Ascend: Hand of Kul

[Update]

 

After spending the 8,000 souls needed for a bonus that negates durability damage for 30 minutes, I was able to find a nice way to grind souls.

 

First you need to be able to fight through the cave in the area called 'Ring of Bones'. Buy the boost called 'Gear Protection'. Now simply run through the 'Tomb of Dakrum' as many times as possible, if you die, warp out and go back in. This should net you at least 10,000 souls, more if you are good at building combos. I was able to earn about 16,000 souls.

 

A note, boosts don't seem to stop counting down of you quit the game, mine froze and when I came back it was gone, luckily I only had a minute left on it.

 

[Original Story]

 

It's a secret to everybody... and it's a long ass one at that.

Story

The story is rather simple, three Gods, The Dark God, Void God and Light God are in a battle to cease dominion over the land. They are not able to claim it themselves, as they would be corrupted by the wickedness of the land below, and use being called Caos (pronounced ‘Chaos’) to convert the people of the land.

Along the way, you encounter a being known simply as ‘The Titan’, a giant creature who feeds off of the people, striking fear and chaos into the land. You are given the task of converting the people to your gods’ faith and fell the Immortal creature.

Gameplay

The gameplay is both refreshing and stale, the basic idea is simply going from point A to point B and killing a wave of monsters, then claiming the territory for your own. However, the online aspect makes the game much less repetitive (if not a little annoying). If you’ve played Fable 2 or 3, you already have a small taste, in Ascend, you’ll see ‘ghosts’ of other players but are unable to interact with them. You can affect their world through use of ‘Curses’ or ‘Blessings’, Curses being used on opposing factions and Blessings on those who are the same faction as you.

Curses can range from sending enemies from YOUR world into theirs, or spawning completely different monsters that will continue to spawn until the ‘Summon post’ is destroyed. This can make fights incredibly tough for other players. If you are able to kill a member of the opposing factions by these means, you are (allegedly) rewarded (I wasn’t….).

Blessings are what you likely expect, buffs for those of your faction, these can range from increased health, attack strength and other boosts. Boosts last for 30 minutes, so using them at the right time is key.

When you obtain dominion over a zone (which I’ll simply reference as zones from now on), you generate Souls, which are the universal currency in Ascend (you get about 10 souls per zone you control every…. I wanna say 30 minutes, this effect continues when you go offline).  The ghost of other players are able to invade your world to try to capture your zone for their faction (invading ghosts are NOT controlled by the player they belong to; they are simply an AI controlled copy of their character), you are alerted and given the option to warp there or go there yourself if you are busy. If you can defeat them, you get some EXP.

Both Curses and Blessings can be bought with souls.

Some zones consist of towns, and once converted, you can ‘Summon’ followers to climb you (I forgot to mention, you’re a huge giant, think Kingdom of Keflings) and they will shoot arrows from your shoulders, or you can drop them and they will climb enemies and attack that way. They can also be thrown and eaten to regain health. Overall, they are very weak and provide very little assistance, unless someone is invading that zone, in which case they can be very helpful.

Going between one area and another often requires the player to traverse a dungeon, these dungeons are similar to the ones in Dragon Age 2 where there is very little variations between one and another and can mostly just be dashed through. Dungeons DO reset everyday at midnight (pst) with new loot, enemies and design.

Once you've leveled up enough (every 5 levels) you can ‘Ascend’, which allows you to create a new character, retaining some items and souls, as well as choose a new faction (at the cost of some of your levels, in exchange, the level cap is raised by 5 and you get a permanent stat boost). Whichever faction needs the most help will offer you greater reward for joining them. Your character is also sent on a Crusade, which allows your ghost to attempt to control other zones from players, therefore allowing you to generate more souls.

Graphics

The overall look of the game is above average, similar to Fable 3…. Exactly like Fable 3. There are very little special effects outside of spell casting. The only notable thing I saw was the conversion of zones, each faction has its own look and feel.

Light is, as you can imagine, very quiet and peaceful, where Dark is very, well…. Dark. The ground is scorched and dead. Void is very odd, the ground and world around you is blue, almost as if you’ve leaped into the world of Tron.

Not the best picture, but it gets the point across

 

Controls, Voice, Audio and Music

Normally I would not lump these all together, but there is absolutely nothing special about any of them, at all. The music is similar to Fable, where it’s quite and dull outside of battle and picks up when you engage the enemy, and there’s no voice acting, outside of Link like grunts and shouts. If you played any number of Action RPGs, the controls are the same, light attack, heavy attack, magic and block (no ranged attacks outside of magic).

Other

The game’s use of souls as currency is a huge NEGATIVE hit on the game. Souls are used for everything, buying weapons and armor, upgrading weapons and armor, upgrading spells, buying spells, repairing weapons and armor. You’d think you’d get a lot of souls then, right? No. Enemies drop very few (the most common dropping between 3 – 6 and higher levels dropping a few hundred).

Guess what though, repairing that good gear you bought can cost upwards of several thousand (my highest being 5,000 souls), this wouldn't be an issue if souls were more plentiful or it didn't cost as much. You can earn more souls by obtaining a multiplier (again, similar to Fable where a high multiplier equals more EXP), but if you get hit, that’s all gone, and enemies are relentless and unflinching.

The games answer to this, like many F2P games, you can buy souls with real cash. 80MSP gives you 5,000 souls and multiples of that up to 1,600MSP. I’ve spent what miscellaneous points I had and am still having issues maintaining enough souls to repair gear (I've even started using weaker gear to offset the repair costs).

Another thing I really disliked is that, once you change factions, you'll have to buy the spells. In your first faction, you earn two of them, but after you swap they must be bought and can cost upwards of 15,000 and go as high as 125,000 souls. Crazy.

Achievements

The achievements in the game seem to be fairly simple, some will require soul grinding (or buying) as you'll need to buy Curses or Blessings, or fully upgrade a spell. Nothing seems to be incredibly difficult.

And in a first that I've seen, beta testers can unlock achievements during beta, and they'll count towards your score. Although this makes it so some will have to buy it, as some features aren't yet available (the endless dungeon and co-op, for example).

Overall

This game has much potential to be a fun single player game that’s interwoven with multiplayer aspects. However, the fact that it relies heavily on the ‘pay to win’ philosophy is very disappointing.

7.0/10.0

Pros

- The zone idea works well

- The blessing and cursing adds interesting possibilities to the game

- Oddly addicting

Cons

- Very focused on the ‘pay to win’ mechanics

- Repair costs will quickly drain what you've earned

- Dungeon variety is lacking

*updates to come.

Resonance of Fate

When humanity has grown too large and life can no longer be properly sustained on Earth, measures must be taken....

Story

In an unknown era, the human population has increased to such a number that the planet has been ravaged by pollution and depleted of resources; people are forced to live on an ancient structure. Peoples’ lives must be controlled, their lives and deaths in the hands of an unknown God, Zenith. In order to control when people die, a system was put into place to easily control the population via a special stone that each person has assigned to them, a Quartz, upon its destruction, that person would die.

A young women, Frieda, believing people should be allowed to live there lives how they want, free of destiny, spoke of her dream often her ideals attracted many followers, the most loyal being made Cardinals, she was seen as both a visionary and a radical. Because of this, she was ultimately killed. Cardinal Rowen continued to carry her ideals more so than the others, he was determined to change the system Zenith had in place and commissioned Cardinal Sullivan to find a way to do so.

Graphics

As is expected from a JRPG, the characters have a bit of an anime look, much like Final Fantasy games, but don’t overdo it and characters are expressive and quirky. A big focus point for many is the environment, many believe it is too grey and dull, but come on, how many machines, gears, buildings and gravel do you see that are something other than black, grey or white? Not many, I’d assume. 

This game is focused on technology, machines and sci-fi, or Steampunk as some call it, and the color fits right in with that classification. The areas will become very repetitive after a bit though, as many areas seem to be a copy and paste of previous sections you’ve already visited, even more true for the battle areas, which vary between 2 and 3 different layouts per type of layout.

Sound/Voice/Music

If you noticed, this game is done by Tri-Ace, the folks that did Star Ocean and some others, and the music reflects that, meaning it is very well done. There are two types of music that play, your standard normal battle music and your hyped up techno-y music that plays when you go into Hero Action, both work well.

Voices are done very well, with the exception of whenever someone cries (I’ve never liked characters crying, as they always sound so forced. Kill their cat, maybe then they’ll get a bit of emotion going….). Zephyr also does very well when he’s angry, which is most of the time, plus he's voiced by Scott Menville, who does Robin on Teen Titans, Lloyd in Tales of Symphonia and many other VO's. I love that guy.

Controls

Controls are fairly simple and require little to no effort to master. In combat, ‘X’ is used to perform a Hero Run or ‘Hero Action’, which allows you to run great distances and build up your attack gauge (more on that soon) faster. ‘A’ either executes an attack when you have at least one gauge filled or begins filling your gauge.

Attacking is done in a seemingly complex way, but after a few battles, you’ll have a basic understanding (if you played Eternal Sonata, you’ll understand it fairly easily). You have a set time to do whatever you want, you can move, attack, use items, whatever, anything you do depletes your ‘Action Gauge’, but stopping will stop the depletion (unless you get attacked, in which case it continues to deplete).

Enemies are the same, they have a Health bar and Action bar above them so you can see if they are about to attack you or not. The ‘Hero Action’ allows for extended time while allowing you to run great distances and avoid damage from enemy attacks (you can essentially double the time you have to act, allowing to build massive gauges). PRO TIP: Jump at the very end of your ‘Hero Action’ to get an extra second in there, this can help get those few extra charges to get the kill.

Other

Gauge strength depends on your weapon level. Unlike most RPGs, your level is the sum of your Handgun, Machine Gun and Explosive skills (all which can max out at 100), so you can easily level up even if you’re level 100 by switching to a different weapon (as each weapon has its own experience requirement and does not rely on the others, i.e. a level 99 Handgun will require 1,000,000 exp to level up, where as a Machine Gun at level 1 will only require 500). So you can easily level the Machine Gun up at high levels and therefore, level your character as well.

As your weapons level up, the amount they can charge also increases  (a level 10 gun can charge 10 times, level 20 can charge 20 times, etc) and also enable the use of skills. Skills are unlocked upon reaching a certain weapon level and can only be used if they charge reaches that level, so if a skill is unlocked at Handgun level 20, your charge must reach 20 to use it. Skills range from an increased chance to launch enemies to higher damage.

Experience is earned based on the damage inflicted on enemies, you don’t get exp just for killing (or at all technically). If a Machine Gun user inflicts a total of 2,000 damage, they get 2,000 exp on the spot (not at the end of the fight), and same goes for the Handgun and Explosives user. There are ways to increase the exp earned through items and things called ‘Terminals’.

‘Terminals’ are simple spots on the map that give you bonus effects in battle, these range from 1.5x EXP, to Double Charge Rate and to Double Rare Item Drop, and can even be linked to allow all of these effects in one battle. Of course, they require a bit of effort to use effectively, and some terminals grant these bonuses to the enemy as well.

The Overworld

One very unique aspect of Resonance of Fate is the ability to customize your guns; this allows you to take a weak and slow gun and affix sights, clips, grips and additional barrels to make them effective weapons of death. The process can be intimidating to those who suck at Tetris, but for those who are good at the game, you’ll be able to affix a half dozen sights, 3 or 4 additional barrels and a couple of extra grips to make you guns stupid fast when charging (this is important later in-game).

An example of a fully customized Machine Gun, allowing
for massive charge in a short amount of time

At some point early on, you’ll unlock the Arena; anyone who’s played an RPG already knows what that entails. For those unaware, the Arena pits you against various combinations of enemies and you fight, simple. Resonance has 50 ranks, getting much tougher the higher you go (duh), after a victory you get a bit of cash and coins that you use in the Arena to purchase rare and helpful items, such as a scope for you gun that increases Charge Speed by 75 and gives you 4 more slots for more power, a must have.

As with most RPGs these days, you can play a New Game+ which you can do on the same difficulty with all your gear (minus key items) or a harder one at the cost of all your items and weapons; there are 16 (yes SIXTEEN) difficulties (only 1 when you first play) and the enemies get stronger as you get weaker, but they do offer more exp to compensate. However since there is no real reason for this extra strain (no extra scenes, no better gear, etc), there’s no reason to play it past the standard difficulty.


Achievements

A good chunk of the achievements will be earned through natural progression, but the rest will require extensive grinding to unlock. The toughest, or most time consuming anyway, being to max every Arena battle. To max a battle, you must beat it 10 times, there are 50 battles so that means you'll be doing at least 500 fights in the Arena alone.

Overall

Resonance of Fate is a great breath of fresh air not only into the RPG genre, but into the stale number of RPGs offered on the Xbox 360, anyone who enjoys RPGs, witty back and forth conversations or anything that borders the insane, should check this game out.

8.5/10.0

Pros

- A great new addition to the RPG line-up

- Great voicing with an excellent script

- Fun and challenging combat

- Possibly one of the best openings ever (don't press 'Start' at the title screen)

Cons

- Combat can feel rather tedious if you're in one area for too long

- Not as many weapons as I'd like

- Story doesn't really take off till the end