The Dink Network

Meet strange enemies, visit new towns and venture into deep forests.

The fall of Tahmar awaits.

In all honesty, I haven't played through too many DMODs. Generally, I enjoy creating them more than playing them. For the most part, I find that there is little balance to fighting and exploring in most DMODs. Often times, puzzles are either too obscure or completely void of any direction to the point where you can't proceed throughout the game, or simply don't want to. Fighting often times is much too difficult (Pilgrim's Quest comes to mind) or much too easy (my recent romp through Prelude). This DMOD however has pulled it all together. It has excellent pacing, a good, if not predictable, story and most of all excellent balance of challenge and fun.

Graphics: Not too much original (Marpro created) graphics here although he has utilized some add-ons from Simon and Dan and some others. They blend in very nicely.

Sound: I really enjoyed the music in the game. I am not familiar with Crono Cross, so most of it sounded original. I did recogize most of the 16 bit midis, but they were used quite well and didn't sound out of place. Sound FXs were also very well done.

Gameplay: For me, this is where the game really shines. Battling is spot on. In almost all cases, the enemies are very well balance with where your character is in the game. I found a couple bosses a bit easy, although not so simple you could just hack away and beat them and one boss was perhaps a bit too strong in the defense category, but for that matter I wasn't carrying the strongest weapon available at the time either so it was most likely perfect. Experience was neither given at too fast of a pace, or too slow. There were several side quests that you could accomplish for moderate to very good rewards. The only downside was that it was pretty straight forward RPGing. Go here, do this, bring me this and proceed. Not a problem, but outside of the original story, it could easily have been any other game. Again, not a problem really, just an observation, and that is really all the criticism I can give this DMOD.

Quality: There were a number of spelling/usage errors and some text color problems, but they were minimal. I didn't notice any hardness errors, however there were times in the Forest and Castle that some of the objects such as trees blended in to the background so well, it took me a while to see what I was stuck on in the middle of combat. Again, not a problem, but it did detract a bit from the game.

Summary: All in all, of the limited amount of DMODs that I have played (mostly the epics) this has been among the most fun, most balanced one. On such a short development time frame, my hat goes off to you Marpro.

This was an entry in the Failure Project DMOD contest. After playing through all of them at least in part, and excluding my own entry for objectivity, this is my choice for Best Game. #1 of 7 (excluding IDRTW)