Customer Reviews

Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

The Aidyn Chronicles has a unique plot line as it doesn't follow a standard 'kidnapped princess' idea, although it has a 'save the world' style of plot. Overall, the game is very well designed and the graphics and cinematic scenes are also well done. The problem of the game comes into play with the tedious and almost boring dialog at times coupled with a similar battle-mode. As a large fan of turn-based style RPG games, this turn-based style implementation has very good intentions, but poor execution.
Being able to go to nearly any section of the world at any time you wish is a nice touch, but not always a plus as demonstrated at times in the game. In instances where you need to return to a distant location, sometimes you have to plod your character's jerky 'running' movements in the direction of the town which can take up to an hour alone if a few fights come into the mix. As almost insult to injury, the 'musical score' often reminds me of that annoying song you get stuck in your head and can't get out. I managed, once, to get the game to CRASH! That's right, in the middle of a battle the game took a dive and posted debugging information on the screen - the kind used in discovering and fixing BUGS in the game's code. How's that for quality?

Pros:
Easy to 'figure out' the controls
Good graphics and environment interface
Unique battle-mode interface
Change in a character's statistics immediately reflected in battle-mode effectiveness instead of leaving you guessing as to what a stat. change affects
Lots of skills and spells to learn, that similarly have immediate effects instead of leaving you guessing if the skill level change actually does any good

Cons:
Tedious, and almost boring battles at times
Lifeless & almost emotionless dialog
Music is extremely annoying at times (as commented by my friend multiple times while we were playing the game)
Can get easily lost in the world map, despite a map function
Some potential party members won't join after certain events
Some useful shops disappear magically with no explanation

This is a boring game. I just couldn't get into it at all. The characters' conversations seem to go on FOREVER, and there's no way to break away from someone talking to you and move on. The "battle mode" is also something that I found to be distracting and frustrating; however, if you're a big fan of the old-style RPGs that use this feature, you'll probably like this game. On the other hand, if you want fast-paced action or thrilling gameplay, I'd stick to another title. The graphics and story line are the best parts of the game. Still, I wouldn't spend sixty bucks on "Aidyn Chronicles" unless you're a hard-core RPG fanatic.

This game is the best game for any system since final fantasy. Anyone who likes final fantasy will love this game. The battle techniques are the best in any game. Instead of jumping forward, attacking and then jumping back, you attack, defend or dive for cover behind trees and rocks. Ocarina of time and majoras mask have invisible boundaries were you cant go any further (lake hyrule, the desert) In this game any where you can see you can go.

First of all, I'd like to say I'm... at the "12 year old gamer from Fort Johnson", second of all, If y'all out there are real RPG enthsiasts and you like games like Dungeons & Dragons & Baldur's Gate you should be pretty well pleased with this. It's got pretty much every type of stat from DND & BG and you can actually move around during combat. I bought FF8, I still play it, but I'm more interested in Aidyn Chonicles, it has an intriguing storyline, and guess what mr. "12 year old gamer from fort johnson" you actually have to beat the... goblin boss before you can get a good story. Now instead of complaining about the fort johnson kid. I'll review the stats.

Graphics
They're not the best, but at least it's not Paper Mario(which is a fun game but is more action related than RPG related). One good thing is that you can go anywhere you want(nearly). I bought this game after stinging my [amt] to spend on a weekend field trip and when I got home to play it I got lost in the very first area(YA DON"T GET LOST IN THE LOST WOODS DO YA? THESE ARE THE WOODS FROM HELL)

Control
It has a simple interface where you use the joystick, the A button and the B button. Combat's pretty neat too . . .

Story
I'd tell you all about my little LV10 dude and what's up with him, cept that give it all away, let's just say this big story just keeps unfolding and unfolding.

P.S.Get all your characters to at least LV8 before trying the goblin boss.

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.

I don't need to sat anything, since people can clearly see my star rating. I just plain like this game. It seems so unique. For one, death actually has a meaning. You lose a valuable party memeber that has been fighting at your side, as opposed to "Oh I'll just use some phoenix down next turn", or "I'll bring him back to life when I get back to town". Afterall, I think that what made Aeris's death so significant. Who didn't want to kill Sephiroth right there and then for doing that? True, the game is slow and graphis are a pretty bad (Even I wanted to quit playing during the first twenty minutes) but this good isn't about looks or speed. It's about something deeper, the actual adventure. I mean, Alaron's life is in jepardy. How exciting would it be if you solved that in an hour and then just went home for dinner? The length of the game should be a lure, like popular television series. When I first talked about this with a friend of mine, he told me about how many people thought the game sucked, and it really got me depressed. Then I looked here and saw that there were people that enjoyed it just as much as me. I'm not going to say that people that down like the game are wrong, thats what you want to believe. But think about it, alot of the complants are about the dragged out story line. Has anyone here heard of Gungrave? The game has almost no story line, just a whole bunch of action. I liked it, but it left me feeling empty. Then I saw the anime of Gungrave, and it just seemed so much cooler. I'm not going to get preachy any longer so I'll just wrap this up with the points that I think makes a good RPG.

1. Choices
2. Consequences
3. Tough situations
4. Realism

P.S. Maybe I just feel this way because I play Dungeons & Dragons

Aidyn Chronicles The First Mage is a good game to get if you like games like Dragon Warior.I love how the characters do battle, because it makes the battle come more alive.I also like the story line and the interesting characters you meet along the way.