Millennium: A New Hope (PC)

Hello, everyone! Today, I'm reviewing Millennium: A New Hope.

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  • System: PC
  • Genre: Role-playing
  • Max Players: 1
  • US Release: 2009
  • Developer: Aldorlea Games
  • Publisher: Aldorlea Games
  • Similar Games: Millennium 2: Take Me Higher

3Hello, everyone! Today, I’m reviewing Millennium: A New Hope. Here’s the game’s official press release…

Released in 2009 for the PC indie and casual market of RPGs, Millennium has since then proven to be one of Aldorlea’s flagship games, along with the company’s other titles such as Laxius Force and 3 Stars of Destiny. RPG Fan awarded it “Best Indie RPG of the Year” in 2009.

Press releases tend to be kind of dry, so I tried to make it more exciting by doing a techno remix of it.

There we go. A hot techno beat, coming out of nowhere to spice things up. This review is gonna rock.

1My favorite part of Star Wars Millennium: A New Hope is the part where you meet Leanne, your first party member. At this point in the game, you’ve been exploring the town for an hour, and you’re sick to death of the somewhat bland background music, which loops every minute. Then you run into Leanne and BAM! A hot techno beat comes out of nowhere to spice things up. I literally restarted the game from an earlier save point, just to hear the song again. Next time, guys, make that one of the background music tracks, not just a character theme that only plays twice.

My other favorite part of Millennium: A New Hope is the amount of customization it offers. Most RPGs offer normal mode and hard mode, I think. But as the press release says, this game was also released for the casual game market. Therefore, it also comes with easy mode and story mode, for the casual gamers who don’t like RPGs. You can also choose to have arrows appear on the ground, which point to where you have to go next, so you don’t have to do any needless wandering around. And finally, you can choose between visible enemy encounters and invisible enemy encounters.

Millennium is a rather large game. The first time I played through it, I went to all the screens and tried to find all the power-ups, and I went after all the quests. It took me an hour and a half to leave the first village and make it to the overworld map. Then I decided to restart the game on the easiest mode and rush through, all the way to the end. It took me six hours. I’m sure a major RPG fan can stretch this game into a 30-hour experience, easily.

2The plot of the game is that there is a town called Myst, with a corrupt government that lets everyone outside of the city die from starvation, instead of sharing their riches with the world. Our hero, Marine, is the 99%. She wants to change things by winning the upcoming town elections, but the only way she can do this is by taking advantage of an obscure law that requires finding twelve martial artists. Makes sense to everyone? Marine needs to find twelve fighters.

Since this game is Part One of a five-part series, she only finds four fighters in this game. The first fighter is Leanne, her fairy buddy. The second is Benoit, her constantly-scared cousin. The third fighter is Karine, the crocodile hunter who lives in a swamp. The fourth is Hirado, the monk/poet who mediates a lot. Can these mismatched heroes work together and save the world? According to my Magic 8-Ball, signs point to “yes.”

The game has its limitations. Even when you’re playing on the easiest mode, about halfway through, the game becomes grind-city. This is because the dungeons at this point go on for far too long. I could only complete about a quarter of a dungeon at once, before leaving to get some healing. And when there was a healing place halfway through the dungeon, it was one of the limited healing locations that don’t cure all status effects. You’re either forced to leave the dungeon constantly for healing purposes, or grind until the enemies don’t do as much damage.

Of course, I imagine that if I went after all the sidequests, my characters would be at higher levels, and I wouldn’t need to grind so much.

3The graphics are really nice. It’s designed to look like an SNES RPG, and according to my computer screen’s display monitor, the graphics are all HD. The game itself runs in 640 by 480, and there’s no option to play it in a window instead of fullscreen. That kind of disappointed me.

From an RPG standpoint, this game is really good, with 30 or so hours of material. From a casual games standpoint, it’s more like a great two-hour game, trapped inside a six-hour game. It’s kind of hard to balance between hardcore RPG fans and casual gamers, but the game does the best it can. I guess that means I have to balance out the score, though. 8 for RPG fans, 4 for casual gamers, making it a respectable 6 overall.

  • GameCola Rates This Game: 6 - Above Average
18 votes, average: 3.56 out of 1018 votes, average: 3.56 out of 1018 votes, average: 3.56 out of 1018 votes, average: 3.56 out of 1018 votes, average: 3.56 out of 1018 votes, average: 3.56 out of 1018 votes, average: 3.56 out of 1018 votes, average: 3.56 out of 1018 votes, average: 3.56 out of 1018 votes, average: 3.56 out of 10 (You need to be a registered member to rate this post.)
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About the Contributor


From 2007 to 2016

Michael Gray is a staff writer for GameCola, who focuses on adventure games, videos and writing videogame walkthroughs.

6 Comments

  1. It makes no sense at all to give the game a 4/10 for casual players, like they are some kind of odd species that can’t enjoy a good game. Beside this game was actually very well received on Big Fish, check your facts! It’s one of the most popular RPG there.

    1. My line of thought was twofold. One, only the first two games in the series are on Big Fish. If it’s so popular over there, why don’t they offer the other games? Two, I’m presuming that casual gamers are much less likely to tolerate grinding (which is the foundation of most RPGs). You hardly see a casual game which does NOT have an automatic “skip” button. Someone who makes a habit of skipping a two-minute puzzle because it’s too long will not enjoy having to do an hour of grinding.

      1. The way you describe casual gamers is a bit insulting, in my opinion. But if you really do see them the way you do, then I suppose you should skip alltogether a rating for them, because in this case pretty much every game in the world would get 4/10.
        ****
        Millennium 3 & 4 are not on Big Fish because the author is not interested (he stated it publicly). It has nothing to do with their popularity and it’s a bit weird you would assume Aldorlea necessarily HAS to publish through Big Fish to offer their games. As a matter of fact, most of their latest games are not on Big Fish.

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