Indivisible: The Game: The Thread: Now With 100% Less Divisions

OP

Draco

Adida


Since this game's release is just around the corner (and there's no thread for it as yet), I decided to make a place to talk about it on here.

Feel free to talk about whatever you want about the game, whether that be characters, plot theories, what tier you backed the game at if you did, etc.
 

Shipmaster Sane

You have been weighed
Ajna sucking people into her head forever after knowing them for twenty minutes is Vore and she must be stopped. She's just a Gravemind with thighs.
 

Shipmaster Sane

You have been weighed
What? What's the problem with Indivisible?
Half a dozen or more of the characters they promised are just background NPCs, and only four or five of them even have any role in the story.
They axed 90% of the planned combat mechanics, making a bunch of the characters useless.
All the healers are useless after the second level because your defensive abilities scale up way too fast and you heal between every fight.
They redesigned almost every character to have a lower detail appearance that would be easier to draw. They removed most of the characters backstories and replaced them with simpler ones.
Several characters have no special attacks, more characters special attacks are their regular attacks while glowing.
"magic damage" is pointless now because it heals certain enemies but doesn't have any advantages and does less damage.
Phoebe is just fucking broken, her special moves activate but do nothing.
They conspicuously replaced the two white men in the cast with people of color, the white men appear as NPCs, a misguided cripple and a psychopath, respectively.

Worse than all of this together, the story makes no god damn sense.
 

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
Founder
Half a dozen or more of the characters they promised are just background NPCs, and only four or five of them even have any role in the story.
They axed 90% of the planned combat mechanics, making a bunch of the characters useless.
All the healers are useless after the second level because your defensive abilities scale up way too fast and you heal between every fight.
They redesigned almost every character to have a lower detail appearance that would be easier to draw. They removed most of the characters backstories and replaced them with simpler ones.
Several characters have no special attacks, more characters special attacks are their regular attacks while glowing.
"magic damage" is pointless now because it heals certain enemies but doesn't have any advantages and does less damage.
Phoebe is just fucking broken, her special moves activate but do nothing.
They conspicuously replaced the two white men in the cast with people of color, the white men appear as NPCs, a misguided cripple and a psychopath, respectively.

Worse than all of this together, the story makes no god damn sense.
And just like that, my interest in the game evaporates. But please eloborate. How does the story make no sense?
 

Draco

Adida
And just like that, my interest in the game evaporates. But please eloborate. How does the story make no sense?
I'm working on a more detailed write-up, having 100% the game within three days of release. Just taking a bit to organize and get my thoughts in order, but I can go into story stuff once I do.
 

Draco

Adida
What? What's the problem with Indivisible?
I suppose I'll go through the pros and cons.

Pros:
  • Pretty good art design overall. Characters are all animated really well, the backgrounds are very pretty, and the different regions in the game are all very distinct from each other.
  • Sound design. Battle sounds all have a good weight and impact to them, and the music is pretty good, with a couple of standout tracks.
  • None of the characters feel samey, each one has a unique playstyle that makes fighting with them a distinct experience from fighting with another character. More than can be said for most fighting games.
  • Transitions between the gameplay styles are seamless, quickly swapping between the platforming overworld to the turn based combat without load times. Makes the combat feel more connected to the world than other turn based games.

And that's about where the pros end. It's all downhill from here. I'll split this up into different categories, some with sub-categories.


My God is it bad. Plot holes abound at every turn, with more rearing their ugly heads the more you think about the plot. Main character quickly goes from kind of cute to insufferably stupid and mean spirited, with really only one character ever challenging her on her behavior. Everyone else either loves her unconditionally or if they're ever annoyed with her they end up deciding not to be on their own after a half hour. Bad plot twists and bait and switches are plentiful. Not to mention that the character writing falls into the same trap everything does nowadays where every scene has to have somebody say some sort of Whedonesque quip or bad joke. I've described it to others like I'm watching the Abridged series of the Indivisible I was supposed to get, with the actual plot nowhere in sight.
Game starts in small village where main character Ajna lives. The village is attacked by the armies of a demon king and her father is killed by the army's commander. She fights the commander and during their fight inadvertently sucks him into her mindspace she didn't know she had. Why this is something she can do isn't explained.

She then goes to find the demon king and kill him for ordering her village destroyed. They fight in his floating fortress city, and after a short bout he jumps off and flies to the ground. She jumps after him, unable to fly and hundreds of miles from the ground. When the people she's sucked into her brain say not to do this, she does so anyway and says "maybe a giant bird will catch us, it'll be fine."

A giant bird then proceeds to catch her.

From here, Ajna chases the demon king into a holy mountain, whom one of her party members is sworn to keep people out of because it's sacred/a great evil lurks there. He goes along with her anyway because she saved him from prison in the floating fortress, but he tells her the whole way this is a bad idea and obviously a trap. She disregards his pleas and falls into the obvious trap. In the trap we find out Ajna is a small piece of a goddess that got blasted off when her father sealed the goddess away in the mountain sixteen years ago, and the demon king led her into the mountain to use her to break the seal around the goddess so that she'd destroy the world and remake it. By aiding her in this, the demon king expects her to reincarnate him in her paradise. He is then blown to smitheroons when the seal around the goddess is broken.

It's never explained why the demon king wants to die, despite being a nigh unstoppable conquering warlord of a whole nation. Also, he had no idea that Ajna was in the village he ordered destroyed, nor her father. It was just destroyed by happenstance, as far as we know.

Now take this level of writing and extrapolate another seventeen hours of game.
Despite my praise for how seamless the transitions between gameplay styles can be, that does not mean the styles really fit together. Rather than one cohesive JRPG/exploratory platformer experience, the game instead feels like two half baked games fused together without a good flow between them, just no load times.
For all intents and purposes, the game was marketed as a turn based RPG with a combat system that actually required conscious input and thought in order to play. While this is technically true since there's no auto-play button like many JRPGs have, the combat turns mindless pretty quick.

Start of the game before the death of the demon king is somewhat challenging. Instead of the usual turn based system, every character in your party has a number of attacks they can do per "turn," which they can use at any time and all recharge independently of each other. As long as your character has an action pip and the enemy isn't currently attacking, that character can make an attack. Blocking enemy attacks at this stage only mitigates damage (with better timing lessening the damage moreso), you have about two attacks per character, one bar of super meter to do special character specific attacks (which also drains if you hold the block button, encouraging you to time your blocks carefully) and your health is relatively low, so you have to plan out your attacks, execute them at the right time and have a healer at the ready to fix you up. All elements of the combat at this stage come together.

After the demon king dies, however, you inexplicably get a massive stat increase. Where you once had one bar of super, you now have three, and your health has gone from about 300-500 to somewhere in the multiple thousands. Enemies do a bit more damage, but as long as you block it's nothing really meaningful. This stat increase happens twice more throughout the game, and it also increases your damage output (you still level with experience from enemy encounters, so you're also dealing much more damage by the end that way).

As you go along, you slowly unlock more characters, but there are some who are head and shoulders above the rest. As a quick primer, most characters deal physical damage, while there are some who deal magic damage. Physical damage hurts enemies more, while magic damage generates more super meter per hit. However, there is rarely a need to generate super meter more quickly, as you already get a good amount from attack spam and you hold onto it between encounters, so magic damage is mostly just a damage handicap. Further, there are enemies later in the game that actually heal from magic damage, making magic based characters useless against them. There is no such counterpart for physical damage, and no apparent resistances to physical damage. In earlier builds, magic damage used to be able to go past enemy defenses for free, but that has been removed for release. So there really is no benefit to using magic damage.

So, now you're left with physical damage characters, essentially. Even among them there are particular standouts. Two characters in particular, Tungar and Leilani, both have AoE attacks that deal massive damage to all enemies around them, and generate a ridiculous amount of meter from using them. By late game these two characters in conjunction with attack upgrades will shred most encounters before anyone else gets to have a turn, your other party members included.

Further, the upgrades in this game completely break the combat system. You collect red gems throughout the game that you spend to upgrade your attack or your defense. Upgrading your attack gives you more actions per character, to a maximum of five a "turn." This gives the already superior characters more attacks to lay the hurt on your enemies, so many combats by mid-late game are over before the enemy even gets to attack, some boss fights included. This is coupled with the defensive upgrades, which lessen how much damage you take when guarding, increase the window where you can land a "perfect" block, and also make it so "perfect" blocks heal damage when you land them instead of further decreasing damage. These defense upgrades effectively make every character their own personal healer, so all characters who have a support focus are rendered useless. I have not heard of a single late game team composition that has a dedicated healer in it.

So, by endgame, you have a whole damage type out of two you've been conditioned not to use, support characters who end up being a wasted slot in your team comp, and two characters that are the spin-to-win button. What appeared to be a deep and challenging combat system on the surface is revealed to be a broken, unbalanced mess.

And, as mentioned, they scrapped many planned combat mechanics, and some of the characters are just unfinished (two of them so unfinished they're not even in the game as of posting).
I've seen comparisons made between this game and Other M in terms of how the exploration in this game works, and I would say it is an apt description. Unlike most exploratory platformers, or Metroidvanias, you do not get to explore the world map at your leisure, finding new paths and secrets on your own. Instead, you are dictated by the level design where you get to go and when, with the greater areas of the world being completely cut off from each other save for a few shortcuts you unlock way, way late in the game. These levels, while pretty to look at, are frustratingly linear and poorly designed, traversal being centered around the use of very clunky platforming abilities that you unlock progressively. Some places where you are meant to use these abilities are marked by floating colored orbs, while others are not marked whatsoever (specifically, hazards you can use your Shovel Knight pogo jump are not clearly defined, and sometimes things you can pogo on in one area you immediately die when trying to pogo on them in another).

Your traversal abilities, also, are unlocked much like in Other M. Rather than finding abilities by via exploration/as rewards for defeating bosses, thus unlocking new areas of the map naturally and with a sense of accomplishment, you instead are given abilities when you first encounter the situation where you need them in order to progress.

Actually, that's not entirely true. There are multiple times where you will encounter a situation that needs an ability you don't have, be told by the game through character dialogue that you can not progress, and then backtrack through the whole level you just ran through to get on your ship and travel to another level (the game does not tell you which level you need to go to to find the ability you were missing) so that you can either a) retrieve a new ability because you were standing in the right spot, or b) be told again that you do not have the right ability to proceed, and repeat the earlier steps. It is as though the game wants you to do the levels in a specific order, but gives you the illusion of freedom to where you want to go or what part of the story you want to do first.

Quest markers for most side quests are also broken, so you have to backtrack through entire levels of the game mindlessly, hoping you end up standing in the right spot for the game to tell you that you can proceed in the quest. Also known as doing the same mindless runaround in one of the other levels. Enemy encounters do not respawn, either, so you're not being engaged as you go either. It's just running.
zn3axlb7dhs31.jpg


Every character design for the final game has lost detail, or is generally worse in some way. Obviously this was done to make animation easier, but that just means they shouldn't have gone into this much detail in the first place if they didn't intend to animate such intricate designs. It just makes the final designs look weak in comparison.

Also some of the best designs were cut completely, as seen in the in memoriam section at the bottom. Poor Kogi.


I certainly haven't gone into complete detail with the problems in this game, so if you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.
 

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
Founder
so if you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.
You mentioned that two white characters were reduced to villain and missguided crippled NPC respectivly. I see that change with Vasco, but how is George disfigured? Have it been stated by the developers why the designs were all changed so much? If you had to compare the lead to a character of another franchise, who would it be?

Overall what would looks like it would be a decent game, turns out to be garbage, in plot, gameplay, and SJW-shit, from what I can see.
 

Draco

Adida
You mentioned that two white characters were reduced to villain and missguided crippled NPC respectivly.
They conspicuously replaced the two white men in the cast with people of color, the white men appear as NPCs, a misguided cripple and a psychopath, respectively.
That was Shipmaster's post.

I see that change with Vasco,
Fun fact, you don't even get to fight Vasco in the quest where you kill him. Or rather, the game says you're fighting him, but you're actually fighting a reskin of a tank miniboss you've fought a dozen times before this point. Then once you beat the tank you see Vasco standing there, he and Latigo have a back and forth, and then he lets Latigo shoot him because "he's been a bad man."

It's incredibly dull.

but how is George disfigured?
He gets relegated to a background character in Antoine's new, much worse backstory where he loses a leg in a dragon fight. Now he's like a weapons merchant or something who hates his country, when before he was the Man on the Wall who didn't care about politics or anything, just protecting people from the threat of monsters. He jumps into your head to serve as your training room to practice combos.

His design is also much, much worse, but I don't have any pictures of him off hand. Will provide later.

Have it been stated by the developers why the designs were all changed so much?
In the case of Vasco, Latigo was going to be a redesign of him for the stated reason of the conquistador/gunslinger design they were going for not being cohesive enough with his original design, as well as wanting a really lanky character in the cast. They have given no reason for the changes to George as far as I'm aware, they just sucked out his character, flipped it upside down and gave that to Antoine. All other character designs lost detail because it was easier to animate that way. So laziness, essentially.

If you had to compare the lead to a character of another franchise, who would it be?
Korra is the first one that comes to mind, but Ajna is less angry strong girl and more stupid, not really strong but part magic girl. Rey from new Star Wars is probably the level of writing cohesion we're on with her too.

Beyond that, she's a pretty cut and dry braindead anime protagonist/Mary Sue/a failing attempt by bad writers to make someone sound like a young girl that just comes off as idiotic.

Overall what would looks like it would be a decent game, turns out to be garbage, in plot, gameplay, and SJW-shit, from what I can see.
I would recommend waiting until the game is both finished and until it costs like, five dollars. It is not worth the $40 price tag.
 

Draco

Adida
He gets relegated to a background character in Antoine's new, much worse backstory where he loses a leg in a dragon fight. Now he's like a weapons merchant or something who hates his country, when before he was the Man on the Wall who didn't care about politics or anything, just protecting people from the threat of monsters. He jumps into your head to serve as your training room to practice combos.

His design is also much, much worse, but I don't have any pictures of him off hand. Will provide later.
@Urabrask Revealed for comparison, here is George's old design, a very clear reference to the legend of Saint George:
latest

And here he is now as of the game's release:
XbjzMxR.jpg

All of his presence, lost to formless muscle and a shitty haircut.
 

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