Saturday Casual Gaming 308: Epic Battle Fantasy 5

In Which I Talk About A New Entry In A Fun Series

I'm pretty sure I've talked about Kupo707 and their Epic Battle Fantasy series before on here - I'm too lazy to check, but it's a fair bet that I have. I really like this series, too,and their latest offering on Kongregate and Steam, Epic Battle Fantasy 5, is a really great addition!

So far, in the series, we've been introduced to the five main characters: Matt the strength-focused swordsman, Natalie the sexy mage, No-Legs the legless cat who may or may not be a demigod, Lance the gunman who may or may not be a straight-up fascist, and Anna the tough and awesome ranger. They've fought dragons, monsters, gods, cats, and each other, many many times. It's been pretty... well... epic!

Every game is basically a soft reset of their universe, with none of them remembering each other (despite the quintet being in every game!) and with the world not really remembering their past exploits. It's kinda like in Legend of Zelda where there's always a hero named Link and a Princess named Zelda but the maps and everything else are pretty varied. And that's true of EBF5, too - combat and travel and locations are all just a little different.

There's teleportation via a few different cat-slimes throughout the world, and when you interact with them, you're taken to a screen between realities where you can warp out to other cat slimes you've already seen. It's useful, but they're not marked on your map, so you kind of have to remember where you saw the cat slime with the tophat and its relation to the cat slime with the skulls behind it...

Teleportation is fairly important because of the gathering quests you encounter in the world. Someone in the tundra wants new socks? You have to go find those socks (which might be dropped by enemies or discovered in random chests), then you have to come back to the tundra and find the guy you got the quest from to return it. This can be a pain (especially before you have all of your mobility items) but it's worth it for the extra skills and goodies they can give you!

Speaking of mobility items, there seems to be one item per area. Ice is slippery, but with the right item, you can walk right across it. There are booster tiles that send you speeding in one direction until halted by a wall or zoomed away in a different direction, but there are boots that let you stop on certain magnetic tiles! There are lily pads and clouds to walk on, and there are gaps to fill with ladders, and there's water to raft across, and it's all very complicated until you realize that you're probably going to find those items in a similar area to the one you're struggling with - probably from the area boss!

And the bosses are pretty darn fun! Mammoths, trees full of mind-controlled cats, alien artifacts, dragons, mechs... the list goes on! In a browser-based Flash game that lasts at least 30 hours, you're going to have a lot of bosses to kill!

But you don't have to just kill - you can also capture underlings and random monsters like in Pokemon - but by dropping a box on their heads instead! That part can be fun, but it can also be frustrating. Some of the monsters just do not want to get in the box (dragons and monoliths, I'm lookin at you...). Some of these captives can even be useful for upgrading your weapons or armor or they might be required for a quest!

And there are tons of weapons and armors for every single character.

Ever wanted to see a cat dressed like a samurai? How about a mage with an elephant on her head? Or a swordsman dressed like a pirate? You can do it! And they can wield weird weapons, too - swords made of ice, guns made of wood, bows made of pipes, and even a skewered hot dog as a weapon! Then there's the Flair - random accessories to boost various stats on your characters!

The battle system is pretty straightforward: You have a team of three with your two other characters in reserve, when it's your turn, you choose whether to attack, use a skill, change your tactics, change your gear, or use an item or run away. It's pretty easy to figure out what's what, since it's all clearly labeled, and the ability to switch gear in combat has saved my butt more than once. It's fun to bash up your enemies or to land that Area Of Effect spell to blast a whole mob, but sometimes I forget to pay attention to which wave I'm on and use a spell with a longer cooldown too early in the fight.

But enough about the mechanics of this game - what's it like?

Well, it's pretty darn fun, to be honest. You control whoever you've put down as your leader while you're walking around the world using either the arrow keys and spacebar on your keyboard or the mouse and right-click. Some things you can interact with will just give you some flavor (like a book telling you more about the ancient cat religion the world is obsessed with), whereas others will be hidden items (yay more snow I totally needed more snow thanks).

The art is lovely and colorful, the combat is fun, the movement is responsive, and the story is engaging, yet silly. Somehow they make the rise of fascism and eugenics funny? It's pretty great.

My only complaint is that it's really, really easy to accidentally start a new game after dying. For some reason, every time I get killed (usually in the Glitch World segments), I end up accidentally clicking "New Game" instead of "Continue" and when you're 20 hours in, that hurts.

I can't even complain about the paywall(s), guys. There are a few areas in the Kongregate version you cannot access without paying for it, but they're optional areas, and you still get some of the optional areas for free! Yeah, it's about twenty bucks to buy the game on Steam, but the free Kongregate version is still hella fun and you can still access everything you need in order to progress. The money helps Kupo707/Matt Roszak keep making these wacky fun games, and I'm all for paying the creators of video games when I can, so I might start buying some of these on Steam as I go along...

I think that'll about do it for me today, guys.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 307: AdventureQuest

In Which I Talk About One Of My Old Favorites

Real Talk, guys, I don't like MMORPGs. I'm only slightly (and begrudgingly) social, so I don't really want to spend 90% of my gaming time being bombarded by gold-sellers, whiney teenagers, and human trolls. I don't want to be constantly ganked. I don't want to be hassled. I just... want to hit the bad-bads with my pointy stick in peace.

So imagine my joy when I discovered browser-based Single-Player RPGs!

And imagine my exultation when I discovered Adventure Quest?!

But what is AdventureQuest?

Well, it's a browser-based single-player RPG made by Artix Entertainment and based in a world called Lore. You're an adventurer, and you're basically just... free to do whatever! You can click on the hills behind the town of BattleOn (yes, that's the town name) and just roam around, hitting the bad-bads with your pointy stick. Or you can just click on random buildings and take on quests! Or you can get hopelessly lost in menus while you try to find a sword you want to drop your hard-earned gold on! Or you can pay real money to become a Guardian (big bonuses, cool armor, you help the game exist, etc)! There's even housing, now!

All in a brightly-colored Flash-animated wonderland!
This is what it looked like for Halloween one year.

 The game does a pretty good job of explaining itself once you get playing, but it can be overwhelming. I know I was a little overwhelmed after going back for the first time in years. My old account was deactivated because that email address doesn't even exist anymore, but once upon a time, I was pretty good at the game.

You can even buy special armors that level up with you and give you special abilities!

Like this Vampire Slayer armor, which lets you have extra bonuses vs Vampires and Werewolves

The game has changed a lot since I started playing, I have to say. The art has evolved a lot, though... Character heads seem to be about the same. Also, there's no body difference between masculine/feminine armors, which is pretty fun, because you don't have to play a girl in a chainmail bikini!

You can play a girl in heavy robes beating the crud out of a sea dragon, instead!

Sometimes I get nostalgic for the old art, but... well...

The redesigns were a vast improvement...

All told, however, I have to say that I still love AdventureQuest/BattleOn. It was my first positive online RPG experience, and it let me play a blue-skinned, lime green-haired murder machine in Digimon goggles, so I can't help but love it. I also love that it's not afraid to grow and change with the times. There's a 3D version of the game now, too, but I haven't played that yet. Maybe some day...

What about you guys? Do you have any odd games you fell in love with long ago that you're craving a return to?

Go Enjoy Something,
FC

Saturday Casual Gaming 235: Elephant Quest

Elephant Quest
From Armor Games, Jimp, and jmtb02
on Kongregate

Every so often, I like to go back to certain games after I've beaten them. I mean, me beating a game is a rare enough occurrence in and of itself that it's pretty noteworthy, but sometimes a game is good enough to return to. Elephant Quest is one such game.

This game is older than you'd think. Armor Games was pretty small when this game appeared on Kongregate, and I have many happy memories of getting stuck in that one block on level 8, blasting my way through Nudgers, and reveling in the fact that there was so much blue in this game! Seriously, it's old enough that blue was not back in vogue at the time. It was still in the barren wasteland of brown and gray.

Seriously, it's really blue. I love it.

Sadly, if you click on the merchant button, they no longer have gear through Armor Games, but the game is still available both there and on Kongregate!

Anyway, what is the story for this little platformer?

You are Elephant the Elephant (yes, that's seriously your name).

You are a dapper little pachyderm.

You're hanging out with the other elephants, who aren't named Elephant by the way (some are named Bob, Bobert, and Bobbington...), when the local ruffian, a bully named Woolly, shows up and decides what's his is his, but what's yours is his too. He ganks your bowler and books it.

Elephant is, understandably, heartbroken over this.

The rest of this game is your quest to regain your hat and beat down that mammoth! Sounds simple, right?

Well, it's kinda harder than it sounds. You're dropped, sans any instruction, into this screen, which has an adorable Yoshi's Crafted World-esque backdrop that I love.

What do? Well, you move with the arrow keys, apparently...

After clicking around (which activates the laser cannon on your back - yes you have a laser cannon, you really liked that hat), I eventually realized that the arrow keys move, so I approached the shiny yellow elephant. His name is Sprouts. A prompt to press the "down" arrow popped up, so I did so.

This activates a dialogue with Sprouts, who tells you what you've already figured out...
you use arrow keys to move, mouse to attack. Up key jumps. Down key interacts.

Sprouts is your first indication that this game is a bit silly. Okay, the fact that you're an elephant named Elephant toting laser cannons and going after a kleptomaniac woolly mammoth named Woolly might have been your first clue, but the fact remains, there are no serious moments in this game. Nothing is dour or dark or bitter. I mean, Elephant's pretty bitter about his bowler, but he's not going full Batman or anything.

The rest of the game is spent doing fetch-quests for other elephants, like hunting balloons for the Bob brothers (Bob, Bobert, and Bobbington), finding lost teddy bears or umbrellas, etc, while you hunt down Woolly. While you're doing these quests, literally everything in this world tries to kill you. Creatures, spikes, endless pits... the world hates elephants. Luckily, you've got a laser cannon or six to help you out, and the more you level up or complete quests, the more firepower and health you gain!

But how do you level up?

You shoot everything that's not an elephant. Seriously. Every moving thing wants you dead, so kill it first.

One of my favorite rooms is this one. I call it the Kill Pit.
You just sit up on the slope and shoot everything to death down there.
You also get the Yellow Key, which you'll need.

When you level up, the box with your level number will glow. You click on it and it takes you to the skill tree. Which is more of a skill jungle. Seriously, there's, like, a million little things to click on. The skill tree takes Credits (which you get about two of with every level), and when you spend them, you might get skill points (if you land on an orange, purple, green, or blue node) or health (red nodes). There are yellow nodes that give you a random node color, too, but they're pretty uncommon. Then, you take all of the skill points you just got from your nodes and head down to the teal part of the menu you're on.

This section is fairly self explanatory...

So you've got your points, you spend them on one of three different sub-skills per skill path. When you hit 25 points in a single section, you get a bonus. Acrobatics improves your jump height, Weapon Targeting gives you better aim with less jitter, Weapons makes your lasers hurt more, and the Miniphant Swarm gives you laser-shooting flying pygmy elephants who swarm around you and murder your foes. I like to max out the Swarm as quickly as possible.

You can also improve your damage resistance, health, how many credits you get per levelup, resistance to spike damage specifically, how fast you move, how quickly you regenerate health, how much XP you gain from quests, and "how cute you look".

The lavender bar on the menu takes you to the Level Map, which is... kinda simple. It's basically screenshots of the different levels with lines connecting the doors to each other. It's useful if you get lost, which you probably will, because the game is bigger than you'd expect from a Flash game from 2011.

The orange bar keeps track of your Quests, which will help you when you get confused about who needs what where and how you need to get it.

Then you've got the goldenrod bar at the bottom that takes you back to the game.

You can die in this game, by the way. If you get swarmed by Nudgers or something, they can absolutely kill you. Thankfully, I have yet to encounter a game-over screen in eight years of play. You just instantly respawn. This can be an issue if the flying enemies swarm you in the center of the level and you have to creep your way back to the door so you can leave, but aside from that, it's really useful.

Yes, you respawn where you fall. Yes, that can be very annoying.

But nothing makes the game bad. I had to restart once because there's a bug in Zone 8 where you can jump into a specific block and get trapped (though sometimes sufficient wiggling can release you), but even that was quaint and funny!

If you're absolute trash at platformers, love elephants, and want to shoot some weird slime birds with lasers, definitely give Elephant Quest a try!


Go Enjoy Something!
FC