You know those games that take a lot of time to really get anything out of? The ones where you're building up 2/3 of the time you play? That's Elona, a Japanese developed open source open ended roguelike RPG where literally anything can happen, factoring in the stats of course, that's been in development from 2006 to 2010, but has multiple fan made expansions that are still developed today. Elona is, like any good open source JRPG, based on character sheets and die rolls. Attributes are your characters characteristics that allow you to do basic actions, skills govern the possibility of actions working, and the things you get from both are essentially how you progress. Skills and attributes grow from potential, a percentage that is used up to affect how much stat gain get from certain actions (i.e. casting spells grows your casting skills), so you also have to go to trainers to train your stat skill from platinum coins, which you get from quests which coordinate to certain stats. Simple right? The main goal of the game is to save the world from an ancient evil usurping the world blah blah blah preventing a mad experiment from ruling the world with zombie soldiers blah blah blah preventing ANOTHER ancient evil usurping the world, it kinda sucks that the story is only in Japanese and the English version doesn't translate all of the lines. These later game content are gradually unlocked through the story dungeons, really just a big dungeon with a boss on some floors, and have higher level scaling. Still with me? I'm about to get to the interesting stuff. But other than the story, the game really depends on what you want to do, you can become a golem and focus solely on big melee hits (or just use potential growth to grow your other stats and become OP), become a cargo trader with a large estate with all gold everything, become a thief who can steal the weapons and leave everyone defenseless, raise the charisma stat and command an army of catgirls, it's really up to you. Scaling in games is far from new, especially RPGs, but Elona has ALL of its skills useful with obscurity making them fun to use, particularly ones that specialize in character growth rather than direct work like combat or magic. A good example is gardening, the ability to grow plants sounds quite plain, until you realize that you can use the cooking skill to make skill food out of your +9 crops (or sell it for lots of money), grow artifact seeds for some easy enchanted weapons, or some magic seeds for spell books and rods essential for a wizard, to become a really well stocked character. That's only one skill, jeweler can make precious gemstones out of ore to sell for a lot of money, carpentry can make a lot of cargo to sell for money, alchemy can make potions in a jiffy compared to the limited stock of low invest merchants, it really is up to what you want to focus on. But a stat that allows rapid scaling for your skills and attributes is very valuable. The fun also comes from dungeoneering (dungeons are called Nefia in-game) which is the more exciting part of the game, you'll encounter weapons of legendary value, weird and funny looking creatures that will kill you in one hit, and of course the cooking supplies and spell books to keep your skills going! Dungeons and enemies are level locked, the best part is the monster balls (poke-balls) that recruit any hostile monster to your team. But that's the most fun, seeing the different bosses and monsters and defeating them, along with the modifiable sprite sheets, so you can put any anime character or moe-ize any monster you want (*ゝω・). Overall if the point wasn't made clear, you really get what you want from the game by just exploring at first, then maybe making a new character that will focus one one thing, it really depends on you. That's all I can say, just don't pick a dumb class like fairy (gear limitations and easy to die early game) and go for any stat boosters. So go young one, explore... But seriously what do I do?
Obligatory Score: *single roll of (8d10+11) that modifies hit bonus by 8 and damage bonus by 5 with two hand modifier and character scaling*/10 Disclaimer: I'm using ElonaPlus 2.01 with some visual modifications, Elona base or OOMSEST are considerable too
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JamesHe aspires to be a game designer, let's just hope he gets there. He also happens to goes to DSA. Categories
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