Author Topic: Elona  (Read 32887 times)

rabish12

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Elona
« on: April 24, 2008, 11:06:29 PM »
Caught this game on rec.games.roguelike.announce, thought you folks might be interested.  It's mostly untranslated, but it's still playable, and has a lot of nice and interesting features (including things like taxes, a more forgiving death system than most roguelikes, crime system, gambling games, a political system, weather effects, a calendar, impressive visuals, and a good soundtrack) as well as showing quite a few inspirations from some of the more popular titles out there (the author's stated that the skill system was inspired by ADOM's, and there are also corruptions like those in ADOM).  Anyone who speaks Japanese might want to check out the untranslated version and lend a hand in the translation, and for everyone else there's an English beta here.

Krice

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Re: Elona
« Reply #1 on: April 25, 2008, 06:24:15 AM »
You know it's japanese when you can have a little girl as pet.

Keiseth

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Re: Elona
« Reply #2 on: April 28, 2008, 09:37:37 PM »
Wow, thanks for the link. Elona looks to be quite good! It's a little quirky in some regards, but that makes a game more enjoyable, for me.

My only complaint with it thus far is the harshness of the dungeons. A Danger Level 1 forest gave me five enemies at once, one was a "kobolt" that was extremely hard to kill. The others (crabs and snails) made me have to save up my magic (as a warmage) to kill. I slept on a bed ('t' key, for tools, when standing on it) and in a dream a wizard taught me Lightning Bolt, which was pretty cool.

But very fun. Look at that! Your sprite changes depending on what you wear? What attention to detail. Can't wait until the translation improves; I just got robbed by bandits speaking Japanese, and apparently chose the "give them what they want" option.

rabish12

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Re: Elona
« Reply #3 on: April 28, 2008, 09:58:24 PM »
Wow, thanks for the link. Elona looks to be quite good! It's a little quirky in some regards, but that makes a game more enjoyable, for me.

My only complaint with it thus far is the harshness of the dungeons. A Danger Level 1 forest gave me five enemies at once, one was a "kobolt" that was extremely hard to kill. The others (crabs and snails) made me have to save up my magic (as a warmage) to kill. I slept on a bed ('t' key, for tools, when standing on it) and in a dream a wizard taught me Lightning Bolt, which was pretty cool.

But very fun. Look at that! Your sprite changes depending on what you wear? What attention to detail. Can't wait until the translation improves; I just got robbed by bandits speaking Japanese, and apparently chose the "give them what they want" option.
If the dungeons are difficult, it helps to spend some time traveling about doing quests.  The roads are less dangerous than the actual wilderness, and if you travel on them you can run into traveling merchants as well, with those merchants generally being the source of the best equipment you'll be able to buy.  It's good to save up a small fortune by doing quests that involve delivering to Noyel, since they almost always pay at least 10,000 gold, though you'll want to be careful that you don't take the ones that give you short time limits because it takes a while to get there (particularly because movement speed is slowed when you walk around).  You also get platinum coins for doing quests, and once you've managed to amass twenty of those you can bring them to the trainers (they're usually found in the building that have a cloak on them) to learn useful new skills that'll let you do things you can't already.

Once you've done all of that, and used that fortune you've amassed to buy yourself some solid equipment, it's good to dive into Lesimas (a dungeon to the south of your shelter) and make your way down to level 3, where you'll find someone who'll further the main quest.  He gives you a chest full of fairly good and useful equipment.  From that point on, you can keep working on the main quest (if you can't figure out what to do because the actual dialogue isn't translated, hit the J key to check your journal - even though the quests you're given aren't translated, the journal entries for the main quest are, which makes the main quest itself technically playable) or you can move on to do other things.

There's also quite a few interesting touches that I've found from machine translations of the game's Wiki, among other things.  For example, if you can bring those red faces on an ally's dialogue screen all the way down, and the blue ones all the way up, you can marry them.  Afterwards, you can actually play as the offspring of your character and his or her spouse.  You can also get a "gene machine" and learn a skill that allows you to combine two allies, sort of like what you might have seen in any number of Pokemon-type games.  Also, you can buy deeds that allow you to create property like shops and museums, which you can then set up to generate you a greater salary (apparently, museums give you more cash for leaving the "figures" in them).  There's a gambling game, but it's completely untranslated (seems to be a bit like blackjack, and after fiddling with it I think I've figured out the basics of controlling it, but I'm still not sure), and there's some kind of political system where you can enter your name at towns and they have several positions to be filled and such but I have absolutely no idea how that works (maybe I need to get my reputation higher - having it at -100 certainly can't help :P).  There are quite a few other things, like being able to play piano for money, but basically the game feels like it's mostly finished aside from the translation, and it has a lot of stuff to do that's pretty hard to actually figure out without some English text to tell you that it's there.

Basically, I'm just a little excited to see a roguelike with really good graphics, really good music, and the amount of content and level of depth and variety that I've come to expect from the text-based ones.  It's almost refreshing.

Keiseth

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Re: Elona
« Reply #4 on: April 29, 2008, 05:24:12 AM »
Thanks for the information! That's the post I was hoping to find here eventually, cleared up a lot of confusion. So, the red faces are bad? And I thought people liked me! My wizard is about to run out of Magic Dart stock and some gold for books would be very helpful.

Basically, I'm just a little excited to see a roguelike with really good graphics, really good music, and the amount of content and level of depth and variety that I've come to expect from the text-based ones.  It's almost refreshing.

Yeah, same here. That's what took me by surprise. Usually if a Roguelike has great graphics, it has no depth. If it has no graphics, it has great depth. This one has both! I hope the translation keeps going, because this game is a real gem.
« Last Edit: April 29, 2008, 05:30:37 AM by Keiseth »

rabish12

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Re: Elona
« Reply #5 on: April 29, 2008, 07:07:43 AM »
Thanks for the information! That's the post I was hoping to find here eventually, cleared up a lot of confusion. So, the red faces are bad? And I thought people liked me!
Quote
I don't really know what they are, but I think they mean that people don't like you.  They go down when you give gifts and on your allies they go up when you take things from them, kill them, let them die, or anything like that, so it probably has something to do with how much they dislike you.  Either that or it's just how irritated they are with you.

Quote
Yeah, same here. That's what took me by surprise. Usually if a Roguelike has great graphics, it has no depth. If it has no graphics, it has great depth. This one has both! I hope the translation keeps going, because this game is a real gem.
Agreed.  I'm not too worried about the translation though.  Since the game's creator has said that he's willing to accept stuff that you've run through a machine translator and then just used that translation to get the general meaning for whatever you write up, I'm guessing that quite a few people who like it will want to pitch it.

AmnEn

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Re: Elona
« Reply #6 on: May 09, 2008, 02:16:04 PM »
Pretty nice game.
It's rather difficult, partly of course because of the language problem.
Currently I am searching my *** off to get rid of a cursed item. I have the suspicion its "investigate an item" but I don't have the money necessary to do that. ANd hell, is that cursed item annoying, teleporting you all over the place :X

/edit:
Bloody awesome... while asleep two more of my items got cursed. Just... awesome. *frustrated*
« Last Edit: May 09, 2008, 02:17:46 PM by AmnEn »

rabish12

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Re: Elona
« Reply #7 on: May 13, 2008, 09:14:43 AM »
Pretty nice game.
It's rather difficult, partly of course because of the language problem.
Currently I am searching my *** off to get rid of a cursed item. I have the suspicion its "investigate an item" but I don't have the money necessary to do that. ANd hell, is that cursed item annoying, teleporting you all over the place :X

/edit:
Bloody awesome... while asleep two more of my items got cursed. Just... awesome. *frustrated*
To get rid of the cursed stuff, there's scrolls of... I think it's "bless".  It'll work on every cursed or "doomed" (you'll have fun when you find one of those) item that you have equipped, and maybe the ones in the inventory (I haven't really checked), though there is a chance that it won't actually work.  It almost always does for curses, at least.

As for the stuff getting cursed in your sleep, the best way to avoid that is to just sleep in better beds (or, assuming you aren't actually sleeping in beds, to start doing so).  You could also start carrying around a sleeping bag, which is just a good idea all-around because it lets you deal with the sleep problem before it gets as severe as it does.

dingbat91

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Re: Elona
« Reply #8 on: May 14, 2008, 02:21:38 PM »
Pretty nice game.
It's rather difficult, partly of course because of the language problem.
Currently I am searching my *** off to get rid of a cursed item. I have the suspicion its "investigate an item" but I don't have the money necessary to do that. ANd hell, is that cursed item annoying, teleporting you all over the place :X

/edit:
Bloody awesome... while asleep two more of my items got cursed. Just... awesome. *frustrated*

Magic shops sell the scroll "uncurse" you might need more than one, as their is a chance that the item will resist and stay cursed (i got the staff to)

Karzack

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Re: Elona
« Reply #9 on: July 19, 2008, 10:48:47 PM »
Noa just released version 1.13 of Elona if it matters to anyone.  There has been quite a bit of translation done, but it's not 100% finished.

I've been hooked on this game a while and it's quite fun.