Wanderlust: Rebirth

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Its really sad if a minigame in another game (fectors challenge) is better made than your whole game..

Edit: After playing through it thoroughly i can only support some of the top negative reviews.

Why do i NOT recommend this game:
* horrible menu and control scheme
* false "wanderlust"
* insane grind / crafting tree
* so much focus on "MP" that SP and the MP experience got ruined
* meh characters and story
* meh music
* eh.. bearable graphics.. i love pixel graphics, but this is not how you do it..

This is a multiplayer only game. Hard to find players nowadays.

This game is a neat idea executed kind of poorly. Seems like a lot of grinding, the enemies are average difficulty except bosses which are way unbalanced. You need to grind for the bosses, I guess thats usual rpg fare but I found it annoying to kick all the minions butts EASILY to wind up getting totally wasted by the boss of the level, it seemed unfair.
I like the graphics and I liked the game enough to buy the sequel but if you are interested in the game buy the sequel since it's better.
It's not that this game is BAD but I feel like I didn't get what I wanted out of it, the way screens load is kind of disjointed and I was expecting something more smooth and jrpg like. (like nestalgia for example)

Hello friends. I found this game that i did not review yet. This is a rpg game where you can play online. From what i remember about it, it was hard to get online with others, and i quite playing this game after awhile because i got bored of it..

My recommendation is neutral, but since i cannot make it that, i will recommend it.

Really a bad game. Would not recconmend unless you have four players and use voice chat.
For singleplayer this game is crap. The AI is stupid and your team is mostly just on the way of you rather than helping at all!

Wonderfull story, well made fantasy game. simple, adventuring. fun. This is actually the best Indie RPG game i've ever played and if you like RPG indie games like these I would definetly recommand this game for you. Especially for the story. Worth the money :)

I'll just list some of the worst things about Wanderlust: Rebirth, because there are far too many for me to bother listing them all.

-The controls are horrible.
-The menu is ugly and difficult to navigate.
-I frequently die from getting stuck on enemies and objects.
-It has worse graphics than an RPG Maker game.
-The story and characters are boring at best, and groan-inducingly predictable at worst.
-Not enough inventory space to hold all the worthless crap you get from enemies.
-Each chapter features several tiny, uninteresting filler maps that you have to go through to reach your objective. These frequently only have one or two enemies in them. Sometimes they have none at all. They might be more interesting if the tilesets weren't ugly as hell.
-When I get critical hits it displays a giant text box that blocks my view of the enemy. Enemies also frequently spam screen-filling attacks. These, in combination with the fact that the game expects you to read enemies' “tells” and block their attacks, creates a rage-inducing and borderline unplayable experience.
-Ironically, the game is totally linear, and has no exploration whatsoever. So much for wanderlust.

Wanderlust: Rebirth wouldn't even be worth playing if it was free.

Ah, Wanderlust: Rebirth. It's been too long since I played you, and I still have good memories...

But, every time I try to go back to playing Wanderlust: Rebirth (WR from now on), I end up remembering why I stopped playing it in the first place. Let me just get one thing out of the way: I do consider this game to be particularly good for what it is, a 2D top-down beat'em-up RPG. WR would be even better had the developpers not centered its gameplay on co-op with other players. And so I start explaining why I don't recommend WR...

First, as the entire game was developed with co-op in mind, there is actually content of the game that can't be accessed in solo gameplay. Yes: because everyone likes playing with randoms or, even better, can convince his friends to play a game only he seems to like.

The first point segues into the second: playing alone you get AI team-mates, but they are just a sliver short of being useful. The reason for this is that the AI teamsters tend to get killed incredibly easily by certain enemy types while not amounting to doing any real damage (or healing) to contribute, in a general way. They are also clearly not balanced to help you in the higher difficulties, meaning that it does end up as if they weren't really there. It even gets insulting when, as the Paladin, you can't even use your skills to bring them back to life, AS WOULD HAPPEN IF THEY WERE A REAL PLAYER INSTEAD. What's the point? Are the developpers telling us that only some classes work for playing solo?

Third, for a game with WANDERLUST as its name, you don't tend to wander much at all. Exploration is minimal, having most scenarios (or chapters, if I remember how the game calls it correctly,) being linear and driven by a quest that is very cliché. I'll admit that you DO wander through a somewhat varied diversity of caves and forests, and that perhaps the setting of the game has a worthy backstory that ends up either unseen by the player or forcefully fed at him depending on perspective and situation, but you would expect initially to have a little more freedom exploring a world full of annoying monsters for you to beat up.

Fourth, the enemies. Maybe if this point was a little more balanced in favour of the single player or by how many players there are in the game, the earlier three points wouldn't stand out as much. But come on! Some enemies are plain ludicrous in their balance. Blood slimes, even if "rare" in the campaign, are about the most annoying thing in the arena game mode if you can't finish them off quickly, or rather, quicker than they can leech off your useless AI budies' health into their own; blood slimes can also one-shot you, given the right conditions. And this is simply the enemy that pops to mind as the most unbalanced: poisoning spiders and the annoying elf casters also come to mind, if you really want a list of sorts.

Fifth... is definitely the grind. You would not believe how much you have to grind in this game... and you'll hate why, too: you need 3 of the previous tier of items to craft a next-tier item. And you also need tons of crappy small parts semi-randomly to craft things. And you need a "blueprint" of the item you're crafting. And the ingame currency as well, lots of it. And then this consumes space in your already limited and otherwise useless inventory. See where I'm getting at? You're not even grinding to become more powerful, oh no: you're grinding to raise a few numbers just a little, so that coming across an elf mage isn't immediately lethal at least. Leveling up is instead done by how well you scored on a chapter, which then gives you X of a total of Y skillpoints that the chapter can give. Meaning that playing alone is much harder in addition to the lackluster AI buddies, especially when you have to rely on them since most other things in the game are broken. Heck, the only way it could be worse was if you decided to actually play WITHOUT the AI buddies, which I believe you can, but why would you? It's better to have 3 meatshields and possibly a buff or two for 10 seconds than to die in those 10 seconds just because everthing was targetting you and you didn't kill the most dangerous things as fast as you could.

Also, that I know of, the multiplayer scene is practically dead. Maybe you can get into a game with a stranger, MAYBE. Timezones apply, of course. Be wary of desynchs, too: those can be quite annoying, with everyone stuck waiting for something that will never happen because the other person doesn't have the exact same data.

So, why did I bother making this review? Simple reasons. Primarily to warn you not to buy this game, but also to tell you that most of the things I listed are promised not to be issues with the sequel of this game, the (as of the time) yet unreleased Wanderlust Adventures. Seriously, DON'T BUY THIS GAME. You'd do the developpers more of a favour to buy the next game and extra copies if you care about them (thus creating a larger player base for an inherently better game by gifting the extra copies) than if you bought this game right now, or ever.

(Edit: the Steam store finally has the aforementioned Wanderlust Adventures here, http://store.steampowered.com/app/240620 , in case you were wondering.)

I can't recommend this came to anyone anymore no one plays it. I played it none stop when it came out. It always had problems but the grind was enjoyable. Don't buy it no one hosts servers no one plays. Unless you have very specific people beforehand who will play 100% don't get this game it's boring alone.

Unfortunately. I find this game generic. Controls are a mess, the game itself seems to run in a clunky manner, and it's attempt at recreating the 90's style RPG is a bit off. At no point during gameplay did I feel engaged. The storyline isn't original, and there is little depth in what you are trying to accomplish. The reward system for "Missions" in this game makes it feel as if they broke away from attempting an action RPG and decided halfway through to attempt an arcade game. Many claim this game reminds them of Secret of Mana. However in my own opinion, had this game came out at the same time Secret of Mana had, I would still have chosen Secret of Mana. The art style did hit fairly close to target in trying to emulate the 16 bit era, however once again, depth and immersion are still a huge issue. The towns, the map, the lands feel all bland. Many of the areas in this game use a rather dull color palette, which to me personally is very unappealing. One of the big strengths in Secret of Mana, and even Zelda, aside from their gameplay and mechanics, was the color palettes and music used to really hit on target with the feeling you get from certain areas in the game. I commend W:R for attempting to recreate this feeling. But I suggest the developers go back and really spend a lot of time analyzing exactly what made those games of the 16 bit era classic.

I really wanted to give this game a chance, for some reason. Maybe because I spent $8 on it. It fails in several ways:

The AI companions are awful. They often stand around, not attacking, and when they are attacking, they are in the way.

The landscape can obscure where you're fighting, so you don't know where the enemy that's hitting you is, or where you are.

The damage numbers are the same color for you getting hit, your party members getting hit, and your enemies getting hit, and non-boss enemies don't have a health bar, so you don't really know the status of a fight.

Perhaps more importantly, I couldn't see any health bars for my AI companions, so as a cleric, I just had to spam heals without knowing when they needed it.

The sprites/animations are pretty poor, you can't face/attack diagonally which really sucks, and I couldn't tell if my party members were dead, or if they were alive and just standing around (which, as aforementioned, happens in combat).

The difficulty/loot scale is awful. The first boss was super easy, and your rival who apparently lost to it comes back next level and wiped my party, constantly stunlocked me and killed me 4 times, so I just had to hold block and get in one hit at a time. Then the loot I got from finally beating him was worse than what I already had.

The game doesn't inform you of many things, such as when I thought I was stacking enhancements on an item, I was actually just overwriting them with another. No info on that.

Your AI companions have no dialogue. Zero. No story, they just follow you around and no one else acknowledges them. Awful storytelling.

Speaking of which, the main story doesn't come in until 40 mins in. That time is spent winning a tournament you didn't join, and fighting through tons of boring battles to get to the celebration of your really easy victory.

The one cool thing is the abilities are cool, but the hotkey system is annoying, you can only have a few powers hotkeyed at a time.

Overall, I really wish I didn't spend my money on this game. Don't get it. It feels very unfinished. Oh yeah, the most annoying part: after suffering through the story to see if it improved, there were some enemies that spawned behind some terrain that neither they nor I could get through. Their ranged attacks couldn't get out, and I had no ranged attacks, and my party wasn't even moving (they might have been dead, but the sprites are such that it's hard to tell). I couldn't leave the way I came, and I couldn't progress until they died, but they were stuck and therefore so was I. I had to quit and lose all progress in that chapter. Now I'm done.

I bought this game on a sale because I had read a few reviews on-line suggesting it would be a pretty decent action/RPG type of game, but after having sunk a considerable amount of time into it, I honestly cannot recommend it.

On the surface, the premise is pretty simple: You battle your way through 10 chapters of action as the story unfolds, and you earn Character Points to use in developing your fighter. You can replay chapters to try and earn 100% in them, but at times, it's not clear what this even entails, and from what I can tell, there's no way to review this information once play is underway. This is just one of many holes in the game, however.

On the good side, the graphics are charming and fairly well done, and there are some pretty decent musical tracks throughout the game, as well. You won't have problems picking out the enemies, and it's nearly always obvious when an item has been dropped to pick up. The gameplay itself is fairly straightforward, and there is the occasional side quest to keep you occupied. Combat is pretty much button mashing; there is some nuance when it comes to the block function, but aside from this, you'll basically be spamming your weapon strikes and/or special ability--at least in my experience.

I've managed to get 100% in the first 5 chapters on Normal mode, build up my stats significantly, and equip better items. Yet there is STILL no way for me to beat the final boss. The game has three difficulties: Normal, Hard, and Epic. The game is structured to basically force you to play through every chapter at every difficulty level to be able to complete it. Without doing so, you can't win.

This is my overall perception; a lot could be resolved if the game simply provided an instruction manual! Virtually every single nuance of the game requires you to experiment and figure it all out for yourself. The biggest offense here is the crafting system. You can occasionally pick up blueprints for better weapons and armor; I have about four of these right now. However, I cannot craft ANYTHING yet because of the sheer costs, and the crafting process itself is not explained anywhere in the game that I have found so far! Additionally, you don't just find the necessary items; that would be too easy. Nor are the items themselves even remotely easy to come by. I've had to replay the same chapter where I know I can find a particular element multiple times to earn enough of it. You ALSO have to have in your possession three of the type of item you want to create. Want to craft a new helmet? Well, you have to already have three other helmets in your possession. On top of that, you have to pay a staggering amount of money (tokens), earned primarily by completing chapters over and over again. The item I want costs almost 6600 tokens, which I have now. But I don't have three helmets, so I'm going to have to spend about 1600 tokens to buy two more helmets, spend a ton more time grinding for more coins, and then maybe I'll be able to craft the helmet I need. As someone who is used to grinding in video games, I find this to be absolutely LUDICROUS. Adding even further to this insult is that such items are EXTREMELY rare as far as loot drops from enemies; in fact, you'll virtually never get an item drop from an enemy unless it's the occasional orb that restores all of your energy. It seems that only certain enemies drop such items, and they apparently only do so in pre-determined places throughout the game. So you can't even effectively farm for what you want during your multiple replays of the game.

And this doesn't even go into the truly major problems of the game. The afore-mentioned block function actually requires focus points (the yellow energy bar) to use; even if you're not actually blocking an attack, that meter drains just from holding the button. Once it runs out, you can't defend again until you recover some points by resting. In the early chapters, this can be troublesome but isn't completely insurmountable. However, after you get past about Chapter 4, the enemy barrages and patterns make it to where it's virtually impossible to block every single attack and effectively retaliate. Every retaliation opens you up to another enemy, whether it's from one that's close in (you will likely get surrounded A LOT) or from a long-range monster throwing boulders at you. In later stages, where you begin dealing with mages that can quickly spam you with fire and lightning attacks, you can be dead before you even know what hit you. Some enemy barrages come so quickly and in such fierce numbers that getting surrounded is almost an inevitability. When you're trying to block and retaliate with special attacks, your focus meter will drain very quickly, and it only takes a few hits to kill you at that point. Additionally, some enemies have attacks they can just repeatedly spam, forcing multiple blocked hits and draining your focus points at an extremely high rate, meaning within seconds you can be forced to take the damage and likely die as a result. (This is especially true of the final boss, who has a multi-hitting attack that he sometimes just spams over and over again.) At this point, just trying to complete the game seems like nothing more than an unending slog.

There's also an extremely nagging control problem in the game. I'm not sure if this affects game pad users specifically, but there are maddening moments every time I play where my character just simply STOPS MOVING or simply will not move in a direction I press. I have to let go of the controls and then press again to get him to move at all, and this happens frequently right in the middle of combat. To be fair, I use profiling software with my Logitech controller, so it's possible there's some issue with this setup (which works in almost every other game I play, by the way) that I'm not aware of. But it's another issue that brings down this game. There's also an apparent sound bug that prevents Direct Music from initializing if you have an Asus sound card; make sure you disable GX in the DSP Mode settings of the driver software (my apologies to whomever posted that solution for my not having the link to the thread for this review).

In short, I find this game to be the worst combination of tedium and frustration, with really no sense of completion or even a feeling that at some point, you can actually complete the game. Yes, I have beaten the final boss on Normal mode, but you get the worst ending for doing so; you apparently can't get the "real" ending without beating him on Hard Mode, if not in Epic Mode, which brings me to my original point about forced replaying to actually win. Wanderlust: Rebirth is an unforgiving and at many times unfair game that only leaves me more exasperated after each play session as I discover some other roadblock to my progress when I know intrinsically what I need to do to win. I simply cannot do it thanks to game design that prevents me from even getting any better weapons or armor that would give me a chance in the final battle. I cannot say enough to avoid this game unless it's completely reworked and rebalanced.

Wanderlust: Rebirth walks a disappointing line between success and catastrophe. Close to fantastic in concept it simultaneously fails to meet basic needs to a crippling point. The key mapping is the worst I've seen in a long time. I can appreciate the 1980s graphics, but no one wants 1980s menu options. On top of that, the clunky combat and unpolished gameplay seems like it skipped its beta stage. I hope the developers return to their drawing boards with the community's feedback to develop the next version of Wanderlust - I'm convinced there's gold at the heart of this mess of a game.

Wanderlust rebirth is an awkward, clumsy game with unpleasant graphics and gameplay.
I just tried it with a friend - the controls when using a controller are unpleasant - they're mapped awkwardly with Right Bumper being the 'use' key, and start being the button to check your ability mapping.
The controls feel clunky and sluggish, with us constantly getting caught on the large collision boxes of the environment.
Maps are tiny, with little exploration, and the game just feels too claustrophobic, even when outdoors.

Cannot recommend.

A valiant effort by a small development team, however, don't expect to jump in this game and start playing multiplayer immedeately. To start off, the game forces you to do a terrible tutorial. Even though it does'nt last very long, its still incredibly painful. Secondly, as far as I could tell, everyone who was playing the game at the time, including myself, had extreme difficulty setting up multiplayer matches to play with friends. Games that emphasize co-op play should have match making capabilities that are really easy to use. The frustration this brought myself and a friend was substantial. I bought the game on sale for about $3.00, and I am not even sure if that's a fair price. The difficulties with the multiplayer alone are enough for me to not recommend this game.

This is a pretty fun game if you have friends to play with. In solo I thought the level curve was a bit rough going from pretty easy to solo to "lol have fun dying." It definitely encourages a grind but I don't think that it's too bad of a thing. If this game on sale it is definitely worth a few bucks.

Fun to play with friends 4-pack is worth it! Reminds me of Zelda, Pokemon, and Maplestory, So if you like any of those games try this game out!

So this is a hack n' slash RPG with crappy graphics. That is kool. What they don't tell you is that you only get 50% of the exp for beating a level unless you manage to beat the level doing as little damage as possible to all the enemies so that you get very high combo numbers. (Yes it's true, I asked the developer) You don't get extra experience for beating a level again. Nor do you get experience for their challenge levels. You can only try to get more experience by getting the higher combo numbers and thus a better rating. There are all kinds of really powerful skills. You can max out maybe 2 of them and if you use them you don't get crap for experience. So, in short this game is based on repetition and ineffectiveness, while discouraging the use of the games advancement system. This is extremely irritating and a horrible idea. Also, it's just what the developers had in mind. The last boss is also a very annoying fight where you whittle away at him only to have him heal back while he can literally kill you in one shot. Avoid this piece of garbage.

This game is pretty freaking fun! It's a bit of a learning curve, but amazing cooperative hack n slash action and diverse classes with unique playstyles make it well worth the time invested. (plus 69% off, how do you beat that)

ENG:

A really interesting RPG game with multiplayer game and community support for the old retro gfx & sfx. A testimonial! :3

FIN:

Todella mielenkiintoinen rpg-peli, jossa moninpeli ja yhteisö peli tuki vanhalla retro gfx & sfx. Suositteluni! :3