Mythical Agent

Lucky me gets the dubious honour of being the first to warn gamers away from more valueless construction kit/asset flip tier shovelware with no value to gamers. Now, this review for Mythical Agent will appear similar to Whiteout Frontier from the same developer. The reasoning is that [i]they're reskins of exactly the same construction kit trashware[/i]. There's only so many ways to warn gamers about the same defects, and when developers push entire copy + paste games onto Steam, finding new ways to same the same things about the same games is pointless. As pointless as these awful games. Mythical Agent is one of hundreds of low effort retro-pixel RPG construction kit "flips" spamming the Steam catalog, but instead of being made with the RPG Maker video game construction kit, it was made with SRPG Studio, which is significantly inferior to RPG Maker in all respects. Like all JRPG construction kit "games", this is essentially a bunch of low quality assets (notably most of the assets here seem to be custom instead of just copy + pasted stock assets). We can tell that these are not likely to be asset flipped assets because the quality is so much worse than stock assets. But you know the old saying, if developers don't know how to actually make a game and resort to using a construction kit, they usually don't know how to do the rest of the job of game development either, and that's evident with "Mythical Agent". The ugly EGA looking graphics accompany a game that's less narrative driven (probably a good thing, construction kit/asset flippers are terrible at building narrative) and more combat focused, which of course is terrible because this was slapped together with a godawfully bad construction kit that should never be used by anyone, let alone as a substitute for real game development. I'm not saying game development is something that should be gatekept, but when ultra low effort construction kit garbage like Mythical Agent appears on Steam, some rethinking about Valve's quality control (none) for Steam should perhaps take place. As with all RPG construction kit 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 construction kits like RPG Maker and SRPG Studio and Smile Game Builder is to make demos and small games to pass around friends, and shouldn't be used as a substitute for "professional" game development. Like most RPG construction kit shovelware, the game features extremely low quality 2D retro pixel art (original or not), looks awful, and has even worse gameplay. SRPG Studio is an absolutely terrible construction kit, and never results in games of any reasonable quality or value to gamers. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. It's locked to 4:3, so either the developer made this using a CRT he found in a dumpster, or is aiming this towards people gaming on PCs made in 1995. Either way, unacceptable. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game all-time peak player count was only ONE player. That's right, only one person ever played this at a time. When I played this for the purposes of reviewing it, I equalled the peak player count for the game. OUCH. The only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Mythical Agent has the frankly insulting, delusional price of TWENTY UNITED STATES DOLLARS, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $20 asking price for this game could get you games like "Doom Eternal", "Dead by Daylight" or "Alien: Isolation". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. [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]