Byond Original RP

As stated in the title of the review, simply do not bother with this game.

Many of the Finale people will scream and moan at me for this unrelenting review, but I don't particularly care. The fact of the matter is, Finale is a waste of time, and isn't worth it to get involved in unless you want to be prepared to waste your time on accomplishing little-to-nothing.

I came into the game, expecting a fun RP romp through Dragonball Z, a rather neat setting despite the fact that the shows and such were rather lackluster in all respects. I log in, and I see that there are a decent amount of races. Okay, that's nice. Except for one thing: Half of the races are pointless to play. What is the purpose, exactly, of the Makyojin? Nothing. They are useless tidbits added on simply for canonicity, and not actually expected to do anything. Most of the races are generally balanced out, however, the sole purpose for humanity seems to be making Half Saiyans and training stats. The sole purpose for Tuffles seems to be making technology so that Saiyans can go to Earth, and make babies with the humans. Speaking of Saiyans, don't really bother playing anything else on this game if you expect to get anywhere (although you STILL won't, for reasons I will detail later on in this review). Super Saiyan, unlike in most games, pretty much spells the end for whatever opposition the good guys may ever face, guaranteed. Changelings end up ruling the beginning, yes, but their reign is rather short-lived, as generally, by year 50, all of the adminstaff and their friends are SSJ.

Now for the next problem with the game: The players inside of it. The majority of players can be divided into three groups: The people who are/know the staff of the server, the people who have lost all hope at catching up with the people that are/know the staff, and the people still vainly attempting to get somewhere in a game that is completely based on favoritism. On most games, one would expect at least some of the older players to be willing to help out a new person to become a better player, right? On this game, wrong. The older players feverishly hoard their secrets, to prevent newer players from getting up to their level despite the newer players often spending far more time on the server and working 10x as hard as them. Adding to this is sometimes rampant abuse by the admins, not to mention a general air of hostility. To describe this as an RP game is tenuous at best, as later on, it more becomes about posing and saying OOCly how powerful one's character is. Of course, I'm speaking only of the admins and their friends, as those are the only people who actually get powerful. The rest of the people are generally stuck in a limbo, where training does nothing, sparring does nothing, and gravity training does nothing.

Continuing on with the theme of RPing, the RP on the server mostly focuses, yet again, on the Administration team and their friends, as they do their own little sagas while the rest of the playerbase go about their daily lives, only able to watch as the powerful people do amazing feats of power. Eventually, RPing just becomes too boring, apparently, for the powerful people, so they basically screw around, blowing up stuff at random and generally not doing anything remotely resembling RP. Along with this, the people who might actually RP and supposedly are rewarded for good RP get, at most, a pat on the head, and sent on their way if they aren't a part of the special group that seemingly leads every single server, thus reducing the motivation to RP to almost nil, the only reason to RP being to not get Noobified or booted from the server.

Graphically, the game is decently pretty, with a system that would be fun if favoritism didn't screw it over. That's not the focus of this review, however.

To all of you Finale Lovers out there, sorry for ripping apart your favorite game, but my words are true. Don't try denying them. Comment as you will.

By Popular Demand, The Gameplay Section:

The gameplay of Finale is rather simplistic, in which you start off with a race which you can take one of two paths with: You can either be a technology-focused person, or a fighter-type. There are no real inbetweens between these functions, and no RP place for whoever tries to do both, either. Your power/skill is determined by an arcane set of numbers that you can never actually see, making it rather hard to see if you are indeed making any progress, or you're just sitting in Training Limbo. Gravity Training is completely and utterly broken, in that most of the time, you gain mastery of it too fast, and it does too little to increase your experience. The Train verb is often the first button someone pushes on Finale, yet it is always the worst option when it comes to training. Instead, spars are considered the best, although again, you still won't get anywhere with any training method you may pick up.

How are you supposed to know all of this from off the bat? Well, here's the thing: You don't. There is a limited guide which covers all of your invisible stats, but it only covers the basics, and doesn't go in-depth at all into why or how things work. The end result is that you are often just training and meditating, thinking you are doing good, while Mr. Saiyan next to you who knows every single thing about the game is going SSJ.

Controls are standard for any DBZ game, verbs for blasting and such are standard, standard standard standard. Nothing special or innovative, other than the sheer amount of limits that the game puts upon you.