Game of the Month #44 (September 2018) - Child of Light

Set in the magical world of Lemuria, Child of Light takes us on the coming-of-age journey of Aurora, a young girl struggling to save a lost kingdom and her ailing father.

Like user TheHulk said in the Book Club thread, Child of Light is currently on sale for 3,74$ on the PlayStation store (for PS4 only, the PS3 version is not on sale). This is for the weekend only and it's a big discount

https://store.playstation.com/fr-ca/product/UP0001-CUSA00339_00-CHILDOFLIGHT0001

Also on sale for 3,75$ on UPlay for those of you PC gamers out there. Free UPlay account required.

https://store.ubi.com/ca/child-of-light/575ffd93a3be1633568b4d36.html?lang=fr_CA

I completed the game three years ago, so I will pass the GotM this time. I liked this game a lot. It's beautiful and clever. The battle system is nice. The music is amazing. I hope everybody will enjoy this playable poem. Happy gaming !

I was going to skip this month to save some money, but knowing that the game is $3+ on PS4 right now, I'll just buy it and play it after I get done with my current game. Going to say that I saw this game a year or two back, and I liked what little I saw.

The discount isn't active in the EU PlayStation Store, and it isn't a game I'm interested in, so I'll be sitting out this month.

Just finished my first play session. It feels a bit slow to me atm the but it has quickly introduced a few new things.

It doesn't take long to gain flight and that changes greatly how you traverse the levels and the levels seem to be built around traversing through flight.

The game looks like like a painting and is rather gorgeous.

The turn based combat is well built especially with the dragonfly which can be used to heal allies or slow enemies. As well as if you are hit or hit an enemy while casting then you interrupt there attacks.

I'll keep playing it's well built but not yet pulling me in

Always liked the look of this but kept getting distracted, so I'm glad to be giving it a proper go.

Hard to say too much at this point, but I'm finding it very calming. There's something about the art style, the flying and the music which helps take your mind off things.

Beat it earlier this morning and my over all impression is a very positive one.

This is a very beautiful game. When I first started to play I kept getting distracted by a mix of the background, the music, and how smooth the flying was. This is one of those games that you can come home to after a hard days work and just relax in front of. I wonder how different the game could have been if I chose the other difficulty. The only difficulty levels were Casual and Expert, which seems like two completely different extremes, almost like they just gave us Easy and Hard. However, I still had fun on Casual and the bosses and some late game enemies were still a challenge to get through.

All of the different party members are really nice and diverse, with their own pros and cons. Some are really strong, but only have long wait times to attack. Some are great magic users, but aren't great attackers. Some are Robert, whom I hate. I used every one equily except for Robert, since he had a very weak when attacking and had no useful spells to make up for his attack stat. With that being said, I mostly used only three characters, Aurora, Rubella (White Mage), and Finn (Black Mage), as these three seemed to gt the job done right.

Here are a few thoughts that I can't really connect together:
It is a little short for an RPG, but I think that it fits with being a nice relaxing game. It's gets you through the story it wants to tell and doesn't over stay it's welcome, though I can see someone not really liking that part (especially for $15).
The rhyming is nice and reminds me of old fairy tale stories, but some of the rhyming did seem forced, especially when they cut their sentence just to rhyme the word I with Goodbye.
The interruption mechanic was really cool to see. It was annoying to see a group of three cave spiders do it to me to the point I couldn't get an attack off, but to do it right back at them was always satisfying.

Right start of week update:

I've just freed the Katergia from the towers labyrinth

It took me a while to get use to the combat. For a long time i found the interruption system annoying as i usually play these type of games aggressively while this game wants you to play much more defensively then other turn based games as defending is instant and speed up your next turn up. I felt this wasn't signposted too well but when i got the hang of it the game started flowing better.

Still i don't know why we are limited to only 2 characters at once when most other RPGs usually have 3. I'm guessing it's to keep the game a bit of a challenge still I'm thankful that it allows for quick character swapping.

Just finished. the game, it took a while to get into but in the end I enjoyed the game and felt it didn't overstay it's welcome

Just finished chapter 6 and I'm really enjoying the battle system. What I like is that it's as much about how you time your attacks as the attacks themselves.

In a lot of turn-based RPGs, you can kinda cheese difficult encounters by repeating an optimal sequence of actions over and over. You can't do that as much in Child of Light because a lot of those actions require a long window of time to pull off without getting interrupted. To create that time, you'll need to do other things like using the dragonfly, defending, deliberately using ineffective attacks to interrupt and so on.

Wow, this game of the month thread is everything I've ever wanted and more. I'm going to try to get Child of Light done before the end of the month, but if not, I'll clear my schedule to pick up the October title!

Date of Completion: 14th September 2018
Time completion: 17h 8m 14s

Child of light is a rather gorgeous short RPG with a cute fairy tale ascetic which while not a substantial story it was an enjoyable experience.

The combat is set up as a turn based RPG but has casting time incorporated into it which means you can be interrupted or interrupt people during casting. This means you do have to put in more thought into which action you can take during the selection and take into account casting times. Thankfully defend is an instant reaction and mitigate a lot of damage, but I do wish the game explained the defend action better then it did and how important it is in the game.

One minor detail I don’t like about in the game is that you can only have two characters out at any one time during a fight while you could be fighting up to 3 other enemies. I’m always dubious about this in turn based games where you cannot use all characters at once which in terms of story doesn’t make sense but I can understand it in terms of game balance, never the less the fact that you can only have 2 characters at once irks me.

The story itself is written like a fairy tale with rhyming couplets used throughout the whole game. It is mainly plot driven with a lot of the characters falling into standard architects. The plot itself is fairly basic fairy tale story with a big bad who while not introduced at the start is depicted right from the get go as the main antagonist and the plot ultimately a journey to return home with the antagonist being a hindrance to the player.

The biggest pull of the game I would say are the graphics. Everything is drawn like a water painting and it is gorgeous to look at. It really wants to make as much use of it’s visuals as it possibly can as early on in the game you gain the access of flight. Flight really changes the way you traverse the level and really opens up the levels to allow for interesting hidden secrets and extras to be found, it also wisely keeps objectives going towards in one general direction so that the player does not get lost while going through the game.

Ultimately Child of light was a fun short little RPG with a beautiful aesthetic but not a lot of depth in the story.

7/10

Just beat it and really enjoyed it. For reference, I played on expert and did a decent handful of side quests.

As others have mentioned, the visual style is beautiful and the music isn't anything to sneeze at either. I particularly enjoyed the main theme, which I often find myself listening to outside the game. While the rhyming isn't necessarily for me, I did get used to it and I appreciate that they're trying something different.

Adding to what I said earlier about the combat, I also really liked the skills. Though most characters only have 3-4 skills and don't get new ones, nearly everything was useful and nothing felt particularly overpowered. If I was getting curb-stomped, it was always because I wasn't using my party's skills properly and not because I needed to grind.

My only slight niggle with the combat is the oculi system. I don't dislike it at all, but I think it could have been fleshed out more. A good set of oculi can give you an advantage, but it never seemed critical to me. Because you get so many characters by the end of the game, I couldn't always be bothered to equip everyone, which is a shame.

On that note, I do think the game tried to have a few too many characters for its own good, considering the length. I'm fine with them being simplistic due to the fairy tale style, but it sometimes felt like they were being introduced so fast that you struggle to get a basic sense of who they are. For instance, the last character you get is right before the final dungeon so you barely even get a chance to use her before the game ends.

Minor issues aside, it was a great game which did a hell of a lot with its short length.

Solid 8/10 for me.

Completed this yesterday, took the day to mull it over and read through what the others have said and it's all quite interesting. I agree with most of it, but not all.

The obvious thing first, like nearly everyone has mentioned, it's a good looking game, a very unique aesthetic that extends beyond just the visuals, nearly everything in the game is clearly tied together with a cohesive vison and very well executed. Sound, art, the writing though it could get a bit tedious with all the poetic rhyming, the effort is clearly there. It's a game that all those that worked on it can be proud of what they worked on.

That said, I do think it has enough mechanical flaws that hold it back from being a truly outstanding game. It's good, but just lacks that extra something that pure aesthetics can't provide. My first problem with the game is limitation, knalb already mentioned one facet of it and that comes in the form of a party limit of 2. This is something that a lot "smaller" JRPG's seem to go for. The most likely inspiration for this game is probably Paper Mario, but where that series had Mario as the sole focus character being supported by others, Child of Light has almost too many useful characters with their skills spread too thin across them, as someone else has mentioned. I would have preferred if the limit was only 2 characters that Aurora was a more central character in combat with the other characters being more supportive. Ideally though, just a larger party size would have mitigated a lot of the other issues that it caused.

The 2nd issue I had was regarding the oculi, the system is just so awkward to work around, clearly modelled on something like Diablo or Torchlight, but they seemed like the wanted it to work like materia in Final Fantasy 7, which I'd almost have preferred. Thing is, this game has an extremely annoying lack of information provided to the player, outside of visual appearance there's no way to tell what a monster is weak to, what abilities they have, how much HP they have or even if they have names, so your only way to work it out is just to attack them and hope. On expert difficulty enemies at nearly every stage of the game can do a lot of damage, you might as well just have 3 hit points most of the time when enemies hit for 100 of your max 300 hp. It gets even worse when enemies start critting for over the max health of some characters. In most cases the only info you need to care about is "is the enemy weapon to physical or magical damage" and from there you have a choice of maybe 1 or 2 characters to use. If you've equipped elemental oculi to a character and the enemy resists it, too bad for you, fleeing is probably your best option. Not knowing what the enemy composition is before engaging in battle alone is quite annoying, but that you can't adequately readjust to a fight without leaving it kinda sucks.

The timeline mechanic, it's alright, can get a bit tedious depending on how things work out. It straight up renders some character nearly pointless to use due to their slower speeds. Combined with the 2 party limit, its nearly impossible to do any significant setups and buffs during battle as well since they don't transfer to characters who swap in making debuffs much more potent. Just little things like that make combat that little bit more fiddly than it needs to be, sucks some of the satisfaction out of it. I wasn't a huge fan of there being no "wait" mechanic, though I understand somewhat why "defend" worked the way it did.

My preferred characters; Physical damage: Robert, especially late game when I gave him a Princess Stone for 40% extra damage, with his basic tier 3 attack was critting for 550+, plus he has access to Hinder to slow enemies which is invaluable. He's so much better than Óengus due to the speed, and he seems to dodge a heck of a lot more. Rubella, usually with either a ruby or citrine to attack with but he was mostly used to heal. Magic; you don't really have a choice here, it's either Aurora for Light damage or Finn for Elemental specifics. Aurora I maxed out the Light Ray tree, Finn, I maxed out his lightning tree. Getting a double Magic all opening with Aurora and Finn was pretty satisfying though. If the oculi system wasn't so restrictive I would have loved to load both Aurora and Finn with Brilliant Onyx and Princess Stones each for a 75% Magic Increase just to see what havoc they could unleash, which I suppose you could do with enough grinding but it would be absolute overkill.

I didn't face that many difficulties, maybe a handful of standard enemy team compositions caught me off guard, and like I said before, in a few instances some enemies straight up 1 shot you on a crit leading to some unexpected deaths.

The last thing I wasn't a huge fan of was the overuse of the music. Tonally the game felt very much like Majora's Mask to me, an adventure through a relatively grim yet colourful and magical place. But the central melody in the game is used nearly everywhere to the point where it loses its potential impact when its highlighted specifically for the big story beats. I compare its usage to how well the Song of Healing was used in MM and it's night and day. While the music etc. is good, just that hearing the same sombre notes for most if it left it feeling monotonous. It does pick up from time to time, especially near the end, nothing major but just something that stood out to me.

So while it might seem like I'm being hard on it, I did like it. The systems, while not perfect, definitely worked well enough and enjoyably enough for its length, in fact I might even have liked the oculi system had the game been longer and more generous with drops, since I got stacked with nothing but emeralds for long stretches of the game. I think there's enough here for a lot of people of all ages to like, love and enjoy.

edit: also, Igniculus is the best and a very awesome mechanic both in and out of combat, and I loved Rubella's lack of rhyming prowess and how that tied in with Tristis.