Venaitura Reviews

After having a blast with Scarmonde last fall, I picked up Ephiam's other releases on Steam. I finally got around to playing Venaitura and had a pretty darn good time with it. Much like Scarmonde and Final Fantasy 1, Venaitura is a traditional JRPG, with a focus on combat and a customizable team. It opens up with you picking a team of 4 from a variety of classes. I went with a Barbarian, a Savior, a Minstrel, and a Hunter, but I could see myself replaying sometime down the road to see how a Companion (magical dog) or Slime Knight would play out. Venaitura otherwise has a largely similar game structure to Final Fantasy 1, as well. Talk to people in towns to get hints about what to do, explore dungeons, unlock new modes of travel, and eventually get to the big baddy. Venaitura has a lot more lore, dialogue, and plot going on than either FF1 or Scarmonde. I largely enjoy the bleak tale told in Venaitura, though, sometimes the dialogue can get a bit overly verbose. Getting to a large new town could feel daunting with how much the villagers could have to say. On the other hand, villagers frequently updated their dialogue as you completed nearby quests, which was a nice bit of reactivity. There is a boatload of optional content and exploration to be had in Venaitura, and it always leads to interesting loot, a boss fight, or some lore. Exploration was a ton of fun here, and was a huge positive for the game. In terms of balance, the game was quite hard at the beginning, but got easier, with a few difficulty spikes. Fairly common for this sort of game. One interesting aspect was that the "post game" content became available at the same time as the last last major zone of the main storyline, though I didn't recognize it as such at first. Naturally, I ignored the story and explored everywhere else first. This led to a huge difficulty spike initially, but also a ton of powerful, new equipment, levels, and permanent stat boosting items. By the time I'd done virtually all of the optional content, I was able to auto-attack my way through the rest of the storyline, leading to a somewhat anti-climactic ending. I don't think it's entirely a bad thing, though, since I caught on to the fact that these dungeons were way harder than the next step of the story content and were giving rewards I'd expect in the post-game fairly quickly. I intentionally continued down that path for the thrill of "sequence breaking" and see how early I could tackle the very difficult bosses these zones offered. I don't have too many comments about general game design, since the majority of it was solid and as expected. That said, I didn't like the oldschool Pokemon-esque choice to make Intelligence double as magic attack and defense. It meant that my magic focused characters were generally my most survivable. Further, two of a barbarians equippable weapon types (greatswords and axes) generally came with an intelligence penalty, which I found to be too detrimental to be worth using. Thus, my barbarians generally used his remaining weapon category -- gloves -- and spent his time punching people. Of course, that's mostly a nitpick. While the class system is quite rigid, without customization past the initial selection, the itemization is very good. Depending on loadout, I could have my Savior drop massive damage with holy spells, or competently wield swords to deal with other enemies, for example. Most weapon types have a group of enemies they do bonus damage to, for example daggers are excellent against humans. Further, many weapons can inflict status ailments and have extra enemy types they are super effective against. It was a nice bit of strategy to move weapons around so that I'd have characters suited to each of the groups I'd commonly see in a given dungeon. One other little touch I really appreciated was the "Monster Zero" item, found right at the beginning of the game. It simply turns off random encounters until a new screen is loaded. The dungeons in Venaitura can be rather long and winding, so being able to turn off random encounters when backtracking for treasure kept things from getting bogged down. Overall, this is a solid traditional class-based JRPG. I think Scarmonde was a definite step forward in terms of design and customizability for Ephiam, but Venaitura is absolutely worth playing on its own merits.