Wooden Ocean Reviews

Murda!

MURDA MURDA MURDA MURDA MURDA MURDA MURDA MURDA MURDA MURDA MURDAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Murda!

An ocean infinitely wide, and just as infinitely deep. Yet another masterpiece arthouse project (that I'll probably never finish due to skill issue) added to my humble collection! Edited after ~20 hrs: Started another playthrough on Infinite Nightmare after playing on Normal. Honestly quite surprised at the replay value, as each dialogue and interaction carry new weight when knowing the lore and nuance behind the world of Wooden Ocean. The highest difficulty doesn't pull any punches, though. Absolutely brutal.

Rpg Maker games tend to cross or stay behind the line of "This Looks Like It Was Made with Rpg Maker" and "OMFG I Can't BELIEVE This Was Made With Rpg Maker!??!" --- yes, Wooden Ocean is the former, but the endpoint is that this doesn't matter. Give it a chance. You're in for a surprisingly well made game with more depth than you could ever imagine. I speak this as someone that had it hanging in my wishlist for years. Enter Violet, bearing news of a death in the family, in search for her missing brother lost in a continent at the edge of the world, a place covered by a massive forest with no end to be seen. This could be the start of a cliche, but the plot of Wooden Ocean is a slippery slope. After a meeting with a duo of demonic siblings, Violet becomes increasingly confused and lost. With each hour, the game gets weirder and weirder, questioning what is reality, how and why it is perceived. The worldbuilding of Wooden Ocean is an intriguing psychedelic drive caused by years of development done with no end of scope creeping with several episodes of mood swings. The F word is overused to a point it's not word, but the writer's safety blanket. Bookshelves are randomly filled with poetry, stories, trivia and absurd rants. NPCs got a ton to say with every interaction, you'll see characters acting nicely in a second to sligshot themselves in genocidal rage in the next one. Sometimes it can be moving, others, very pretentious and full of itself. Exploration is a delight. You roam through a multi-layered, interconnected world, probably one of the largest created with Rpg Maker. It is not only impressive in a matter of discovery, depth and size, locations phisically make sense; if you walk a number of a maps in the underworld and other lower layers, you can then climb up to a location that follows almost the same amount of walking time, maps crossed and direction in the overworld, then vice-versa. Several optional dungeons are hidden all-around, enough to justify more than one playthrough. Poetries of Blood challenge your team comps being one of the best sources of gear and EXP, other Poetries are puzzles which can range from logical to a test of your knowledge about the Wooden Ocean itself. The music is fitting to every place you visit, visuals are simply neat as a large part of those are Rpg Maker assets, but with filters applied in a manner to give a surreal, dreamwordly feel that ends up to be quite cohesive in its entirety, at times, quite Yume-Nikki like. A lot of thought was put in the battle system, with an absurd amount of elements, skills buffs and debuffs to pick, of esoterical outliers like cancer, panic, party confidence, extra turns and other things that aren't really explained, but fun to figure out. Different builds matter and the game demands that you'll respect a handful of times if you want to tackle difficult bosses. Talent points are milestones reached every ten levels that can be assigned via a monolith in the ghost town, those are very impactful and because of it can't be reselected. Speaking of the ghost town, unlike other games this gameplay element is intrisically crucial to your progress. It sure looks very demanding and the town itself looks like absolute crap in your first visit, but turns out the management is very simple for the impact it brings in your progress. Card battles are another thing that are seemingly ignorable, but seriously, you can break the first hours just by playing not to mention those are important to make some later parts of the game a LOT easier. Unfortunately, scope creep is scope creep, so it created a multitude of issues. I had game-breaking bugs that forced me to restart my save from scratch TWICE, one that crashed the game everytime I loaded, other that loaded a black screen (I have 140 hours, steam registered only 80). Time is money and I wasn't paid for this. Some events played out of place, others played more than once for whatever reason. Maps have entrances that can be only triggered with the press of a button on a specific tile even when there isn't a door there, so you'll think that's a deadend. The most aggravating bug was related to talent points, there are super hidden crystals each giving you an extra point. I found FOUR and NONE worked, so I lost the equivalent to 40 levels of grinding. In battles, enemies managed to damage and oneshot characters that had over 100% resist to an element. The most outstanding bug removed some of my items. There's dozens of pieces of gear, but the scope creep turned it into diablo loot. The best weapons in the game acquired very early, but hours later you keep fighting hard bosses and exploring dungeons that reward you with interesting stuff, but 98% isn't useful. The UI is the average Rpg Maker one and this game coud really benefit if it at least was changed to properly look as something like Romancing Saga. The only way to properly check the status boosts of something is in the selling and buying menu of a shop. I wish I was kidding. Wooden Ocean is played as an standart Rpg for the first 10 hours, but later all boils down to minmaxing coming almost close to Disgaea. Eventualy, you get to deal 5K, 10K damage to some enemies once or twice --- yay!!! But then, you reach the end of the game and wink wink, nudge nudge, the developer doesn't want you to finish the game --- he wants you to love Wooden Ocean. So in a very non-discrete manner, after a point of no return you are hit with a difficulty spike where the sun doesn't shine --- oh dude, it can't be THAT hard --- yes, it IS. Even if you have explored 95% of the world and got over 80 hours, this is a huge, intentional, softlock quite similar to a wall of drying cement. One can try to grind over it, but it's very hard. You wasted your talent points on bad talents? You're screwed. You can't go back and the last bosses got millions health. (Fun fact, I bought the game after a friend told me he gave up reaching this place on easy mode) Wink wink, nudge nudge, you're given the option to restart everything in a NG+ losing over 90% of everything you got. Why? Because of the scope creep, because you're being punished for not expending hours on the roguelite dungeon previous to the point of no return. Yes. There is one. It's boring. It's tedious. It's ASS. It's the true endgame of Wooden Ocean and if you don't love it, go educate yourself. Fortunately, I've been playing games since the 80's and there are ways to break this. So I managed. I did it without need to grind by using a convoluted setup that took multiple tries. Then the game crashed. Because I nuked the final boss too hard and this broke the damage numbers. So after multiple retries, I nuked the final boss in a "gentler" manner. I got presented with a rant. Wooden Ocean is a product of years of development, scope creep, changes of mindset, and it shows. While I'm no stranger to rants packed inside of games, those rants were fine spread through it in a creative and organic way, this one came so off of the field, detracted so much of the story so far, that I couldn't help to be left with a sour note. I would rather have had my day with one less rant about life and how it sucks. Disregarding all issues, everything is subjective, not recommending Wooden Ocean would be a disservice to the amount of effort and dedication poured on it. It's a solid 8.5 RPG. Just be mindful, the game is still development so your experience may differ a lot from mine depending when you choose to play it. The game got an "ending" of sorts, but more chapters are yet to come.

I wish there was more info about this game, the story page is empty and nobody talks about it. Its really well made but its just hard to find info on. The entirety of the game the only issues I've had so far is that fullscreen kinda sucks and there is no WASD controls or key binding but I'm more then willing to deal with both to play this game.

The game is really good, I havnt played a TON yet but i can already see that theres tons to do and a lot of skills/playstyles to mess with! Cannot wait to play more. The dev is also based as all hell and updates the game regualary with things i dont understand but look SUPER cool. Support this dev. We need more games like this and more devs like this too.