Reply To: Revisiting Albion
Home › Forums › Previous Months › 75 – December 2022: Albion › Revisiting Albion › Reply To: Revisiting Albion
There is a series of sketches by UK comedians Mitchell and Webb that are about the adventures of superheroes Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit. In every scene, BMX Bandit comes up with some elaborate plan involving spins and wheelies, and Angel Summoner just conjures up an army of angels to do everything for them. Eventually, with his partner fed up of not getting to do anything, they go instead with a plan made up by BMX Bandit, who immediately dies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFuMpYTyRjw
What I’m getting at here is that Sira with her Frost Avalanche is Angel Summoner – it makes battles that would be dangerous into very easy encounters, and ones that would be impossible into just medium difficulty. And the trouble is that I can’t imagine the game being playable without it – on the third island, you start getting gigantic hordes of 10+ enemies at once which would quickly overwhelm you without being able to freeze them all and pick them off without them retaliating. I can’t make a guess at how much grinding it would take to make the game feasible otherwise.
There really isn’t a lot of direction in this part of the game beyond “talk to everyone and see what you can learn”. And it sounds odd for me to call this a drawback after praising just about the same thing in Jirinaar at the start of the game… it feels that this time, you’re just searching for something to do, as opposed to exploring (and I’m almost certain part of it is that I just find the furries much more interesting!) The whole political storyline would be much more involving if you had had any kind of introduction to these characters at all – as it is you’re just trying to find a quest for the sake of having a quest.
Speaking of which, I’ve just left a dungeon that was just there for the sake of having a dungeon! You talk your way past a guard (you can fight him instead but I really didn’t want to kill him, it’s so out of character for your party), then it pointlessly switches to a 3D section which has a load of doors and traps and monsters without any explanation as to why it’s there or why you’re exploring it.