Apologies for not blogging recently. That either means nothing is going on in my life or too much is going on in my life with no time to blog about it. Fortunately for you, it’s been the latter. 🙂 I’ve been playing a lot of Arvale II: Ocean of Time for iPhone lately, and I’ve got a few teaser shots for those salivating.
And a few notes on the game, and changes for the iPhone version. Obviously, this is a work in progress and some screens may not actually exist in the game, blah blah blah, you know the drill.
Slick new interface, with the map flowing into the whole screen now. Also one-button access to all the different menus, which is way, way better than the old branching menu system used in Arvale: JOI.
Inventory is still one button access from the main screen, but the tabs have been moved to the left side with really big buttons, easy on the fingers (or thumbs).
Battle system is pretty much the same, but the UI has been tweaked for much easier use. While playing through the game recently, I noticed that this game has lots and lots and lots of fighting, so this screen is pretty important to have done right. Especially on the harder difficulty levels.
Oh yeah, there are three separate difficulty levels. Although, I’m seriously thinking of changing Easy to Normal, Medium to Hard, and Hard to Insane (I only know one person who was capable of beating the game on Hard… and I think he’s pretty insane).
Level up and stats screen merged into one to make a whole lot more sense. I completely forgot that you can change your stats at any time during the game by simply visiting a Stats re-arranging guy in any of the towns. Awesome, for people like me who end up putting too much into strength to early and realizing that… well, you’ll find out. And no, those aren’t my stats, don’t ask 🙂
New Quests screen is one button from the main screen now (nice). Very similar to the new Quest list in Arvale: JOI 1.2. Honestly, I don’t think there are as many mini-quests in Arvale II as there are in Arvale I (which had a slew of ’em), but this gets used more often in the game to follow all of your actions in the main quest, which is much better than in Arvale 1. Also a nice little box appears telling you every time the Quest list is updated (I don’t think Arvale 1 did that).
Map screen is pretty much the same as Arvale 1. However, I find I use it less often in OOT as the maps are on a much more manageable scale (you can see most of what’s going on in the screen within 1-2 screens). When I do use it though, (for the colored tiles puzzles, you’ll see), it does seem much more useful.
I think that’s it for today. Hope that keeps you satiated for now 😉