Reviewed: March 12, 2006
Reviewed by: Jason Porter

Publisher
Amaranth Games

Developer
Amaranth Games

Released: February 20, 2006
Genre: RPG
Players: 1
ESRB: N/A

4
4
7
6
5.5

System Requirements

Nowadays, the mid-nineties style RPG is a rarity, its 2D sprites outdated and its turn-based battles lambasted as unbearably boring by many game reviewers when it turns up in a new title. However, for many, those games remain representative of some of the best the game industry has ever had to offer. These mid-school "Japanese style" RPG’s still maintain a rabidly loyal fan following, and command premium prices on collector's markets.

Aveyond, a new RPG from independent developers Amaranth Games, is nominally cast from the same mold as this type of game. Featuring vibrant 2D graphics, a long and involved storyline, a wide cast of characters and a deliciously traditional battle system, Aveyond seems as if it is poised to carry the torch for the classic RPG community, at least at first glance. But is this game the new crown prince of "mid-school" RPG’s, or just a pretender to the throne?

As simple as all that sounds, Aveyond unfortunately maps the commands to odd keys, making it difficult to get used to the game's control scheme. Both Spacebar and Enter serve as an action button, but the only cancel button I found was, oddly, the Insert key on my extended keyboard. Directions are controlled via the directional keys. This setup can be dealt with fairly well, considering that Aveyond is a turn-based RPG with no action or timing elements to speak of. However, allowing users to map their own preferred hotkeys would have been a welcome addition.

The game world is divided into a world map, which is not seen too often except when traveling great distances, and several very large, seamless areas to adventure in. I liked this approach because it allowed for a greater level of detail than just having a representative world map, but still retained the map's ability to convey a larger world. In some respects, this aspect of the game's design is similar to the Squaresoft classic Chrono Trigger, except that the action areas in Aveyond are generally larger and feel more like a whole countryside rather than one small part of it.

As previously noted, Aveyond's battle system is totally standard and turn-based, with a speed modifier occasionally mixing up the order of the battles (for example, at higher levels your characters are usually fast enough to always strike first against lower level enemies). There are two systems of magic inherent in the game's world, both of which see use during fights.

Sword magic, called "Sword Singing" in the game, refers to magic spells that use the metal of a sword blade as a focal point for drawing out magical energy. Its attacks encompass a wide variety of skills, ranging from status ailment skills to simple, non-elemental damage dealers. The other type of magic, Sorcery, is less physical in nature and more along the lines of what most of us imagine when we think of "magic:" fireballs, lightning bolts, that sort of thing. Some sorcerous spells also have embedded status ailment attacks, making them more useful than they would be early on otherwise, since their raw damage dealt is not as high as that dealt by sword singing spells.

The enemies you fight appear on the world map in real-time, and they appear in full quantity - that is, if you see three spiders wandering around in an area and touch one of them, you'll fight all three. A fun touch is that, instead of getting loot at the end of a battle, in Aveyond you get to see the defeated carcasses of your enemies on the map and must loot them there as well. If you prefer not to fight, it isn't terribly difficult to avoid many of the enemies either, which is nice for plot-hungry players in a hurry to see the next snippet of story.

Aveyond is the story of a young woman named Rhen, and the adventures she has when she is kidnapped from the Western Island by a slave trader in a case of mistaken identity. Rhen starts out as likeable (if a bit dull - but whaddaya want? she's a farm girl), but quickly degenerates into an annoying moron for the sake of driving along the early plot. At one point when Rhen has been living on the Eastern Island for over a year, first as a slave and then as an academy student, another character comments on what part of the world they are in, and Rhen replies that she doesn't even know the name of the kingdom she is living in.

Bear in mind that the academy she attends is under the direct control of the Queen of this country. There's no excuse for that kind of ignorance, unless we call it idiocy instead. She also has a frustrating tendency to respond to things like "you are the Chosen One" with comments like "whatever..." and "what are you talking about?" On random occasions she is shown to have a "fighting spirit" of sorts, but considering how stupid she seems most of the time, it's just hard to swallow the sudden tonal shift.

Unfortunately, the plot isn't a whole lot better than Rhen herself. The influence of fantasy writer Tamora Pierce is obvious, but where Pierce's heroines tend to drive the story forward through their assertive, determined personalities, Aveyond's Rhen is instead dragged along by the current of Too Much Coincidence. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I am a fan of traditionalist RPG’s. I gave the Dragonlord the spanking of his life when I was 10 or 11, playing the very first Dragon Warrior game, and I've been in love ever since. But the more dialog there is in an RPG, the higher the bar is raised to actually do something effective with the story that is being told through that dialog.

I don't have a problem with my hero being the "Legendary Chosen One of the Ancient Sages of Golden Myth and Similar Things, Et Cetera Ad Nauseam," or whatever. I do have a problem with seeing a character who has a budding personality early on, lose that personality completely and start to go along with everything thrown at her as though she were a rag doll on a leash. If Rhen hadn't had a single line of dialog, it would have been much more believable to see her heading into everything that's placed before her with nary a second thought. However, a speaking, thinking character should never agree to be yanked out of the best situation she's been in for a long time on literally a minute's notice, told she is humanity's only hope and sent packing on a quest to find a bunch of druids without giving us, the audience, some insight into her thought processes.

Also, if it wasn't obvious by this point, the plot isn't the most original (or, more importantly, the most originally told) on the market. Chosen ones, bad guys who apparently just really don't like anything, for the most part, a set number of mystics who must be gathered together in order to stop these bad guys, a Queen who randomly permits a young student to accompany Rhen on her dangerous journey (against Rhen's own wishes, no less) instead of a seasoned fighter or protector... the list of clichés goes on. And the kicker is that, if it weren't for the stilted dialog and poorly realized personalities of the important characters, it really wouldn't bother me that the plot is clichéd.

Each flaw in Aveyond only serves to more harshly reflect all the others, since, taken together, they are the tattered tapestry of the game experience itself. And too much stuff that's too hard to believe has to happen to get things rolling. For instance, when one of the bad guys (who used to be a good guy, but has since turned evil) wants revenge on his mother (who is a being of immense magical power, and he knows it), he decides to send her into slavery instead of killing her, so that she will suffer more. Riiiiight. And does he use the dark resources that are assumedly at his command? Maybe send some flying monkeys or a minotaur to do his dirty work? Not at all, thank you very much. He contracts the job out to some fat guy with a weird hat, for no apparent reason.

This sort of inconsistency, astonishing stupidity and outright silliness pervades every aspect of Aveyond's story, making what could have been a decently fun, if not terribly original, role-playing experience into a frustrating and difficult to enjoy one instead. I don't have anything against any of the characters in the game except that they hardly ever act realistically. The technical elements of gameplay are hardly original enough to even bother adding in to the equation.

Overall, although Aveyond showed some early promise, I found that it quickly became a chore to play, much less really enjoy. The world was decently fun to explore and the battles were unobtrusive for the most part, but the characters were unrealistic, unlikable and uninvolving, and they dragged the story down with them. Without a good story and good characters, an RPG is nothing, and Aveyond is no exception.

The game's visuals are smooth, colorful and completely 2D. The battle screen is nearly identical in layout to Final Fantasy VI's, but the towns are a bit more spread out and open than in any of the SNES Final Fantasy titles. As mentioned previously, the game world has been designed in a style roughly emulating Chrono Trigger's, and I am happy to write that all the maps are clear and bright, and present no confusion at all. I am not sure, but some of the objects and almost certainly the character sprites in the game were created from scratch, which is a nice touch and shows some extra effort.

There are a couple of things that bother me, however. First of all, I have found at least one instance in which the zone graphics really, really did not fit the zone - to wit, a distant starscape in the background of the first level of an underground cave. Upon reaching the cave's second level, this disconcerting background is no longer there, leading me to wonder: what were they thinking? Is this some sort of magic effect that I'm supposed to pick up on, or did they just make a mistake and forget to change the area's background to a more sensible one? I admit that looking down through a hole and seeing a starry night sky is a cool idea, but the rest of the zone was quite down to earth, so what gives?

Also, I have a problem with Rhen's character design. No, not her cute little map and battle sprite. That one is fine. What I mean is the portrait next to her name whenever she talks. Minor NPC’s simply have a picture of their sprite next to their name, and I wish Aveyond's creators had just done that with the main characters as well. This isn't to say that some of the faces don't fit their sprites, but Rhen is who we see the most of, and her portrait doesn't match who she is, at least not at first.

Rhen the character is curious, sprightly and living in blissful ignorance at first, changing to... well, to something else, later (see Gameplay for more on Rhen's sad degeneration of character as the game progresses). She calls her father "Pa," speaks simply and more or less acts like a 13 to 15-year-old country girl living a nice sheltered life. Even after she has dealt with some hardship and pain, the story has only skipped forward a few months, and then a year - certainly not twenty years, or anything remotely close to that figure. Yet Rhen the character illustration is drawn so that she looks at least 30, and like she climbed down off the page of a bad Boris Vallejo impersonator's handiwork. The image I had of Rhen from the first few minutes of play on, just didn't - and doesn't - match up with the bitter, thirty-something B-list Dungeons and Dragons pin-up look her picture gives her.

That all being said, I do like several of the other main characters' portrait designs. For the most part they do a good job of looking like how I imagined they would based on their respective personalities, or at least dictating to me how they are supposed to look. I also like some of the later and larger monster designs, which are fun to see whenever you spot a new type of enemy in your travels. And the overall 'look' of the game isn't bad by any means. It reminded me of a nicely detailed Game Boy Advance game world, like those found in Kong: The 8th Wonder of the World and Golden Sun. There's just nothing that's much above average, and a few small things that are below average.

Unfortunately, one of the town themes in particular is repetitive and invasive almost to the point that it's hard to focus on trying to enjoy the game. A few times, while in town, I actually just reached up, said "ooo-kay," and turned my speakers off entirely. Aside from that song and maybe a couple of others, I found the music to be of generally good quality. I even liked the title theme, which doubles as a sort of "royal palace or other important place" song in the game itself. Title themes and I have a long and rocky history, so that's actually saying quite a bit.

Outside of the game's musical score, there isn't much as far as sound goes. Aveyond is a part and parcel look-alike of mid-school RPG’s from the Super NES days, so there aren't any fancy frills like voice acting or live-recorded sound effects, and I'd have it no other way. The stock thumps and zaps that populate its battles fit the spirit of the game quite well. It's just too bad that Aveyond's creators couldn't have created characters and a plot on par with the game's sounds and music. The result would have been a playable and mostly enjoyable stroll down memory lane for long-time RPG fans.

It helps that, unlike another independently developed game I once reviewed (the creator mysteriously pulled that game before my review was posted), Aveyond is actually a decent-looking and decent-playing game. It has a surprisingly good soundtrack as well. But the foundations of this game are its main character, Rhen, and its story, and both of those aspects of it are just plain bad. Rhen is plagued by unbelievability in her actions because her personality shifts with the plot, rather than changing because of it. And the plot itself hinges on so many cop-outs and so little human motivation, that it fails to even mildly captivate. To make a long story short, Aveyond is a good value, but not really a good game.

On the other hand, I have fond memories of playing the original Escape Velocity, Crystal Quest and Glider 2.1 on my old Mac when I was a wee lad. Those games were much smaller productions - sometimes even the brainchild of a single programmer. That just goes to illustrate that the funds allocated to a game project do not necessarily correlate directly to the quality of the finished project. This game is a good case in point. Aveyond's problem is not funding; it's fundamentals.

By using the tools of the RPG Maker XP programming environment, Aveyond's creators have circumvented the high cost of developing a game world from scratch. They avoided having to spend time or money creating the underlying game physics or object recognition system. They had tools before them that allowed them to focus all their creative energies on making their vision and story come to life, instead of worrying about arcane technicalities. And yet they dropped the ball when it came down to brass tacks. I've said it before and I'll say it again: without great characters and a great story, the greatest of everything else can't save an RPG. Aveyond is sadly lacking in these two all-important aspects.

In the end, I cannot wholly recommend Aveyond, even to RPG fans. However, it's playable, and I do believe that the team behind the game shows a lot of promise. Maybe in the future, we will see something really spectacular from Amaranth Games... if that is ever the case, you can bet I'll be the first one lined up to download my copy of it. You could do worse than to support them. So even if you do go out and buy Aveyond, don't feel too bad.