Oh boy you guys, a new uninspired screenshot Lets Play from yours truly!
And this time it's for something that
even less of you care about! Truly a joy to behold.
Anyway, our subject of engagement today is
Vantage Master Online, or if you believe the .EXE window,
Vantage Master V2. It's hard to be sure.
Hardcoregaming101 has Vantage Master listed under its "Strategy" category and describes it as being vaguely similar to Magic the Gathering (?). From screenshots, it looks to be somewhat similar to a TBS/JRPG hybrid along the lines of
Final Fantasy Tactics, a series I have never played. As a side note, this game was released as freeware in 2002, so if you want to grab it, just do a bit of googling.
There are lots of game modes, but we're going to be doing the campaign obviously! It kicks off with a "personality quiz" to discern your character class, fans of
Morrowind will find this quite familiar, but the questions in
Morrowind were a bit more elegantly phrased than, well....
Yes. The reason I picked this game up was because poor translations speak to me on a spiritual level, and "in frint of the clown" is just impossible to read without smiling. Go on, try it, I dare you.
Anyway, because of said translation it's a little hard to figure out what exactly we're picking here. So I think after a point I just went with the bottom answer on all of them. I should note that each answer gives you a card, accompanied by a short description, the designs are actually quite neat, so of course I did not screencap any of them. It's a bit hard to tell if the things depicted on said cards are intended to be monsters, but I assume they are.
A few questions in, and we're given our class.
I was hoping for a witch, but this works too. I stuck with the default name of "Platina" because honestly it's kind of badass.
In the next update: we learn what the hell this game is actually about.
Comments
I'm more wondering why she gets to be a witch while I don't. She's got a cat and everything!
That sounds an awful lot like we drew the "jack of all trades" class. Side note! The HCG101 page has the official art for the classes and the Paladin is pretty clearly a dude while our "Palladine" here seems to be a more feminine version of the same individual, so I'm not sure what's up with that. Maybe there are two genders for each class (although I was never given an "are you a boy or a girl" option a la Pokemon).
The four what now?
Hooray! A bunch of random junk!
To be fair to the gamedevs here, objects of mystic importance being used to summon monsters actually makes significantly more sense than using cards to do the same, but I do wonder how we're going to carry all this. Also! As a fairly devout Christian I can say with some certainty that there is no angel named Guene-Foss in the Bible. In fact, that rather sounds like the name of a swamp in France more than a being of light and holiness (also why is the fourth element "Heaven" instead of Wind?).
Yes. Let's.
it's interesting in that it operates in multiple sub-windows within the game, which is a practice that's (deservedly) died out in recent years. In any case, our help window is empty and we've got four possible places we can go. Nothing here is flagged as a tutorial, which is both scary and intriguing.
Without much to go on, we select the first area, a forest.
this brings up some stuff in the help window (rather....specific. Is there seriously not a tutorial?) and pops up a pair of new windows containing information on the map and the summoners (myself and the computer) respectively.
Scary stuff, but we've got no choice but to press onward.
so here's us, I suppose.
With no evident tutorial in sight, I'm going to spend the next bit of time trying to figure out what exactly I'm supposed to like, do.
I'll see you on the other side.
there's not much to go on, but bear with me.
The player unit (which is our paladin) can summon other units at the end of its turn. We have four, the four we got earlier at the end of our quiz. Now, the "Help" tooltip seems to indicate that the Water creature can move well in water, and I thought that since much of the map is water (as you can see) it'd be wise to summon it. However, I was incorrect as it seems like no units can ever move into water tiles. Disappointing.
Also, you seem to only be able to move units on some kind of timer (that is, when you move one, there's a certain amount of turns that have to elapse before you can move it again. Although some units you can move every turn). There's no real indication of any of this, and I'm having to sort of intuit it all.
I'm also not entirely sure as to what the goal is. We started out controlling those glowing tiles ("magical stones") so I'm not sure if we're intended to keep the other team from capturing them or what.
Also, there's no music in this game and what audio there is is ear-splitting, best played muted.
without any real idea as of what to do, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that we lose--sorry, "have losted", according to the game.
Unless I can find a tutorial somewhere, this is going to be a slog.
but i'd want a better translation were i to play it