Bôken preview play and impressions - One Stop Co-Op Shop
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Transcript
Hey everybody, this is Mike with the Onetop Co-op Shop and today I'm doing a preview of Bokeen, an upcoming JRPG inspired adventure board game for one to two players. And as always, I take no money from publishers. I'm just showing the game so you can see how it plays and make an informed decision about backing it. And if you like the content on the OneTop Co-op Shop, consider supporting us through Patreon. You get early access to our videos and exclusive videos every month you can't see anywhere else. You can also listen to our weekly podcast for reviews and design discussions, or join the conversation and say hi on our Discord. So, I'm not going to mince words about this one. I adore it. This is one of my favorite games of the year so far. Now, a lot of that is because it is unabashedly inspired by classic Japanese RPG video games like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Fantasy Star. So, many of the quests and things in the game give you nostalgia for that kind of stuff. It's also incredibly quick to play. Combat takes no time at all. It's just fun to go around and adventure and quest. And a big part of my enjoyment is that my 13-year-old, who has also been getting into JRPGs recently, also adores this one. We have played this, and this does not usually happen with prototypes.
I want to say 6 to 8 hours worth, which took us through maybe half of the content in the game. It's a little bit hard to say. We hadn't fought most of the major bosses yet, but we had done about half of the quests because the creator estimates that it's about 15 hours to do one full playthrough, and I would say that's pretty accurate. And this is a game for one to two players. The normal way to play is to have two characters, one fighter and one wizard, and you can split those between players or two-handed, but they do have a true solo mode, and I thought some of you might be interested in that. So, I will be playing with just the fighter character. But how the true solo mode works is you can freely equip items that are for either class. You can freely equip skills that are for either class. So, it really is going back to something like Dragon Quest 1, where your character is a sword fighter who also throws fireballs around. Yeah, just to show her. Here's the wizard character if I was using her. And this game is all about ease of play, all about quickness of play. The character sheets are magnetic, so your current health and basic items and gold and all of that are kept track of here. And it has in the prototype a nice little storage area.
You can drop your character sheets right in there. The map goes in there. There's really nice card holders for all the cards. And they keep everything organized in terms of which quests you've already seen, which items you've already bought, which things you've sold. So, it makes it incredibly quick to set up the game or tear it down. There's a second box for some other things like encounters for combat locations you've visited. Now, I am very curious to see how much the final price will be for the crowdfunding campaign. I don't have that information. I imagine it might be more expensive than you would think for the components, but uh I do really appreciate how incredibly easy, even in this prototype, it is to set up the game and tear it down in literally seconds. But after I do some setup, I'm going to take you through the first few quests and combat encounters in the game. Clearly, this is going to be spoiler territory. So, if you don't want to see anything about the content of the game, just skip to the end where I give my impressions and thoughts. But, if you want to see a few combat, see a few basic quests in action, stick around.
Okay, we do get a little bit of a narrative intro. This is very typical JRPG stuff. 150 years ago, King Card bravely vanquished the evil mage Muo, restoring harmony to the land of Lenoth. Over a century later, this peace now seems to be in an end. Wandering monsters roam dangerously close to villages and terrify the local inhabitants. Mysterious illnesses spread as oracles mournfully prophesy the end of days. Driven to seek the truth, you leave your quiet village life behind as you set off to explore the kingdom of Lenath. As you set foot in this unfamiliar land, a longforgotten fireside tail resurfaces in your thoughts. The famous Babelico Tower is so close. And then we get some starting stuff. It tells us where to start in the map. Each of us gets three experience towards leveling up. We get one of each of the basic items. And if we're playing in easy mode, which I am, because I have found the true solo mode is a little bit harder in my opinion.
You get double actions to attack, but you only have one pool of hit points that all of the enemies are attacking against. So, I don't mind playing an easy mode for this. So, I'm going to start out with 10 gold and one each of the basic items. And just to show what's going on with the character board real quick, it's pretty straightforward. Uh, this tracks your level every time you get to 10 experience you level up. But the amount of experience you gain from enemies is based on your level compared to theirs. So, you can't just keep on fighting the same weenies and leveling up really quickly. This little bonus at the top, which starts at plus one, but becomes plus two, three, four, and five, is a set bonus that's added to many effects, especially attacks. You might get your hit point tracker. You'll see it shows different maximums based on your level. Right now, mine is 18. This will go down if you take damage. And some things will poison you, which makes this go up. You can heal damage very easily, but poison is pretty tough to heal. And if they meet, then you're defeated. You also have your magic point track. Again, it shows how much you have by level. You're going to spend this to use your spells and skills. Your XP track. Whenever you get to 10, you level up. And finally, your SP, your stamina point track. As you uh travel around and from some enemy abilities, your stamina will go down. It goes back up when you rest at an inn, as do most of these things. But if it gets down to zero, you lose four hit points passing through all armor. And then every time you would lose an additional stamina, you'll keep on losing four hit points. You've also got gold, a 10 and ones tracker. So right now, I've got 10. And as I mentioned, you've got these basic items.
There's a healing potion you can use on your turn or outside of battle to heal 15 hit points. There's a teleporting potion you can use to fly to any location you've been before. So, not much frustrating backtracking here. And the prices, uh, by the way, above them is how much it cost to buy them at a basic store. So, these are each one. This is a flash room. You can use this in battle to make sure you escape, otherwise you would have to roll off for it. This is a mana seed. You can use it to fully heal your mana points. And this is some meat, which fully heals your stamina points. This last one you don't get to do anything with until later in the game. I don't think I'll get that far, but it's definitely a lot harder to find. You can't just buy it for free, and it has a really cool effect. Just to show you some other stuff, I start out with a basic weapon and basic armor. There's also the wizard versions that I could have chosen to take, but I slightly prefer the character a the fighter stuff to start out, and I'll explain what that all means when we actually get into combat. You also have skill cards, which are going to let you cast spells and do other things using mana points. The A fighter has their skills, the B mage has theirs, but when you're playing true solo, you can mix and match them however you like. And you start with four instead of three, which is actually the max number of skills you can have equipped at one time. I actually like all of the wizard ones quite a lot. So, I'm going to take heal, fireball, and flames. And then I'll take mighty blow on the fighter side of things. The rest of these go in a pool that I could potentially level up later.
And all of these are combat only skills except for heal, but I'll explain them when I get to combat. I've also got Ume, who's my little pet fox that helps me out. On the normal difficulty side, they give you some mitigation in rolls, but you have to spend magic point to use them more than once. On the easy side, which again I'm playing with, they still give you mitigation or they let you use some items without spending your battle action or they can do piercing damage every turn. So, super helpful as a pet to help me out. And finally, in true solo, I start with overpowered, which lets me take two battle actions per turn instead of one, because you need that since normally there would be two heroes and they would each be doing stuff every battle. All right, and with that, we're ready to begin our overland adventure. We've got this little marker to show where the party is. This is another magnet to keep track of things. And if I was playing with two characters, you would switch to show who's in front of the party, which is going to affect who monsters attack more frequently and some other stuff. But here, it won't matter.
So, a few things before we start moving around. The terrain determines what type of encounter you'll have. Planes is the easiest, as you might imagine, and I'm sure you can guess which are harder and easier from there. There are also little lock icons on the board. Those are quest spaces, but you need to have a card that makes them matter. So, right now, these are meaningless to me. And then there are key locations I can go to. Like they mentioned the Bellico tower over here. There's a town over here. There's a cave. There's a tree. Lots of stuff. The sort of things you might see on an Overland adventure map. and I get to start going and moving around. Now, there are two different ways to handle movement in the game. The first way is to use the exploration deck. It's 10 cards and on your turn, you flip it and at the top it indicates how far you move. So, the red numbers are when you could have an encounter. That's either in a dungeon or in overland travel. The number is how far you move and then you see what encounter you have, what monsters you fight. The smaller black number next to the boot is the peaceful movement you have when you're in a village or something. Yes, you could theoretically move infinitely in villages because nothing's coming for you. But as you'll see, there's still a chance to lose SP to get tired as you're traveling a lot and have to go back to the inn. So, you still have to draw a card each time you want to move. On the right, the horseshoe symbol is once you get a mount. Again, something you will not see at all in this game, but we have several mounts in our game now with cool abilities and stuff. The look at the bottom of the card, it has some numbers.
These are used to determine which enemies you're fighting. It also tells you who has initiative and you get some fun little loading screen style tips at the bottom. And when you use these, one out of the 10 cards has an arrow down, which makes your stamina go down. So that means every 10 turns, you're going to get tired from that. Also, whenever the deck comes out, each player has to spend a stamina to flip it back over and shuffle it. Unless you go and rest in, and then you get all your stamina back and get to reshuffle it for free. So on average, you're losing one stamina every five turns or two stamina every 10. The alternative, and what I'm going to be using in this video, cuz I think it's a little bit simpler, are movement dice. You've got a die that shows different movement values. It also has a lot of stuff is still in French in this prototype. It has the bis or B on some of the results, which is also the case on some of the exploration movement dice, which means you'll fight alternate enemies. There's actually six enemies per terrain type plus more in the dungeons. But if you don't get that B result, you fight some of the regular enemies. If you get the B result, you use a different board for them. And then one of the six faces has the stamina down. Exact same effect as the other thing. So it's a one in six chance.
whereas the cards is kind of a one and five. Of course, the die is going to be more swingy. You also have a horse die you roll additionally if you're moving with a mount. And finally, you roll d6s to see which enemies you encounter instead of drawing a second card for that. So, let's uh start exploring. Let's roll. And I get three movement. And if you end on regular terrain, you have an encounter. If you end on a special location, you do not have an encounter. And instead, you draw that location's card. So, I look for it. And all these are still fully in French. So I will uh explain things as we go. So here we go. It's the Bellico tower. All right. So basically we find the tower and it is impossible to go into. I was using Google translate when I played with my son. But we do have a onetime effect that each hero receives five gold. So yeah, I'm up to 15. But the bottom stuff says that if I had item 73, I could use it to enter the tower and go into the bubellico dungeon. So nothing else going on with this location right now. This is very similar. For those again who have played a lot of JRPGs, many of them will have like a final endgame dungeon right near the beginning. This one's no different. Now, importantly, I get to put this card in a different slot of the holder. And now I can use one of those single gold very cheap teleportation potions to go back to the Bellico tower whenever I want. Uh if I want to get like to that a quicker or if I want to actually go inside the tower. And there's two variants for how you do this. You can either keep the cards face up so you can refer back to them and kind of like remember who's there in a town, remember which quest you need to do, remember which item you need, or you can leave them face down so you have to actually travel back there or write it
down and take notes like a classic JRPG like I used to do when I was a kid. I ain't doing that anymore, though. I'm just going to keep them face up with the variant. All right. Uh, let's show you a battle. We get to move three more. One, two, three. We have ended on a piece of terrain. So, we are going to fight. I did not get a B on the movement die. And also the very first time you fight in each given terrain, you never get a B. So you at least get to see the regular uh monsters. So I'm gonna roll 2d6 and that's a six the star result. So I got a two and a six. And I take the plains monster card and I flip it over. And what you do is the monsters stand up like this. And you mark them. What did I get? I got a glue glue cuz he's a 56 and a slime. He's a one two. So you just mark their life on these little tracks here. Here it has how they attack, lots of other stuff. Now, for this video, I'm going to be putting them down on the table, obviously, cuz it'd be a little silly to try to replicate that view. And in a totally unnecessary but fun little touch, you cover up the monster that you're not fighting. And when you defeat your first monster, cuz you're never battling more than two, you can cover them up with a little KO, but you still see what their reward is. Just little fun things like that. All right, so let's go into the most mechanically complex part of the game, but it ain't that mechanically complex. This is a game about quick, fast combat, so things don't feel grindy. So, zooming in our friend, the slime, again, that one, two in the upper left is uh what chances you have of encountering them in the planes.
The four hit points is how much damage you need to do to defeat them. The four plus retreat means that is one of your battle actions. You can try to run away. You got to roll a four plus on a d6. Although, again, you can use that flash shroom basic item to automatically escape. And then you've got the enemy's attacks. So, the basic little blue slash, that's their basic attack result. That is three out of the six die faces. So half the time they'll do that. They're doing five damage. Doesn't have a elemental icon next to it. The poison is not an elemental icon. That means it goes against your basic armor. That's what reduces it. But additionally, you do take two poison damage. If they instead get a crit, which are the other three faces of the die, then they deal six damage, one poison damage, but they also reduce your stamina twice, which could get you to that zero where you take four automatic damage. And then if you look at the four corners of the actual picture of the monster, you'll see a gray shield, red shield, yellow shield, and blue shield. That's its defense against different elemental types. The one gray is against basic physical attacks. And then it's fire, lightning, and water. Those are all spells you can get or things you can uh get on your weapon. And finally, at the bottom here, we have their automatic rewards, which is the one gold and the experience thing. And then you have a chance of getting a special item from the enemy if you roll a d6 and get the indicated result. So, the slime has very low hit points, mediocre attacks, and terrible defense. The glue glue is a bit stronger. They have seven hit points.
Don't worry about that heart and 64 yellow arrow thing. That's something special you'll unlock later. The glue's basic attack is a fire attack. That's why there's a little fire next to the five, but its crit attack is still a regular attack, just very strong, and it makes you lose one magic point. And the glue glue has great fire defense, so you don't want to hit him with a fire spell. Now, when you're playing with the exploration cards, the second card you draw, the one that actually determines which enemies you're going to fight, is going to tell you who has initiative. And that will vary based on easy and hard difficulty. But when you're using the dice, they don't have anything to do. That's if they say the player always gets initiative. So, on my turn, I can take two battle actions because of my little overpowered special ability here. Before or after any of those actions, I can also have Ume take a turn, unless I exhaust her to roll one of my dice, and then she can use an item or deal one piercing damage. One action I can take is defending. So you always get the top value as reductions against certain types of attacks. In the case of my chain mail here, I would subtract two from any of the physical attacks the enemies could make. But if a gloo did its fire attack, I have zero fire defense and would subtract nothing. The bottom values are what you use if you spend one of your battle actions to defend. So I could like attack once and then defend and then I'd be getting two fire defense and four regular defense.
Alternatively, I can roll a basic attack which is going to use my weapon stats. If I roll one of the three basic hits, that little blue line, I do three physical damage. If I roll a regular crit, which is like the flashy blue arrow, that's a two out of six faces. I do four damage plus my basic bonus, which right now is plus one. That goes up as your level goes up. So that would be five physical damage. And here the super crit, which is the X's, that's a single face of the die. And enemies treat that the same as a regular crit. So they are 50/50 for their results. I would also do five physical damage. So no difference right now for me. Alternatively, I could use an item for my action. I could try to run away, which uses the highest value out of all the enemies. So, if the slime and the glue are alive, I would need to roll a four plus right now since the slime is harder to run away from. Or I could use one of my skills. Let's go through them real quickly. So, mighty blow costs three magic points, but I do five damage plus my bonus. That'd be six right now, and it's guaranteed. You don't have to roll for it. Flames is a basic wizard spell. Only costs one magic points and I do two plus my bonus one fire damage.
And if I'm the lead hero, that means the person at the front of the party, which I always am right now, I get plus one to that. So it's four damage fire for one magic. Pretty great. I've also got the fireball. When I want to go bigger, that's three magic points. I deal six plus my bonus fire damage. So seven right now. And finally have the mages heal. For one magic point, I can heal 15 for the target hero. And this one you can use out of combat. Each combat skill also has a boost. For wizard B spells, generally it's going to be to recover one magic point. For fighter skills, it's generally going to be to add plus one attack, which you can do after you see the results of the die roll if you need to finish somebody off. But whenever you use one of these for their boost, you flip the card face down until you pay it an in to flip all your skills back up. So eventually you could run out of skills to use if you're using too many boosts. But whenever you level up, you're going to get another skill added to your supply. You can only have four of them equipped in a combat and you get to pick when you go into combat after you see who the enemies are. But that does mean that if you use a few boosts, but you have other skills unlocked in the next combat, you can equip your other ones and not actually be down at all. And yeah, those are kind of all the rules in the game. I mean, pretty much. All right, so let's see.
First, against the slime, let's go and use our flame ability for one of our five magic points. You just slide this little blue tracker down. So it again does two damage plus my bonus one plus one if I'm at the front four fire damage reduced by the slime's zero fire defense. So the slime is KO'ed. I don't gain anything yet but he's out of the battle. And I could use flames again. These don't flip over unless you use them for their boost. You can use the skills over and over. Although I will say some of the more powerful skills, especially the wizard's most powerful skills, they do flip themselves over after one use. I could use my Mighty Blow, but might as well conserve some mana and see how well I can do with my rolling. Okay, I did get a crit. You see it has kind of the flashy stuff around it. So that's four plus my bonus five minus their physical defense back to four. So they're down to three life. And I didn't need Ume's reroll. So I will go ahead and use their attack for one piercing damage. But now the Google gets to attack. So I roll the exact same die for them. It shows they got a basic hit.
Now you'll see this eye here. Some of these sides also say A and some of them also say B. If I was playing with two heroes, that would determine who they attack. And how it works is the A always refers to the fighter. The B always refers to the wizard. They've got little letters right there to help you remember. But the I refers to whoever's in front of the party. So you have a 2/3 chance of taking the hit if you're in front and only a one-/ird chance if you're in the back. So here, he's doing five fire damage to me and one poison and one stamina. Ouch. So I have no fire defense. I'm down to 13. I've got one poison. And again, if they meet, I am defeated and I lose one stamina point. Oh, and I should have said, obviously, the enemies always attack you in true solo, so the letter doesn't actually matter. All right, let's do some basic attacks against this guy. I think I will kill him no matter what. I got a basic hit, uh, which is three damage, minus one armor. He's defeated. So, when a battle is over, you get to gain the spoils. And in the two-player, two character game, each of you rolls for your own enemy, and you mark them with your matching health token. So, a B for the wizard and A for the fighter. and that determines who gets which bonus and has a chance to roll for the extra bonus. Now, in true soul, you only get one monsters bonus because otherwise you would level up way too quickly. But you do get to pick the better one. So, here I'll do the glue glue. I get two gold and I get experience equal to three minus my current level. So, since I'm at level one, I'm going to get two experience, which is pretty great.
That's 1/if of the way to leveling up. So, that was two more gold, two more experience. I'm at five out of 10. The slime would have given me less gold and less experience. But I still get to pick which one I want to go for in terms of rolling. And I'll go for the slime because that gives me another gold, same as the glue glue. But the glue glue would give me a healing potion I don't need. The slime will give me a unique item. Now I need a six on this a star. So it's probably not going to happen. Nope. But it was nice to try. All right. Now I'm outside of combat. So I could use whatever skills I want. So sure, let's go ahead and use one magic to cast my heal spell and get back to 18 life. I could also use items freely. And again, before every combat, I can change out my load out. Like, if I have different weapons with different elemental capabilities, I could change out which four skills I have equipped. Right now, none of that really matters at level one. And as you'll see in a second, battles usually take about a minute. That was just slower cuz I was teaching you everything. Oh, I did get one SP, so I take one and roll again. Uh, and oh, I got a four. So, I can get all the way to the village and not have a battle. Cuz the second you get to a key location, you are safe from enemies for the moment. Makes me think of, for those who have played it, the second Legend of Zelda game where in the overland the monsters would pop out, but you could go in somewhere and they would go away again. All right, so I've reached Utoro Village. The icon on the map is the same as this. And this is what a regular map looks like. I'm going to come in on those uh double white arrows at the bottom, the up down arrows. Each of the other arrow places shows somewhere I can interact with. So on the right, there's a house that'll give me quest number three. On the left is the inn where I can spend one gold to heal all my hit
points and my SP and my poison. I can spend another gold to heal my magic points and unflip any of my talents, my skills that I've flipped over for their boosts. I can spend two gold to do both if I need to. There's also a boutique in the upper left. Again, this is all in French, but it mostly translates. Uh, where I can look at items one through four, and the plus bag there in the upper left means I can also buy basic items. And finally, there are some villagers I can talk to about quests. That lady will give me quest card one. The one at the top will give me quest card two. And the guy in the bottom right does not give me a quest until I'm at least level five. So, they have some gaining of the content. So, when you level up, you can do some tougher stuff. And they do include some little magnets if you want. And there we go. We're in the village. Now, we're going to start using the black value for the die. And we still have to roll this in case we take some fatigue. So, we got a nine. Uh let's go one, two, three. Let's go ahead and talk about quest two first since she's farther away. And they have a little blocker card. So you just look for the number and this will become generally an unlocked quest that you keep in your little personal party stash. The flower of Latar. Okay. So I'm talking to Salia the healer. Our village chief Ura is seriously ill. The only cure is the flower of Latar. A legendary plant so hard to find that we're starting to lose hope. Perhaps the villagers of Battleton northwest of here know more about this mysterious flower.
Okay. And then quests will generally tell you how you can advance them. And this goes into the lock symbols I talked about earlier. In the case of this quest, it says to turn over this card, visit H. Now, they told me it's in the village of Battleton to the northwest. But sometimes it's more mysterious than that, and you got to really look around to find out where you need to go. All right, thanks for the flower quest. I can move nine again. Let's see what they're selling at the boutique. I've got 17 money. So, it's at items 1 through four. We can look at them and potentially buy them. Each item in the bottom right corner has its buying price and then its sale price if you want to sell it back. Okay, so we've got a B weapon, a wizard weapon. That's why there's a B in the upper right. Normally, I could not use this because I'm the A character, but in true solo, you can use whatever you want. This is an arcane grimoire. The attack stats are pretty bad, but it has a great great skill at the top. When you equip this weapon, all skills cost one MP less to use in battle, but they cannot cost less than one MP. So, like my fireball or my mighty blow would be two only. So, this could be worth buying just to equip instead of a sword when I go into a battle where I plan to use a ton of skills. I also have a bastard sword which does four damage instead of three on a basic hit and five on a crit instead of four. So it's basically plus one damage on every basic attack action I do. Oh, and I guess they're not hiding it. It says at the bottom enchantability. This becomes item 44.
Yeah. So there's green crystals you can't buy. Eventually once you do some quests and stuff, you can upgrade your items. We also have Devastator, which still only does three on a basic hit, but adds two more damage on a crit. Uh six plus your basic. Pretty awesome. Although it costs more 12 compared to the bastard swords 8. And finally, we have a new armor specifically for the wizard. So, I haven't found any fighter armor yet. It would keep the two physical defense, but raise up all my elemental defenses to one. And when I defend, wow, my defenses go really high. Like, it would be hard for almost anybody to hurt me. All right, I have 17. Let's go and buy the Devastator. Sure. So, that leaves me with five gold. And you can hold on to multiple weapons, multiple armors, and again, switch them out when you start a battle. But, there's not much point in keeping the sword. I'm going to sell it for its sale cost of two. Now, if I sell this because it has a gold value for its purchase price, I can never buy it again. It is gone from the world. Compare that to I just found a random item that I'm going to find in a future city. The bomb has a three blue price. Once you have sold or used this, it becomes available to reby at every town in the world. So, it's kind of like as you unlock new basic items, they become more widely distributed. But yeah, here I'm just selling a sword for two and it's gone forever. Again, into the nice little card holders to keep track of things.
All right, what else am I doing? I'm moving up to nine. Let's go and get quest three. Arm wrestling contest. You enter the eccentric chicken in. There's an arm wrestling contest taking place in one of the tables. One player can choose to take on this challenge by paying two gold to turn this card over. Heck yeah. Now, it does say if I don't do it, I store the card without discarding it. That means that I could come back later and try it when I'm ready. All right, so I put the DP the difficulty points basically the uh health tracker on 13. I get a d6. I get to roll three times. Each time I roll, I add my level bonus, and that's how much damage or reduction I get. And if I can do it in three rolls, I win. So, even at level one, this is pretty doable. Although, if I fail, I can get to level two and destroy it. All right, so I get Oh, that's not a good start. 2 + 1 is three. And then, okay, 5 + 1 is six, so that's nine. Need to get to 13. So, I need a three plus with my bonus. No, I fail.
Okay, whatever. I'm not going to lose. Let's try again. Oh, there we go. That's a seven to start. Love that. And okay, we beat it immediately this time. All right, if I win, I get five gold. Okay, so I only got one, but one experience. Yay. And that quest is discarded, so I can never do the arm wrestling contest again. I still haven't talked to the girl at one yet. Angela's a cat. Have you seen a small blue cat? I've been looking for my little moon for two days. I hope I didn't leave the village. Okay, when I end my movement on a forest space, I can roll a d6. On a four or more, turn over this card without drawing an encounter card. No battle. On any other result, draw an encounter as normal. Cool. So, I just got to go to the forest. But first, let's go. Do I need to go to the inn? Honestly, I don't think I do. So, I'll just move here. And you can move in, again, very typical RPG fashion out of any open side to go back to the place.
And you don't have an encounter the turn you move out. And this stays face up. I could teleport back here whenever I want. I think I'm ready for a bit more fighting. I could also check out this cave over here. I could go to the forest to find the cat. Uh, clearly the town of the northwest is that one for the flower quest. Although forest might be a little tough until I level up. So, let's move. One, two, three. I'll stand near the cave, but I want to have another battle. Although, uhoh, I got a bee fight this time. And I love those B plains enemies. Let's see how this goes. Oh, cool. So, when you get two dice that are the same when using the die variant, you only fight a single enemy, which is also a result that's on some of the expiration cards. And that's honestly great true solo because you still get the full experience and gold from one creature.
Whereas in two-player, you'd have to pick which of the two of you gets the bonuses. All right, so this time I'm going against a pesticro. We can cover up these guys. He's still only got four life like the slime. He's got better flame defense. Honestly, not that bad. I mean, with four life and my devastator, I'm really not too scared. There we go. Crit. I do seven damage. Our boy is dead. So, I get a gold. I get one experience because of my one level. two minus one and I go oh I got a six I get another gold two gold not that exciting of a bonus but I am now three experience away from leveling up which is going to give me a higher max hit point is going to give me a higher max magic point is going to fully heal me it is like you get to fully rest when you level up I'll get a fifth skill and a big one my bonus value will increase to plus two which is pretty crazy but before we fight again let's go in Yep to the cave this is the Utoro cave so same as the town and we got a dude and a treasure your chest.
Let's uh go talk to him. By the way, this is not a cave with enemies in it. If it was, it would have information up here as to which encounter card you use for the enemies. Okay, so I can go up to eight. Say hi to this guy. Furu the beggar. Today, Leon's castle is a peaceful haven. The fortified town surrounding it protects everyone who seeks refuge. But that wasn't always the case. I've known darker times, and now I'm reduced to this. If only I could taste just one last Dory, yaki. It would remind me of better days. Okay, if I have item 90 and if I'm on a space adjacent to this NPC, then I can turn over this card. But yeah, as you can imagine, that's going all the way to the castle, which is through desert and hills. We ain't doing that at level one. I might as well see what's up with this treasure chest. I already know everything that's going to happen with all of these things since my I got way past this. Well, I don't know about you all. I like replaying RPGs I've already beaten. Okay, item 91, locked chest. You cannot open this chest if it is locked.
If you have item 49, discard that card and this one to get item 92. If not, store this card and come back when you have it. So, yeah, this is just uh nothing right now. But again, now we can teleport back here. So, you always want to go into these special locations, even if you don't plan to do anything with them. We get out. All right, let's uh let's fight a bit more to try to level up and maybe even go into the forest for the feline. Okay, we're doing three no. Which two monsters are we getting? Oh, another three and four single monster. This is going to be quick. So, this one's a croklin. Six hit points, one physical and fire defense. Our boy ain't got a chance. Uh, go. Oh, that's a basic hit. That was my first action. Go. There we go. Crit. So, basic would have done three minus his one armor, but then the crit with my new axe does seven. So, he's dead. I'm getting two gold point and two experience afterwards and no bonus. Haven't needed to use my fox for any of these fights. So, I'm just about to level up and I'm at 10 gold again.
All right. All right, I'm going to hold off on going into the forest until I get level two cuz it'd be a little silly to go against the way tougher enemies give you a lot more experience but then waste it cuz you don't get the overage experience. You just level up. So yeah, we'll go one, two, three right to there. So I have a nice straight shot to the place and I'm fighting a two and a three. Crocklin and slime. Honestly, the slime's a little bit more annoying because he poisons you consistently. So let's go for him first. Boom. Yay. Got a crit. That was too much. He's dead. KO him and then the Croklin. A regular hit. Let's use umeo and reroll that because I can one-shot him if I get a crit. There we go. Remember, she can do a piercing damage or use an item or let me reroll a die. Yep, cuz that's six plus one 7 minus one is six. He's dead.
And I'll certainly take the Crockland stuff cuz that's two gold. And I'll level up. But I'll still try. You can split it in true solo to get a six for the special slime item. No. All right. Here we go. Exciting. We get a new level. So whenever we level up, our level goes up one. So now we have plus two bonus. We fully heal and get our mana back to our new values. Our XP zeros out. We get all of our stamina points. And we get to equip some new talents. This is a big deck of skills. My son and I only got through about half of it. In regular play, when you level up, you would draw two cards and pick one. In true solo, you draw three. And they each have an aside and a bside. in two-player or double-handed play. This is actually really interesting because whichever card you pick, the other ones go into the communal supply and in any future level up is sort of mage knightish, you can pick any of the cards you didn't pick before. So, you got to sort of pay attention to what you might be leaving for the other player. Now, what gets extra interesting in true solo is whichever skill I pick, I can pick which side is in use every time I go into a battle. So, ideally, I might want to get something that's interesting for multiple uses, but let's see what our options are. Okay, so we got flaming weapon for one. We take an attack action, but it's a fire attack instead of regular physical damage. And if my hit points is in the dark shaded section of my hit point bar, which is when I'm down to five health or less, I get plus4. And we got the exact same thing for water attacks, which is nice cuz I have no way to deal water damage right now. And as you get the tougher enemies, some of them will have like three or four defense for physical and flame, but
zero defense for water. And finally, shockwave. Take an attack action add plus three to your attack damage. If you perform a super critical hit, that's the six, and deal damage to the enemy, that enemy is paralyzed and skips its next turn. Wow, pretty good. Now, let's look at the wizard side. All right, so confusion costs five magic points, and it's got a little circling arrow there. That's because this one is depended for its success on a die roll, and you can pay its magic cost again, although five is really expensive to do to roll the dieice. And the exclamation point next to the text means this is a defensive one. Doesn't take your turn. You can cast it automatically when something happens. This one says, "When an enemy attacks a hero, roll a d6. On a four or more, choose another enemy to take the attack instead of the hero." That's great. The enemy cannot attack itself. If Oh, it can't attack itself, though.
If there are no other enemies to attack, it skips its turn instead. So, not quite as good against like single bosses, but still a great card. And it lets you heal two magic points instead of one. And then we got Vampiric Strike. Take an attack action. If you deal damage, immediately heal a target hero for eight hit points. You may spend an additional magic point to add flame to this attack. That's really good, too. And then magic shield. This one's another reaction. The target here gains plus4 elemental defense against an attack targeting them. It's only one magic point. Now that's on flaming weapon. I was really more interested in the frozen weapon, which would also give me access to vampiry strike. Uh the shockwave one is more chancey. Yeah, I'm going to go for the frozen weapon. So these go back for me to potentially select later cuz also some cards combo with specific other cards. So you might like want to pull back another one. And not to spoil too much, but like many RPGs, there might be a character maybe that for a nominal fee lets you rejigger all of your skills or even trade with the other character.
Now, I can only have four equipped at a time. I don't Well, I don't really know if I'm ever going to use Mighty Blow. Let's get Mighty Blow out of here. Now, again, I can change these up going into any battle, but just to have something kind of set as normal. And I think I'll wrap things up pretty quickly. Y'all are getting the basics of how things work in the game, but let me uh let's have a forest battle. Maybe find the cat. Okay, so I can move three. It says B, but again, you ignore that for the first time you have a battle in any given terrain. So, you can see the basic people. Okay, I have a four plus chance of finding the cat. Oh, I did. So, I guess I don't have a forest battle yet. You find a small blue cat that matches the description Angela gave you. Stuck up a tree. You carefully catch it and take it back to its owner who you see nearby looking for her pet. Yes, so some quests will require you to return to the town or whatever. Use a teleportation stone. This one just does it for free. Okay. Rewards. Each hero receives three gold. Nice. The party receives one teleportation stone while I'm already at max. Each hero gains three experience minus level. So only one for me since I got to level two. And I discard the card. So this quest is gone. And yeah, let's still walk around and try to find a stamina loss. Although that's right, I healed. So I'm at four again. Let's try to have another encounter in the forest.
Come on. There we go. I'll just go right there. And who we battling this time? Uh oh, it's just a single four. It's an Aera rock, which is nice because Ursuses are pretty tough. By the way, you'll see that the Ursus in his rewards says unlock R because you also sometimes get quests to like hunt monsters. You can also a little bit of spoiler, maybe uh turn monsters into your pets and recruit them. Not going to say any more than that, but there's tons of fun stuff to discover in this game as you go along. Oh, and this is a good time to use my new skill cuz look, this guy's got four flame defense and two physical defense, but zero ice and water defense. So, heck yeah. I'm going to use my frozen weapon. So, I just roll a basic attack, but it's water/ ice damage instead. All right, let's see how we do. Ah, regular hit.
I'll use umeo's reroll once per turn. There we go. Got a crit. So, that is Oh, man. With my devastator doing six plus two now that I'm level two. And this guy having zero damage, I just one-shotted him. That was a little bit of overkill, Mike, cuz he still had another action. But I get three more gold and now it's four minus level experience for this guy. So I'm already 1/if of the way to level three. Eventually you can get up to level eight and I get to roll for a six for his item. Nope. By the way, again, not trying to spoil anything, but there are items and things you can get that can make those rolls automatically succeed if you really want like item 60 from the spider, which might be part of unlocking a really cool special item. Not going to say any more than that. And I guess I won't show any more than that yet cuz this game is super super fun.
And like the quest you get in the forest place, the maybe boss fight you have up here, maybe the secret thing you can do with an item from here in the lake, uh maybe the boss fight you can have in the town mysteriously here, maybe the pyramid dungeon you can unlock. All that stuff is better left for you to discover, I would say. But hopefully I've given a pretty good idea of how the game plays. And what are my thoughts on this one? Well, as I said, this is easily one of my favorite gaming experiences of the year. Now, part of that is playing it with my 13-year-old and him having such a good time, but this is just such a blast to unlock and find things. It's so quick to play. It's so quick to set up and tear down. So, for my current lifestyle and also for my nostalgic tastes, because again, I grew up and I still play JRPGs, this one is just so so so much fun. It reminds me a lot I think of as the closest game to compare it to of Aridia in that you are moving over an overland map. There's not really any time pressure. You have like a lot of quests and you have some freedom in where you go. You go into mini maps and can move around them outside of the world map and you have combat against various things. Now, this game is very different from Aridia though because it's about a billion times faster.
Aridia you're going through so many cards to find things and it can be a little bit of a chore. But also, Aridia has a lot more content. Again, this game, I would guess from how much we've played and from what the publishers said that it's about 15 hours to do a full playthrough. And while the wizard and the hero are quite different, and also from my experience playing true solo is pretty different. Aridia has drastically different characters, the combat is way more involved. For better or worse, the combat here takes like 30 seconds. Aridia, that is not the case. But Aridia is also more of a tactical kind of dungeon crawler in its combat and has more variety in attacks with like the directional thing. For me, for my family, for my time constraints, I like this one better. But Aridia is a meteor and I would assume way more expensive game. Like, I'm hoping this one is not as expensive as Aridia. That'd be ridiculous. But if you liked Aridia, you might like this one. Although, again, it might seem a little bit more simplistic.
Uh, what else is there to think about for the game? The combat, as you saw, is pretty straightforward for better or worse. You do get pretty cool combos and your skills later, but it's never going to like blow you away. It's never a extremely strategic thing because even big boss battles usually only take you like four or five minutes. It's really trying to keep things moving. I appreciate that. But if you're looking for a highly tactical strategic experience, this is not really the place to look for that. And also a minor complaint, this is like 7 hours in where my son and I were playing, is that eventually they start just raising the defense values of enemies up sometimes across the board. Like some enemies will have three defense against everything or four defense against everything. I don't love that as much as when it's like all the enemies you see here where they're good against some things but weak against others cuz that gives you interesting choices to make in your skills. But when they just have a ton of defense in general, uh the few skills that are piercing become way way better, which actually now that I think about it, you could kind of consider like a fifth element piercing damage. But yeah, so we did find that some skills were more universally useful than others. We did find some combos that were really like particularly excellent. Now, it's a big skill deck, so if I played through again, I wouldn't get the same skills at the same time. And especially when I'm like playing against the easier bosses, I would probably do things differently.
So, this is definitely a game that I would not mind playing through the entire campaign of again. Like, True Solo is certainly a different experience, and my son and I still need to finish it. Not with the prototype. I got to send that on, but when the final game is done. But I can't really imagine most people getting more than maybe two full campaigns of this. Maybe three if you wait a while. So again, depending on how expensive it is, uh the value proposition might depend a lot on how easily you can trade or sell or give away cuz this is one that's honestly pretty quick to uh set back to the beginning. I did it before this video and my son's going to be a little bit mad that I took away our progress, but it took me maybe I don't know 5 minutes to put all the cards and components back to where they started. So it is very easy to pass this one on. nothing is changed or destroyed. Uh the game can also be a little bit random. You saw that your crit hits are way better than basic hits. There are some skills that change that. You start out with your fox that lets you reroll dice once per battle for free if you're playing on easy even more often, but still sometimes the enemy rolling the right thing or you rolling the right thing can make a difference in battle. There is also a little bit of grinding. I mean, not not really. As long as you're fighting at the right level, like you're in the right terrain type or in the right dungeons. Generally speaking, every single enemy is going to give you at least one experience and sometimes two experience based on your level, which means that 5 to 10 fights will let you level up again. And usually that tended to happen to us naturally as we were just going to places. Again, fights are very quick. But there were a couple times during these seven hours we played where we did grind for like 10 or 15 minutes just to get to the next level,
just to get enough money for the next really expensive weapon or armor. So, it's a much more truncated and friendly experience than like some of the Final Fantasy games I could name where you have to grind for a while, but they didn't completely get rid of that aspect of JRPGs. So, if that kind of thing frustrates you, then you might not like it. But yeah, I don't know. I think if you've uh watched this and been excited like I am, you'll already know this game is for you. Again, if you want something like super tactically deep, if you want a campaign that's more than 15 hours or has tons of branching paths and replayability, this game doesn't offer any of that. But if you want a distilled JRPG experience that's going to hit you in the nostalgia bones, that's fun for families and for kids, that's incredibly fast to set up and tear down, that's incredibly fast to play, and that keeps giving you excitement through new quests, new discoveries, new level ups and abilities, Bokeen is faking great.
And again, one of my favorite playing experiences, me and my son, that I've had this year. And the crowdfunding campaign should be launching, I think, in a month or two. They wanted me to post this one early, so check the link in the video. You can subscribe and hear more when it's ready. And that's it. Thanks for watching everybody. And a special thank you to our biggest Patreon supporters, Matt G, Dan J, William F, Steve Ren, Andrew R, and Chris C. We'll see you at the next