Short Version: I tried my best to like it, since it seemed right up my alley, but I didn’t. It’s probably one of the blandest and generic RPGs I’ve played in a while. Nothing I see in it is interesting and the plot is boring as hell. The UI is awful and the gameplay feels cheap and antiquated. Even for hardcore RPG fans, I would recommend other games that do the same thing better.
Long Version: Every single time I saw Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy through screenshots, it looked like the coolest game in the world. However, every time I saw it on video, it felt like a super rough RPG held back by old ideas. Unfortunately, the latter is what I ended up being reassured of, with the coolness I perceived from it very quickly vanishing. This is mostly due to large amount of small annoyances that accumulated over time to something I didn’t want to involve myself with anymore.
Begin the Operation
Operation Abyss is a first person dungeon crawling RPG that takes place in a modern day setting. In this setting, we find an incredibly generic story about a silent, amnesiac protagonist (stop me if you’ve heard this one before). This person of course gets roped into a secret high school organization of monster hunters who claim that he/she is important than what it initially seems. None of it really matters though, since the game gives you a bunch of pre set characters with no story behind them, who then are talked to as a single entity. Who you are doesn’t really matter, because you can create your own teammates and still not make any difference in the boring and uninteresting story.
There are a couple of generic looking characters with forgettable art direction that show up in the beginning hinting at some sort of story, but all of them are so bland that you forget about them almost immediately after they leave the screen. It doesn’t help that both the Japanese and English voices sound like bored people that are trying their best not to fall asleep in the middle of a recording. Everyone sounds so monotone that I lost interest in listening to anything the characters had to say.
The Standardized Written Electronics Evaluation (a.k.a. A Review)
Whenever you’re not going through dialogue scenes, you’re preparing for some dungeon crawling, which can be a much bigger chore than it sounds. This is mostly due to the horrendous UI and how this game loves to overcomplicate simple things. Instead of naming things in a simple way, they would much rather re-skin it in unnecessary jargon and confusing ways to find everything; mostly for the sake of having it sound cool or more complex than it actually is. Instead of just having an option like “Exp Boost” or “Class Change,” you instead hear terms like “Growth surgery” or “Therapy.” Every time you go back to one of the many confusing facilities with even more confusing menus, you have to read the names and try to remember what all of these labels mean. No matter what, you will always be cluttered with too much stuff on the screen with weird names and no easy explanation as to what any of it does, making the whole experience frustrating.
Speaking of frustrating, the dungeon crawling is not fun at all either. From the beginning, you are met with random encounters with still images of crappy looking monsters you need to fight. The battle menus look incredibly cheap and are presented in a way that’s always difficult to tell what you’re actually selecting. Since this game is very much rooted on the old style of RPGs, then it relies on concepts like not being to select individual enemies, having to use up a strange assortment of points for magic spells or not being able to level up until you return to a medical facility, rather than just automatically.
[I originally posted this review on The Buttonsmashers. You can read the rest of the review
by clicking here or just listening to the video version above.]
Game Review – Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy
0Short Version: I tried my best to like it, since it seemed right up my alley, but I didn’t. It’s probably one of the blandest and generic RPGs I’ve played in a while. Nothing I see in it is interesting and the plot is boring as hell. The UI is awful and the gameplay feels cheap and antiquated. Even for hardcore RPG fans, I would recommend other games that do the same thing better.
Long Version: Every single time I saw Operation Abyss: New Tokyo Legacy through screenshots, it looked like the coolest game in the world. However, every time I saw it on video, it felt like a super rough RPG held back by old ideas. Unfortunately, the latter is what I ended up being reassured of, with the coolness I perceived from it very quickly vanishing. This is mostly due to large amount of small annoyances that accumulated over time to something I didn’t want to involve myself with anymore.
Begin the Operation
Operation Abyss is a first person dungeon crawling RPG that takes place in a modern day setting. In this setting, we find an incredibly generic story about a silent, amnesiac protagonist (stop me if you’ve heard this one before). This person of course gets roped into a secret high school organization of monster hunters who claim that he/she is important than what it initially seems. None of it really matters though, since the game gives you a bunch of pre set characters with no story behind them, who then are talked to as a single entity. Who you are doesn’t really matter, because you can create your own teammates and still not make any difference in the boring and uninteresting story.
There are a couple of generic looking characters with forgettable art direction that show up in the beginning hinting at some sort of story, but all of them are so bland that you forget about them almost immediately after they leave the screen. It doesn’t help that both the Japanese and English voices sound like bored people that are trying their best not to fall asleep in the middle of a recording. Everyone sounds so monotone that I lost interest in listening to anything the characters had to say.
The Standardized Written Electronics Evaluation (a.k.a. A Review)
Whenever you’re not going through dialogue scenes, you’re preparing for some dungeon crawling, which can be a much bigger chore than it sounds. This is mostly due to the horrendous UI and how this game loves to overcomplicate simple things. Instead of naming things in a simple way, they would much rather re-skin it in unnecessary jargon and confusing ways to find everything; mostly for the sake of having it sound cool or more complex than it actually is. Instead of just having an option like “Exp Boost” or “Class Change,” you instead hear terms like “Growth surgery” or “Therapy.” Every time you go back to one of the many confusing facilities with even more confusing menus, you have to read the names and try to remember what all of these labels mean. No matter what, you will always be cluttered with too much stuff on the screen with weird names and no easy explanation as to what any of it does, making the whole experience frustrating.
Speaking of frustrating, the dungeon crawling is not fun at all either. From the beginning, you are met with random encounters with still images of crappy looking monsters you need to fight. The battle menus look incredibly cheap and are presented in a way that’s always difficult to tell what you’re actually selecting. Since this game is very much rooted on the old style of RPGs, then it relies on concepts like not being to select individual enemies, having to use up a strange assortment of points for magic spells or not being able to level up until you return to a medical facility, rather than just automatically.
[I originally posted this review on The Buttonsmashers. You can read the rest of the review by clicking here or just listening to the video version above.]Game Review – The Silver Case
Game Review – Birthdays the Beginning