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It's not that uncommon being asked to review individual parts of a series. I've now done it on a lot of occasions. I mean there's Good or Evil: A Knights Tale (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=t=5880), 0-1: The Warehouse (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=p=100217#post100217), The Abandoned Coal Mine (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=p=114465#post114465), The Factory of Mystery Part 1: Where am I? (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=p=134292#post134292), From Siberia with Love Pt. 1: Infiltrate (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=p=162926#post162926), Private Eye: The Diner (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=t=10013), Uncharted Realms: The Twilight Portal (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=t=11332), Heart of Gold (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=p=230543#post230543), Salvation: An Introduction (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=37747-SA-reviews-quot-Salvation-An-Introduction-quot&p=652964#post652964), Hobo Warrior (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=37620-SA-reviews-quot-Hobo-Warrior-quot), and Tron Legacy (https://lbpcentral.lbp-hub.com/index.php?t=38432-Tron-Legacy/page2). Wait, I think one of those might have been a movie. Ah **** it. So back to the earlier statement, getting individual part reviews out isn't really that odd, but at times it can be frustrating. See, when someone asks you to review an individual segment of a large project, they are essentially telling you to review "a fraction of the finished product", which I consider frustrating for two big reasons. 1) It makes it a lot harder for me to judge a work on the sum of it's parts if all I get to work with is a single part, thus making it really dificult to accurately tell you what I think of the series based on the single level I played. 2) I can't give a proper review since, again, I'm only reviewing a single part and I really don't want to give people the impression that just because the level I played was good/bad means the whole series must also be good/bad based on the one level. Madness, I tell you. Solutions come in the form of playing multiple levels within a series and mentioning them briefly or comparatively when reviewing the single piece. Let's take a look at this particular case. Blue Heaven Guild is a series currently in the works by creator Laharlsama (clearly a reference to the manic Disgaea character) in which you play the role of some kind of telekinetic warrior that fulfills requests for, presumably, the Blue Heaven Guild. Recently out of recovery you've been assigned the task of rescuing the king's daughter, Alexia, from great peril in the Woods of Maya. Now, it is not entirely possible to get all of that info out of the first level, and I found it helped greatly to start with the Prologue chapter. As a level, the prologue chapter is fairly abysmal and has almost no content at all to it nor anything to speak of very positively, but it really helps for setting the stage so I highly recommend playing that level first. Anyways... The level begins with a pitch black wall and lines of text to set the mood. You are told a brief story about a girl that got lost in the woods and never made it out, and the only thing known is that the forest took her name "Maya". Already I'm fairly excited, the concept and story direction seem decent so far and thanks to what I know from the Prologue everything works and makes sense. After that, the stage opens with a vast green scenery of trees and well constructed bushes, with some unusual petals falling from the trees above. As a friendly note, whenever the character notices something new that isn't immediately recognizable, the stage freezes into a cutscene camera to "name" it. While I appreciate the information provided, I'm not sure having a cutscene camera for each one is necessary. The first main obstacle you will be told about are a set of fire breathing snake creatures. You have two ways through this, a horrifically long and tricky convoluted path to "glide" over the danger, or spending about 20 seconds dismembering them in a fairly risk free manuever called "switching layers". For the sake of time, I always found myself choosing to fight. After making your way through that, you must begin climbing the trees. As you walk the path, the background scenery will shift until it is made of dark wood and occasional regions you can climb on. After working through some insanely tricky swinging and jumping, and fight through a couple baby dragon-things, you will be chased down by what looks like a Hound of Tindalos. If you can out run it perfectly (and I mean freakin' PERFECTLY), you will proceed, otherwise I hope you enjoy restarting the entire level again because the creator decided that the most difficult section of the level would be better with 0% leeway, which includes having more than 1 life apparently. Mostly, I consider this kind of a **** move because I think it would be a lot more sensible to have the checkpoint follow the player instead of dumping them at an emergency exit, or hell just have them get dropped off at the end of the trial anyways and reward them with points if they make it. Basically, I'd be fine with just about anything other than what the author did, and because I strive to review levels to the fullest of my ability I think I may have gotten to and retied that part 9 times trying to confirm to myself that there was actual content beyond that section. Luckily, there is more. Going a little further you will encounter a doll in the woods. Your character will note that finding a doll in the woods is a little strange...which is pretty rich when you consider that line is being spoken by an animated stuffed doll himself. If you chase after the doll, it drops off the cliff it's perched on and you sill suddenly get shot across the screen into a wall and a checkpoint. Also, just a minor note, but it may be in your best interest to alter your trajectory a tad when flying since there is a minor chance that you will land right in between two glued together pieces that will squish you when you get stuck in between them. So, now it's time for the final challenge against the spirit of Maya. There will be a "glose" field that you will have to travel across in an attempt to get to the doll on the other side (as it apparently belonged to Maya). The spirit of Maya will be trying to destroy you while you are doing this, firing occasional plasma shots and dropping bombs. Once you touch the doll, the spirit of Maya erupts into a fantastical light show and the spirit passes into the next life. Well, it's back to your original mission of finding Alexia, except the level ends there. There's also a Chapter 2 available, so if you still have interest by this point, go check that out. There's a few issues I want to address with this level that I didn't mention so much in the review yet. First and foremost, the level is way too complicated, which is definitely not to be confused with being overly built. Truth be told, there aren't any specific mechanical wonders at work in this level (there's a large monster that chases you but that's about it), yet I'm willing to bet that the thermometer is jacked up like crazy because the stage mildly lags at a lot of points due to an overload of data. Most of that is actually being caused by the platforms that exist within the stage, all of which are fairly deformed in shape. There are a lot of minor cuts and deshaping elements in most of the figures that don't even need to be there. For example, there was a swinging section in the tree where I noticed that all of the supporting materials holding the swinging blocks were shaped as either crescents or other misshapen figures. At no point do you interact with most of those blocks, so why not make them circles which as the MM team have put it "take up the least amount of thermo space out of all the existing shapes". Not only those, but most of the platforms you travel on regularly have really weird shapes that not only take up absurd amounts of thermo but also make jumping from one to the other tougher than it needs to be. I can understand keeping it that way for stylistic reasons, but it should still be run through with a corner editing tool to cut little corners that aren't needed yet still retain those shapes. The second big thing is that the level is way too difficult, and that's not to confused with challenging. There are definitely harder levels than this I've reviewed with more positive scores, but that's because the difficulty was intended for the sake of creating a challenge to the player. Here, it feels like the level was made difficult just for the sake of making it difficult. For example, most of the platforms are spaced pretty far apart from one another, making the distance reachable but only if you have a lot of precision. The complexity of the platforms doesn't help much either, making calculated jumps difficult due to the highly uneven and weirdly curved terrain. What this does is creates unnecessary challenge that ultimately comes out as busy work. It seems to me that with a level like Rest you would want to focus mostly on the story aspect, and throwing all this extra difficulty in there makes it too tough to tell that story adequately. The other big thing I already mentioned was with the chasing scene and the one chance or retry notion it carries. That whole section is only really bad becasue you have to make another climb through a series of weirdly shaped platforms with lots of difficult indents and annoying curves that might be good aesthetically but not in this particular instance since you don't have time to observe them. I've said enough I think. So is there anything about the level I actually liked? Well, I thought the story and basic concept were really good, and the art direction and aesthetic aren't bad. Visually, the level presented itself pretty well, if we were to exclude some of the overly complicated platforms. The music selections were all very appropriate and helped to reinforce the mood, and I'd even say there was a fair bit of creativity to the whole experience. I have to say that I think Laharlsama is a pretty decent storyteller, but maybe not the best level creator. Hopefully Chapter 2, and all the chapters to follow will help the experience improve. One last thing I'd question is the name. Yeah, I understand "Rest" refers to the spirit of Maya whom you finally put to rest, but that title is incredibly non-engaging. I'd more heavily support replacing "Rest" with "The Spirit of Maya", or just "Maya", or even "The Lost Child" or "The Passing of Maya". To me, "Rest" seems a little to passive, but it's your levels. Do what you will. Final Score: 6.0 / 10 While being somewhat imaginative and even well organized (and also having a really good concept and story), Rest is also way too complexly built for its own good and overly difficult when it doesn't need to be. The level is still a good one, but refinement is necessary. On a side note, how about that LBP2 demo? Pretty cool huh?

2010-12-22 10:05:00 Author: Shining Aquas Posts: 353

Posts: 1077139    Threads: 69970    Members: 9661    Archive-Date: 2019-01-19

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