"God Dance Fantasy" review: Don't worry, this game you have to savor

At E3 in June this year, as one of the few Chinese manufacturers to participate in the United States, the red booth and night real machine demonstration picture of "God Dance Fantasy" were amazing. In October, we went to Beijing to participate in the "God Dance Fantasy" creator exchange, and experienced the work that is still under development. In December, "God Dance Fantasy" finally unveiled its mysterious veil.

Needless to say, the beautiful graphics under Unreal Engine 4, the static graphics and combat effects are particularly obvious. The glazed tiles of the imperial capital, the texture of the characters' clothing are clearly visible, and the dynamic effect of the waterfall and the stone pool water flow in the early stage of the checkpoint is equally good.

After experiencing the surprise brought by the screen, I found that "God Dance Fantasy" also brought me a progressive game experience - "sink your heart and slowly experience" is the first impression of this domestic RPG to me.

System | Rhythm sense interacts with the player

God Dance Fantasy is a fantasy RPG with original turn-based combat. Let's talk about the kernel of "original turn-based" first.

In combat mode, the player can control the character's attack order, walking direction (allowing walking to change perspective), skills, equipment, and support character attacks, providing a lot of content for the player to participate in.

In order to improve the turn-based system, there are two things to consider, rhythm and player interaction.

Rhythm sense

The first thing to point out is that each character in God Dance Fantasy only has blood bars, and there is no blue bar mechanism. In other words, there is no cost to skill release, so how do you limit skill release accordingly?

Use turn count and cast speed.

We will see that after releasing normal skills and aid characters, the skill icon will dim and a "1" logo will appear. This is the number of cooldown turns. Casting speed is also a limiting means to combat, casting speed of the move is generally more, get up fast, relatively low damage; Slow spellers have a high damage of accumulating power. Due to the BEC system in the game, the hit during the weak point time is higher than the three skills stack, so how to make the player's skills hit the enemy as much as possible is the key.

God Dance Fantasy does not use the traditional resource constraints class, but tightly integrates the constraints with the combat system, which greatly increases the strategy and gameplay richness of the later game.

While the four options in the player's skill bar and equipment bar are fixed (need to be deployed in advance), they can all be cast with one click, which is the operation speed of the player's Angle. Turn is called after turn, and if there are many enemies, they will attack the player at one time, rather than the traditional mode of first selecting and then attacking in turn. From these design ideas, the development team will undoubtedly speed up to the end.

Speed up the pace, which is a feature of the original turn-based God Dance Fantasy.

Player interaction

Another feature is the feedback the game gives to the player. The traditional turn-based system is often the state of the player watching the character perform after the input of instructions, and God Dance Fantasy has made a corresponding optimization for this problem.

In the "God Dance Fantasy" map, the player can freely explore within a limited space. There are no maps, no NPCS with overhead markers, and all the hidden items, map stories, and missions must be discovered by the player himself. The experience was similar to Uncharted, where I wandered deep into Laoshan and naturally climbed the cliffs as I saw them, a carefully designed pattern that encouraged exploration and reflected the skill of the level designers behind it.

"God Dance Fantasy" battle can move, hide big moves, change the formation, but to consume a round. When the character moves, the camera changes from close-up, mid-shot, and distant shot. This first breaks the fixed pattern of confrontation between the two armies from the perspective of perception.

The game uses a three-person battle, one person support lineup design. The aid role is undoubtedly the highlight of the design of "God Dance Fantasy", which is the solution given by the nine Phoenix team to the problem that the enemy has nothing to do. For two examples, the doctor Yun Yun who joined the team in the middle of the story is actually a heavy gunner, and he can cooperate with the team of three to achieve a kill effect from the perspective of assistance when the team attacks.

But during enemy turns, you can also summon a backup character. For example, Shenbird Xiyu, who has been accompanied by the protagonist's flying star, can treat the protagonist's team regardless of the round, and Shenmu is mainly responsible for appearing in the enemy round to eliminate all the attacks of the enemy for a period of time.

These are just a few examples. On the whole, the system of "God Dance Fantasy" is easy to learn and difficult to master. As the plot progresses, the number of characters involved in the war and the introduction of divine aid characters, you will find that the book is far more than you expected.

Details | Reservoir of skills and gaming experience

God Dance Fantasy has designed an original BEC system to make combat more compact and strategic. These include a weak spot attack system that deals a lot of additional damage to enemies. When the character releases the ability that triggers the weakness, it triggers the Weakness time system, during which the attack on the enemy accumulates the damage amount, and we can deal more damage to the enemy. Therefore, the timing of each character's move for each skill is the key to maximizing damage in the limited time. In Dance Fantasy combat, the player's characters act immediately after giving the command to attack, rather than the traditional turn-based approach of giving orders to all characters and then acting together.

The swords surrounding the battlefield above

In addition to the general attack, the weapon can also be freely equipped with 3 additional fighting skills, these fighting skills are divided into sword array system and meta spirit system two, each series of skills are divided into resource technology and end technology two, which is like a reservoir, the damage of the resource system is not high, but in the damage pool, until the sword array is full of 6 swords, the use of end technology damage can be poured out at one time. In this way, how to match the use of skills in the weak time will give players a headache for a while.

In the battle, only need to achieve certain conditions to call for God aid war, from the screenshot can be seen, in the lower right of the screen there are sword array, spirit and weakness attack metering slot, when these slots are full, it will trigger the corresponding god aid attack after the end of the round. These gods are collected through the main line and hidden trigger conditions, in other words, outside of the combat RPG, the game map has a lot of freedom and hidden eggs to explore.

On the level design side, the game reduced the map system in an attempt to allow the player to better immerse themselves in the character and explore the limited space. The most difficult thing to control is the proportion of the guiding UI in the game, and God Dance Fantasy here weakens the UI and tries to give the initiative to the player. This design sometimes makes the player feel that the trigger range of the work to pick up items is limited, and the teaching of graphic form is not direct to the explanation of the mechanism, etc., "God Dance Fantasy" can do better in this respect.

Culture | Details of the Shanhaijing period

What do you think of when it comes to domestic stand-alone machines? Martial arts, Mythology or RPG? Looking back on the history of Guodan, you will find that these elements seem to be the only ones that can really become Chinese game labels. This situation is not only in the field of stand-alone, online games mobile games are the same.

That's not a bad thing. It is the elements of Chinese style such as Wuxia and mythology that the domestic works have the initial recognition. At one time, the "Three Kingdoms" and "Westward Journey" have always been the focus of the domestic ACG themes, and recently, more and more content points to an ancient annals of Mountains and Seas.

The cultural background of "God Dance Fantasy" is also derived from this, as a new audience of ancient culture, this work lets me deeply understand the "witchcraft culture" and "Nuo culture".

Since ancient times, there has been the concept of "witch dance origin" and "all things have spirits". People believe that all things in the world have souls at that time, so there are various prayer rituals to try to communicate with the gods, and these dance steps used in sacrifices have also been handed down as a symbol of witch culture. It is said that in the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, when the number of Chinese characters was limited, "witch" and "dance" were the same word, and the characters and movements that communicated with heaven were the same concept in the eyes of the ancients.

The Nuo festival, which is highly traditional Chinese cultural content, has been visually reproduced in the game. For example, the oath of the newborn is placed on the ground covered by corn when the child is young. Under the guidance of the prayer festival, the gods will gather around the child. Now the full moon wine is to celebrate the child full moon, pray for the child blessing.

Nuo festival is the ancient sacrificial mask covered with clothes made of animal skin, in the sacrifice to imitate the gait and movement of the beast to drink away evil. These are all traditional customs that exist in ancient books, and are still spread in unique forms in modern times, such as full moon wine, Halloween, jumping God and so on.

The concept of "witch dance" represents the attitude of human beings towards the gods, even in the face of the unknown, people are willing to communicate with heaven in a positive attitude. "God dance fantasy" is the same, in the current stand-alone market, they are also willing to actively try to find more possibilities for domestic stand-alone works.

On December 22, "God Dance Fantasy" will officially land on the Wegame platform for sale, and the success of this game work needs to be carefully experienced after you get started.