Ashes of the Night

Very fun and challenging.

Ashes of the Night has traces of the SaGa series' "just go do stuff and see what happens"-type inscrutability. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be a deliberate artistic choice. While SaGa titles tend to unleash their relative directionlessness within otherwise highly competent traditional JRPG frameworks, every single map, item, battle, and character interaction in Ashes of the Night's opening hour reveal the project as being devoid of anything resembling competence and professionalism. This is a prime example of the dreaded "baby's first RPG Maker project" cliché, where it's obvious that the developer didn't know how to do much of anything when they started working on it, and basically ended up with a finished 'game' by way of making dozens of throwaway test maps. None of these projects should be sold as a commercial product, obviously, but even among the many black marks on the RPG Maker engine, Ashes of the Night stands out as a remarkably--almost willfully--sub-par release. I can get some degree of enjoyment out of poorly executed but clearly well-meaning 'bad' projects. But Ashes of the Night, despite featuring some of the most incompetently designed maps, most unnecessarily cluttered side-view battles (despite everything being default--why are the enemy positions so bad?!), and least satisfying 'quests' out there, seems to revel in how bad it is. The armor, item descriptions, conversations, etc. were clearly written in haste and never given a second pass, with most conversations being placeholder "lol u r poopy" lines that almost have to have been written by someone in elementary school making a project for their buddies. And, although I just mentioned it, it bears repeating: the maps are so poorly done that it has to be on purpose. But looking at the game as a comedy project doesn't absolve it. There's no sense of timing or direction or cleverness to any of the jokes, and "wow, each map is uglier and clearly took less effort than the last" is not exactly a strong comedic hook. It's really quite suspicious that this game holds an 88% positive rating on here, because make no mistake about it: it's about as bad as bad RPG Maker projects get. This here thumbs down won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but boy howdy, do I not want any prospective RPG Maker creator to see the frankly unreasonable reception to this game and think "oh, I can do that." Because literally anyone could--it's an artless, un-directed entry-level test project, unless it somehow takes a crazy unexpected turn and pops up saying "I was only pretending to be extremely bad for an hour!"--and literally no one should, ever. S'bad.