Playing through the next bit of the game, it seemed so much shorter compared to Chapter 1, with only 4 major checkpoints and 1 side area, compared to Chapter 1’s 5 major checkpoints and, 9 side areas.
I feel that there is a big missed opportunity to add in a story beat that occurs in Freejia. After all, there was a short cut scene that played where Axe commented about the presence of the Mishima Clan and the lack of Kazama clan presence. It could be a thing to have a whole story arc about Axe confronting his past, driving out the Mishima clan and restoring the Kazama clan presence in the city. Similarly, pulling a Ryuu Ga Gotoku, and dipping into the criminal underworld once again as someone who once earned his freedom from the Kazuma clan mafia is another option.
The Nazca Desert section is even more bare, it is a mostly blank featureless sand plain, with no real defining features other than a couple of landmarks sparsely scattered around. There were no encounters, and no geological features that give the location its own personality. All there was to do there for the main story is to get to a cut scene, which then transports your party to the Sky Gardens. If there ever was a masterclass on how to make a desert biome interesting, one should look no further than the continent of Oblivia from Xenogears Chronicles X, which featured a wide variety of environments and interesting geological features for a desert biome. The Duma Desert from Legend of Mana is also a good reference for how a desert biome could be done properly.
The Sky Gardens dungeon itself is...functional. There are puzzle relating to the story of the Sky Lord, which is extremely basic, but I guess it is something. Given that we’ve already done some side content, we are way over-leveled for the Tiamat fight, and are able to tackle her with little resistance. This fight with her is nothing to write home about. This dungeon would have been an excuse to map out a world wonder like The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, where there would be shifting aqueduct puzzles to challenge players in a way that matches the theme.
Getting to Evegrow, if there was one thing that struck me about this place, it’s that it was forgettable and generic-looking. It was my second visit to that place, (The first time being an early Special Ops mission.) and I can barely remember anything about the town. It has all of the typical buildings, but nothing to really distinguish it from other towns. In fact, the layout really resembles the ruined town of Minimaly. This really kneecaps the gravity of Remus setting the town on fire just to gain the party’s attention. It’s like “Oh no! A town I never had the time or opportunity to get to know and grow attached to is being set on fire! Anyways...”
Feeling disappointed, I decided to start dipping into the side content.
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Mining Town
The Mining Town doesn’t feel like a mine at all. It feels more like stone-age village, and less like a cavern that promises a plethora of rare gemstones. When I think of a mining town, I think of either a temporary camp with tents for domicile, trading, medicinal, etc purposes, with a nearby entrance to a dark underground labyrinthine cave, or an underground village carved out of stone, and inhabited by cave-dwellers, with a nearby tunnel leading to deeper underground areas. As for the mining areas themselves, I think a good set of inspirations to draw from are the cave areas from the Mana series. From Trials of Mana, we have locations like the Dwarf Tunnels and Gemstone Valley, and from Legend of Mana, we have the Ulkan Mines and Mekiv Caverns. I could easily imagine that the side quest in this Mining Town playing out like the Dwarf Cave segment in Trials of Mana where the party was tasked to look for Nitromyte from Watts the Dwarf, and ended up encountering Jewel Eater, the dungeon boss.
After you defeat the boss monster that was terrorizing the Mining Town, you’re given a pickaxe, and, with it, the ability to mine gemstones yourself. It feels disappointing. A big reason for it is that this mode of play, the mining loop, boiled down to mashing buttons mindlessly until the gems you desire pop out. Plus progression is quite arbitrary and not at all dependent on player skill or input. In other words, it did not follow the idiosyncrasies of mining at all.
What I would think a good mining mini-game would be would involve a system that assigns each party member to different roles. These roles are all dependent on different stats, and the success of the mining operation depends on the desired stats of each assigned party members. For example:
- The Driver would need to have a high strength rating to maximize maximum carrying capacity, high constitution for endurance, and knowledge in Dungeoneering to determine the safest paths through the tunnels.
- The Skirmisher would need to have high Dexterity/Agility in order to detect and defuse traps, and to be able to strike at any threats first before they could come into attacking range.
- The Geologist would need to have a good head on their shoulders, as well as be armed with the knowledge of precious gems and minerals in order to find high-value mining nodes.
- Finally, the Miner would need to have good Strength and Dexterity/Agility stats in order to be able to deliver sharp strikes at a good rhythm and pace, so as to not go too fast, or too slow.
What this would all build up to is not just the acquisition of rare gemstones, precious metals and accessories, but the potential to feed into a weapon and armor crafting system.
My personal idea, if I were to design a system around mining, would be to include similar mining locations scattered throughout the world. Some would be well-known, some would be hidden, each location offering different types of minerals, gemstones and metals. Each of those locations would expand as you mine in them, sometimes connecting to various underground locations, maybe even each other. Perhaps they might even eventually form a global network of mines and caves that could span across and in between continents.
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The RP Punch-Up (Fight Club)
This is probably where the primitive quality of this game really starts to show. Arena style side quests are supposed to bring out the best of a battle system by introducing volatile mechanics that would be considered too overwhelming or difficult if implemented in the main story battles. As it stands, the Fight Club assignments are underwhelming. There is no anticipation at all, no lead up, or narrative elements to really put the next target “Over”. I was just given a battle with mostly generic, increasingly tankier single enemies. Not satisfying at all.
I think when it comes to this kind of side-content, each target should have specific behaviors and gimmicks that make them not just powerful, but also weak to specific strategies. Think of the asterisk battles in the Bravely Default games. I also don’t think that those fights should just be given to you. I think that with each target given, the players should go through the following gameplay loop:
- Research: Players should travel to the target’s home town, ask around in bars, and around the target’s usual haunts in order to learn of their habits, vices and weaknesses that could be exploited.
- Preparation: Often, exploiting the target’s weaknesses may require, specific skills, gear, and party configurations. The process of acquiring these advantages would oftentimes be out of the way, and require a gear hunt, which means traveling and raising funds. During research, players may learn about specific combat conditions that must be honoured on top of everything else. (Things like solo duels, no healing magic, no items, etc.)
- Meeting: Players are then tasked to approach the target to arrange a duel. Some may be willing to fight right off the bat. Others may require some favours done, or for the party to prove their worthiness by going on a secondary mini-quest.
- Report: Once the target is defeated, players must then report on their victory to the Fight Club representative to gain a reward, and be given the next target. The cycle then repeats.
Occasionally, previously defeated members, or members one or two tiers up would challenge the player party to (re-)assert dominance. This would add gravity to the choice of joining the Fight Club, and keep players on their toes.
Rewards could be unique gear and accessories that are not available anywhere else, which would grant unique skills.
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The RP Punch-Up (Battle Royale)
Looking at the Battle Royale events, they are little more than search-and-destroy missions with almost no variety to the encounters. They don’t even offer any challenge to me as I played through those events. This is greatly disappointing because they really should be all about testing the adaptability of the player party, challenging them to make decisions based on changing conditions like item locations and increasing enemy strength.
My idea would be that the player party’s gear and inventory would be confiscated at the beginning/orientation phase of the Battle Royale event. Enemy participants would fight each other, would collect loot and grow stronger over time, while the player party seeks to do the same, starting from scratch, and needing to collect gear upgrades scattered throughout the arenas in order to keep up.
Each party member would be given a role, which would serve as a temporary “class” that gives them access to different gear and weapon types unique to the Battle Royale arenas;
<<Striker>> for damage-dealing,
<<Shielder>> for tanking and drawing aggro,
<<Medic>> for healing and protection, and
<<Support>> for crowd-control, buffing and debuffing. Over time, repeated participation could lead to the learning of unique skills as AP accumulates with found gear over time. While any party member can assume any role in the Battle Royale events, certain classes would fare better with specific roles. For example:
- Eleara would be well-suited for the <<Striker>> role, due to her fast and powerful physical and offensive fonic abilities.
- Axe would fare well with the <<Shielder>> role, possessing a large HP pool and a selection of taunting and various aggro-drawing abilities.
- Chicken, on the other hand, works well with the <<Medic>> role, with Solar, Lunar, and Entropic fonym at his disposal.
- Jason, thanks to his chosen class, would be excellent with the <<Supporter>> role, giving out morale buffs, and oppressing the enemy party with debilitating skills.
Of course, there are options for each alternative role and character combination that could work well with each other, and in the context of party synergy.
At the end of these events, all items and gear would be returned to the player party. An alternate form of currency might also be awarded that would only be redeemable at those Battle Royale locations, likely for things like the unique gear found in the arena.
One final note of suggestion I could provide would be to have rival parties occasionally join the Battle Royale events. Given that the levels of the rival parties would scale much more closely to the party’s average level than that of the generic contestants, this could be a way to add a fun spike to the challenge.
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The Company
As far as side content goes, this could easily be its own quest line, thanks to it playing very similarly to the main story. It could have been a nice way for players to go down a different story path with a satisfying conclusion. However, there are a few issues that really kneecapped its effectiveness as a piece of side content.
For one, the introduction and initiation made no sense. Why would anyone wander into the 5th floor? What kind of hare-brained system would even allow people to wander into the 5th floor? As part of The Company’s recruitment strategy, relying on random people wandering in doesn’t seem very wise.
What’s more, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why the portal in the Company’s HQ couldn’t let players choose their destination instead of what it did, which is to set the portal to take the party to the mission destination. This could easily be a factor in stranding the player’s party in a location with no easy way to return to where they were previously.
Moreover, there had been no cross-interactions between this quest line and other quest lines, which made it hard to believe that the missions in the Company quest line had an appreciable effect on the world. I believe that, given how the Company missions diminish the Chimera Clan’s hold on various parts of the world, that should be reflected in how the story and narrative flows in other quest lines.
Another idea to change up the gameplay, that could distinguish it from the main storyline’s mode of play, would be to expand on the interrogation mechanic that was introduced in a couple of the missions, namely the mission in Dao. I think this could have been revisited several times throughout the quest line. Going further, the process of gathering information could also be expanded upon, putting players in a situation where they’d need to gather pieces of evidence, either via questioning various NPCs, or by subterfuge, before confronting their mark. Think Disco Elysium or Paradise Killer. The Netflix series The Blacklist, or the Southern Reach trilogy of novels by Jeff VanderMeer, especially Authority, could also be a good source of inspiration to draw from.
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The Brewmaster
This quest line had a few good elements, but overall, it was fairly underwhelming as it failed to satisfyingly capture the idiosyncrasies of brewing, mixing, transporting, and running a bar. The quest line did not touch on brewing, reduced the experience of mixing drinks to a series of random multiple-choice questions, reduced transportation to a couple of retrieval missions, as well as a couple of undifferentiated travel missions, and running the bar...that was the most disappointing part of this quest line. Instead of a way to passively earn income by setting up a bar and managing the various aspects of running it, it was essentially just a dice roll that the player can just mash through for a chance to accrue small amounts of gems each time. There was no real idiosyncratic or engaging mechanics like deciding on supply lines, the security detail, the menu, or the staff.
Brewing itself can be difficult to translate into gameplay in an engaging and satisfying way, as the process of brewing can span several months, which, even when accounting for accelerated in-game time, is still a lot of time to make players wait. However, this could be handled in a more abstract way by putting the player through a few lessons, perhaps a few quests to thwart rival sabotage attempts, culminating in a short test. Players would then be, upon passing the test, be awarded a book that would serve as a guide to brewing. (In gameplay terms, a key item that unlocks brewing.)
On delivery and retrieval missions, how I think it could be handled would be akin to escort missions in TF2 or Overwatch. Which would involve a caravan with a payload of a number of barrels, and crew members. The player’s job is to protect both the crew members and the barrels of product from occasional bandit raids. Some bandits would prioritize attacking the caravan crew, while others would go straight for the product. This would mean splitting the party into two squads, where one half is responsible for being the crew’s bodyguards, and thus requires a lot of muscle, while the other half would be responsible for loss prevention, meaning that they would need to be fast. The two parties would be complimented with generic security detail hired by the Brewmaster. On the retrieval phase, if any, the player’s party would be tasked to track down the stolen shipment, wipe out the bandit presence, and then accompany the caravan back to its rightful owner. In both cases, players will be awarded based on how much of the crew survived, as well as how much of the product remained intact throughout the journey.
As for the bar gigs, I feel that this could be handled more like Overcooked where the player have to take patron requests in real time, and mix them by manually filling the drinks portion by portion, and then choosing how to garnish and mix the drink. This would be a great way for the players to really learn how to mix those drinks, in a way that could translate into real-life skills. A recently-released game that captures this experience well is Dine-in Dungeon by Looey, (
http://lui421.itch.io/dine-in-dungeon) an indie game released for the RPG Maker 2025 game jam.
All of these experiences could come together and culminate into a satisfying conclusion when the player is finally given the chance to open up a bar. They would have the opportunity to pick staff members, and then train them to run the bar, using the player’s collected knowledge to help decide on what traits to look for in each member of the crew. Then when everything is set up correctly, this could be a source of income that players would accrue over time, as stored gems in a vault somewhere, that the player could withdraw from as needed.
This could have also lead to a new quest line to revive the town of Crown, and lead it towards a renaissance of prosperity, commerce and trade. This could also tie into the Company quest line, where, as long as the Chimera Clan is still active under their leader, emergent missions may become available that would have the player deal with bandit raids on the town of Crown, or have the player deal with extortionists looking to muscle in on the town and bar’s profits. This may even be a way to properly segue the player into getting involved with the Company.
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Fishing
Gen 1 Pokémon was what came to mind when describing how the fishing mini-game was handled. However, this does not fit the game for several reasons:
- In Pokémon Gen 1, the fishing mechanics serve as a mere prelude to the core game loop, which is encountering and catching wild Pokémon. In fact, this serves as a way of encountering Pokémon unique to aquatic regions. In contrast, all fishing did for this game is to give us fishes as items that could be consumed for HP recovery, or sold for money.
- As a method of generating income, it is inferior to mining, as there is no requirement to invest in tools in order to mine, unlike with fishing, which requires a constant supply of bait. What’s worse, to get the fishes that generate a lot of income, players must make use of the worms instead of dry bait, and for each fishing attempt, players must manually select the worm bait each time, making it just involved enough to make mashing through the dialogue to grind for fish impractical, while offering nothing substantial in terms of engagement.
- At the end of the fishing quest, there is a very esoteric set of conditions that would lead to an out of the blue encounter with Riverson, an impossible super boss. There was no signposting to this, and Riverson is impossible to deal with, due to its multiple immunities, and sky-high AGI stat. More on that later.
I do feel that fishing mini-games should either be made to be a completely chill, relaxing idle affair, with zero risk to the player, as a way to pass the time, or its own mode of play with an entire quest line, set of unique locations, fights and loot. I do have a few ideas on how to make these ideas work, but that, if I were to pursue them for real, will take considerable prototyping.
Fishing Idea 1 – Idle Mini-game
This idea would involve the use of autorun common events that would automatically generate fishes, and successes, based on the party member who is fishing. Bait would be purchased as needed, and the price added to a ledger. Similarly, all successful catches would be prepared and sold automatically, and the sell value, with a multiplier applied based on the fish processor’s survival skill, and on the seller’s selling skill, would be added to the ledger. With each catch, depending on the fish processor’s skill, fish guts can be added to the pool of available bait, which could be used as a higher tier of bait that could be used to increase the odds of subsequent successful catches. And finally, the spotter could make use of their strength and perception skills to improve the pool of fishes that are available to catch, and to help reel in supersized fishes.
At the end of a session, usually at sunset or sunrise, all costs and profits would be tallied, and all profits or losses would be reflected on in the player’s Gem count. And the running catch totals will be used to improve the various skills of the party members that were involved. This will eventually lead to access to better and more challenging fishing spots.
What makes this idea work is that it would be a non-demanding change in the mode of play. Though, the challenge that this idea presents would be in the scripting, balancing the temporal resolution of each processing tick, and game engine performance. Lag would be a real challenge to deal with. Another challenge would involve the creation of a set of bespoke assets that may not appear elsewhere in the game.
Fishing Idea 2 – Monster Hunting Quest Line
This idea would involve the conceit of an ecological society, specializing in aquatic wildlife, possibly part of the guilds already present throughout the world, who are dedicated to culling unruly monsters who got too strong and are disrupting the local wildlife. (Think of the Tyrants in Xenoblade Chronicles 1/2/3/X) These monsters could be found on land, on the shores, at sea or deep underwater. In this context, the idea of fishing could be stretched and bent a bit with the idea that some fish have developed air bladder systems that would allow them to float through the air.
Upon receiving a mission to hunt down a monster, players are then tasked to make use of tracking skills to find and draw out the monster. Upon finding said monster, a fight ensues, which would often involve special conditions to keep them interesting. Conditions like fighting at the edge of a cliff, rendering all grounded and melee attacks from the player’s side completely ineffective against the monster. Another idea would involve catching the monster with the aid of a fishing pole, or any other restraining implements, rendering the designated trapper immobile and bound to the monster. Or the monster could be confronted underwater, with the aid of air bubble, or gill mutation spells, necessitating a dedicated caster to keep the air bubble up, or spending a turn out of every few turns to reapply the mutation spell/item effect.
Upon a successful hunt, the carcass would be harvested for its meat and trophies, to be shown to the guild as proof of the hunt. These trophies could later then be used to craft unique gear and accessories. On top of that, the player’s party would be rewarded with unique weapons, armor and accessories. Perhaps, additionally, an advancement through the ranks of the guild, leading to more riskier, and more bountiful hunting missions being made available to the player.
The advantage of a system like this is that it slots nicely into the main gameplay loop, not needing many new scripts and event systems for this to work. Though the biggest challenge would involve writing dynamic lore that would react to the hunts, and how they would impact the world around them. Things like the local ecosystems, the locals , as well as how the presence of these monsters, or lack thereof, would affect the flow of other quest lines; All of them are important considerations for the writing process.
Fishing Idea 3 – Using a Plugin
This would be the simplest and easiest option, as most of the work would have already been done for us, and all we would need to do is to set up our assets and customize the provided options to suit our needs.
However, without a working knowledge of how each piece of code within the plugin works, flexibility would be limited. And there would also always be a possibility of plugin incompatibility. Moreover, there would be potential ethical concerns for editing and modifying the plugin code.
Not only that, there is a good chance that the kinaesthetics of the mode of play provided by these plugins may not match the intended mood or aesthetics of play for the rest of the game. This may result in an incoherent experience overall.
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Book Club
The way the Book Club quests are set up was functional, but there was so much more that could have been done with this concept. For one, having to go through the inventory system to “use” a book and refer to its contents can be a pain. Given that most of the available books are riddles that serve as clues to dungeon puzzles, there’s no reason not to implement an auto-reminding system that could display the riddle on screen as the player approach relevant areas.
The reading assignments could also have been an opportunity to introduce ARG elements by assigning reading tasks to players that involve books that exist in meatspace. The solution to riddles in dungeons and puzzles could then be found in passages within those books. Although, with public access to books being more and more of an issue lately, it might be prudent to source from public domain books, or the original works from the author(s) and/or collaborators.
The segue into the anthropology and ancient aliens aspect of the quest line seemed to have come out of nowhere, making it feel like the Book Club quests could have been more of a recreational activity like the Foamy Card Cult instead of being a part of this quest line. I feel like this could have been handled as two separate activities, with Book Club activities eventually leading players into exploring the secrets of the viewing tables, and that line of questioning leading players to research books to read, and gain knowledge from.
Obviously, the challenge associated with making use of fully-fledged works is that a lot of reading material has to be included, and that could potentially be a lot of work writing, and typing up stories, articles, theoretical books, etc. However, I do feel that this is the perfect opportunity to introduce more lore of the world to the players.
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Super Bosses
I talked about Riverson earlier in this post, and I think it’s time I elaborate on it and the other super bosses that popped up at various points while playing through the side content. My biggest gripe about them was that they were thrown at the player out of the blue with no anticipation, and with stats, skills, and abilities that are just impossible to deal with outside of just brute-forcing the stats.
In my eyes, super bosses are meant to be out of the way encounters that players would learn about over the course of the game, and would be encouraged to actively seek out as a side challenge. Their great strength and capabilities would be hinted at long before the encounter happens, would be put “over” by a series of increasingly challenging encounters leading up to it. Most importantly, they would present gimmicks that, although very difficult to deal with, would not be impossible to get around.
This was not what I saw in this game. The post RP Punch-Up super boss, Death Toll was triggered by a yes/no question from an NPC sprite that players would never, in a million years, would assume to be that of the “Strongest Warrior in the Galaxy.” As for Riverson...you could easily explore the world several times over and never figure out how to encounter it. I had to look at the events in the editor several times over in order to figure out how Riverson could be encountered, and I still haven’t figured out how to get to the next bit of this quest line. (The “Here, Kitty! Kitty!” switch.)
And, much like Death Toll, Riverson possessed astronomical AGI stats, far above anything else that had been encountered before, complimented with substantial ATK, DEF and SPR stats. All of which ensured that it not only hits hard, both physically and magically, it also takes a lot of hits. It is also immune to all detrimental status effects, magical elements, and debuffs, and it doesn’t end there. It also possess a Tier 3 Drain spell which, coupled with its high SPR stat, would ensure that it could potentially out-heal any damage the party could throw at it, healing itself for up to 5000 HP per turn. All of this meant that there was absolutely no possible counter-play possible, without grinding up Gems via mining or fishing, for hours on end, in order to purchase stat up seeds. I spent 2 hours doing nothing but grinding up stat up seeds this way, and it still did not make much of a difference. It was not until I went into the editor to reduce its AGI stat to 150 from 200, removed its elemental immunities, changed its status & debuff immunities into resistances that I stood a chance against Riverson.
Again, I think super bosses should be capstone encounters that serves as a culmination of all of the challenges that the player’s party had faced beforehand, and as an ultimate test of the player’s knowledge of battle mechanics. They should be puzzle fights hyped up by previous encounters that lead up to the final encounter by following a natural progression of rising challenges. They would have a distinct set of immunities that are balanced out by well-defined and precognizable weaknesses that would be hard to, but not impossible to exploit. These fights would require players to change up or adapt their strategies in order to come out on top.
These encounters are supposed to be fun challenges that are satisfying not just to beat, but to also attempt. The moment players are forced to grind for stat growth seeds just for a chance of hopefully surviving these encounters, is the moment that those challenges are no longer fun, but a tedious exercise in the patience of players.
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