Board Thread:Fun and Games/@comment-30093849-20161003161516/@comment-27713488-20191021103105

Having played most of what currently exists of Timeless Pantheon, I am going to have to discommend it. The writing is funny at times, the setting interesting, the combat not entirely braindead, and the dungeons and puzzles frequently clever. There is PotentialTM. I am also ever grateful to see quality-of-life features like instantly-appearing and skippable text. However, there are two major issues running through the whole game that severely degrade the experience.

Firstly, Timeless Pantheon has only a few hours of gameplay so far, if you take your time in dungeons or read slowly, and already it is well past TLS in terms of easily missed content. One of these is explicitly acknowledged in the official (not very comprehensive) walkthrough: If you do one of several free time events before another, you'll miss out on the ability to develop a relationship with a particular secondary character. This secondary character is the only way for the main character to acquire a healing ability, and also gates a class change of sorts for a main party member. Another such missable branch is near the beginning, where if you pick just the right dialogue options, you can avoid all those fetishy transformations Arakhne is complaining about for the entirety of the game so far!

Except that's not true and we need to talk about the other problem: This game is buggy as shit. That branch that lets you not transform isn't implemented properly; a careful look at the game's innards shows me that one value is set wrong at the end of the calculation for whether you qualify for that path.

A double-digit number of times while playing, some event or other would refuse to progress or lock up the game entirely, and I found it necessary to go in and tweak the code to get things back on track. Contributing to this problem was a tendency for the game to not remove party members when it should've, especially after shopping or ending a plot dungeon. Often the game would have your party follow behind you in a line, a stock RPG Maker feature, but also NPCs couldn't walk through your line of followers, and also NPCs would try to walk through them anyway and refuse to return control to the player until their cutscene was over. After several times when I had to reload and do a long cutscene over again, I ended up tweaking the game to not do the line of followers thing most of the time. Using text skip or just reading a little too fast could often get NPCs stuck in walls, again requiring me to reload.

Reloading wasn't always a wise idea either, though, because not all aspects of a map were always saved, though usually the results were only graphical issues like invisible NPCs, which you might have to grope around for.

Most of these issues I suspect ultimately stem from the developer being a little too clever for their own good. Much of what I saw in the game's innards was stuff being coded directly in script calls or stored in custom data structures when there were perfectly good ways to accomplish the same thing with standard engine features. Combined with a tendency to spread cutscene logic through several events scattered in random places on the map, I don't envy this developer inevitably going back to change some old event and trying to relearn how it was meant to work internally.

The main takeaway here, I think, is that Timeless Pantheon could be good one day but if you try it now it'll probably break on you just as you're getting interested. Check back in a year, maybe.