#toward dawn

[cherrykcrunch]

[thesturnest]

My review of Toward Dawn

Toward dawn is a welsh mythology inspired RPG about a priestress named Caris who due to an attack on her temple ends up as the last priestess of her religion with the only reason she survived being due to being saved by Bleddyn a Gwyllgi (essentially a wolf guy) who lives in the woods around the temple and hunts the monsters in it.

This game is pretty short for an rpg at a length of about ten hours, but that length is perfect for the kind of story it's trying to tell. It isn't a particularly complicated narrative, but the characters are explored extremely well during it's runtime.

The combat is also quite interesting as a sort of combination of break systems and active time mechanics.

Now while this game may not be a full active time rpg that would just make the enemies attack regardless of the players turn like in most final fantasy games.

This is more like beloved rapture or in stars and time in that there is a speed meter that determines how fast a characters turn will come but it all stops on the players turn.

The interesting part is that every character and enemy has essentially two health bars. Health, and poise.

Health works like health in most normal games, it determines how close a character is to death. Poise is where it gets interesting, see poise is essentially a barrier protecting the health bar, the poise bar also regenerates itself when a character is moving along the turn order bar.

Most attacks won't do that much damage when the enemy has poise. But when a character's poise drops to zero they are broken and are frozen at the start of the turn order bar for a bit, from that point on until the character moves again and reaches the planning zone of the turn order bar they will have no poise and take double damage from all attacks.

And due to the differences between the abilities of characters such as Caris being amazing at taking down flux but not at actually hurting the opponents health while Bleddyn is amazing at hitting health but is terrible at getting rid of the poise it creates an interesting system where your party members have to rely on each other in order to actually fight effectively.