The Dink Network

Secret of Parizaya

One of the mod's nicer-looking screens. From the COTPATD project.
January 10th, 2002
Gold
Score : 5.9 fair
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Revised: After I finished FIAT and AGAE, I decided to change the score I gave SOP. I won't change my review though.

I was always troubled that by saying "this was xxxx's first dmod" you can have a substantial lower standard. If by the same standard, "Isle of Croth" should be rated higher than 10.
This is especially troublesome if such a dmod is a HUGE one. In fact, I hold higher standard for large dmods since it requires much more time to download and beat.
Ever since I finished POTA and SOB, I had much higher standard for a dmod, especially large one. Typically you might need to invest a lot of time to beat a large dmod without cheating. So if you got stuck (not your incompetence) with no reason after playing 20 hours, you would get very frustrated.
Overal plot is not bad, but nothing really new, either. (contray to what the author claimed) You really CAN find something that you have never seen before, but not necessarily good.
The author did not understand how to use global variables at this game. So you do need to do something in a certain order otherwise you might mess up everything and need to restart the game at much earlier stage or even start it all over.
Hardness and map tilts are poor. Most of the screens were not carefully designed. Most people would talk about the size, but the truth is: if the dmod is only about half of the size it is now, it could be a much better dmod. Most of side tasks are not original or important. But you need to finish most of them in certain orders to get the "KEYS" to go to next region. The similar quest goes on and on. I did manage to finish the game with some cheatings. (I found the Key to the next location, but the block won't disappear.)

Although it says "Final", it still contains certain bugs. Some of them might need to re-write the whole variables system, although the author still claimed he fixed all bugs.
It IS amazing that without proper use of global variables such a huge dmod can work. The author did not know how to make changes in dink.ini at that time. So don't be surprised that you can find very little new graphics.
If you do have a lot of time to kill, do not mind you might need to restart the game a few times, and are not very picky on some annoying bugs or map tilts, you could find this one entertaining. Otherwise, it might be better to beat POTA or SOB or the original Dink again.