8-Bit Adventures 1: The Forgotten Journey Remastered Edition

I really enjoyed my time with this game. (my hours are from three separate starts/restarts over a few years). You did a lot with very little and some very amazing PoV sorcery on some scenes and areas. Great use of parallax and music. The combat, though a bit repetitive, was well balanced (until the very end but that's to be expected in a jrpg style game). I thought bosses were reasonably difficult, I even died a few times. The only character I struggled to find use until late game was the Thief, outside of her poison and smoke bomb abilities. I felt that the element system, built into the very world & individuals within it, was a unique take and I loved the concept of the BBEG. It was a very interesting story that I enjoyed a lot with a lot of side quests. I loved that each piece of ultimate gear was locked behind some sort of legend or side quest that you could ignore if you wanted but I really wanted to seek out. (except for the last three pieces of course). I felt that your dungeon design was very well done with an appropriate amount of encounters & twists/turns with treasures. I feel like most items mattered and I was mostly almost broke until the very end of the game (which is good from a balancing place imo). I thoroughly enjoyed the dev room trivia section as a hobbyist game maker myself. It is fun to peer behind the veil of what other people's development process is like. I'm going to be vague about the ending but basically my main criticism is having to use an item several times & then not really feeling like the cool abilities I unlocked at level 20 were really that effective on the last boss. I think you were going for a "this boss should feel unbeatable and what these characters should feel is dread that their strongest abilities are doing very low damage to it... can we win this?" and then the umm *vague on purpose* where you aren't really able to fight anymore but just heal was a bold choice. If the feeling you were going for was to make the player feel like this is a lost cause then it worked but idk, I think you might have sacrificed their heroic persona for the big reveal at the end. It was cool, don't get me wrong, just not sure how I feel about it. I really enjoyed my time in this world and am looking forward to playing through the sequel next!

Like the title implies, 8-bit adventures encompasses the classic rpg games from the late 80's to early 90's through it's art style and feel. Unlike other game of that era it dumbs down the complexity a bit by having a cap on the amount of abilities you can learn for each character and boiling down the elemental traits to a rock-paper-scissors like system. This is by NO means a bad thing, if anything it makes combat more approachable and so you don't have to guess or memorize the weakness of each enemy. It also devoids the feeling that you need to constantly grind for levels; you could do the minimal amount of combat and not be overwhelmed. The story itself is simple, fun and somewhat serious. Even though it only took me 12 hour to 100% it, I still felt satisfied with it. It just shows that not all jrpgs need be lengthy and grindy to enjoy them.

Quand tu te retrouves à batailler pour changer les contrôles du jeu c'est qu'il y a un problème fondamental avec ton jeu (même pour 2015). Le menu de réglage des touches est une abomination. Le rendu à l'écran est vraiment pas terrible, sois on est coincé avec une fenêtre de 640/480, sois un fullscreen qui n'est pas net. Le jeu mériterais qu'on s'attarde un minimum sur l'expérience utilisateur. J'ai prix le 1 suite à la très bonne impression que m'a laissé le 2, mais même en sachant que le 1er était plus brut de décoffrage, j'ai mes limites. C'est dommage, j'aurais voulu jouer au 1er pour connaître le début de l'histoire; je regarderais un playthrough à la place.

"8-Bit Adventures: The Forgotten Journey" is a single dev JRPG made in RPG-Maker and an earnest bow to the classics, while inheriting a "meta"-narrative that is worth the journey. On the surface you have your standard fantasy tropes with the typical main protagonists bound to save the world - pretty standard stuff, but they are quite likeable. Presentationwise it is a really "blocky" experience. The pixelated surroundings are really simple, their scaling sometimes feels off and they got some asset-characteristics. Spritework is also very basic and the enemy design is so awkwardly plain, that it nearly inherits a style of its own (last boss looks cool, though). The writing is quite decent; I found minor typos, but nothing severe. Music is also nice, simple and retro. Gameplaywise you get your standard-combat mechanics with elemental weaknesses, it gets the job done (the "SmokeScreen"-Ability feels really strong for normal mobs and you got this from the start). Luckily it is not very grindy and has almost no backtracking. Escaping battles has a good window of success. The overarching narrative and the symbolism of it [spoiler] the inevitability of the old to catch dust and your ability to prevent this [/spoiler] got me through the whole ordeal which can be casually 100% in less than 10 hours. Overall a nice and heartfelt little game that can be offputting for some, but nevertheless gets the oldschool-charm right. Looking forward to the second game (bought both in a bundle and the second looks gorgeous in the pixel-department)!

O the scale of JRPG mechanics this would land below Final Fantasy 1. It felt more like a walking simulator than a JRPG, at no point in the game I was making any tactical decision more advanced than red beats green, green beats blue blue beats red. That said the story and the characters kept me playing till the end, it was nothing original but felt charming. The ending was meh, but writing a good ending is hard. In summary i had good and relaxing time playing this. Recommended at discount.

gg

This was such a charming throwback to JRPGs from the NES and even the SNES era. It had surprising depth and it managed to capture some of the "simplicity" of the games from those eras, while reducing or eliminating a lot of the grind or tedium that those games had (ex: think Final Fantasy 1: endless walking, fights that drag on forever, hitting empty spaces after monsters are killed in combat, or dying in combat and having to *redo 30+ minutes of gameplay to get back to where you were before). You can tell the game was made with a lot of care and love, and while not perfect, highly recommended for fans of old-school JRPGs or gamers that grew up in the 80s or 90s! Minor gripes: 1) I grew to really appreciate the art style, but at the beginning I felt like some assets looked more like console "blocky" 8-bit, while others looked like assets made in MS Paint with higher detail; not bad by any means, but visually it felt like conflicting styles. 2) While they did do a really good job at reducing tedium, you should still expect to spend a lot of time walking, dealing with many random encounters and lots of fights that you can't just "fast-foward" through as if you were using an emulator. I think it's hard to avoid this when you are creating a game in reverence to these types of old JRPGs, but you may start to feel this before the end of the game, especially if you "binge" the game over a few of days. 3) I encountered a few bugs, all of them minor but I still noticed. Later in the game there many walls you could walk through that should have been solid imo, as they did not lead to any secrets. And one time when exiting a dungeon, something weird happened with the tiles I could move my character to, but after entering/exiting the dungeon again, everything worked well. Overall though, I love this game, and it really suprised me at times with its creativity, and yet also its faithfulness and references to the games of the past. Final rating: 85/100