Cycle of the Heavens

Cycle of the Heavens
CreatorVonIthipathachai
Adarya
EngineSRPG Studio
DownloadHere
Score39/80
Rank15th

Reviews

Judge 1: Darrman

Gameplay: 6/10

You have three units, aiming to arrive at the other end of a reasonably long pathway. SRPG Studio’s strengths over GBAFE are used here: the player is allowed to save once every five turns, like in Vestaria Saga. The entry as a whole is inspired by Tellius, and this chapter was solid. The main stand-out was being able to have fun with Berserk, while the lack of heal staff on the Micaiah lookalike was an annoyance. Some of the AI was also unusual – a group of mages weren’t moving to attack my units in range, for example – and nothing stopped me from turtling near the boss.

Presentation: 3/5

Many of the SRPG Studio default assets have been replaced here. The Tellius inspiration runs deep here, with almost all of the music originating from it and the AI-generated character portraits succeed at reproducing the FE10-style mugs. The world map narration is even voice-acted, like FE10. The animations are still fairly clunky, though they aren’t the default ones, and the map tileset, though edited, is still stylistically similar.

Story: 2/5

The entry is under no illusion that it’s a standalone entry, rather openly serving as a demo for a full game produced using the ideas from here. The story premise is interesting, with a typical Fire Emblem world about to enter a parallel of the Industrial Revolution, but by the entry’s nature, nothing is resolved. The ending cutscene is little more than an appeal to await the finished product – you’re limited to one chapter, but you’re still allowed an ending.

Total Score: 11/20

Judge 2: MCProductions

Gameplay: 3/10

This is a very bad escape map where you are surrounded on all sides and need to take an extremely roundabout path to reach the escape point while two of your three game over conditions die from two hits from everything. If it wasn’t for the Vestaria/Berwick style once every five turn battle saves, this map would be one of the worst trial and error things I’ve personally played through. The saves however, do help a bit, and ironically the further into the map you get, the enemy quality seems to decrease, so things become much more manageable, but the first few turns were just annoying enough to leave a really bad taste in my mouth, and first impressions are very important to me.

Presentation: 4/5

Music is a selection of really good Tellius tracks and Heritors of Arcadia from FE15, and the voiced opening is a nice touch, but default SRPG studio assets hold back the presentation in gameplay. The character portraits however are very reminiscent of FE10’s. and while I’m not big personally on FE10’s portraits, I respect the stylistic choice.

Story: 2/5

Story has a neat hook that implies a largely FE plot is happening, but as this is clearly a demo little is resolved and what’s there doesn’t interest me greatly in the final product.

Total Score: 9/20

Judge 3: 2WB

Gameplay: 3/10

not having a way to guide enemy units to attack a specific unit
with only three units
and not much healing to go around

is very distressing?

I love being lame, boring, unexciting, and uninterested, because I don’t have these things I feel obliged to TEDIOUSLY BAIT enemies one by one to make sure I don’t randomly die.

and then the enemies i want to bait
don’t move forward

cool exciting great

aaaaaa

Unit skills:
Delos has two next-to-useless ones. Wow, Crit +10 and enemy Hit/Crit -5.
Syme? Pivot is useful, but a 7% chance of instantly killing the foe is actively anti-interesting and I am insulted that it’s there
Kythira gaining +2 damage at range is neat but it’s either hugely important (enables one shot/round) or irrelevant (we do 15-20 damage to enemies with 25-31 hp). Reposition is incredibly strong and well usable.

I’ve been told 20 turns
I’m on turn 12 and I’m still in the upper third of the map, because I have to slooooooooooowly bait enemies out because they don’t come to me when I’m in range for some unknown reason and then pray I haven’t misunderstood when they charge down, because again
I have a very limited number of attacks and heals.
And even then? They’re not guaranteed!
Syme might be good, but she only gets 15 attacks, and that means against the quantity of enemies I’m very scared — and her Berserk hasn’t been useful because the enemies keep missing their 70-80s against one another and then getting healed by a Physic staff user.

So I am reduced to moving Delos into range and having him canto away.

Then, because I’m already doing this slow terrible grindy thing, I might as well wait more turns so I get a new save so I don’t have to do it again. Like, ugh.

This is particularly prominent as something I feel obligated to do because of DYING multiple times due to UNRELIABILITY or LOW PERCENTAGE CRITICALS which are UNRECOVERABLE ISSUES due to NOT HAVING HEALING

am I harping on it too much? I just feel I really need to drive it home. Having ~80 hit rate is survivable WHEN YOU HAVE HEALING or LOTS OF UNITS. I have NEITHER such thing.

Basically, the entire time I was playing, I was saying “readme says 20 turns by the way”, because I had taken 20 turns to clear the first– what, 2/5ths of the map I guess?

The boss has 2 range. Why is he flanked by immobile snipers? For what purpose? I didn’t know if they’d move or not if I berserked them so I didn’t want to waste the staff on that!

And the boss does 40 damage, which means Syme can’t fight, Kythira doesn’t do great damage, and Delos is in pretty poor form against him as well. I literally just had to get lucky with two 90s hitting and had no other recourse.

The Berserk staff’s RNG prone, the enemies and players don’t hit consistently.

Presentation: 4/5

ok so
i was bitching about this being an srpg studio submission because i don’t like how srpg studio handles, i don’t like it using “a song” for title music because i’m weird
and then it was voiced. like
wow.

Monotone or not, that’s a lot, and there’s not a shortage of narration on it.

The portraits, the text boop noises — It’s Tellius. I was a bit floored at how decent it all looked – There’s a few rough internal edges on some of the portraits but the main issue I take is how the opening segment has three black haired friends gazing dourly to the left. It… was really homogenous and blended too strong, for me.

Then I got to the credits and they’re AI generated and I’m just mad for personal reasons.
But they’re unique, they’re not unpolished, they’re aesthetic. It’s just also, uh, Tellius again.

Story: 2/5

Magic Crystal Can Be Used For TECHNOLOGY!!!

Very repeated piece of text, but it’s fairly competently done. Each character contributes to the story and it takes only a bit too long to get there in the opening segment.

Then Bandits Attack, which is
rather depressing?

Then the story ends instead of having any closing. Which is. The Worst.

Total Score: 9/20

Judge 4: theghostcreator

Gameplay: 5/10

It’s very slow being a big map and having only 3 units with very limited healing. 2-3 bows and daggers is really mean and it felt like it wasn’t properly tested.

Presentation: 2/5

This is wholeheartedly a me thing but I think SRPG studio games look very ugly. The portraits also look somewhat off in some cases and a lot of the assets just clash in terms of style.

Story: 3/5

Alright, but nothing great or substantial, really felt like a cut out piece of a bigger project.

Total Score: 10/20

Results

CategoryDarrMC2WBGhostTotal
Gameplay633517
Presentation344213
Story22239
Total11991039

Grand Total: 39/80

=15th Position Overall

See Also

Forum Thread