Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage

Pros • Beginning castle does an impressive job of portraying medieval architecture • Some of the combat animations are cool • Story line is interesting • Wide variety of weapons and armor • Interesting selection of characters • The inexperienced young squire Alaron is actually inexperienced	Cons • No voiceovers anywhere, get ready to read text • The combat system absolutely, 100% ruins the entire experience of this game • Boring game play gives no reason to unravel the interesting story line • Combat is sloooow and boooooring • Quality of dialogue ranges from excellent to annoying • If a monster shoots at me with a bow, when I loot his dead body, why, oh why doesn’t he have a bow?!?!?
Bottom Line Let’s hope the second mage is a pacifist. I set down the phone after talking to my Mom, walked to the kitchen, made myself a sandwich, headed over to my computer, surfed the net for a bit, parked myself on the couch, and had a nap. About an hour later I awoke, reached for the remote to turn on the TV, and was shocked to see it was already on, and even more shocked to see my party of adventurers still frozen in combat where I had left them over three hours before. In the midst of a fierce battle with a group of goblins, my Mother’s phone call had set off a chain of events that had caused me to completely forget that I was playing Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage. Hmmmmmm, I thought to myself; completely forgetting about playing a game can’t be a good thing.

Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage manages to start off with a great deal of promise; an opening cut scene introduces you to some of the game’s characters, and gives you an interesting first impression of the game’s title character Alaron and some of the abilities he possesses. From there you make your way through a mini-quest, experience some foreshadowing in the form of a surreal Twin-Peaksish dream, and learn of some of the problems in your new fantasy kingdom. This entire prologue to the game is then wrapped up nicely as you make your way through the castle and talk to each of your possible travelling companions, before deciding which of them to take along on your journey; an excellent idea that allows you to customize your party a bit. So far, so good, looks like H20 Entertainment has done their homework, and built up the foundations of a good fantasy RPG for the N64.

Even better, H2O Entertainment has managed to create an innocent, about to be pulled into his destiny, title character that actually plays like an innocent, about to be pulled into his destiny, title character. Alaron is presented as a young, naïve squire just beginning his training in both the arts of warfare and magic. Too often, games give you a story background like this for your character, while the character’s actual in game skills and abilities are better suited to a seasoned warrior. Alaron is a neophyte both in story and in game play and is, initially, the weakest member of your party. Only after winning a few battles and spreading out experience points does Alaron start to become a valuable asset to the rest of the group, and begin his growth into the knight, and mage you know he will eventually become. Neither Bilbo, nor Frodo were much use when their adventures began, but part of the fun was reading about their transformations into stronger characters; learning from their travels. Aidyn Chronicles manages to capture this feeling of so many fantasy novels as you watch Alaron grow into his potential.

With your young protagonist and his newly formed group at hand, the game continues on quite nicely, until of course, you run into your first opponents and find yourselves transferred over to the combat screen. There is no possible way that any review of Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage can be longer than one or two paragraphs before bringing up what could be the worst combat system ever implemented in a fantasy role-playing game. The combat in Aidyn Chronicles is so annoyingly slow, and cumbersome that you will dread the appearance of any enemy on your TV screen, knowing that you will soon have to muddle your way through yet another yawn-inducing round of combat. There is no possible way that words can do justice to this RPG programming disaster, but here is, at least, an attempt:

Combat is turn based and provides each character with a radius of movement represented by near transparent, hard to see diamonds. Your character can move within this circle for as long as you want before choosing to attack, use an item or skill, cast a spell, or do nothing. Combat consists of each character and opponent taking turns to move around in their respective circle before carrying out a turn ending action. The main problem is, almost every battle starts out with a large amount of distance between your characters and their opponents, leading to multiple rounds of combat consisting of nothing more than slowly closing the distance enough to actually attack. This problem is further compounded by your opponents continually getting caught on terrain features which forces you to hunt them down across the field of battle. Even worse, your entire party is spread out randomly across one side of the combat screen leaving your weaker characters vulnerable to attack if you can’t move them into a tight group fast enough. As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, once you actually engage in combat both sides miss so often that the repetitious hack and slash will soon have you desperately searching the options menu for an auto-pilot feature. In the end, each battle breaks down into a simple formula: start combat, move all your characters into a tight group, wait while the enemy closes into range, wait while the enemy closes into range, wait while the enemy closes into range, swing and miss, swing and miss, hit, swing and miss, swing and miss, hit…repeat until one side wins.

The concept behind this system was to add strategy to your battles by adding an element of movement to the on screen action, a good idea conceptually, and one that may have worked in practice, with some more fine-tuning. Unfortunately for Aidyn Chronicles this attempt to add strategy to combat brings the entire gaming experience (slowly) crashing down, and ruins any chance of the gamer enjoying the story being presented.

In all honesty it is strange to be so hard on a game that manages to succeed on so many levels. Every time I started playing Aidyn Chronicles I was excited to travel to a new area, as some of the environments are quite unique. I enjoyed advancing my characters, the system of advancing skills and abilities by spending experience points works well. And I looked forward to watching the next cut scene of character interaction, which are animated well and do a nice job of advancing the story, even with the complete absence of voice-overs. However, none of these aspects of Aidyn Chronicles come even close to making up for the horrible combat you must experience to reach all of the good stuff. H2O Entertainment has succeeded in enough RPG features to show gamers they have potential, but in the end, all anyone can do is wait for the arrival of the Gamecube, and hope that Nintendo and THQ give H2O Entertainment a second chance.

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