From the first moment the jazzy yet elegantly drawn "Sonny" splash screen contacts my eyes, I know "Sonny" must be a special game. How special it is, however, is something that turns out to be far exceeding all my possible anticipations, and perhaps imaginations, about the limits of games that are on the Flash platform of the present day.
There are 4 zones in "Sonny", which should not be bad to know at first; I thought it should be 5 at least so was kinda unfulfilled when it just ended like that.
The appearance of "Sonny" doubtlessly pushes forward numerous boundaries that were previously known to be "look, things can only go this far for Flash" in the industry. Of the most spectacular is the all fascinating visuals and audios; it's not very much related with technical limitations but more about the time the developers willing to spend on it, or even something more basic - that whether someone with the right sense of art could be put in charge of the job - yet the graphics along with the musics are two major outputs the game would depend on to excite the players' sensations.
The art design in "Sonny" is a complete success.
The secret in the graphical designs of "Sonny" is the extensive usage of rich and bright color gradients, which makes the game all brilliantly vivid. Plus, landscapes are created out of simple yet alacritous shapes and lines, while details about the appearances and poses of characters are all carved into some very tiny levels. Cooperating every outstanding visual factor together, it becomes the source of magnificence which gets to be convoyed in the form of sheer beautiful scenes and interface we see in "Sonny". Not to mention the almighty battle musics, especially the boss battle one which is so heatedly ablaze; it's just even better than the average of commercial retail games! Sometimes they hire a whole lot of symphony orchestras and can't even do half better than this! Further supplemented with decent and full voice acting, the visual and audio works of "Sonny" have been successful in making up some excellent cutscenes and storytelling moments.
One thing smart about "Sonny" is that it knows to choose the kind of presentation style that is most ideal for the platform the game is running on, yet managed to accomplish this endeavor in a miraculous way, in which the optimization is achieved without yielding to certain compromise, thus keeping the fun value of the game sound and intact. Well, in a plainer way of speaking, "Sonny" knows how to make itself attractive without being a system resources monster.
Turn-based RPG itself is, in essence, one of the countable few genres that will be handled better on Flash over the others. Obviously the key is all about performance and processing time, for example one should be able to easily imagine point-and-click adventures being another prominent instance that is most proper for Flash, while shooters on Flash always suck a big time because they either have to be laggy (suffering from excessive real-time processing) or stupid (yield to game performance by taking away advanced entertainment features). The fact "Sonny" does not opt for a real-time system but a turn-based one implies that it was given birth towards the right direction.
Voiced conversations occurring during the battles make "Sonny" being able to provide a far more fluid experience of immersion comparing with other typical Flash-based RPGs.
Yet, the term turn-based nowadays is quite often linked with some not so favorable impressions like outdated, outmoded, even perhaps superannuated, and modern indie turn-based RPGs usually propagandize themselves as "in the feeling of NES/SNES style RPGs", being very much pound of this, which I would reason is why "Sonny" comes to be such a huge impact (no exaggeration as it's currently the highest rated game on Kongregate and likely on other Flash portal sites as well upon its debut) - "Sonny" utterly toppled our past recognitions about turn-based RPG on Flash, that could be of one which is beyond a linear leveling up progression, beyond mazes and town maps where your little protagonist should run on, beyond histrionic NPCs that roam aimlessly around in circle repeating the same few dialogues over and over again. Certainly there may be various games already in existence containing some of the concepts above, howbeit "Sonny" is without any doubt the first to incorporate all these elements in a delicate manner, ennobling the entirety up onto a higher plane, high above all previous attempts and actual creations of Flash RPGs.
Although the accomplishment of "Sonny" is one that significantly surpassed previous expectations of, not only the players but the industry as well, on the possible extent of Flash RPG, "Sonny" is still one that was made by human and is not free of flaw. First - it's too frigging short! But it is also very nice for the development team to choose quality over quantity, for which I wholeheartedly salute. Second, there are some glitches - ranging from tiny issues of graphical layer orders, to interesting leaks such as one that can grant you all four Kongregate badges within a blink; however if you are not operating a pair of sharp eyes and are not tempted to meddle with things in a way that is unintended by the game design, the game would appear to be just near perfect for you.
Copy this URL and play: http://www.kongregate.com/games/ArmorGames/sonny
No comments:
Post a Comment