Forever Home is a positive microcosm of the RPGMaker genre. It has a lot of flaws with story holes, and it may get too artsy with character development, but it does some new things. From gameplay to cutscenes, it's got a lot of mechanics other games don't have. From my limited experience with the engine to AAA, Pixel Blade shows that originality isn't dead, even if, I assume, these ideas have been done before. I'm not gonna compare it to others, so let's get down to an actual review.
The story starts off simple: A boy and his sister are the only survivors of an attack on their village. From there, they go on a quest to find their legendary father and maybe get revenge. They find an assortment of characters with various ties to the big bad guy. Along the way. they grow, control time, and kill a god. Pretty standard affair!
The bad:
A lot of plot points seem to come from nowhere or are an act of coincidence. It's fairly nonexistent early on, but the late game stuff is frustrating. At the very end, when Garin shows up to have save the day, for example. How did he get there? Both through space and time? The entirety of Enda's backstory leaves me wondering how.did Garin find her? How did she know all of that stuff when we went to the Life Sanctuary? A lot of my questions revolve around Enda, now that I think about it.
Along a similar vein, a few other character stories confused me. Lina's ending scenes leave me annoyed. She had a big, heavy, and unique point in the game, but it gets magically waved away by something that isn't explained. Some of this may have been something I missed. Maybe I missed something about Enda or Kina, but they'd be painfully odd stretches regardless. Did we ever learn how Xero has time altering skills? There are also a few scenes where some of our characters say they don't want revenge on the big bag guy, however, it's not brought up at all outside of these two conversations.
Monster variety is a bit off. I'm fine with pallet swamps, but dungeons only have about three or four types of monsters in them. Fortunately, the dungeons don't tend to be very long, so this is a nitpicky thing from me. It's a small team, so I shouldn't expect 1000 different monsters. There's only ~160 in total, so there's no need for everyone to be different. That's not even how the real world works.
There may be a few bugs, as well. I don't think Radiate II works correctly, and battle actions stopped working once or twice for me. I ran away from the fight, and it fixed it, but what if that happened in a boss battle? I'm also curious if something went wrong during the ending scenes. Most frustrating, Steam achievements didn't pop for me.
What's up with the romance stuff?
But if I'm already being nitpicky, you know things are good.
The good:
Keeping with the dungeons, they're great! Most are short, unique, and well designed. There are a few pieces of concept art we see during the credits to let you know a lot of work was put into them. We can see the evolution on graph paper to the basic dungeon layout, all the way to second and third drafts. They weren't thrown together with no thought, and I really enjoyed them. Denizen Cave aside, of course. The puzzles aren't nerve wracking, which I'm a big fan of, too, but they might be a little too simple.
The music is top notch. None of it is RPGMaker stock, and it was all composed by David Hunt, who did the majority of everything else in the game. And there's so much of it! More importantly, it's all fun. The calm and relaxing town themes would be great on my Spotify playlist. Sadly, it's not there. The battle tracks aren't terrible, by any means, but I never felt excited and into them. I'm more into chill tracks, so I don't see that as a problem. The world map, towns, and even dungeons are enjoyable to traverse through because of the soundtrack. As I said, it's not on Spotify, but you can hear it on Bandcamp.
https://pixelblade.bandcamp.com/album/forever-home-ost
Most of the characters have a good, well described backstory and growth. No one is a trope or a one note chump, and they all feel like actual human beings. Even the mute, Burns, has a fun, unique past. I wish he felt important to the story BEFORE learning of it, mind you. Asera may be the shining jewel of this game with his personality, heartbreak, and shock. It's not perfect, of course, as I feel like there's a lot of contention between all of them. Xero flows from just wanting to "count clouds" to arguing with his teammates over tiny details. He rubbed me the wrong way a few times, so I never felt a connection with him. I also want to point out that I've read the ending cutscenes change based on character sidequests, so there's something to look forward too.
The artwork is the best I've ever seen in RPGMaker games. Hell, it's among the best I've seen from foux 16-bit games. We can get a glimpse of the hard work put into it during the credit roll, and the hard work paid off. From character sprites and scenery, it's beautiful. It was pretty much the whole reason I wanted the game to begin with, so I'm glad the preview shots aren't lying. But Forever Home is more than just sprite work. There's a number of action sequences where two or more characters have a one-on-one duel, and it's so cool. They're super anime, filled with pretty flashes, teleports, and sword clashes, and I was into all of them.
But the battle system is the best part of Forever Home. It's a Final Fantasy ATB turnbased game, which I'm still a fan of. FH doesn't break that bold, but when it comes to learning magic and skills, that's where the game shines. No one gets new stuff by leveling up, but you have to teach them from a list that grows as they learn. Spend your PP on skills to unlock a more powerful version of them. You need to master two or more to learn a strange combination of them together. Early game characters are some molds you can choose. Do you want to rush Xero's time magic, his lightning spells, or his techniques? Do you want Enda to be a healer or a wind mage? Eventually, all players will have the same character specs, but the mid game has a variety here. Skills and spells are on different gauges, so you always have something fun to choose from. Many of them have a cooldown period, though, so you can't spam them, which means you need to learn everything! More skills; more fun! But, again, they're not perfect. I was always afraid to use Kina because her skills hurt her more than the opponents. There may be a story link there, but I didn't trust her in battle. There are enough hard hitting mobs in the game as is, so I felt like she'd die all the time. I also found Throg to be a waste. His stuff won't work on most bosses, so he's too niche. I liked him when I got to use him if that means anything...
And I haven't talked about the Shard System. It's very similar to FFVII's Materia, but I'm out of space!
Forever Home is a flawed game by a guy who might have tried to do too much. Shout out to him for doing it and doing it well, but I wonder if more help would have been nice. Some games have plenty of breadth but no depth. The scaffolding is there, but there are no bricks. Forever Home has almost the exact opposite problem. It's got the bricks, the roof, the elevator, and the walls, but I think someone forgot about the windows. So not the exact opposite, but I don't know construction metaphors...Forever Home is an amazing game filled with an assortment of great mechanics, but it's missing some things. In the end, I enjoyed the game, but I was left confused a few too many times. There are just enough questions I have from the plot that keeps this from being perfect, but it's definitely a must play if you're craving a mid 90's RPG. I got 50 hours of it and didn't come close to 100%ing it.
