Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage

by Aidyn chronicles

Product Features

• n64

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00004U3GC
• Media: Game Cartridge
• Release Date: March 20, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,383 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)

Product Description

n64

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A diamond in the rough... covered with bugs, April 24, 2001

By 

David L. Gilbert (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Game Cartridge)

A diamond in the rough... covered with bugs

Gosh I so wanted to like this game. There's a lot to like. The gameworld is huge - you could spend hours exploring it. The story is immersive enough to keep you interested. The combat sequences can be kind of long, but never get boring. Plus you have a large number of party-member combinations which changes the direction of the story. I could go on, but others have extolled about the virtues of the game better than I could.

The game feels kind of unfinished, like a piece of coal that isn't quite a diamond. THQ boasts a gameworld larger than both Zeldas combined, and this is certainly true. I spent about an hour trekking from the castle town to the first village - travelling takes a LONG time - and while the scenery changes alot (from forest to lakes to snow-capped peaks) there's not all that much to DO. After the initial "Gee that's pretty" factor, traveling from town to town becomes an effort in patience. The towns also feel kind of empty. There are a couple of people walking around, and about a dozen houses (only a few with people in them). I know that the memory constraints are tight, so they couldn't have included everything they would have liked, but that's the sacrifice you make for such a huge gameworld. I'm not sure this is a good thing. A smaller, detailed, more interactive gameworld is always better than a huge, sprawling, empty one, in my opinion.

Aidyn Chronicles is also, I'm sorry to say, a bug ridden mess. A few times my main character got stuck in scenery (trees & walls) and I wasn't able to get him out. But, the most unforgivable thing was the huge number of errors & crashes I encountered. I played for an hour, gathered & equiped my party, and set off on my quest, only to talk to a villager and have the game give me an error message and die on me. I started over, this time saving frequently. I reached a certain point and my saved game became corrupted, forcing me to start over again. This time I kept a back-up saved game. I reached a bit further only to have BOTH saved games get corrupted. By this point I was so frustrated tip-toeing around the game's bugs that I gave up and put the game up for auction on eBay.

This is a major shame, because the storyline was interesting enough to make me want to continue (long treks and empty towns nonwithstanding). Maybe if you've got more patience than me, this is a game worth having.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Respectable RPG For The N64!!!, May 31, 2001

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Game Cartridge)

Hello,

We had to wait over five years, but here it is!!

This was supposed to be the follow-up to Quest 64. While it does bear some vague resemblance to Quest, Aidyn Chronicles is a wholly different class of game altogether.

I've played many RPG's in the last twenty years, and while I can't say this is the best in every respects, for a game that attempts to challenge the demands of producing an exciting 3D medieval fantasy world geared towards the Dungeons and Dragons crowd, while attempting the bridge the innate limitations of the N64 console into a category of software that normally requires the most storage capacity possible (which the N64 game cartridge sorely lacks compared to CD and DVD), Aidyn Chronicles is a major achievement.

The developers paid much attention to detail in all aspects of the game. Couple that with the fact that this game takes 30 - 50 hours of continuous play to complete the main quest, and you have detail in epic proportions.

Hardcore RPG players have used PC's for their gaming experiences (and in some cases, the Playstation has made it on the map), but this is the first entry that has the complexity close to what one would expect to find in a high-end RPG PC game, without the keyboard, CD's, and $1000+ entry fee in the way of a PC as your console.

Remarks: I started playing it on a weekend a couple months ago. After a few hours, I was hooked. It became my favorite weekend companion. I recommend giving yourself at least an hour (if not two or more) per playing interval. Don't try to play the entire quest through in one sitting!!! It is exciting and absorbing enough (like other well written RPG's) to wrap you up in it and leave you in a timeless dimension. If it's your first experience with an RPG of this caliber, take note of that. Otherwise, it is a thought-provacative, exciting and fun!!

Good luck!

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's about time, January 6, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage (Game Cartridge)

From what I've read and seen this game is amazing! I have been waiting months for it to come out and still am. A total of 13 playable characters and hundreds of non playable characters throughout the game, either good, bad,or neutral. There is a money and trade system. It has fully customizable characters, every level up you put in experiance in the areas you want it like agility or strength, a great advantage if you rather like to be a weapon user rather than putting experiance points into magic. There is also a day/night cycle and some characters are either solar or lunar aspected.(Play well during day[solar], play well during night[lunar]) The battle system is great. You have complete freedom with your character being able to move around the battle arena in the characters movement range. A small fast character can move in bigger areas. This gives the a small character a chance to run behind an enemy and get in a backstab attack. A big muscular bulky player cant move as well though. It is probably best for them to just go in for a frontal attack. Finnaly there is an RPG that players have been craving. It is about time to because it is hard to look at the N64 and look at the RPG genre and see Quest sitting there. That game was a humiliation.