Are you ready for an adventure to a new land?
Are you recently married and need to find a way for you and your spouse to connect closer, while defending your honor as a man at the same time?
Well then, grab your staff and say your “I do”s…
This is Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan!
Let me begin with that saying this review might not be as “punny” as normal. I had to take a more serious look at this game. I like to keep politics out of my video game reviews (because let’s face it, we aren’t getting away from politics anytime soon ), but it was nice to see my skin color represented a little better than Afro guy with bird in hair.
Only kinda ridiculous…
I’d never heard of an African RPG before in my life and when this game across my Twitter, it was an eye opener. I saw the Steam reviews and they were mostly positive. I was psyched!
I had been used to playing as small Japanese boy or girl fighting against things like the will to live, death itself, and other things like insert random errible empire here. It was strange to me to be playing as the Prince and Princess of a whole city/village, fighting to take back my land. Strange but refreshing. It was nice to see representation of another culture in videogames, specifically this genre.
Now, seeing the video game on Steam and other small GIFs on the internet is one thing. Playing it is a completely different thing.
Playing it reminded me of The Lion King, but if Scar won from the beginning and there wasn’t any Hakuna Matata. Hakuna Matata has been kicked out on its ass. Timon and Pumbaa are dead, with their heads on pikes.
Now before you think that I’m going to rip into this game harder than ugly on a warthog, I am going to ask you to sit down and let me explain.
I’ve played many games. I’m Mr. Gamer, obviously. Comes with the job. I’ve seen the best that some developers have had to offer and I have seen the worst. Now, while Mr. Gamer’s Mom told me to never judge a book by its cover, I was guilty of judging this game by its title screen.
Frankly, it looked like a flash game from Newgrounds. It looked like I was playing a game that I downloaded on my Windows XP computer and was just using Macromedia Shockwave to play.
I think I just aged an extra 10 years with that bit but the point is that the first look wasn’t very enticing. There were as many frames of animation on the NPCs as pixels on a reposted image on Imgur, complete with spelling errors sprinkled here and there. But even in the actual story and small exploration section of the village, I found myself nitpicking a little.
The story is that you are Enzo Kori-Odan, the prince of Zama. You are to be married happily to Erine Evou but that gets interrupted when your brother-in-law, Ngarba, confronts you because he doesn’t think that you are fit to be king, and he proves it with a well-muscled punch to the face and an Aurion, the manifestation of the fighter’s strength, that puts your wimpy thing to shame.
Sad really.
Kicked out of the kingdom, you and your wife must gather your strength and take back your land. I love that type of story because it makes the journey to power less generic but I still found myself asking throughout the fight, “Is this it?”
“But Mr. Gamer, isn’t this from an indie developer? Give them a break!”
Billy, shut your face hole. First of all, I am professional. Indie developer or triple A developer, a game is a game- it will be judged as fairly and unbiased as possible and if you could calm your outbursts – This isn’t Twitter – you’ll realize that I don’t think the game is all bad.
After the scripted, “You will lose this fight” scene, the rest of the game opens up for you and this is where it shows its true colors.
You are introduced to the real combat after getting your ass kicked and this the first thing that I noticed the developers did right. You control both Enzo and Erine with the same controller; not switching between characters. That is amazing! I am don’t feel like I am slowed down because I need to make sure that Erine, basically the healer and buff-mistress, is not going to get hit. The game gives its own story based explanation that with her equipment, she is always shifting, and therefore, disappears after she performs her action. Yeah, I’ll accept that. And she had better be quick with how faced paced the combat is.
Enzo is the attacker of the couple and you are constantly moving around, dodging, blocking, and stringing together ridiculous combos that still need a little bit of polish but I can see where they were going with it.
Not sure if they meant that…
The game isn’t perfect and no game will ever be but what I want is to encourage people to hang on past the intro- for people to give this game a chance past the first 5 minutes. I almost gave this game a pass during those first five minutes, and I would have missed out. Had I done that, I would not have seen the effort and imagination that went into making this game and I know that I wouldn’t have the challenge of writing my hardest review to date.
With the color of everyone’s skin being such a hot button topic and people saying what you can and cannot have an opinion about based on that, it was hard to look at this game not as a black person. I didn’t want to seem like I was holding the game up and after playing it, I can safely that I am not because I don’t have to. The game can hold its own. I say that it deserves its positive reviews.
Is the game perfect? No.
Were there some bugs that I think should have been worked out before release? Yes.
Do I think that the game needs some polish? Hell yeah. Brush that game up and make it shiny!
SHINY!
Do I think that people should play this game for a different RPG experience? Yes.
Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan – Take a trip to another land…just keep your comments until after the tour.