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It's half like Zelda OOT and half like Fable. Combat's good fun as you can work on producing simple combo's and getting at your foe's weakspots. Exploration so far seems to be very much like OOT, wander around noticing things you can't access yet (some surrounded by glowing dust) and blatant clues about what you'll need to do to get them later. Also there's the very Zelda-like 'I walk up break your vase/open your chest infront of your face and run of with your gold ahahahaha' moments. I managed to spend the first half hour just exploring the city I started off in, talking to all the NPC, watching a puppet show, browsing a shop and completing a few mini quests on the way whilst smashing vases and opening chests for objects and gold.
Back to combat: Combat seems to be more like Fable with an assisted autolock that doesn't get in the way and is barely noticeable. Leveling-up is based on experience for kills and quests with a simple system (making Fable's simple leveling-up system look positively complicated by comparison). After a battle sometimes a chest 'beams in' (once again like OOT).
Graphics seem to be a mix between Fable and OOT (it's early days so it might swerve one way or another later). Camera work is very reminiscent of OOT (Wide camera pans of villages first time you enter etc, pausing to show a large monster looming up on you).
The music seems to be inspired by the darker elements of OOT and the game certainly seems darker. There's a nice level of blood (bordering on Conker's Bad Fur Day gore at times) and it seems like every dead body along the roadside has been impaled by it's own weapon (bizarre but funny)! Early on I'm detecting a strange sense of humour in the game as one female vendor in town reckons I can 'handle my meat'.
So far it seems like a mini-RPG as if made by Rare which isn't a bad thing at all.
It's half like Zelda OOT and half like Fable. Combat's good fun as you can work on producing simple combo's and getting at your foe's weakspots. Exploration so far seems to be very much like OOT, wander around noticing things you can't access yet (some surrounded by glowing dust) and blatant clues about what you'll need to do to get them later. Also there's the very Zelda-like 'I walk up break your vase/open your chest infront of your face and run of with your gold ahahahaha' moments. I managed to spend the first half hour just exploring the city I started off in, talking to all the NPC, watching a puppet show, browsing a shop and completing a few mini quests on the way whilst smashing vases and opening chests for objects and gold.
Back to combat: Combat seems to be more like Fable with an assisted autolock that doesn't get in the way and is barely noticeable. Leveling-up is based on experience for kills and quests with a simple system (making Fable's simple leveling-up system look positively complicated by comparison). After a battle sometimes a chest 'beams in' (once again like OOT).
Graphics seem to be a mix between Fable and OOT (it's early days so it might swerve one way or another later). Camera work is very reminiscent of OOT (Wide camera pans of villages first time you enter etc, pausing to show a large monster looming up on you).
The music seems to be inspired by the darker elements of OOT and the game certainly seems darker. There's a nice level of blood (bordering on Conker's Bad Fur Day gore at times) and it seems like every dead body along the roadside has been impaled by it's own weapon (bizarre but funny)! Early on I'm detecting a strange sense of humour in the game as one female vendor in town reckons I can 'handle my meat'.
So far it seems like a mini-RPG as if made by Rare which isn't a bad thing at all.
It was half so boring I wanted to rip my own head off just to stop the tedium and half so crap I wanted to throw the disk out the window and write to Microsoft to get the 5 minuts of my life back that I'd wasted playing it.
I decided to turn the game off before I found out which one.
Somthing to do with a figure 8 shaped hall, a lot of enemies and a block puzzle.
Doesn't sound very representative of the finished product, at least not as far as I've played, a sounds more like a demo of the fighting system and then a puzzle.
Then it all went weird.
Ended up somewhere very different, more like Majora's Mask, an evil looking place. Finally got to use the full team of four in a mini-skirmish followed by a titanic battle against a lot of very evil looking things. Just about made it out alive.
It's possible the OOT-a-like stuff is meant to ease you into the game with a familiar setting, now it's taking large steps away from it.
The battle system works great with a full team blasting and hacking its way through the hordes!
More weapons, more items more monsters. Trying to avoid spoilers, simple puzzles that take about 2 mins, at the most, to do. Plenty of mini challenges inc races and more original things.
The team keep getting split which allows for more play with each character, combat's getting more varied with different mixtures of monsters appearing. Not majorly difficult but certainly more challenging than Fable. Not sure exactly how much longer I've got to go (I've heard one estimate that it takes 12 hours to complete) but there's a lot of options in the map section that haven't become available (looks like 2 thirds, although they're seperate sections from the main map menu and so could be very short - will have to access them first to know for sure).
Miles better than Fable and more indepth than Zelda. Great stuff! :)
Nasty monsters. Beefed up everything. Intricate yet simple puzzles. Twists.
Quality.
:)
Hedfix needs shower.