It’s an rpg! It’s an adventure game! It’s a simulator! It is a game about you attending the Hogwarts school for wizards and witches. Well, ok, it’s not about Hogwarts per se. I’m pretending it is, though.
So where does Impulse store manuals again? I may have to check the game’s homepage tonight to see if there is any online documentation. It needs documentation. Badly. Well, that and an interface overhaul. I haven’t gotten very far. The character creation process is very detailed. And it’s here that the interface fails the player.
You get 10 points. These 10 points can be divided up amongst dozens and dozens of things. You can spend no more than 5 on your innate ability scores, which each start at one. You can also spend it on things like educational background, a starting familiar, your family history. There are something like 7 or 8 sections where points can be spent. And it is bewildering. Some choices will cancel out other choices in the set. But you are often chosing from something like 10ish things, with the somewhat small display area for the choices needing to be scrolled to see them all. Call that problem the first; there is plenty of room to display the entire list.
Problem the second? You can select something to see what it imparts. There’s flavor text and then a list of the exact bonuses you gain. But it’s in an exceptionally scrunched display area, so you usually have to scroll that box to see the bonuses. Absurd. Again, there is a crapload of real-estate available, there’s no reason why the bonuses shouldn’t be always on display.
Problem the third is the process in general. It’s a wizard. But you can’t see your overall progress in the wizard, you just spend points on a given page and then hit the “next” button, unsure of where the end is. So you might spend your 10 points on the first 4 screens only to discover you have like 4 more screens with options waiting. And maybe some of those will be better? So then you’re looking at all the options in the section (typically involving some scrolling of the “options” list and lots of scrolling of the “description of the option” box. Character creation in Academagia is hard work). And some of these things provide 3-5 statistical boosts. And you’re hitting forward/back and trying to decide what’s the best choice. And then you realize. . .
Problem the fourth: you don’t really have the slightest idea what the hell you are doing. Oh, if something says “strength + 1”, you know it’ll give you + 1 strenght. But a lot of these things boost skills. What skills? You can’t see them in the character creation wizard. Once you get in game, you’ll find dozens and dozens. And many skills have sub skills. It appears to be a deep/complex system. But you can’t see what you’ve accumulated bonuses in during creation (I don’t think you can even see which abilities will be boosted).
One of the last sections of character creation is chosing your house and class schedule. Again there are dozens of subjects (and I think ~10 houses).
And speaking of in-game, your wizard has something called “phemes”. They’re apparently the result of certain character creation choices. There’s a luck stat but also a “lucky” pheme. I wound up with 7, including some that appear they might be negative. I’m not sure I understand the usage of the term “pheme” here. Anyway, it’s not clear that you’ll be getting all of these during creation. Which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, per se. But character creation as it exists is far too confusing for the player. So I needs a manual. I spent over a half hour in the game yesterday and I felt exhausted at the end (and went to play Rise of Legends instead), and I barely did anything with either of my created characters.
To come: tonight I hope to meaningfully play the game.