Azarine Heart Reviews

As part of a disclaimer, I do enjoy the world building and story potential of Azarine Heart. The game has an interesting basis for a plotline and lots of potential, but that is also what kills it for me. My first gripe is no real controller support. You can do conversations and dashing with the controller, but no combat or abilities. So you might as well use the awkward keyboard controls that don't really work well for an Action RPG. Plus, dashing is not the most effective way of travelling, because that's the dodge key that's not on the controller. My second gripe is a two-parter about combat, as it is a major thing in the game. No matter the difficulty, you can skip random encounters in the overworld by simply mashing the dodge key and backstepping. Meaning you can travel from one side of the map to the other by mashing dodge and only stopping to change directions and not once encounter a single random encounter. The second part of this gripe is that while I love Action RPGs, the RPG Maker system is not a good system for Action RPGs. While I hear there is a new plugin out that is much smoother and better for Action RPGs in RPG Maker, this game came out before then. Where you have an issue where certain animations take priority over others and there is no animation cancelling. Attacking and Moving for instance. Attack animations take priority over Moving animations, to where if you do the inputs for both either on top of or too closely together, your character will only attack. This includes when you are just wanting to change directions to swing at a new enemy. This means that you will need to heavily slow down your reactions and inputs in order to properly play, which is an antithesis of what an Action RPG is about. The best strategy appears to be to just dump stat points into health and attack and face tank while standing in a spot where enemies need to come to you and hope you hit them more than they hit you. My third gripe is about the main story. While I did try some of the side quests, that were a little lackluster early on, the main story feels underwhelming not in what it is about but rather how you are a part of it. It tells you to ask the locals, and through a few dialogue options with the right NPC it will eventually tell you to go to one of three different cities of Eastwatch, Oakcross or Blackmark. I ended up going to Oakcross as it was much closer, where I talked to more NPCs before one told me to speak to a particular NPC, where I was then told to leave and go to Eastwatch to talk to a different NPC, halfway across the map. Once I got there, they gave me a book to deliver back to Oakcross to the person who told me to go to Eastwatch, who then tells me to go to take a nap and then to go back to Eastwatch to try and find a scholar in the Mage's Guild. Who in the Mage's Guild you ask? Fuck if I know, you aren't given a name, just that they are in the Mage's Guild. So I go to the Mage's Guild and talk to every NPC available and not a single one says, "Oh, you need a scholar? Second floor, their name is ." Like you work and live with these people, and you can't be bothered to roughly know who does what or who might know? I understand wanting your players to explore your open world, but having this as the first leg of your main story is just down right disrespectful of your player's time. I would akin it to Morrowind, but Morrowind had the decency to give you clear "Go here and find/talk to ." and when you get to that city you can ask almost every NPC about what or who you are looking for and they will give some kind of information. Potential means nothing if not properly acted upon. A rock has potential to be thrown, broken, smoothed, polished and/or refined into a statuette or some other object. To say it has potential is nice, but it ignores the rough parts that must be fixed. With these three main gripes hitting so early on, I am not willing to play the game to completion. With combat and controls being so unfun, I would not be able to give it a proper review.