A New Player's Experience 2024

[smelleaf 0]

There's so much to like. I had a blast just exploring Hidden Leaf Village for about half an hour. The skills are all intriguing and I want to unlock them all. I got to level 18 before writing this. I'm looking around the somewhat empty streets and wondering why this game isn't clicking with more people.

 

The very first seconds of gameplay are really laggy on the default Ultra settings, and if you reflexively lower your graphics settings the game will crash. The early quests' text can get a little weird with both meaning and spelling. The tutorial npc asks you to demonstrate your newly learned ability when it's not actually required to progress. You're given some quest books that tell you to right click to read , but this equips them as offhand weapons instead. I managed to run out of the Academy and miss the path to the backyard which slowed me down in getting Shinobi Travel for a while. Sometime around here, the addons have accumulated so many errors that WoW recommends disabling them. The addons seem to lag the game hard and there's no way to stop them from spewing out errors pretty much constantly? I hated how loud the loot popup SFX was so I edited it down in Audacity, only to find that the launcher checks for this and un-fixes my solution. The loot pop-up SFX are way Way WAY too freaking loud and I just want to turn the entire system off without breaking the game.

 

That's everything I could think of that negatively affected me in the first hour or so of playing. Otherwise this project is so cool. Walking out into a new world and not knowing how far I can go is such a cool feeling. This project is already a win just from a tourism standpoint. Thanks devs! Good luck with your story push.

[Osiria 0]

The loot sfx you're hearing are from an addon called Shinobi Loot Display that pretty much everyone disables (from the character select screen).

[smelleaf 0]

Part 2: I hope this feedback is useful to the developers, this is not intended as a public critical review.

 

Made it to level 23 and I'm noticing a lot of bugs. A bunch of the graphics settings can't be changed without UI errors/bugs. Successfully throwing a shuriken displays the error text that you have no ranged weapon equipped. I couldn't cook edamame beans at a stove where I could cook bear meat just fine. Getting to Notchi City was amazing until the roof above the entrance bridge started flickering. One of the bridge guards is down below having a swim. The way some prof skills are in the profession tab while some are in the skill book is confusing, and some buttons like create campfire are unresponsive. One of the music tracks in Land of Fire is missing the end of its loop.

The quests in general went grey fast, especially the island tour. The intro to smithing questline felt a bit pointless since academy students are now given a true T1 weapon back in Konoha. I actually liked doing my first couple D-Rank quests, finding the lost cat was a nice callback to the show. However doing this 120+ more times to rank up sounds really tedious. I started to sleepwalk through a lot of dialogue because it didn't feel authentic or accurate. There's an NPC who says "tho" instead of "though" which took me right out of it.

I wish I could free respec as an Academy Student/Genin. It's easy to make a suboptimal choice when you know nothing and then you're just stuck with it. Apparently going bloodline-first is a big trap that I almost fell for, so a free respec could save a lot of noobs from quitting. I never figured out how to use the Paperbomb Kunai skill as I was looking for an ammo item similar to the shuriken.

I didn't like how much AoE grinding there was to get skillpoints. I'd rather fight single roaming ninja/beast than many spiders or bees at once.

Inventory space was a constant burden. Things like the Spiky Thorn aren't grey/junk but I never found a use for them either. I bought as many bank slots as I could and tried to craft often but there just aren't many options (except cooking which felt pretty good, especially visiting akimichi grill).

As a newcomer, a phone-verified Discord on a public game shows the players are trying to say something the developer does not want to hear, like about microtransactions and how they affect game balance. Also the "white name" aggro is crazy considering the server is struggling to stay in double-digit population numbers.

So much of what a new player needs to know exists outside of game in the General Gameplay Guide which I didn't see until just now. You guys wanna see my custom map I was making because I had no idea an official one existed? Turns out the thing I was enjoying doing the most wasn't even necessary looooool. My only excuse is 99% of games use their launcher to spam you with ads so I'm selectively blind to all those little boxes.

This project is so small and charming I want to love it so bad. These bugs are driving me up the freaking wall though. Good luck and happy hunting devs!

Edited May 28 by smelleaf