xXCrowXx's Reviews

[Dear, Princess]

This flash is well made. I did catch that there was something metaphorical going on about halfway through but didn't catch exactly what until I read the description afterward.

My problem with it is that the story pulls no punches at all. At a minimum it should have done something to reveal that "the prince" was Jesus at the end. As is, the list of things that are going to happen is pretty obvious from the moment you see the princess writing a letter, and absolutely nothing happens outside of the default course.

Without ANY particular event to trigger a particular response, the potential for an emotional response that the rest of the story builds up just never comes at all.

As a more minor nitpick, describing Jesus as physically attractive runs counter to the metaphor - following Him is generally not appealing on a superficial level.

exninja123 responds:

thank you for the review! :)
btw, when i said Jesus was "beautiful" i was refering to beauty beyond the phyiscal attractiveness.
and i agree with you on the following Jesus part, it's because Jesus is so great and we as humans are so messed up that following him will show our ugly nature
but i gotta say, the experience of it all is pretty beautiful :)

[what up hEdLesS]

Suggestion:

This episode takes a long time to get going - there was a while that I thought it was broken. You should put a disclaimer in the episode's description saying to be patient after the loading screen.

Anyway, the head gear comment is amusing, the rest is pretty typical.

[There She Is!! step4]

Best flash movie ever. Probably best cartoon ever.

There really is no limit to how much praise I have for this.

Pay close attention to all the details in this movie as you watch it. Everything flows together artistically in a way that is not matched by ANY other flash animation, not even the other ones in this series. In fact, I would venture to say that nothing short of a multi-million dollar, full length motion picture comes close to it, even among those only like one movie reaches this caliber per year.

Let's look at just a few of the details that make this shine:

Panning. Pan right, pan right, pan right, then everything falls apart and zips left as the cat reverts to a previous . Later, Who knew just scrolling could be so artistic?

Backgrounds are natural, but active. When something shocking happens, the background actors jump. When the world is unfriendly and scary, the background is too, and it all adds up.

Notice the use of color. Most of the movie is greyscale, and this allows simple things like the replacement of a green scarf with a grey one to become symbolic.

The music is perfect for the subject matter, and the cartoon is designed to flow with it excellently.

I know this episode is never going to match Final Step in score because it is sad, but really, without this episode the whole series becomes just a typical romantic flick. A well done romantic flick, mind you, but Step 4 here really gives the series its teeth and its meaning.

[Epic Battle Fantasy 4]

I played this game in its Kongregate release. Newgrounds does it much better justice - the game runs smoother here, and full screen makes the game so much easier on the eyes. Props for taking the time to add the full screen feature rather than just doing a simple copy/paste from the Kongregate release.

The game is, as expected, excellent.

While in principle the combat system remains largely unchanged from EBF 2 and 3, the changes to the status effects are extremely good. Wet and its interaction with elemental weaknesses is particularly cool, as is stagger, which makes multi-hit moves functionally different from single hit ones, rather than just cosmetically so. All ailments and buffs are handled in a consistent and transparent manner (this is rare, even in commercial RPGs, and it is a step up from EBF3). And this game's in-battle character swapping system is more strategically interesting and quite frankly makes a lot more sense than how "real" RPGs generally do them.

The plot is not inspired, but apart from the excessively deus ex machina-y ending, it never annoyed me. Much of the player characters' dialogue is funny, though most of the NPCs are boring - more back and forth dialogue might be nice (and the party simply being cynical of the NPCs' ineptitude doesn't count).

I will say that the beginning of the game could have been smoothed out for non-EBF3 veterans, particularly by making sure none of the initial equipment has the "randomly casts ___" property, and also by reworking the layout of the first town so that a road sign is immediately available. My roommate was confused at the start and I don't blame him.

In any case, this game provides about 30 hours of complicated and yet fair turn based strategy and resource management. This is a rare mix to achieve. I strongly suggest Epic difficulty mode, as it forces you to explore and utilize the plethora of strategic options that the game has to offer.

[Utopian Mining]

2 is described as "nothing too new or interesting." This describes this flash perfectly.

Anyone who enjoys this game should try the substantially better "Mega Miner" of the same genre but with a better execution.

The basic framework of this game has been done numerous times before, and many such games have additional strategic elements added. This game doesn't try to mix up its content at all; you move somewhere, dig until you're full, return to the surface. Even the energy balance is made to not be strategic because you are never in risk of running out; taking a trip to the energy recharge station is made into just another nuisance each time you surface rather than an actual addition to the game.

Add some sort of strategic twist to the game. There's plenty of room for innovation in this genre, and choosing not to innovate _at all_ after taking the time to get a game engine working is just embarassing.

[Great Mate Master]

The quantity of chess puzzles is fine, and chess is always good.

Unfortunately, the AI in place is so atrocious that you often don't need to see through to all the possible outs the opponent has; you set up some stupidly simple trap and the AI just blunders right into it for a mate in two when it should take several moves more than that.

Including the option to play against the AI in a normal game of chess just makes the core failure more obvious. Also, something isn't right with the castling detection; it is often not possible to castle in cases where it should be.

Making a chess AI that sees through 6 moves into the future is a trivial task these days; failing to do so in a game which hinges on that level of accuracy is inexcusable.

[Acruta Lao D'nor ~P~]

When I first played EBF3, I went and downloaded all the EBF songs I liked at the time. I distinctly remember skipping downloading this one, as I just didn't like it.

However, when I went to listen to my collection today, there were two that I was specifically looking for. The first was Twins of Duality, but I could not identify the second. I came back to NG and found out that it was this one. Apparently this song grew on me over a time during which I didn't even listen to it.