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| Creator | Rammerrush |
| Engine | Lex Talionis |
| Download | Here |
| Score | 52/80 |
| Rank | 10th |
Reviews
Judge 1: Darrman
Gameplay: 7/10
As the name of the game implies, you have to tame things. As a hunter, you can recruit almost every single enemy on the map. But this is not a free action: most enemies when killed by the lord provide an item that allows another enemy to be recruited. This provides an experience somewhat similar to FE5, but instead of capturing everyone, you recruit everyone instead. What you see is what you get in this regard: the stronger enemies make for stronger allies. This results in an experience unlike most other FE games. The chapter also has replay value: there are 19 achievements to hunt for (I unlocked 16) and there are several alternative gameplay modes. The main negative here is an easily-accessible crash: the unit menu is highly unstable and will frequently crash upon exiting. It’s easy to avoid, but also easy to encounter.
Presentation: 2/5
The score here is lowered due to the Lex Talionis engine’s inherent clunkiness at times – it does a good job imitating GBAFE, but it’s not GBAFE. Aside from that, the mugs aren’t the greatest, but the music is free from any technical restrictions and benefits from it.
Story: 3/5
The story isn’t particularly complicated: a veteran tamer sets foot into a magical forest hunting for his partner. He finds her quickly, but is told that a girl was in trouble and they need to find her. This leads into a long sequence of events providing more and more creatures to tame, up to and including dragons, with the aforementioned girl also being a dragon. The chapter ending foreshadows a sequel, but still neatly wraps up the chapter. I’ll take the time to note I appreciated the random recruit names.
Total Score: 12/20
Judge 2: MCProductions
Gameplay: 8/10
The gimmick is very very cute and reminds a lot of SMT, a franchise I adore, however a lot of the map is just walking from point to point avoiding the Raid bosses you can’t recruit preventing me from going higher than 8 with the score.
Presentation: 4/5
There’s a lot to love here. The game is colorful and the animations for all the beasts are well done, however the music doesn’t really fit from my perspective and it also has an issue of cutting out entirely lowering the presentation score for me.
Story: 3/5
It… does the job. It gives a reason to be capturing random beasts and to play the map, but there’s nothing that really catches my attention.
Total Score: 15/20
Judge 3: 2WB
Gameplay: 4/10
The gimmick was unique. I didn’t like it because it felt really confusing, and it involved a lot of vocabulary that made it difficult to play.
But it was cool stuff, mostly.
I really felt penned in and not like I was able to really…move a lot, because I kept ending up in awkward scenarios and didn’t have the ability to get enemies to good thresholds to be assured the bait would work – I do not want to gamble anything on a 70. So I played really slow, really carefully, and crawled the entire army over to each objective.
Then this all became pretty moot when the succubus got a nice 11% critical on the Tamer, because I foolishly expected the objective to be the objective and not spawn new enemies on the map such that I would be basically be guaranteed to be in a poor position when they came in.
So that was really not fun, and the lack of checkpointing meant going back over a whole halfhour, which is incredibly difficult for me due to the whole desire to actually win thing.
The practical bullying from the narrator afterward just kind of pissed me off. It ruined the remaining fun I was having.
Then I have to go back and play slowly in order to make sure that I have enough units that I can kill a unit – that I don’t know exists until after I commit, that I can’t check the stats on.
And that process is tedious! And offers some challenge, but it isn’t fun because I have no earthly idea how much I need or how to figure out if a given unit is even useful.
Leader of the Pack doesn’t have a graphic for all possible attack counts. This… is a problem, because I don’t actually know which “within 2 tiles” it’s measuring — the unit or the target — and which one it is hugely changes my strategy.
The skill has a hard cap of six attacks; which, if it TOLD ME THAT anywhere, or SHOWED ITS HIT COUNT, would be fine.
But it doesn’t, so it’s not. And it’s a lot of stuff like that that really makes me hurt — How do stats contribute to things? I don’t know and I don’t really have the ability to science because there’s so many things that change between targets.
I also want to say similarly about all the stat renames because I keep looking for a “Def” and it’s actually “End” and that’s very annoying.
This, of course, is particularly infuriating, because I want to know why so many enemies are putting up critical rates! I really need an answer to that and I have absolutely no idea which units are more or less vulnerable to criticals.
Your project is too damn long! I spent over four hours playing it! When it says “one chapter”, have you ever seen an ACTUAL FE CHAPTER* say “go to A, then to B, then to C” when each part takes over ten minutes?
No. You haven’t, because THEY AREN’T TESTS OF ENDURANCE LIKE THAT. At MOST, they’re two parts if a part takes significant time.
*FE4 does this. But FE4 is a game with literally half-or-less the typical chapter count.
Basically, I submit that, when you added the second checkpoint to your game, you should have realized your game was too long.
Current playtime: Between 3h 15m and 3h 45m hours (igt 2h 42m)
At this point, I just had no interest in continuing to `try` and proceeded to attack with my endless army of TWENTY FIVE UNITS, which is SIGNIFICANTLY ABOVE the deploy limit of even the most populated FE chapters.
At this point, there had just been so much nonsense happening that I could no longer keep track. This is not helped by the fact that actually decent critical rates start existing, making planning go from “annoying” to “actively impossible” because the Harpies in particular just decide they’re going to land two 15% criticals on your units. Oops! To say nothing of your own criticals making planning kind of end up a pointless endeavor. This, again, is something not helped by every stat being renamed and the formulas being changed: I have no earthly clue what a calculation is. All of my training is useless and my ability to anticipate any given number is basically luck based.
And, simply, the “trade out last time’s units for this time’s” thing has gotten really boring because I have been doing it for so long I’m sick of it.
7 movement fliers with 22 critical rate wouldn’t be a problem if I knew how much damage they’d actually deal, which I can’t predict because I already know that damage is not equal to Might + Stat. I have no idea how a unit’s Fortune becomes their Magic Damage Bonus, which means I have no way to predict how much Fortune a unit needs to have to survive a critical – let alone a critical and a normal due to their high Agility.
Lost about 5 minutes of tactics due to “Separate” ending turn while “Transfer” doesn’t. One more reason to hate pair up is this sort of awkwardness because those actions have the same feel. Why do they behave so different?
3h 8m, +50-70m.
While I COULD get to the MAP STATED OBJECTIVE extremely fast, I know from the LAST SIX TIMES you told me what the objective was that that’s not actually the end of the map, which means I have no payoff for interacting with half the cool things I *could* do with Pair Up. It just becomes “dual attack stance” and I have no reason to use the other like, five parts. No need for me to defend the Tamer, because his actions are almost never “attack” and haven’t been for more than TWO ACTUAL HOURS of playing.
also i Suspended and X’d out of the game and it broke the save again
nice
cool
thanks LT very stable
I am still struggling, after 3hr 35m of in game time, to figure out when I get loot from a corpse. Because I genuinely can’t find a single consistent rule.
The Alraune having 14 range means there’s basically no safe spots on the map
I appreciate that this might be on purpose
this doesn’t change that it’s shitty and means I’m now also contending with bullshit siege tomes whose damage output I have no way of knowing because ONCE AGAIN I have NOT HAD A CHANCE to figure out WHAT THE DAMAGE FORMULA IS. As far as I know, if the Alraune hits the tamer, he’ll instantly die.
making it somehow even shittier the range isn’t consistent nor is it explicitly called out as, for example, magic/2.
look siege weapons in vanilla fe are 3-10 and this is already too big.
I keep staring at combats and seeing 5-15% critical rates and it makes me feel agony. When my units die to a critical, I need to NOT be seeing that kinda bullshit.
Due to the way that additional enemies are spawned, the Alraune can be pushed around by them coming in which is… not great at best.
4hr 6m igt btw
And yeah, I’m once again treated to “better spend an extra turn to make sure that you can completely destroy whatever spawns happen when you trigger the event, instead of having most of your army be already tapped!”
thanks
very.
cool.
4hr 20m igt? another. event.
PLEASE
FUCKING
END.
*If the game had ended by the river event, this would be so much better*.
This is definitely not the worst. I am having fun *for brief moments* between realizing I have been here for FIVE GOD DAMN HOURS on ONE SINGLE MAP.
STOP.
though
i should note
that it is at this time that i figured out how the damage formula worked, and the reason i was unable to figure it out is because i was following my gut about how numbers should be ordered instead of actually reading
i still don’t know how hit, avoid, critical are computed but those are much less important overall
When the red Alraune killed the purple Wolf, the enemy Tamer dropped … as a *red* unit.
4hr 40m
and
we’re
still
going
stop……………………….
the game has gotten SUPER laggy though. so it’s really… painful to play, like, even if it wasn’t already so.
5hr 6m in; and a megadurgin spawns in behind me oops!
none of this matters
i have infinite use 13 range, no real camping penalty, and an endless supply of units that i can use the MP from to get force crits. If something dangerous snags close i can make it *my unit*. And feed it to the Aid users.
This does not make me feel clever or smart
it makes me feel like your game is stupid and not worth playing
Presentation: 3/5
THE MUSIC IS TOO LOUD AND I ALREADY TURNED IT DOWN. I turned it down to the *minimum volume*, and this was still too loud so I had to turn down the volume on external settings.
I really should not have to do that, and I really should be able to hear the cursor booping noises at roughly the same volume as the music *before* adjusting them to be wildly different from default.
The map is nice looking but the gameplay is a bit at odds with its visuals. Particularly, the trees preventing walking behind them is awkward with how they… don’t have any of their mass on the ground they cover.
The mugs are decent and the premise of a monster horde as well as the unique tileset *definitely* all stand out.
I greatly appreciate how each section has its own map, enemy, and attack themes. They’re just really overkill themes, taking full advantage of the engine for some really bombastic tracks.
Unfortunately the music constantly cuts out and I have to go back to title to restore it. Adding just One More Thing that I need to keep doing to maintain the experience? It feels rough and unpolished as a result.
the alraune’s animation with the thorn weapon is broken / doesn’t work.
The lightning bolts when the purple dragons show up HURT MY EYES and make it HARD TO PLAY THE GAME.
Story: 3/5
I zoned out so hard because the story introduction from the mysterious person was so repetitive and … typical? So I had to read it three times which was silly since it then proceeded to give me different dialogue because I restarted on turn 1. That kind of… like, it’s a nice detail, but I wanted to see what I had missed the first time!
The story is nice! I quite liked it, and the characterization of the man (whose name is randomizable… for what purpose?). I actually forgot to take notes because I usually was emulator screenshotting but LT doesn’t support that.
Then the Lamia says `that well looks sus as hell` and I’m groaning with every fibre of my being.
Oh, cool, a lightning bolt entry. And boring jumpscares, I’m just so done with it. It’s not interesting or gripping because there has been no build up or tension, it just *happens* and that makes me feel like you saw something that was cool and stole the climax from it instead of looking at why the building tension of it is what made the climax be cool.
Like I’m really pleased with all the mid map dialogue. It is all good things.
But there’s so much of it I am banging my head wondering when you will stop saying words. And, furthermore, when the tamer says “oh they’re friends now” — that’s not the first time I’ve seen wolves and cyclops tag teamed together and not attacking while adjacent! It’s the third time!
and i just
i can’t be bothered to care
there’s so much and it’s all nice but there’s SO MUCH GAME that the quips are TRITE AND BORING and i WAANT IT TO JUST END
Total Score: 10/20
Other Notes
I hate LT.
In this particular instance, I have a habit of mashing buttons when I’m waiting to be given control.
LT thinks that start+a+b input, which for me is sdf, is a soft reset command. This would be fine.
Except it also doesn’t anchor the suspend file properly or…something stupid like that, so when I pressed this by accident I lost literally over an hour of progress.
Thankfully something stupid had already happened so I had already made a backup of the save; but that’s… that’s not good.
I apologize for the stream of consciousness below in advance. Your game took me over five hours in-game-time on my successful run. This is too long. I initially had given it a 7 because it was pretty fun and cool and neat, and then found out there was four more hours of playtime so I kept ticking away from it as my soul left my body.
What follows is my limited documentation of that process.
Judge 4: theghostcreator
Gameplay: 7/10
Simple but pretty good, fun gimmick and the fact that some wolves have skills is neat too, thought healing was a bit tight though.
Presentation: 4/5
Very nice looking, not much to complain about at all.
Story: 4/5
Pretty solid all around.
Total Score: 15/20
Results
| Category | Darr | MC | 2WB | Ghost | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay | 7 | 8 | 4 | 7 | 26 |
| Presentation | 2 | 4 | 3 | 4 | 13 |
| Story | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 13 |
| Total | 12 | 15 | 10 | 15 | 52 |