Who knew Avalon was such a boring place

by Peter Fiorilla

Fun factor: Boring

Worth to: Avoid

A collection of clichés that have players repeating the same boring chores undermine a rather beautiful game.

Matrix Software’s Avalon Code may be the company’s first original game in a few years, but it has been nearly a decade since the company could be compared to the best developers in the genre. With their latest game, it is obvious they have a lot of work to do if they ever want to reach that pedestal again. This Action RPG feels like a poker hand made up of a nine, an eight, a seven and two fives; so close, yet so far.

Beautiful but a closer look reveals cracks

Indeed, despite coming from the prestigious studio behind the lovely remakes of Final Fantasy III and IV, the world of Avalon Code feels a bit visually dull at times. The positives outweigh the negatives, if only because they are much more noticeable. Character models are often stunning; dynamic cutscenes and camera angles take full advantage of it. Monsters leap, waddle and run in somewhat realistic fashions, and the main character’s smooth animations bring him/her to life.



When the player enters hostile territory, however, the game’s ambitions seem a bit less stellar than they do while progressing the storyline. Linear environments are barren (other than one or two randomly positioned monsters and objects on each screen), and textures are re-used a lot. When there are just a couple enemies on-screen the frame rate will dip, though this is rare.

In some ways, it feels like a step back from the company’s previous DS efforts, perhaps because this project is action-oriented and its design has not already been laid out for them by another developer. Either way, it is a game that -- while certainly one of the best looking DS games in its genre - could look better.

There are far more noticeable issues here than an occasionally unreliable frame rate, however.

“B” as in “Book of Prophecy”

Avalon Code blurs the line between action RPG and action adventure, and so is best described as a linear action-oriented game with elements of both previously mentioned genres. Dungeons are full of monsters to be hacked down by sword and puzzles to be solved by common sense. If monsters do not put up a good fight and puzzles are a bit simple, this is only because the focus of the game is on the potentially groundbreaking Book of Prophecy.

Despite the cheesy name, the Book of Prophecy is not to be taken lightly. Both inanimate objects and organisms alike can be recorded into the magical book by pressing ‘B’ when nearby. Once in the book, what you have recorded stays there permanently (think of it as a bestiary of sorts).



Everything in the book has adjectives (ill, hopeful, copper, etc.) that are portrayed as puzzle pieces on a small grid. After flipping to a page with adjectives, you can either take or store puzzle pieces using the stylus.

Having trouble with a monster? Make it “ill.” Need to make your sword stronger? Replace “copper” with “stone”. Cannot unlock the entrance to the forest dungeon? Give the key “forest.” Avalon Code has a decent variety of adjectives to use, and each time a new one is discovered the game becomes a bit easier.

Giving a monster “ill” tends to make it harmless, but with or without that particularly useful adjective, combat is ridiculously easy and a terrible chore. It is far too easy to knock a monster down, and even less of a challenge to hit them again to ruin their best attempts at getting up. Grunts have nothing but basic attacks (and sometimes block), which makes most fights uneventful and boring.

The game tries to make combat more exciting by introducing unique types of weapons (grenades in a medieval setting?), but it is not enough to conceal the flawed core of Avalon Code’s gameplay. No matter how the player chooses to kill monsters, they are brainless, uninteresting and easily defeated.

And “B” as in “Boring”

There is an alternative to traditional combat, but it is even worse. Juggling opponents in the air sounds like fun, but unlike Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier’s avant-garde take on juggling, there is no depth, skill or graphical flair to be found in this poor excuse for combat. After hitting an enemy directly up into the air, the player’s sole objective is to wait until it comes back down and hit it up again. Fighting this way is not fun the first few times, so there is little incentive to keep using it throughout the moderately lengthy hour story mode.



Despite the tedium of combat, it plays heavenly compared to the Book of Prophecy. There is no search option to locate specific adjectives, and as the player is constantly moving around words (across hundreds of pages) to make the current danger less threatening, this makes using the Book of Prophecy an enormous pain in the neck. The only way to maneuver around the book is to use the index, which is exactly what it sounds like. The front page displays all the basic categories; those categories house sub-categories, and those sub-categories are home to the pages that fit into that sub-category. Locating specific pages is not too bad, though load times in the Book of Prophecy make it a bit boring.

The real issue is finding adjectives. It can take minutes to locate a specific word and store it in the desired page, with most of that time being spent dumbly staring at the screen. A simple search feature could have made the Book of Prophecy easy to use, but it is hard to have fun with minutes of tedium interrupting the game every fifteen minutes.

So if combat is botched and the game’s star attraction a chore to use, what makes Avalon Code worthy of a purchase in the competitive market of DS role-playing games?

Nothing. Avalon Code’s clichéd narrative is hardly worth mentioning, being the typical “young village boy/girl obtains amazing powers and goes out to save the world.” The twist is that the world is ending so the character is trying to scan every good organism in the world so they will live in the next one, but the end result is the same. You end up fighting an evil government (with villains who conveniently love death, misery and human suffering -- a good excuse to hate them upon introduction), become a well-respected hero and you save humanity in a black-and-white fantasy setting.

Summary

While an exceptional collection of ideas, Avalon Code lacks the polish to be a compelling experience. Fans of the genre will enjoy dabbling in numerous creative concepts and applaud the developers on their unique take on action games. Yet after a few hours of play, when simply locating adjectives in the interface becomes a chore, it is time to put Avalon Code’s cartridge back in its case and leave it there for good.