Swords of Wartales- Beneath Glimmerscar
Misplaced the game files for a minute because I was looking for “Swords of War Tales” based on the easily readable cover text and not “Beneath Glimmerscar” the web game title proper and name on the file.
First Impressions:
Beautiful Art, Incredible Music, Wonderful Voice Acting, Moving Storyline.
Mini Essay:
This is a game I’d call a Visual Novel. A very narrative driven short story that was beautifully executed with a hauting conclusion and just a dash of main story promotion.
The art is a classic anime style for the character portraits with no shading, probably due to time constraints, which conflicts just slightly with the highly polished design of the narrating Bardess who is almost certainly an asset used in the main game.
The gameplay is smooth save for the sfx being mind blastingly loud. After turning them down to 20% it was in balance with the rest of the stellar audio, sadly this made it hard to hear the final narration of the Bardess.
The attack animations were quite large compared to the battler sprites and the scale of the enemies to the scale of the people based on the noncombat sprites was a bit off.
As a side story from the main story it was not lacking in narrative depth at all, though some portions of the narrative were repeated verbatim in differnet cutscenes. Additionally the pacing of the voice over, though beautiful, felt like it was holding back the story as there were no visual accomplaniment to compliment the depth of spoken word. The speed made me a bit antsy. My biggest pet peeve in literature is redundant narration. The lines at the beggining saying “Shall we begin then? Wonderful, lets begin then.” unnessecarily ruffle my feathers. If the wording changed to not have the same words in a different order or cut one of those lines that would be fantastic! (Also there’s a part of the credits too big to read.)
The replayability value is the same as reading a good short story, if you love the story you’ll love the game!