Forums > Submission Feedback > honestgamer's Echoes of Aetheria review

Hello Jason,

Thank you for reviewing our game. After reading the troubles you had, I really have to wonder where we fell short.

We specifically put a great deal of effort and resources into avoiding any kind of grind. You can always lower difficulty, you can always re-invest skill points, you can always shuffle around gear and augments, you can salvage gear for forge materials, you can re-forge gear, you can always move your formation around. Easy difficult is such that enemies basically hit like wet noodles - designed for the player who just wants to see the story.

Were any of these tools unclear to you that they were available? Believe me, we HATE grinding in RPGs and we feel that there shouldn't be ANY in this one. Please let us know how we can improve and/or which one of these convenience tools you were unaware were available to you.

Thank you!

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Hello, apparent developer of the game I reviewed! Thanks for reading, and I'm happy to answer your questions.

Your efforts to avoid the grind worked until the final dungeon, so they were not entirely wasted. I played through the game on Normal difficulty. I didn't avoid enemies, but I didn't necessarily seek them out, and so I made it to the final dungeon without grinding or even upgrading my equipment (except for applying a few augments here and there). This was possible because, as you noted, a lot of the enemies hit like wet noodles.

The enemies in the final dungeon, particularly the elemental dragons, do NOT hit like wet noodles. They suddenly put up some actual resistance, and they do so regardless of character level. I was at level 50 or so when I attempted the final dungeon, and the elemental dragons encountered halfway through--and beyond, I later found--absolutely brutalized my team. Their area lightning wiped out everyone within a single round, with no time to heal in between. That's not hitting like a wet noodle.

I didn't have the resources to put together capable equipment to resist those attacks until I left the dungeon and grinded by revisiting old dungeons. But most dungeons were closed off, for reasons that elude me but probably make sense from a development perspective. The few dungeons that were open to me required me to lower the difficulty to Easy just to survive, because the enemies I encountered were color swapped variants that could slaughter my party almost as effectively as the elemental dragons. Beating those monsters allowed my characters to level up quickly, from 50 most of the way to 60, but character levels aren't really the problem. The problem is that the enemies can hit too savagely for your party to survive a round if you don't have the best armor.

The components that make the best armor, most of them, must be purchased. Great armor requires armor patches and other crafting elements, so a piece of truly good equipment runs something like 8000 gold by the time all of that is brought together, even when--as I did--you already have a lot of obsidian and aetherium lying around (or can get it by salvaging other gear). So your typical cost is something like 8000 gold per piece of gear, with each hero needing 3 pieces each to really be off to the races, and with premium augments adding another 5000 or so to the cost of each piece, but potentially pushing your weight unless you buy beef at 10,000 gold a pop or fill up slots with costly puffin feathers that mean you can't add more useful augments.

The enemies available to fight at that point might generate around 1800 gold per battle if you get lucky, but they might also award 0 gold. So that means a lot of grinding, even though up to that point none had been necessary. To answer your specific questions, then:

Yes, I know about the lower difficulty (but I've completed some of the genre's toughest RPGs over the years and haven't had to rely on such concessions).

Yes, I know you can re-invest skill points whenever you like (and I mentioned that as a plus in my review), but there aren't ANY skills that work against last-dungeon enemy groups that can wipe out your entire party by blinking.

Yes, I know you can salvage gear for forge materials, but a lot the expensive materials like armor patches that are used to fire the forge or whatever aren't returned. It makes sense that they wouldn't be, but it still impacts the player.

Yes, I know you can move your formation around, but it had little impact on how hard enemies hit. Enemies could and often did one-hit kill my party members regardless of their position, once I reached that final dungeon, and the only thing that provided any relief at all was crafting the best equipment possible for each character. Even then, the golden spiders and such would wipe out a character in one flurry of blows, so I had to do a lot of reviving.

I hope the above response fleshes out my complaints in a manner that the team will find useful, so you can properly dismiss me as an idiot or gain insight into how some players approach RPGs. I hope also that my affection for the game came through in my text, since there was a lot here that I really did like.