Reviewed: September 3, 2007
Reviewed by: Mahamari Tsukitaka

Publisher
Strategy First

Developer
Cypron Studios

Released: July 20, 2007
Genre: RPG
Players: 1

5
6
6
7
6.3

System Requirements

As Vivien, a typical destined heroine who has lost all her magic powers and must travel through an unfamiliar land to recover them, your mission is to recover your divine essence while gathering the three parts of a weapon that might end a war among the gods. Just as in most other RPG’s, you start of with basically nothing, but along the way, you pick up cronies and better equipment as you do quests assigned by a handful NPC’s. (Alarmingly, there seem to be a disproportionate number of quests involving unfaithful husbands and their spiteful wives, but I guess that theme works just as well as any other generic quest premise.)

Mostly, the game is linear, with new areas opening up as you complete certain plot-oriented quests. There is a limited amount of mobility and non-linearity, but the game mostly only gives you a few areas in which you can either farm monsters for experience and loot, or a few villages between which you can play merchant and earn a bit of necessary cash. Plot events, though, seem to be strictly linear.

The beginning parts of the game move along fairly smoothly, but it isn’t long before the monotony hits. Monster difficulty ramps up quicker than you can keep up with in level advancement, so you must eventually resort to farming creatures in order to build the stats necessary to tackle the next series of opponents.

Higher levels and statistics – or even paid training in one of a handful of job classes, such as Fighter, Mage, Alchemyst [sic], or Archer – isn’t enough, however. Being able to handle later battles depends largely on equipment, and not only does the selection of armor and weapons you can equip depends on job levels achievable only through costly training, equipment prices abruptly jump from being affordable (say, around 3000 gold) to outrageously expensive (over 25000) mid-game. The prices of the items you need just to get by are so high that you won’t earn enough to buy them during the ordinary course of events, so again, you must resort to farming creatures or playing trader.

I usually enjoy the mercantile aspects of RPG’s, and the trading mini-game in GODS is simple (buy low, sell high) and probably could have been fun, but for a few factors. A more realistic human carrying capacity means you can barely carry anything (monster loot or trade items) before you’re so overloaded that you cannot move, and there is no option to buy a wagon or beast of burden to help you carry your wares. Furthermore, after you buy a merchant’s goods, he or she takes many in-game days to generate enough trade items for it to be worth all the real-time legwork running town-to-town. Finally, inventory space fills up too quickly because some items can only be placed in your bag in small stacks and thus take up unreasonable amounts space in your inventory, especially since items seem to group just fine into larger stacks if they enter your inventory automatically as loot.

To add to all the tedium, you must also feed Vivien and her party members on a regular basis, especially after camping, or they suffer severe stat penalties. If you’re out adventuring, camping to heal – as well as camping at night when you can’t see because there are apparently no torches or lamps or light spells in this world – is a necessity in this game, and therefore, much of your carrying capacity will already be taken up by food and drink, unfortunately leaving very little space for treasure. This means more legwork (as there is no quick travel between map points, except from a signpost at the edge of each specific area) and more time wasted traveling into town to trade and empty your bags. By mid-game, I found myself traveling back to town to vend loot every 2 or 3 battles, which used up much more real time than I would have liked.

Despite an awkwardly roving camera, combat is, at least, passable. Encountering an enemy takes you from a first-person view to a third-person, turn-based tactical system similar to that of most console RPG’s.

GODS uses an attack point type of system, much like Xenogears did, allowing characters to defend to generate additional points for stronger attack types. Unfortunately, it’s not very well balanced; Vivien’s party will generally have to guard every 2-3 rounds in order to pull off a reasonable offense, while the enemy never has pause to regenerate points. Unfortunately, using rounds to save up points for a stronger attack often isn’t all that helpful, since the enemy will be taking chunks out of you in the meantime, and the stronger attack usually isn’t damaging enough to make up for the damage soaked. A tougher battle basically becomes nothing but an exercise in figuring out how to deal the most damage quickly enough to avoid a wipe.

Overall, GODS is acceptably playable, and I encountered very few actual bugs, but it has some balance problems and requires a good tolerance for grinding for gold and experience points. If you don’t mind some awkwardness and repetitiveness in a low-budget RPG, though, GODS isn’t altogether unenjoyable.

As with everything else in this game, though, don’t expect anything particularly new or exciting. The design of the elven town in the middle of the forest looks like a cross between World of Warcraft’s Darnassus and Rivendell from the Lord of the Rings movies. The ice troll camp looks like it’s been directly ported over from Warcraft’s Horde settlements, except it’s been frosted over blue. The elves are your typical pale-skinned, pointy-eared pretty people in fancy clothes; the trolls are your typical giant, tusked monsters; and the barbarians are your typical dudes in horned helms and furs. In short, the character, monster, and environment design isn’t ugly, but it’s boring.

For a low-budget game, it’s really not bad, but for today’s standards, these are sub-par graphics that you’d most likely see in a game from the early 2000s or in MMO's, for which graphical detail must often be sacrificed for faster Internet play. The animations, too, are mostly stiff and unnatural, and the combat animations move much too slowly to look exciting. Other than that, though, it’s passable, and if you’ve played older games and enjoyed them despite the less advanced visuals, GODS probably won’t bother you too much.

As for the music, it’s really not that bad, except for the fact that the same music plays for multiple areas, and the clips are often so short that the soundtrack can get annoyingly repetitive. There are some pretty good tracks, though, like the one that plays at the Crystal Palace. Unfortunately, the entire soundtrack isn’t uniformly enjoyable and is, for the most part, either forgettable or unfortunately prone to repeating itself in your head after you’ve been playing the game for a while.

These are all relatively minor gripes, though, so if the game sounds like one you’d enjoy, the sound aspects would probably be acceptable to you as well.