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Sword of Jade quasi-review with questions

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rightblaze:
Wow, if this game were released under a big label back in the early days of the SNES, everyone in the gaming world would know about it!  The story is excellent, gameplay is new and fresh -- in short it was amazing.  I just realized that you get different responses depending on who is at the front of your party, so I think I'll play it again sometime.  I imagine that a party with Mi'la doing the talking would be quite fun!

The Jade countdown system was very novel.  I tend to play games carefully, so I found myself making decisions on whether it would be worth it to stop and train or if I needed to progress the story a little bit so Dogero could get some more motivation.  It also made me think a bit more about the decisions the game wanted me to make and what their direct, indirect, and ethical consequences might be, i.e. giving money to a kid that wants to craft something or telling him to get a job.  The same thing drove my brother crazy, though, because he wanted to try every choice to see what happened.  In the end it looks like it didn't really matter since I started with 15 days and never dipped below 10 or so, but it would be fun to have a 5 day game so that everything you did would really count.  Admittedly some of the choices you were to make were obvious on what their consequences would be (and in some of them you helped either way, which is fine since Dogero's a good guy), but I enjoyed it the way it was.

The stats battle system was really cool, and made me really think about how I wanted to level up my characters to take advantage of their skills.  In the end, several of them were worthless, but it was cool to figure out what worked, and to realize I had to get X skill not for its attack effect but for the beneficial stat raise so I could then use heal and actually heal someone.

Story... what can I say; I'm a sucker for a good story.  It's the reason I play, really -- in my mind, all other elements -- graphics, music, battle system -- serve to accentuate and compliment the story!  This game did a very good job with the story, it really drew me in and made me want to keep playing to see what happened next in the big story and in the little decisions Dogero made in talking with the townspeople (that surprisingly directly affect the game!  It's not a town of NPCs that just tell the character something, they interact!).  Every main character was well-developed except Pyrus, but he was quiet, anyways.  Johan and Mi'la contrasted well with Dogero's innate seriousness, and gave the game a levity it needed to deal with heavy topics like depression and hopelessness.  I do wish that Katina got a little more time so we could see her motivations, why Dogero liked her, etc., and the other protectors in the proem could have used a little more development, too, as most of it happens in the proem and then they're discarded until they get cameos later.  You'll just have to play it; I'm not feeling like a literary critic at the moment, and it's been a while since I played.  Plot = good.

The only major flaw I see is in some of the music.  It ranges from great to absolutely abysmal.  I know Charbile and Fyrewulff had last-minute music problems, so that's understandable.  The main area where it shows up is in the proem, with long periods of silence interrupted only by music that's more grating than anything, though I did enjoy the battle music.  I almost didn't make it through the proem because of that (and because I couldn't figure out what was going on).  Starting the game in Fralin and having the proem show up as a flashback sequence right after you meet Mi'la might have been better.  But, one plus is that the game taught me the word "proem," which I wouldn't have learned if it was moved to a non-proem position.

I have a question -- when I played, I noticed that often when I got into a battle or switched screens the music would sometimes slightly change.  It would be the same orchestration but sometimes with a different instrument or missing parts, which usually were added after one loop.  Was this just a particular problem with the hamster creation engine, the way it interacted with my computer, or was it done on purpose?  I actually enjoyed it; it made it feel like there was more variety to the music, and was a strong point to the music.  I'm not talking just how it changes every 6 hours during the game, either.  For example, when the theme for the 2nd town during the day played in a piano instrument instead of its usual instrument, I enjoyed it more than the original.

I found a funny glitch -- in the race dream sequence, Mi'la is still in your party!  You can switch her to the front, and have an adult, blue-shirted Mi'la race against her young self!  How's that for fighting against a traumatic childhood?  I got a kick out of that.

Is Dogero pronounced like the words "dog" and "eros" without the "s"?  That's how I thought it was.  Or is it like "Dog hero" without the "h" -- um, I guess that would be "Doggy row"?  Where is the stress on the name Mi'la?  I pronounce it like in the musical scales (doremi) with the stress on the "la," but my brother always said "My la" with stress on the first syllable.  Okay, that may be overboard, but I was curious.  My experience with Chinese may have admittedly twisted my pronunciation of her name, though....

Thanks, keep up the good work!

rightblaze:
Oh, and I second what another guy said earlier -- "Dude, this game is deep!"

RinkuHero:
Thanks for the review, will forward it to the developers (they don't visit the forum as often as I do).

As for the music question, I believe it was intentional -- slightly varying the instruments in the music is a nice idea, I wish it were done more. It's easy to do for MIDI or BAM (which the Ohrrpgce uses).

Interesting glitch, I didn't notice that back when I played it. Will look for it when I replay it.

I don't know about the pronunciations though -- I think it's interesting when people pronounce RPG characters in different ways so it'd be nice if there were no official pronunciations.

As an aside, you can see the further adventures of Johan in this casual gameby charbile: http://www.kithappy.com/games/perfectservice/ -- it's *very* different from Sword of Jade, but it's made by the same person and has some similarities. I haven't bought it myself yet (or asked char for a free copy) but I enjoyed the demo, which is pretty lengthy.

FyreWulff:
I am very busy these days but I can try to answer a couple of these questions and then come back at the weekend when I have more time.


Day limit: We discussed this. Originally, Charbile had it at 5/10/15 as the possible days you could get. However, the 5 day limit was extremely easy to 'lose' with, and people who didn't understand how the difficulty could be selected were easily frustrated by this. It was later moved up to 10/15/20 after some discussion, as that seemed to make it difficult but not frustrating.

I apologize for the way the music works in the intro. Some music tracks were outright deleted, and the others do get grating due to the BAM format. I probably should have just deleted all the BAM tracks and left all music as the stereo MIDIs. Some of the music was written by me as placeholder and it ended up actually getting used due to the music problems. If the game ever gets updated (small chance right now since both me and Charbile need to be making games for money) I will probably replace all the BAM and missing tracks with Creative Commons music.

You will have to talk to Charbile about the battle system. I had zero to do with that, because I despised the engine's built in battle system. Only he has the arcane knowledge required to master it.

Sword of Jade actually started out as "Sword of Jade 2" and was a sequel to the unfinished Sword of Jade 1. I figured that the storyline that I was aiming to reach at 2 was more interesting than 1's. Katina was a main character of 1, maybe someday we will revisit that story (hopefully).

I pronounce Dogero as Dog uhr row and Mi'la as Me lah (like the musical scale), however people can pronounce them however they like.

Thank you for the feedback.

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