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A strong message told well

I feel that most people are missing the point. The creator is not saying that video games are evil or anything, but rather than they should be treated with caution, as abusing them is easy and many of us are susceptible. He even made a large caveat that gaming communities are evidence that video games are not particularly bad. What he was generally saying was that video games are not particularly good and we should also spend our time in other, more meaningful ways.

I like games a lot, and I've spent a fair amount of money and time on them. Sometimes I'll play ten hours a day, sometimes I won't touch a game for an entire week. With that said, this animation has brought to my attention that I should put more effort into non-gaming activities. I will always love and play video games, but I hope that I always keep in my mind that moderation is important.

It needs some polishing, but...

...it's a solid animation. The character design is good; the cast so far seems varied and interesting (even the two who died were unique and had their own personalities). Although it was far for perfect, the voice acting was natural sounding and the voices fit well for each of the characters. The animation was a bit rough, and some actions could have used more frames, but that's a small complaint. More importantly, in some scenes there were anatomy issues that should have been addressed.

Some have said that the story is thin, but since this is the very first episode, that is a weak complaint. I mean, you can't expect a fully fleshed out universe and characters in the first episode. It's possible, but a story needs to be judged as a whole, and frankly, only the surface has been scratched thus far. If anything, I think that this is a good start to the story, as it gives us a taste of the universe and the type of people that the story is going to be about.

I don't know if the music was original or not, but it fit very well, and you worked with it in some scenes that made it more than just background noise. Kudos for that, especially since most action works just have the characters fight to heavy metal and hard rock.

The only strong complaint I have is that the animation was somewhat blurry during practically all of it. Being an action piece, this is a problem, and drags away from the otherwise good animation.

Those who complain about use of cliches and borrowing ideas from action anime are being silly. Just because the characters are in an Asian style fantasy universe doesn't mean that it's an Inuyasha or Naruto ripoff any more than an action movie with explosions and terrorists is ripping off the Die Hard series. One of the characters is (quite clearly) strong and dark, but that doesn't make him a Sasuke clone; we don't know enough about him to make that judgment. I hope that he is more unique than that, but we'll have to wait before we can say anything.

That said, there is obvious inspiration from some action anime, but that's certainly not what I'd call a bad thing. Besides, there is a fair amount of originality among the bits that are inspired. The Chinese setting is relatively unique (too often it is that things just happen to occur in a Japan-esque universes). I feel that the idea of a trap master, while not uncommon, is underused. Also, the "featherweight" skill as an express specialty is, to my knowledge, unique, especially as it is often a secondary skill that many people have in fantasy action anime (the ones that come to mind are Bleach and Naruto, although there are others).

I eagerly await the next episode to see how this develops!

Speechless (sort of)

I'm writing this review because I feel an incredible urge to say something about this incredible animation, but I'm finding it difficult to find anything to really talk about. I mean, this is practically perfect. You have my mouth agape at this deep and fascinating universe, with its colorful characters that have yet to barely even introduce themselves yet still manage to leave me so interested in them and the amazing mechanics that they use to run their world.

Okay, so I found something to say. You know what I meant.

Great idea, but needs tuning up

This is really a great idea; a super simple interface for a reasonable complex system. However, there is something that bugs me--elixirs. The way they work is perfectly fine, but when we buy one while we already have one in our possession, shouldn't one of them be automatically used? I mean, that just makes too much sense to me. Instead of just wasting money, why aren't we allowed to use the old one and buy the new one? it's the only time you can actually lose money without getting ANYTHING back, so I think it's important that you get something for buying an elixir when you already have one.

Great!

It was a pretty great game. The music was good, the combo idea worked well, and you've perfected the aesthetic in this series.

You could have had more minibosses though. Just one near the end didn't feel like enough.

Also, versus the final boss on normal mode, you don't tell us that we control Vandheer Lorde. The thing is, if the bad guy is to the right, your first instinct is to go right. So for the first few tries, I assumed that he was just running away from me. I didn't realize he was being controlled by me.

Made unplayable by a bug

Whenever I paused the game with "P", when I unpaused the game, nothing that was supposed to move moved. Not the bots, not the engineer. Using WASD moved the terminal instead for some reason. I thought it was a one time thing, but it was a recreatable error.

The lag and lack of a quality option didn't help either.

The idea seems great, but the game's pretty clunky. I don't know if it's because Flash 11 is new or not, but it still makes the game a bit unplayable.