Journey across the land in a new adventure styled after classic JRPGs from the 90s.
Earthlock: Festival of Magic
Snowcastle Games
Price: 29.99
Platform: Xbox One, PC (reviewed), Mac
Earthlock: Festival of Magic was inspired by classic JRPGs, and that’s clear in its basic gameplay. You enter towns and dungeons from a world map, combat is turn-based, and so on. However, despite these surface similarities, Earthlock quickly takes on an identity of its own.
Enemies appear in the field, but if they spot you, you only have a limited amount of time to get away. Triggering the battle yourself ensures you get the first attack. Although it is sometimes useful to lure tough enemies away to fight them in smaller numbers, your earned experience is multiplied by the number of enemies in the battle. This makes it worthwhile to fight them in large groups.
For combat, you can map eight of your character’s abilities to a button or key to select during battle. Items and other actions are likewise mapped and selected. Additionally, each character has two stances, each with its own abilities. For example, the main character can be either a thief with melee attacks or a ranged fighter who uses a blaster. Party members also fight in pairs, and paired characters build up a bond meter that enables them to use powerful special attacks.
As you level up and increase your bond level, you’ll earn Talent Points. These can be spent, along with talents, to raise your characters’ stats, teach them new abilities, and grant them passive abilities.
Crafting plays an important role in the game, as you’ll need to craft ammo, healing items, and talents. Some crafting materials you must buy or get from enemies, but others can be grown by planting seeds at your home base. As you harvest more materials, your plants will level up and eventually mutate into new seeds, letting you craft better items.
Earthlock can be challenging. It occasionally forces you to level grind, but a level or two can make a world of difference, especially if you can exploit enemies’ weaknesses. And aside from a couple tedious dungeons—most have a fairly good design—you’re rarely too far from a save point, which lets you warp to your base to heal and allows a form of fast travel. A few minor bugs and glitches notwithstanding, Earthlock’s gameplay is solid and entertaining.
Unfortunately, its story isn’t on the same level. Your journey begins when a young man named Amon finds a mysterious artifact and begins to investigate it. Despite some interesting lore, however, the story is rarely compelling, between bland plot developments, villains whose motivations go unexplained, and protagonists with almost no character development. In fact, the characters are generic enough that you might remember them more for their roles in combat than for their personalities. It’s disappointing that Earthlock doesn’t live up to its potential in this regard, but at least it delivers in terms of gameplay.
The Final Word
Storytelling and character development aren’t Earthlock’s strongest points, but it has some interesting twists on classic JRPG gameplay. If you miss those classic games, Earthlock: Festival of Magic is worth a look—just don’t expect anything earthshaking.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
