, note that it might get boring going though all that, considering the actual game part of the game is weak (but not uniformly, it was fun in some parts, particularly the middle of the game onward, when you have to select your party for each new area), but I found myself playing this game in the same way I played the Playstation game Kartia: I couldn't stand the battles, and got through them as quick as possible, but I always looked forward to the next story-scene. This is not a good thing for a professional game to do, and I'm not saying that the story "makes up" for the lack of gameplay. But I am saying that if you are going to play Walthros, you're going to look forward to progressing the story more than you do to the battles. The author explicitly said that he made this game "To tell a story, and to express my strange, twisted mind." He didn't make the game to make a game, he made the game to tell a story. This isn't exactly rational (he could have put it in comic or book format, or even Ohrrpgce format without a gameplay system), but understand that this was the focus when making it, to tell a story, not to make a game. This is an older paradigm, and the newer one of making games for the sake of the game instead of for the sake of the story is very rarely seen (I can think of only three Ohrrpgce game authors, myself, Moogle1 and Cube, who actually make the game for the sake of the game, rather than for the sake of the story). I am writing this with one goal in mind: to warn you of the danger of making a game for the story of the game. The very term game tells you the story is secondary, only a part of the whole. If it is crippled by a bad game, it's not going to be fun. Waltros wouldn't be the same in comic book or book format, or without a gameplay system in the Ohrrpgce, but it would have been easier on the player/reader. The bottom line is: if you are going to tell a story in game format, make sure the game is worth playing. Otherwise it's the equivalent of putting prizes in cereal boxes when you don't like the cereal and are just buying and eating the tasteless the cereal for the prize inside.

On that note, if you are going to put music in a game, make sure it's enjoyable. There is an option to turn the music off (both in the game itself with the Volume control and on your speaker with the off-on control), so I recommend you make use of that. Even if you, like me, like classical music, it's still better WinAmp in the background with that type of music playing (I have all the songs used in this game in midi format), because that would work better than what's in the game. The only real problem with the selection is the conversion to .bam. Specplosive wrote a great article on how to convert music to .bam in the last issue, but its advise isn't used much yet. What I'd really like to see a re-release of the game with better conversion of the music to .bam format -- the music is too good to be left in crippled form. The conversion is only half the problem, the other half is the battle music, or should I say, "music". Like most amateur music, it's discordant and grating on the ears. If I could change *one* thing about this game, like one wish on a magic lamp, it would be to change the battle music. I'm sure it deters more players than any other single element of the game.

But back to the point of this review. The following has spoilers of the story, so stop here if you are convinced you are going to play the game. If you don't mind knowing a bit of the story beforehand, and if you still aren't convinced the game is worth playing, read on.

The world of Walthros is greatly imaginative. Unfortunately, like most imaginative worlds, it wasn't created with a specific theme, so the creations of it appear a bit haphazard, without an organizing principle besides the general idea of animality and the eternal recurrance idea also seen in the Ancient Greeks and Nietzsche. But it is still imaginative, and worth living in, temporarily, for the 10 hours or so that you will live in it. So I'd say it's at an equal level with most mediocre to good fantasy-world creators (examples: J.R.R. Tolkein, Terry Brooks, Terry Goodkind, Dr. Suess, William Goldman, Frank Baum, Isaac Asimov, Fred SaberHagen, Stephen King), but it's not in the first-class of imaginativity and artistry as far as fantasy-worlds are concerned (examples: Peter Beagle, Stephen R. Donaldson, Orson Scott Card, C.S. Lewis, George Orwell). So if you liked at least one of the authors in the first of those groups, you'll probably like this imaginative world to some extent.

The characters of Walthros are basically part of the imaginative world, with the exception of Bob Surlaw, the older Surlaw, Super Walrus Man, Dinosaur Triple, Woo, and the Blue Spirit. But everyone else is either part of the the fantasy setting or plays too minor a role to be of note. The other playable characters are usually of the representational class: there is a seal that represents the Walthrosian seals, there is a worm that represents the Dunzian Worms, there are five mice that represent the Rodentian Mice, and so on. There is no villian of the game besides the Blue Spirit.

Bob Surlaw is the main character, a fish (boo!), not a teenager (yay!), uses swords (boo!), and is a summoner (yay!). He's the new incarnation of the older Surlaw, who created all life on the planet (yay!) and split his soul into 5 pieces altruistically (boo!). Super Walrus Man fights for Justice (yay!), is a genetic experiment created for war who overcomes this (yay!), is slightly crazy (boo!), but is overall the most noble character (yay!). Dinosaur Triple is made up of Dinosaur Giant (yay!), Dinosaur Super (boo!), and Dinosaur Micro (yay!), each of which has their own individuality, but together operate as an interesting group, with each compensating for the weaknessess of the others. Woo is deceitful (boo!), wants to be a singer (yay!), and is knowledgeable about the world (yay!) through some unknown mystic means (boo!). The Blue Spirit is the only really good villian in the game besides Dr. Mu (the cliche Dr. Lugae-style mad scientist).

The story itself, apart from world and characters, has high, medium, and low points. Its defense of rationality in the form of a conversation between Dinosaur Super and Dinosaur Giant was beautiful. It had a genius trick convincing you it deleted your .sav files, which even fooled me and my 5 years of experience with the Ohrrpgce for a second. And last and best, after a long line of gradual transigent Kiekgaardian-Wittgensteinian insertations which appeared throughout the game in increading numbers, it has a nice refutation of existentialism near the end (I'll leave Surlaw's actual refutation out so as not to ruin the ending) which was for me the high point of the game (and it actually came at the climax of the game, you don't see that happening every day). 

The medium points were a few things that are unrelated to the story and just placed in haphazardly, however: an attack on industrialization, an attack on on corporations, . While these arguments have validity, they were too unattached to the rest of the story to be integrated with it without the feeling of crumpled rinkles.

It also has a few serious errors, which give the story a few cracks, foremost among them is dualism. This dualism is seen again in several dozen places in the game, and almost forms one of the backbones of the story. That's no excuse, however -- dualism is evil wherever it rears, whether in Walthros, in Platonism, in Christianity, or in Final Fantasy 7 and 10, and we fight it here as everywhere. A second serious error, also seen in several places throughout the game, is an attack on selfishness and arrogance. Of course, where you see dualism you also usually (but happily not always) see altruism, so it didn't surprise me. And aside from those more evil flaws, there are also one or two spelling mistakes in the game -- I don't mean typos, I mean words that are consistently misspelled the same way over and over. Spelling a word wrong once is okay, I can filter that out, but seeing it 5 or 6 times being misspelled the same way is annoying, and weakens the suspention of disbelief necessary to enjoy a fantasy world. And it did have one bug that let you bypass a particular boss.

While the writing quality is literate, it is slightly unpolished. There are a few times when cliché leaps with teeth out from cliché-land (or wherever it is they live). Some of these cliches are just stumbling imps, but a few of them are hostile monsters which travel in predatory flocks. I just chalk that up to the current philosophical void, so I don't really hate things like this conversation between Woo and Super Walrus Man as much as I would in a human qua human world.

So, I shall proclaim that the artistic apptitude of the dialogue writing is unstable, but shows rough promise. Despite dualism, altruism, spelling, and inconsequential and ad hoc additions, at certain moments, and other moments, and yet more moments, the author (Paul Harrington) shines brilliant flashes in your eye -- like a kid with a flashlight pointed at you, trying to get you to look away from what you are doing and up at more interesting things -- the flashlight in these moments having a brightness unequaled to any other flashlight on the Ohrrpgce thus far.

If you are going to try this game at all, the reasons for doing so would be its gameplay gimmicks. Let me list them: it has a 'statistic table' which works much like, but is generally inferior to, the Final Fantasy X sphere grid; it has an interesting battle command setup; it has fairly good maptiles (of interest to those looking to learn that skill).

But be warned about its weaknesses: it has sub-par (read: "average") story, sprites, dialogue, character design, imaginary world, and textbox formatting; and it is only about an hour and a half long.

As I did in Walthros above, I'll just talk about the positive reasons to play it, and treat the others as obstacles in the way.

I once recommended my Moogle1-Rinku game Knight of the Ages for only one reason: its Summon system. There is just no other summon system in the Ohrrpgce with its level of complexity, and so it's a one virtue game: learn how to do a fancy battle gimmick. I can recommend Dimensions I for the same reason: except that it has two things to learn: the statustics table system and the battle command system. I'll explain both.

As a result of defeating enemies you gain shards and movement points -- you use these on a table, and select stat upgrades for your characters. It sounds like a good idea, and it is. It's plotscripted fairly well too. The only problem is that it isn't implemented well -- you can actually beat the demo without using it once, and quite easily (as an aside, you can also beat Final Fantasy X without using its sphere grid once -- see a FAQ on how to do this on GameFaqs). So it's a good system but isn't actually used in the game too well (at least not yet).

The battle command system works like this: each weapon you buy comes along with its own special attack. So one weapon has something called Animalstrike, another weapon has something that lets you increase your speed, another weapon allows you to steal, and so on. This is a fairly good idea as well, and is used better than the last idea. Unfortunately, there are only about 4 weapons in the demo, so the value of this idea is pretty low right now.

I also want to point out another minor good idea, which is characteristic of Cube: when you get an item that will teach you a magic spell, you can opt to use it up and learn the spell, or to equip it and get some stat bonuses. This is an interesting choice to make and adds to the gameplay well (although one small bug I found in this is that the Cure+ spell doesn't disappear when I teach it to my characters.)

In summary, though, good ideas don't make good games; there is a big difference between having a good idea for a game and making a good game out of it. Walthros wasn't just a good idea, it was a good game (with some weaknesses which I pointed out in its review). Dimensions 1 is currently in the 'good idea' stage. It has no story worth mentioning (except for once nice character description), and no overall purpose and plan; it's more like a technology demo, similar to many of Moogle1's games. It can be a good game, but not unless it gains some good overall planning, loses the obvious story format imitation of Final Fantasy X (a game not even worth imitating),  and elaborates the vague, unfolded ideas in the demo into a solid, concrete game. Until then, I can't recommend downloading it except for the few gameplay tricks it has in it.

If you are going to try out this game, the reason for doing so would be to see one of the few Ohrrpgce games with a consistently good graphical look. The maptiles and the battle backrounds especially. The portraits are not of a consistent style (compare this, this, and this), but are nice nonetheless.

You won't enjoy the game for the game or story, even though it does have a game and a story. I think what happened here is what happens with most bad professional rpgs -- that the project progressed too far without explicitly deciding how it was going to distinguish itself from other games. In the professional arena, this could makes sense; the purpose may be only to wring some more money out of people by making a dishonestly derivative product (similar to how there are about a million clones of Dragon Warrior in Japan). But, at least to me, the point of making nonprofessional games is to do something different than what everyone else has already done, something that no professional company would dare make due to the risks involved. Something like a person who is tranformed from a tennis player into a hero is named after a deoderent, or a floating fish and a crazy walrus who wind up disintegrating existentialism, or a group of 8-bit heroes who wind up returning technology to the world, or even just a remake of an old game with new twists. So when I see games that feel too cloney, that feel like they take parts of a dozen other games and put them together in random order and hope something appears, I can hardly stand to play through them. This is the case here, but only for the story and the gameplay. The graphics do not suffer from this cloney-ness at all.

I think this is a variation of the flaw of Origin and Lolsidothaldremobine. Origin and Lolsidothaldremobine are games that have original, interesting stories, but have rehashed or amateur gameplay and graphics. In Motherland, we see original, interesting graphics, but rehashed and amateur gameplay and story (and in all of these cases, note that I'm only going by what I see in the demos, whether the story and gameplay will be changed in future games is irrellivent for the purpose of reviewing this particular demo -- just as in my review of Dimensions 1, and in any other unfinished game demo I review, I have to review what I have here to play, not a potential or a might-be). 

In Origin, for example, the game went on and on, for about 5 hours, and it was all story. The gameplay didn't get any better, the graphics didn't get any better, the music didn't get any better, but the story was just continuing and continuing, good as always. It would have been nice if the author had just stopped a bit, put the story on hold, and planned the other areas of the game to equal the story's quality (it's a *game* afterall, not a novel -- although currently the author of that game has switched completely to novel-writing, a wise choice I believe). 

Similarly, this game goes on, the graphics are as good as always, but the gameplay and the story are just as ugly as ever. There is even an entire worldmap set up. The story isn't completely idiotic (although it does have one insane premise), it can be salvaged, but it needs to move faster. In a good novel, if you read it for four hours, countless events have occured, and you're pretty deep into the plot structure. In Final Fantasy 6, after playing it for four hours, you know the characters pretty well, and have seen a couple of great scenes that you'll remember forever. In Motherland, after playing it for four hours, you know almost as little about the characters as you did before you began the game, simply because they have done nothing but smash bandits and other baddies for all that time (and maybe give a beggar some change and banter about apparel here and there).

And speaking of that smashing, it's very repetitive smashing. It almost makes the NES game Destiny of an Emperor's battles fun (although it is a step above most Ohrrpgce battles -- but as a wise man once said to me, better than the worst is not good).

That aside, it really does have some nice graphics work in it. Everything from the title screen to the enemy graphics is near the top notch of the Ohrrpgce games I've played. If you want to better your graphics skills, give it a download, otherwise skip.

One parting note: we now know that Char[-bile] is a Communist Villain.