RPG Maker strikes again!
阿津 is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG Maker asset/construction kit flips spamming the Steam catalog, made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit... in their own words, "Our easy to use tools are simple enough for a child." Like all RPG Maker "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality/canned assets from RPG Maker coupled with a cringeworthy high school anime club fan fiction.
There's no English translation for the game, but that's ok. It turns out, the language of bad games is universal. And this is bad, real bad.
As with all RPG Maker games, the poor quality engine displays badly in fullscreen and doesn't have full HD support or any graphics tweaking options, making this unacceptable for any dedicated modern PC gamer. The point can be made that the intention of RPG Maker is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used for "professional" game development.
Like most RPG Maker shovelware and asset flips, the game features extremely low quality copy + pasted 2D retro pixel art, looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. RPG Maker is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers.
Notably the developer here couldn't work out how to use RPG Maker to make an RPG... and that's the only thing RPG Maker can do properly... except it's not even very good for making RPGs. Instead, we have an incredibly lame "spooky" adventure game that involves solving some puzzles to escape a haunted house... heck even the developer admits this is bad. Which means there's even less excuse for publishing even more RPG Maker asset flip trash on Steam.
So, should you download this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ products on Steam?
阿津 has no upfront cost, but just because something doesn't have a price tag doesn't mean it's valuable. This isn't worth downloading. While this won't cost you any money, you get what you pay for, and sometimes, even when the game is free, it's still not enough. Gamers who want a good retro JRPG experience would be better off playing the originals, like Final Fantasy, Star Ocean or Chrono Trigger.
It's important to note that, despite this being such a low quality product, there's a number of positive reviews that all appeared immediately after the game launched, from suspiciously inactive Steam accounts that have reviewed almost no other games apart from this. On a purely unrelated note, recent US FTC rulings mean that review manipulation and fake reviews are now federal crimes. Interesting, isn't it? Regardless... take the review score of this game with a grain of salt.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
