A time-travelling tale for old timers
Oh sorry, I rhetorically lost myself for a minute there! I’m supposed to be telling you aboutTerra Memoria, a newRPGfeaturing time travel, magic crystals and animal wizards. Here’s a trailer.
The areas from the Steam demo put me strongly in mind ofGrandia- characters and objects have similar proportions, and there’s a familiar hurly-burly to the town scenes - though the combat is rather more measured, with characters forming neat ranks and spaffing spells at each other according to an initiative bar at the bottom.
Terra Memoriais the story of six characters - a handyman, a blacksmith, a summoner, a sorcerer, a shapeshifter and a bard, going by the Steam page - who are swept up in a timeframe-hopping mystery involving angry ancient machines. They’re calling it “cosy”, but I think “feisty” is a more appropriate characterisation of the writing in the demo, which begins with one character having to defend a town against the aforesaid rogue contraptions.
This also introduces you to the game’s construction mechanic, in which you craft stuff at worktables, then rotate and place it, from patches of grass to barricades. You can apparently build a whole village. I’m not sure I feel the need for building mechanics in games like these, but eh, it more-or-less worked forNi No Kuni 2. More appetising is the opportunity to “write a regional guide” by collecting lore docs and pasting them into a nice colourful scrapbook.
The key to combat seems to be exploiting elemental weaknesses while weighing the pros and cons of attacks that impose cooldowns of varying lengths on the character, as indicated by the initiative bar before you commit to a choice. Magic boulders deal more damage than fireballs, but they might also let the target sneak in a riposte before your next turn. Shatter an enemy’s guard by targeting elemental weaknesses, and much as in Grandia or the more recentOctopath Traveller, you can postpone their next move. It all seems straightforward enough - hopefully later battles are more challenging.
