C9 Review IGMC 2015 Submission: Ikenie
Cloud Rating:
I loved this game and hated it at the same time. I'm actually still a little pissed off at it as I'm writing this so I'll do my best not to let my seething anger at that stupid last boss not affect my review of this stupid game... GRRRRR!
We're greeted with a non-traditional title screen which is pretty neat. It's more of an animated, intro movie thing. Problem is that it only shows once. As soon as you start the game and the autosave feature kicks in (Finally! A game with autosave!) then any time you load the game up later it completely skips the title scene and takes you directly where you last left off. This could be good, could be bad. If I wanted to let anyone else play this on my system, I'd have to go through the motions of unihding a hidden folder simply to delete or move the save file so that someone else can start fresh. Hopefully that will be fixed in a future update.
Starts off easily enough. I am a little robed guy. No idea who I am, where I am, or why I'm there. All I know is some other robed guy gave me a bone. What am I supposed to do with this? Apparently ghosts are weak against large, thigh-looking bones. (I'll have to remember that the next time one of my seances go wrong.)
So I whack a few ghosts and a portal appears. And that's how the game begins. Very odd intro.
Eventually I find a sword to whack monsters, ghosts, and baddies with instead of a bone, so that's nice.
The controls are pretty difficult to get accustomed to. I wish there were a keyboard button press to initiate the sword swing. That was kind of annoying but after I got the hang of it, it wasn't so bad. The interesting thing about this game is how they manipulated the engine and base RTP graphics of the RPG Maker program to create really neat visual effects. Being an RM developer myself, my interest was highly piqued on how the different effects were created (Nicolas, if you would share your magician's secrets with another magician, this magician would really appreciate it!).
Now, I wasn't really following along with any storyline until the very end. All I noticed was the witty banter every now and then as I was walking around trying to figure out what the hell to do while avoiding ghosts.
I appreciated the fact that when you die, you just respawn at the last weird little respawn, crypt area and when you ported back into the fray, you jump right back in where you left off. The only thing that I really didn't like was having to pick up my weapon and kill those little ghosties at the beginning again just to get my HP back up all the way so the portal would open. I didn't understand the point of that. Maybe just to punish the player somehow for starting over? If so, it worked. Even though I knew that if I died it wouldn't really matter, I HATED dying mainly because I'd have to go through that whole ordeal again.
The difficulty level of this game is IMMENSE. I played it through twice. The first time I barely got to the Vampire without destroying my laptop from fits of rage. This has been, by far, the hardest game I've played from the IGMC thus far. Once you figure out the tricks (which you get no obvious hints for) it's really not all that difficult. Problem is, most fights are nearly impossible without doing something very specific that you have to figure out on your own with very little time to figure it out.
Great example is that vampire SOB. I HATE that guy so much! That was where my first ragequit was.
Now this is a good case of having to figure out the tricks without any hints.
SPOILER ALERT
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APPARENTLY if you shoot your magic into the mirror in the upper left corner of the map, it'll reflect back. If it hits you, you actually gain HP immediately. Wish I had known that before I abused my poor laptop. (Sorry baby. I'll get you a new SSD, you forgive me?)
I couldn't finish off the final boss, unfortunately. I started getting just as frustrated with him as I did with the vampire so after about 8 or 9 attempts I just closed my laptop and rubbed my ears saying "Woooosaah" to myself over and over.
The creativity of this game is off the wall. The way everything is stitched together and the neat visual effects really creates a great atmosphere of... weirdness. I was reminiscing of Yume Nikki while playing at times with how odd everything was playing out.
The originality will definitely go into the game type to earn it a cloud. The graphics looked mostly standard RTP but the manipulations of the graphics and the gameplay were definitely something else. The black/white ghost fight made me so dizzy and disoriented I was literally spinning my head in circles trying to keep up with where I was going. That's just one of the very cool, original concepts I saw in this release.
I ALMOST don't want to count the fun factor worthy of a cloud. Only because I think I was more mad at the game than I was happy with it. Then I realized, that didn't make it not fun. The fun part was overcoming these obstacles that at times seemed impossible to overcome. To finally laugh in that STUPID vampire's dying face when I finally dispatched him. Although I was mad at the game, it was a FUN mad.
Sorry, but I won't be replaying this game. The first go-round is great! Figuring out how to get through the different aspects of the game is a real learning experience. However, once you've figured it out, there isn't really much of a challenge anymore. This paired with the linear storyline makes it not worthy of the replayability cloud.
So, for all these reasons, this RAGE INDUCING game deserves 3 clouds!
