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- Carpe Fulgur
- Carpe Fulgur
- Carpe Fulgur
- Carpe Fulgur
Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone
Released On: Jan 30, 2012
60
7.6
All Platforms
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 6 Critic Reviews
60
33% Positive
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
50% Mixed
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
17% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 6 Critic Reviews
60
33% Positive
2 Reviews
2 Reviews
50% Mixed
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
17% Negative
1 Review
1 Review
Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone is hard as hell. For beat it you have to make practice with the slow control system, but in the end is a good indie JRPG.
Don't let its charming aspect fool you. Fortune Summoners is a game that can challenge the most experienced and skillfull players thanks to its hard but fair combat system, which requires the player to be mindful of how and when strike for maximum effect. It has some technical shortcomings, and can be really frustrating, but overall it's another small jewel brought to west flawlessly by Carpe Fulgur.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 34 User Ratings
7.6
74% Positive
25 Ratings
25 Ratings
9% Mixed
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
18% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 34 User Ratings
7.6
74% Positive
25 Ratings
25 Ratings
9% Mixed
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
18% Negative
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
This Game is pretty cool! I am not actually into role playing and/ or side scroller, but the cuteness in sounds ,graphics, text and a nice story got me! I can not understand why the rating is so mediocre and how someone could rate this below 70. It´s a fun game! Wouldn´t pay more than 15 euros for it, but on steam sale, it´s must have! I rate this with an 8!
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PC
Very good JRPG sidescroller. It has a very classic feel to it, but the art design and sound are by no means dated.
This game is hard and even brutal at times though it stays fair.
The combat/controls are very responsive and I would very much compare it with the way one controls a character in Street Fighter when in fighting, this also means you can not charge at mobs and expect to beat them as they all need to be defeated in a certain way and require skill. The game is also translated good, to the point where one is unable to tell
Story-wise it's nothing ground breaking yet satisfying, but the perspective one is given is to my liking.
Characters feel very alive and all represent a stereotype or another.
It will not hold your hand on the way through, expect to do some digging around in order to find out what to do next, but as there are many walkthroughs already it will be of no hassle.
Try the demo as it will reveal a great bit about the game.
For what this game is : 10/10
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PC
A frustrating, obtuse, weirdly satisfying experience, covered in yayness and cute. [Apr 2012, p.56]
Held back by a difficulty that isn't satisfying to overcome, but annoying for its fiddly controls and cheating AI. [May 2012, p.77]
This is a disturbingly conservative action RPG that functions as a museum of bad game design.
After wasting thirty hours of my time, this is one game that has no right to pass kindergarten.
A little gem, that will go unnoticed by most people. But I have to say that this 2d game was so much better and so much more entertaining than 99% of the games that we get these days. It took me 40 in-game hours to complete it and it was worth it. I had a feeling that I just finished reading an amazing book. If you are into jrpgs, warm and colorful stories, give this gem a try and I bet you won't regret it.
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PC
At first glance, one could very easily fool ones self into believing this is an offline Maple Story. They would be VERY mistaken. The combat system the developers have chosen to implement was extraordinarily complex and rewarding, plus the amount of content crammed into this game was pretty insane as well. It is a 2D platformer / RPG with cheesy anime dialogue, and pretty 1 Dimensional characters, but it does its job.... it kept me entertained for a substantial period of time. A+ in my book, and I was glad that I bought it.
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PC
Fortune Summoners is probably one of my favorite platformers.
The gameplay is amazing. The fighting game-esque inputs behind Arche's sword open it up to an increasingly varied arsenal of attacks. In order to make the most of it, you have to understand which moves easily lead into others and which will leave you vulnerable after. There's a lot of experimentation and a lot of satisfaction following execution.
It's tempting to manually control one of the other two characters in your party and let Arche's godly AI take over, but I wouldn't recommend it. They mostly just stay out of the enemy's range, which removes any real interaction, which removes strategy and fun. However, the one section where you have to control one of the magic users by herself is plenty fun, since without Arche to keep enemies at bay, her fighting style works very differently than when she's in the party.
I did die a lot, but the game is very forgiving with deaths, so it's not a game I would consider especially difficult. Not when you can just throw yourself at an encounter until you win with no consequences.
Graphically, it looks like a well done 2D Saturn game, which is just about the pinnacle of graphics in my eyes. The music is fine, if a bit bland, and the environments can get a bit bland too (especially dungeons), but I don't find anything about it offensive. Everything is thoughtfully designed from a gameplay perspective, if not always an aesthetic one.
The story is fine, though it's ultimately unresolved, which is a shame since the creator doesn't seem inclined to make any more games. The characters are likable enough, if you like this sort of thing, and the party's personalities are reflected in how they control and even in how their fighting styles interact when fighting as a group, which I enjoyed.
It's a good game. Play the demo. If you like how Arche moves, then you'll probably like the rest of the game as well.
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PC
Fortune Summoners: Secret of the Elemental Stone, a side-scrolling Action "Metroidvania" JRPG produced by Lizbox and localized by Carpe Fulgur can only really be described as 'bipolar.' It seems to swing from one end of things to the other, constantly displaying a stark contrast between it's cute, sugary writing and characters with its quirky, stylish, punishingly difficult combat. Although it's very easy to feel relaxed at the game's opening, with the beautifully stylistic artwork making up the game’s hub world—as well as the main character Arche's playful mannerisms, the combat can take some serious getting used to. Arche and her friends' attacks have a large amount of recovery time, and the flinching, knock-backs, knock-downs, freezing, sleeping and other status effects enemies can dish out blend together with the intelligent AI and variety of enemies to create a perfect storm of crippling, often frustrating difficulty. The hand-numbing frustration, however, has a tendency to result in immense satisfaction. Enemies explode into a hail of sparks and money when they die, and being able to let go of your anal clench when you finally hear the battle music die down to the peaceful, ambient dungeon soundtrack makes my day in a way that's both unique and refreshing.
Outside of combat, Fortune Summoners is a game that's rich in flavours. Every NPC in every village, town and city feels as if the creators sat down and wrote a story, culminating in that character's existence. For the first time in years, I've found joy in wandering around a new town talking to absolutely everybody, searching every container and looking at every piece of the environment to soak up staggering amount of charm and TLC the creators have sprinkled around.
For all of its charm, however, Fortune Summoners' plot is one-dimensional and reliant on countless anime and JRPG tropes to help the story chug along. The story revolves around a handful of young children and their quest to obtain a few **** of MacGuffins to save their generic High Fantasy Kingdom, warranting treks across the land to many dungeons, wherein the heroes slay many monsters, solve many puzzles and dodge many nefarious traps. Although the well-written, highly amusing dialogue included in every Carpe Fulgur localization makes this story bearable, the term that cannot be avoided is 'dated.'
The game is accompanied by an ambient, well-made soundtrack consisting mostly of Baroque orchestration, which, despite its early freshness and appealing melodies, quickly becomes stale and repetitive as the same few tracks are reused throughout the entire game (which may take an upwards of 30 hours to complete.) The sound effects, however, remain satisfying and refreshing from beginning to end. Every slash has enormous impact behind it, every spell has mystery and power surging through it, every clash of steel against steel is tense and climactic. In summary, Fortune Summoners is a game whose deceptive art style may have caused it to miss its target audience. The quirky writing and characters, “Slice of Life” characterizations and humour end up forming a mask that attempts to conceal the fast-paced, punishingly difficult gameplay. Although its music and plot may leave something to be desired and the combat and controls require time to adjust (and are nearly impossible to work with without an Xbox 360 controller due to the various Street Fighter-esque input combos), Fortune Summoners is a satisfying game that's not shy of content by any stretch of the imagination. At a price tag of $20, it provides the player with way more “game” than the average AAA release.
P.S. I attribute most of the professional reviewers’ complaints about the combat mechanics to their own ineptitude and unwillingness to tolerate difficulty in games (undoubtedly caused by the recent casualization of most popular franchises, and the generally easy difficulty of modern RPGs.) This is a game that punishes button mashing, and will take advantage of any opening you let the various slimes, bats and kobolds sink their teeth, swords and tentacles into. Again, and again, and again.
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PC
If there's anything that needs to be said about this game, it's that it is incredibly difficult. The difficulty borders along that line of "Incredibly Satisfying" and "Pull your hair out from irritation". It takes a LOT of getting used to, but overall this game is charming, cute, and funny. The story isn't exactly mind blowing, but the like-able characters make it worth sitting down and listening to. There are some obvious flaws, like massive difficulty spikes, unfair situations, and a bit of repetivity, but overall the goods outweigh the bads by quite a bit.
Anyone who is a fan of anime and jrpg's should pick it up, and anyone looking for a good challenge, but otherwise, don't bother with it.
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PC
Summary Elemental Stones: stones imbued with the power of an Elemental Spirit, which grant the wielder of one the ability to control that element via 'magic'. In the country of Scotsholm, three centuries have passed since they were first created. Elemental stones are now mass-produced and widely used, making magic a personal, commonplace part...
Platforms:
- PC
Initial Release Date: Jan 30, 2012
Developer:
- Lizsoft
Publisher: Carpe Fulgur
Genres:
